Beyond Photography: An Introduction
to William Henry Fox Talbot’s
Notebooks in the Talbot Collection
at the British Library
Mirjam Brusius
Referring to his photograph ‘Queen’s College Oxford’ (fig. 1) in The Pencil of Nature (18441846), which was the first photographically illustrated book, William Henry Fox Talbot
(1800-1877) stressed the photograph’s superior way of recording inscriptions: ‘It frequently
happens, moreover – and this is one of the charms of photography – that the operator
himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted many
things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the
buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a
distant dial-plate is seen, and upon it – unconsciously recorded – the hour of the day at
which the view was taken.’1
Fig. 1. W. H. F. Talbot, Queen's College, Oxford. Entrance Gateway, The Pencil of Nature, Plate XIII, 1843.
Salted paper print from a calotype negative. British Library, Talbot Photo 6 (13).
1
1
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London 1844), plate XIII.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Talbot’s evidence that a photograph could capture features originally unnoticed by the
photographer through a passionless mechanical process refers primarily to script; itself a
recording device. When explaining to the reader the nature of the photograph, he talks
about inscriptions, dates, printed placards, and dial-plates, which are unconsciously
recorded. In his photographic experiments, his major pursuit between 1830 and 1840,
inscriptions became common subjects of his images.
While photography was one way of recording information and past moments, providing
technical possibilities to refer to the information recorded in future times, another and more
established way of doing so was keeping diaries and research notebooks as a means to
memorize, understand and reflect upon what one had perceived. One could take this argument
even further and state that script and drawings have been replaced by photography as a
recording device.2 The notebook ‘as a paper-made device meant to store information and make
it manageable and mobile, belongs to the field and the cabinet, to the time of travel and
observation, and to the moment of return and recollection’.3 Photography being a mobile
copying device could in Talbot’s opinion do just that. Like a person taking notes, a
photographer would furthermore select information, for instance in choosing a certain point
of view. Hence, the processes addressed by both photography and note-taking are selection,
storage, summary and sorting. These processes can indeed be done with completely different
media like a clay tablet, papyrus, or a photograph, though ‘each method of storage carries with
it constraints of reliability, preservability, and accessibility’.4 That is to say, despite their
common features note-taking and photography are also arguably different. This is especially
the case if we disregard their usage and function, but take a closer look at the production
processes. As Talbot pointed out in The Pencil of Nature, photography can for instance, unlike
note-taking, also capture the unseen. Precisely for this and a number of other reasons the
mechanical nature of photography lacks the understanding and reflecting impetus of notetaking as a ‘discipline of the mind’.5 The scientific meaning of note-taking will be addressed
later on, where its distinction from photography will become apparent.
Talbot is now primarily remembered as the pioneer of photography. This was reinforced by
the disposition of his papers, notably the separation of photographs and the few notebooks
that document Talbot’s photographic innovations from the rest of his archive mostly
concerned with other scholarly activities beyond photography. This article is neither about
photographs, nor about photography as a genuine recording device. Its aim is to explore
Talbot’s notebooks that address subjects beyond photography. His notebooks ranged across
the natural sciences, classical scholarship and Assyriology.6 From the beginning, Talbot’s
interests were peripatetic, the 1830s when he made his photographic experiments being one of
the most productive decades in his life. Around fifteen years after he first started
experimenting with the medium, however, he stopped being an active photographer in the
1840s and turned his interest entirely to other fields, photogravure, his insistence regarding
patent rights and his pursuits to advance the practical use of photography in the sciences
notwithstanding. His notebooks are the reflection of his manifold interests beyond
photography, even though some of the interests reflected in them can most certainly be linked
to its invention in various ways.
2
3
4
5
6
2
Christoph Hoffmann (ed.), Daten sichern. Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren der Aufzeichnung (Zürich and
Berlin, 2008), p. 9.
Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to
Nineteenth Centuries)’, Intellectual History Review, xx (2010), pp. 377-400. Bourguet refers to Alexander von
Humboldt’s travel narrative (p. 378).
Ann Blair, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, Critical Inquiry, xxxi (2004), pp. 85-107, at p. 86.
Bourguet, ‘A Portable World’, p. 382.
For detailed studies taking this manifold interest into account see especially H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry
Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science (London, 1977), Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows:
Herschel, Talbot and the Invention of Photography (New Haven, 1992).
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Amongst most Victorian scientists, keeping notebooks (these could be laboratory
notebooks,7 field notebooks or simply a description of phenomena which had been studied)
was an essential part of scientific practice. And yet this practice is particularly interesting in
Talbot’s case. First of all the notebooks help us to situate the photographic achievements of
Talbot in a broader context. Moreover, Talbot’s interest and achievements in photography
render his notebooks more interesting as comparative mobile objects encapsulating
knowledge8 and material culture relying on paper.
