44 Q. Ann St <1>
Tuesday
Dear Sir
The Editors of the 2 London principal scientific newspapers, “the Athenæum” & “the Literary Gazette” have both taken up with zeal (much more than I could have expected) the subject of my discovery of Photogenic Drawing. <2> The Editor of the Athenæum has applied to me this morning for leave to publish in full, the paper which will be read on Thursday at the Rl Society <3> because, he observes, no time ought to be lost, the Parisian invention <4> having got the start of 3 weeks – I replied to him that a resolution of the Council would be necessary to that effect, & there is no council before Thursday week, but that I would enquire of the members beforehand if they would consent to this temporary suspension of the rules, without prejudice to the paper being afterwards printed in the Transactions. <5> In case I receive the assent of the majority of the council, it will then be only necessary to wait for a formal vote.
I hope you for one will accede to this, under the peculiar circumstances
Believe me Dear Sir Yours vy truly
H. F. Talbot
Sir J. Herschel Bart
&c &c &c
Slough
Notes:
1. 44 Queen Ann Street: London home of the Mundy family and a frequent base for WHFT.
2. An account was published in both journals, more fully in the Athenaeum, as WHFT, ‘Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s pencil’, Athenaeum, no. 589, 9 February 1839, pp. 114–117, and in the form of a letter to William Jerdan at the Literary Gazette, Doc. No: 03782.
3. WHFT, ‘Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s pencil’, read before the Royal Society 31 January 1839, a report of which was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, v. 4 no. 36, pp. 120–121.
4. That is, the daguerreotype.
5. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.