Lincoln’s Inn <1>
23d Jany 1862
My dear Sir
In compliance with Your expected wish that I should write to You to say that all pecuniary accounts between Yourself and the present firm of Price Bolton & Filder as well as with the preceding one of Price & Bolton are balanced and sealed to the end of the year 1861, – I beg to say that such is the fact –
I regret that the darkness of the season, it has been pretty much the same here, has interfered with the prosecution of Your Photoglyphic engraving <2> – I do not hear that Pretsch has made any thing of his <3> – Photography howr flourishes more than ever – at Brighton Hennah & Kent <4> require a week or even 10 days notice for a sitting!
Henneman, <5> I find, has left Mayall’s <6> employmt but is with Claudet <7> – my messenger did not see him – but was told that he lived at Kentish Town: I augur therefore since You have not heard to the contrary that he is gaining his lilelihood livelihood with C.
believe me to remain My dear Sir Ever yours faithfully
J. H. Bolton
Wm H Fox Talbot Esqr
Notes:
1. One of the four Inns of Court, the ‘colleges’ of barristers at the English Bar. Bolton had his chambers [lawyer’s offices and, at the time, living-quarters also] there.
2. WHFT's second patented photogravure proces.
3. This reference is probably to the photomechanical enterprise as a whole, rather than a specific process. The Patent Photo-Galvanographic Company (commonly, The Photogalvanographic Company) was based on the work of Paul Pretsch (1808-1873), Austrian photographer & inventor and former Manager of the Imperial Printing Establishment in Vienna. Located in Holloway Road, Islington, London, from 1856-1857, Pretsch took over as manager and Roger Fenton (1819-1869), photographer & lawyer, was a partner and their chief photographer. Starting in late 1856, they published a serial portfolio, Photographic Art Treasures, or Nature and Art Illustrated by Art and Nature, illustratated with photogalvanographs derived from several photographer's works. Photogalvanography was uncomfortably closely based on elements of WHFT's patented 1852 Photographic Engraving but, unlike Talbot, the plates were heavily retouched by hand. Compounding the legal objections of Talbot, their former manager, Duncan Campbell Dallas, set up a competing company to produce the Dallastype. The company collapsed and near the end of 1860 Pretsch, out of money, allowed his patent to lapse. A public appeal was launched in 1861 to assist him but he returned to Vienna in 1863 in ill health, going back to the Imperial Printing Establishment, but finally succumbing to cholera.
4. Thomas Henry Hennah and William Henry Kent received licenses from WHFT and established the Talbotype Portrait Gallery at 108 King’s Road, 1854–1884.
5. Nicolaas Henneman (1813–1898), Dutch, active in England; WHFT’s valet, then assistant; photographer.
6. John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1810–1901), photographer. See Doc. No: 07101 and Doc. No: 09078.
7. Antoine Françoise Jean Claudet (1797–1867), London; French-born scientist, merchant & photographer, resident in London.