In the following discussion I will give an overview of Talbot’s notebooks at the British
Library.9 I will focus on exemplary items selected from around 200 non-photographic
scholarly notebooks that draw a new picture of Talbot, in which photography merely appears
as a single piece of a broader puzzle. Talbot’s habit of classifying his notes and keeping some
of his notebooks as a series will be placed in the context of more general nineteenth-century
note-taking practices.
The Notebooks in the Talbot Collection
The Talbot Collection was donated to the British Library by the family of Talbot’s
descendents in 2006. It is the major part of a wider archive of the Victorian scholar. As
previously mentioned, several photographic notebooks and thousands of important prints
(originating in a donation to the Science Museum by Talbot’s grand-daughter, Matilda, in
late 1937) are held at the National Media Museum, Bradford, and a smaller number of items
in several public and private collections. From the perspective of scope and scholarly
integrity, the British Library’s collection is significant. Apart from notebooks, it contains
unbound Assyriological and mathematical folios, natural specimens, photographs,10 diaries,
letters,11 offprints of Talbot’s articles, patents, artefacts and a small selection of books,
presumably from Talbot’s library.12 As pointed out by ‘The Correspondence of William
Henry Fox Talbot Project’,13 directed by Larry J. Schaaf, Talbot’s precocious awareness of
the preservation of his archive, ‘combined with the protection of a stable family structure
through several generations, has led to an unusually complete archive’,14 reflecting scientific
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
3
Friedrich Steinle, ‘The Practice of Studying Practice: Analyzing Research Records of Ampère and Faraday’,
in Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science, ed. F. L. Holmes, J. Renn and H.-J.
Rheinberger (Dordrecht, Boston and London 2003), pp. 93-117.
Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. M. Lynch and S.
Woolgar (Cambridge, MA., and London 1990), pp. 19-68. See also Hans-Jörg Rheinberger,
Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge: Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas (Göttingen,
2001), pp. 109-21.
The notebooks were largely unknown to researchers and warranted a fuller description. The notebooks
catalogue was the subject of an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral project to research the wider aspects of
Talbot’s work in Victorian scholarship. This catalogue was recently completed in a draft form that will be
migrated into the manuscript catalogue at the British Library where it will be accessible shortly.
The
photographs
are
catalogued
in
the
Jerwood
catalogue
of
photographs
www.bl.uk/catalogues/photographs.
The letters have been transcribed and are available online. See the project description at
http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/. Henceforward cited as ‘Talbot Correspondence’.
A larger library containing many of Talbot’s books can be viewed at Lacock Abbey.
See http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/index.html.
At the age of eight, Henry Talbot commanded his stepfather to ‘tell Mamma & everybody I write to to [sic]
keep my letters & not burn them’ (Talbot Correspondence, Document no. 00492).
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
networks in Victorian Britain. This justified the ambitious acquisition and transcription of
the correspondence and inspires further projects acknowledging the significance of the
collection in a broader context of the history of science. As already revealed by ‘The
Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project’, Talbot was connected to a
remarkable network of nineteenth-century savants. The letters offer a point of entry into
this network that can be traced to other sources such as the Layard and Babbage Papers at
the British Library and the Herschel Papers held by the Royal Society Library.
The recent conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography’ raised two key
issues about Talbot’s work and life. These are Talbot’s role in the social geography of
Victorian science and the relationship between Talbot’s social role and his intellectual and
theological frameworks. Common themes also emerged around Talbot’s preoccupation with
difficult subjects, origins, script, decipherment and language, all subjects to be further
explored in his notebooks.15 Hence, access to Talbot’s own notebooks, hitherto largely
unknown, is not only a key to his interests beyond photography, but also to contextualize his
correspondence with other scholars. Above all, the notebooks are manifestations of the very
origins of Talbot’s scholarship, providing further avenues to understand his way of selecting,
assembling, acquiring, and organizing, classifying, memorizing, revising and establishing
knowledge. Ultimately, the notes tell us what really mattered to Talbot. From the perspective
of the history of photography, future access to the collection will foster research that gives a
better account of Talbot as a creative individual, taking the idea of the intellectual mindset
into account.16
The notebook collection at the British Library comprises around 360 items. The first
notebooks emerged when Talbot was around 10 years old. He continues the practice of
keeping notebooks until his death in 1877. Even though several items are in private and
other collections we may assume that the quantity of notebooks held in the British Library
gives a representative overall impression of Talbot’s scholarship. Of these some 360 items,
124 are accounts, miscellaneous notebooks and calendars many of which were held by
Talbot’s father, his mother’s servant or other staff at Lacock Abbey. The few agenda books
which Talbot used to keep miscellaneous notes, including lists of scholars to whom he sent
photographic specimens, reflect the extent of his scientific network and the importance the
distribution of photographic specimens had for him.
