31 Sackville St <1>
Saturday
Dear Babbage
Being in Town on Business for a few days, I called on you this morning, but was not fortunate enough to find you at home. If not too late I should be very glad that you should propose me as a steward, but if it is too late then be so good as to send me a voucher that I may procure a ticket. I shd wish my name to be put down for a subscrn of £1 to the vase.
I see in yesterday’s paper excellent improvements announced in the Cambridge Mathematical Examination. Are you one of the Syndicate who proposed them? Some of them are so exactly what I should have desired to propose, that I think I must have unconsciously published a pamphlet on the subject which met with general assent.
I should like very much to see Baxter’s processes of colour printing, or the Pictorial Album of 1837. <2>
Hullmandel <3> has certainly several faults – one is, that he is slower than any snail, and always the same excuse for it, viz. important works that he has in hand, which absorb the “whole strength of the establishment.”
Yours vy truly
H. F. Talbot
Notes:
1. 31 Sackville Street, London residence of the Feildings, often used as a London base by WHFT.
2. George Baxter (1804–1867), inventor of a method of colour separation printing, illustrated the The Pictorial Album or Cabinet of Paintings, (London: Chapman & Hall, 1837), using as many as 20 different woodblocks for one image.
3. Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789–1850), lithographer and engraver, was printing the coloured plates for WHFT’s paper, ‘On Analytic Crystals’, Philosophical Magazine, s. 3 v. 14 no. 85, January 1839, pp.19 –12, 3 illustrations.