Dear Sir,
I received your note <1> addressed to me at Woolwich; but as I immediately resolved to pay you a visit on my way to Scotland, I waited till we shd be able to fix upon the time when we could leave London, before I wrote to you.
We leave London by the Express Train on Tuesday first, and shall be at Ambleside the same Evening if the Train to Bowness is suitable, & if we can get horses to Ambleside.
My Daughter <2> is with me and if you could allow her to occupy the room whh you kindly offer to me I would get a bed at the Inn.
I have just returned from the visitation of the Observatory at Greenwich where I met with many of your Friends.
Photography is now about to be merged in the Talbotype. <3> They are busy in Paris with experiments of all kinds. Gelatine is used as a substitute for albumine, <4> and I learn from Niepce <5> that he has new methods of accelerating the Process.
I am Dear Sir Ever Most Truly yrs
D Brewster
London
4 Albemarle St
June 1st 1850
H. Fox Talbot Esqr
Notes:
1. Doc. No: 06324, inviting Brewster to pay the Talbots a visit while they were staying in Westmorland.
2. Margaret Maria (b. 1823), who became Mrs Gordon and published a memoir of her father: The Home Life of Sir David Brewster (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1869).
3. Brewster and a few others wished that the inventor of the calotype would have called the process after himself, in parallel with the Daguerreotype, but WHFT resisted this idea.
4. Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805–70), nephew of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce who produced the first surviving photograph. Niépce de Saint-Victor, too, made contributions to photography.
5. In 1848 Niépce de Saint-Victor prepared glass negatives using a film of sensitised albumen. The process was very slow. In the 1850s the albumen was combined with gelatin to prepare dry plates. [See Brian Coe and Mark Haworth Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983).