The rest of the notebooks, which I will subsequently call ‘scholarly notebooks’, cannot
easily be divided into categories. In the especially illuminating cases of mathematics and the
natural sciences, Talbot would often switch from one discipline to another within a single
notebook.17 Nevertheless, it can be clearly stated that Talbot had a sense of division between
natural sciences and mathematics (including chemistry and photochemistry, optics, and
applied sciences) on the one hand and studying languages and the past (including such fields
as philology, etymology, Classics and mythology, and Assyriology) on the other hand. Even
though Talbot mixed these latter fields with each other within one notebook there is hardly
ever an overlap between these fields and the natural sciences and mathematics.
This type of ‘classification’ accounts for the emerging division of scholarship into
different categories as well as the advent of newly institutionalized disciplines around the
time. Talbot’s fascination for these newly emerging disciplines, however, makes it also hard
to classify him as a scientist. On the one hand he can be considered an active participant of
15
16
17
4
At the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (Crassh), University of Cambridge,
see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1113/40.
As it was brought up in the final discussion at the conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond
Photography’, Crassh, University of Cambridge, June 2010.
The notebooks vary in size and scope and in the manner in which they were held. While the account books
are usually smaller, the scholarly notebooks are usually twice as large, sometimes in hard covers, sometimes
soft cover notebooks that vary in length and design.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
a shift around the middle of the nineteenth century during which disciplines became
institutionalized. On the other hand, Talbot is still reminiscent of the eighteenth-century
idea of the natural philosopher, denying the border of different disciplines and attempts at
specialization. This entails that Talbot’s archive also recalls typical notebooks of eighteenthcentury universal scholars like Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).18 Nevertheless,
Talbot’s sense of division between the natural sciences/mathematics and the Antique
sciences/philology in his notes is apparent. Within this division, a further level of
classification can be traced on an additional sublevel.
On a subordinate level within the collection, Talbot classified some of his notebooks as
series that he indicated with numbers or letters (see later in this article). Amongst these are
1 science sub-series, 2 Classics and etymology sub-series (including one sub-sub series S.1S.5) and approx. 6 Assyriology sub-series. The rest of the notebooks have not been identified
as part of series, although some are related for example by subject matter. Talbot’s prospect
of assembling a certain number of notebooks in a ‘series’ is subject to different origins and
attests to the different notions of ‘classification’ Talbot had in mind. What makes his
arrangement of mathematical and scientific notebooks a series was mainly a continuing drive
towards scientific inventiveness with occasional side trips to mathematics. This led to an
array of scientific results and inventions, photography being one of them. These successes
might partly be owed to the fact that the 1830s, the decade in which the science series
emerged, was a particularly productive period in Talbot’s life, when he seemingly found it
easy to absorb any topic that engaged him. While a fast working impetus and inspiration
attributed to Talbot’s broad knowledge can also be observed in the etymological and
Assyriological series, the notebooks seem less scattered in the sense that Talbot refrains from
jumping from one field to another. Rather, Talbot seems to stick to a certain prospect. In this
sense, the series in philology, etymology and Assyriology resulted in most cases in a
publication.
Studying with Pen and Paper: Talbot’s Way of Note-Taking
Talbot’s education is a crucial part in understanding his notebooks. Note-taking was
something he was confronted with early on in his life. He was taught first by his mother,
Lady Elisabeth Theresa Feilding (1773-1846), then at Harrow and finally at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he was a student between 1817 and 1821. Expectations were high when
Talbot entered Trinity College. Talbot’s stepfather expected Talbot to become a Senior
Wrangler, the person with the highest marks in Mathematics, on his way to an outstanding
career. Talbot graduated as twelfth wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos. He was also a
dedicated classicist, and his early scholarly successes at Cambridge include the Porson Prize
for Greek Verse (1820). Talbot’s family always sent him detailed reports from their travels,
for example from Rome describing Roman sculpture and other antiquities they had seen.
Their letters gratified Talbot’s restless thirst for knowledge about the antique. Talbot’s
interest in antique and classical studies dates to his early years, but his relationship with
Classics was never a straightforward one. Owing to his multiple interests, Talbot seemed
constantly unable to decide how much time and energy he was willing to invest in this
complex subject. In this letter from 1816 Talbot expresses his concerns to his mother while
at the same time assuring her that his classical education would not suffer in the future: ‘In
Classics I have certainly lost ground since I left Harrow; yet not much, & easily recoverable
at any time.’19
18
19
5
See Bourguet, ‘A Portable World’.
