Royal Gardens,
Kew.
Decr 25. 1847
My dear Sir
Dr Hooker <1> has left England more than 6 weeks en route for Calcutta, where we think he has nearly arrived by this time. From Calcutta he proceeds almost immediately into the interior & as soon as practicable to the Himalaya & if possible into Chinese Tartary.
I fear it is too late for any photographic apparatus to reach him in India proper. And I must confess that I should much prefer photographic landscapes to the kind of representation you allude to. By landscapes I mean not only home and distant scenery, mountains, buildings &c. but portraits of Trees, such as cannot be done from specimens. When he is at Borneo for example how interesting it would be to have faithful representations of the Palms, the Climbers & the various Forest-trees which abound in that country. We can indeed have the details in our Herbaria, but nothing else.
I dined with Mr Brooke <2> last week & he was on the point of starting to spend his Christmas holidays in Bedfordshire & Norfolk, dividing his time between Woburn <3> & Holkham. <4> He quite expects to return to Borneo next month in the Meander. He has promised to come to Kew before his departure, & if he put this promise into execution as I trust he will I will not fail to speak to him about your process: <5> I think Mr Low, the Secretary, would be better able to consider the merits & usefulness of your process.
Yours, my dear Sir, very faithfully,
W. J. Hooker.
Notes:
1. Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), botanist, traveller; succeeded his father as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
2. [Sir] James Brooke (1803–1868), Raja of Sarawak.
3. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, seat of the dukes of Bedford.
4. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, seat of the earls of Leicester. The 2nd earl, Thomas William Coke (1822–1909), was, like his father, a noted agricultural improver.
5. In fact, WHFT's paper negatives were widely used in India, even after the introduction of wet collodion on glass. See Roger Taylor, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), especially chapter 9.