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Document number: 9375
Date: 1861
Dating: possibly April/May 1861 - see Doc os 08354 & 08393
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: TALBOT Rosamond Constance
Collection: British Library, London, Manuscripts - Fox Talbot Collection
Last updated: 25th January 2011

[fragment]

mama desired me to enclose Mrr Grieve's note, which she hopes you will find quite satisfactory.

I am so glad you are coming soon, but unluckily it is just at the time that Tilly and her husband will be away at Speddoch for a fortnight or so. They propose going next week or the beginning of the following one; and Tilly is looking forward with so much pleasure to the change, that she says she does not think it will even be possible to tear herself away again and come back!

Will you bring any of your engraving apparatus with you directly, or wait till we have removed to Millburn?<1> I am getting quite impatient to know what you will think of your work room there. Mama has written to give you Wilkins direction to send us a hamper of geraniums and useful plants for ornamenting and filling our flower beds there; - with your luggage when you come.

Goodwin waits for my letter; so goodbye dear Papa; Love to Charles/

Your affectionate daughter
Rosamond

I am deep in Froude<2>


Notes:

1. Millburn Tower, Gogar, just west of Edinburgh; the Talbot family made it their northern home from June 1861 to November 1863. It is particularly important because WHFT conducted many of his photoglyphic engraving experiments there. The house had a rich history. Built for Sir Robert Liston (1742-1836), an 1805 design by Benjamin Latrobe for a round building was contemplated but in 1806 a small house was built to the design of William Atkinson (1773-1839), best known for Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford. The distinctive Gothic exterior was raised in 1815 and an additional extension built in 1821. Liston had been ambassador to the United States and maintained a warm Anglo-American relationship in the years 1796-1800. His wife, the botanist Henrietta Liston, née Marchant (1751-1828) designed a lavish American garden, sadly largely gone by the time the Talbots rented the house .

2. James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), editor of Fraser's Magazine but better known as a novelist, biographer, and especially as a historian. It seems unlikely that she would have been moved by his his notorious 1849 novel, The Nemesis of Faith, which ended his clerical career. Perhaps she was immersed in his History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada (London: Longmans, Green, 1856).

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