Malvern <1>
July 3d 1812
My Dear Henry
The weather has been so extremely bad that my excursion into Herefordshire never took place. You must have been yesterday extremely surprized by the apparition of Mr Feilding <2> It was a most sudden determination in consequence of your Letter <3> received the Evening before he set off. I did not answer your last Letter, thinking the sight of him would be pleasure enough, & I hope you had the satisfaction of walking with a friend on Speech Day & of not being the only forlorn. I conclude you said to him all you have told me about your journey & that you have settled it together. I have given Jane <4> your Map, she likes it very much. Have you ever done one of ancient Greece? What have you been so very busy about lately? & what have you been reading at your leisure time? I have got a book for you that I think you will like, it is called Les soirées d'hyver <5>. Upon consideration I think "& ce regret fut le dernier" <6> must mean that Mathilde <7> died. Dr Beddoes says that in some people the fumes of oxygenated muriatic acid will produce all the symptoms of complete catarrh, and that some chemical processes have induced so violent an affection of this kind as to terminate in complete Phthisis.<8> - Dr Mercer who was shewing the Steam Engine to Lord Lansdowne <9> & your aunts, when that accident happened, was in such agony that he did not know what he did & rushed among the company & almost pushed down your aunt Charlotte <10>. I saw in the newspaper that they have invented a way of carrying coals in Northumberland by the force of steam, & that they go at the rate of 10 miles an hour. - Lord L. cured his face by constant applications of cold water. I have been enquiring at Worcester if there is anybody capable of conducting your experiments for you, but I really don't [thin]k <11> you will have much time for them here. Tell me all that passed between you & Mr F. & whether you were very much surprized -
Ever yours
E F
Do you remember Lord Robert FitzGerald's eldest Son <12> at Burley, I suppose not as that is 3 or 4 years ago. He is supposed to be dying, for want of following such good advice as is contained in Dr Beddoes's book <13>
[address panel:]
W. H. F. Talbot Esq
Revd Dr Butler's <14>
Harrow <15>
Middlesex
[illegible deletion]
[written in another hand on verso of panel:]
Malvern July 3 1812
Notes:
1. Malvern, or Great Malvern, Worcestershire.
2. Rear Admiral Charles Feilding (1780-1837), Royal Navy; WHFT's step-father.
3. Letter not located.
4. Jane Harriot Nicholl, née Talbot (1796-1874).
5. Winter evenings.
6. And that was the last regret.
7. Sophie Cottin, Matilde, ou Mémoires tirés de l'histoire des croisades, 6 Vols. (London: Peltier, 1805).
8. Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a physician who established his Pneumatic Institution for Inhalation and Gas Therapy at Clifton in 1798, installing Humphry Davy as his first chemist. Muriatic acid is hydrochloric acid.
9. Henry Petty Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1780-1863), MP, WHFT's uncle.
10. Lady Charlotte Anne Lemon, née Strangways (d. 1826), WHFT's aunt.
11. Text obscured by seal.
12. Robert George Fitzgerald (1795-1812), Capt Feilding's nephew.
13. Beddoes’s work on popular medicine was Hygëia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (Bristol: printed by J. Mills, for R. Phillips, London, 1802). Beddoes discusses the health risk of swimming in his fifth essay “Temperature and Hardiness; with Remarks on Diet” in the section on “General Principles for an Advanced Age,” v. 2, p. 35. Lady Elisabeth may also have read it in John Edmonds Stock's Memoirs of the life of Thomas Beddoes, M.D., with an analytical account of his writings (London: J. Murray, 1811). See also Doc. No: 00573.
14. Rev George Butler (1774-1853), Headmaster at Harrow.
15. Harrow School: WHFT attended from 1811-1815 and his son Charles from 1855-1859.