Mount Edgcumbe <1>
Wednesday Jany 2nd 1861
My dear Henry
A very happy New Year to you & all your dear ones! & may you have many more to come with health to enjoy them!
I heard from Amandier <2> of your dreadful journey to Edinburgh – it must have been enough to freeze you outright – & if it had not been you, I should have said you were not so sehr witzig <3> as you might have been, to chuse the very coldest night in the year for your déménagement. <4> I believe 10 degrees of frost was the lowest point the thermometer reached here – but at Brocket in Hertfordshire where the Abercorn family <5> are residing, it fell to 39 degrees of frost – 7 below zero – rather lucky for Lady Abercorn <6> that she was not well enough to leave London – particularly as Brocket is the coldest house in England. According to Amandier’s account, you are better off in Scotland. How beautiful Edinburgh Castle must look in the bright snow!
We have had several quite mild, almost warm, days, since the thaw – But yesterday the frost began again, with a biting wind. I tried to make a sketch of the huge iron transport, Qn Victoria, <7> ashore on the rocks, under our battery – but the cold made my fingers ache as if they were frost bitten. Many thanks for your specimens of photographic engraving. I don’t quite understand the art yet, & feel very stupid about it – as I don’t quite perceive in what these specimens differ from those you made long ago – but of course there must be a difference, else you wd not say you had been making important experiments. I wish you had a good artist to arrange all that part of the business for you – I am sure your discoveries would be more appreciated than they are. I do not think these views are very clear – Why is that?
Our Christmas Tree was very successful. Val <8> had put some cotton wool on the branches with such good effect, that it looked exactly like snow.
Please tell Amandier I could not send her agenda today, but hope to do so tomorrow. I have told her about the Qn Victoria laden with an Electric Cable – It was heated, & they wanted to cool it by bringing the ship round to the Dockyard to flood it – but the freshets from the Tamar were so strong after the rains, that she cd not weather the Wilderness Point as it is called, & ran on the rocks with her jib-boom almost touching our Battery.
Goodbye dear Henry Yr affte sister
Caroline
Notes:
1. Mt Edgecumbe, near Plymouth: seat of the Earl of Mt Edgcumbe.
2. Amélina Petit De Billier, ‘Mamie’, ‘Amandier’ (1798–1876), governess and later close friend of the Talbot family [See Amélina's journal].
3. Very intelligent/prudent.
4. Moving house.
5. Brocket Hall is about 22 miles from London. Built in 1760, it was owned by this time by Lord Palmerston and was visited by Queen Victoria. James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Abercorn (1811-1845) and some of his fourteen children.
6. Louisa Jane Hamilton, née Russell, Lady Abercorn (1812-1905).
7. Victoria (1819–1901), Queen of the United Kingdom (1837–1901), Empress of India (1876–1901).
8. William Henry Edgcumbe, ‘Val’, 4th Earl Mt Edgcumbe (1832–1917), JP & Ld Steward of the Royal Household; WHFT’s nephew ‘Bimbo’.