Talbot to Elisabeth Theresa Feilding, 16 Aug. 1816, Talbot Correspondence, Document no. 710.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Despite concentrating on mathematics at Cambridge, Talbot never left behind his
classical studies. One reason for this might be found in his concern to preserve and cultivate
his scholarly well-roundedness, rather than becoming ‘too mathematical’, as his mother
expressed it in this letter sent to her son in 1817: ‘You seem so mathematically inclined that
I ought en bonne mere to send you to Oxford to counteract it that you may not grow into a
Rhomboidal shape, walk elliptically, or go off in a tangent. all which evils are imminent if
you go to Cambridge.’20 Mathematics in Cambridge in the 1820s became a fundamental and
pre-eminent subject and very much related to reasoning, a ‘substitute for logic’21 as taught
at Oxford. Talbot’s mother’s concern was grounded in mathematics being the pre-eminent
field, while the literae humaniores dominated at Oxford. Though Classics was taught at
colleges and medals like the Porson Prize were awarded for outstanding performances,
Classics was, however, not part of an official University examination until 1827, when the
Classical Tripos was introduced. The combination of mathematics and Classics was
grounded in an ideal predicting that classical languages would connect ‘the student with the
past, [while] science would connect him with the future.’22
In 1817 William Whewell (1794-1866) became Fellow at Trinity College and taught as a
college tutor while Talbot was studying for the Mathematical Tripos. At that time the Tripos
was called the University Senate House examination.23 It was the passage to a Cambridge
degree, and ‘a means rather than an end, a means for the intellectual elite to display the
talent and achievement that opened doors to fellowships and careers […].’24
Mathematics in Cambridge around 1820 went through major changes, with previously
isolated structures opening up to changing developments from the Continent.25 The
geometric approach of Newton’s Principia was enriched by abstract, algebraic analyses,
demanding new textbooks and methods. What is interesting in the context of Talbot’s notetaking practices were the accompanying changes in how to study mathematics. Students
were now asked to ‘write out their mathematical knowledge from memory and to solve
difficult mathematical problems on paper’.26 In this context, pens, ink and paper were
Talbot’s major tools at Trinity. Here, the art of writing was strongly emphasized. Thus,
Talbot’s ‘paper-based’ education evolved ‘not merely as a record of what goes on inside a
theoretician’s head, but as a skilled activity that developed coextensively and inextricably
with technical innovation in mixed mathematics’.27 A sheet of paper was the space where
everything was ‘entered’, calculations, translations or miscellaneous notes. This marked a
shift from a culture of reading towards a culture of writing; written papers were to become
‘the most important factor in determining a student’s place in order of merit’.28 Being
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
6
Elisabeth Theresa Feilding to Talbot, 19 May 1817, Talbot Correspondence, Document no. 767.
John Gascoigne, ‘Mathematics and Meritocracy: The Emergence of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos’,
Social Studies of Science, xiv (1984), pp. 547-84, at p. 570.
Harvey W. Becher, ‘Voluntary Science in Nineteenth-Century Cambridge University to the 1850’s’,
British Journal for the History of Science, xix (1986), pp. 57-87, at p. 59.
See Harvey W. Becher, ‘William Whewell and Cambridge Mathematics’, Historical Studies in the Physical
Sciences, xi (1981), pp. 1-48, Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (eds.), William Whewell: A Composite
Portrait (Oxford, 1991).
See Harvey W. Becher, ‘William Whewell and Cambridge Mathematics’, p. 10.
See Simon Schaffer, ‘Paper and Brass: The Lucasian Professorship 1820-1839’, in From Newton to Hawking:
A History of Cambridge’s Lucasian Professors of Mathematics, ed. K. Knox and R. Noakes (Cambridge, 2003),
pp. 241-93. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago
and London, 2003).
Ibid. See also Christopher Stray, ‘The Shift from Oral to Written Examination: Cambridge and Oxford 17001900’, Assessment in Education, viii (2001), pp. 33-50.
Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory, p. 169.
Ibid., p. 131.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
prepared for these expectations, Talbot was used to producing his knowledge on paper and
taking notes, while reading. Knowledge could be reproduced from memory, once it was
written down.
Recent historical studies have outlined the epistemological and aesthetic qualities of writing
in the sciences,29 highlighting note-taking as a practice of ‘science in the making’.30 Taking
these studies into account, note-taking can be understood as more than mere passive
reflections of thoughts, but part of an epistemological process that shapes and promotes
knowledge. In addition to the transcriptions of his letters available online, Talbot’s
notebooks provide an extraordinary opportunity to examine his scholarly inheritance.31 The
letters have already opened new avenues for researchers to explore Talbot’s activities as a
savant whose interests reach far beyond photography. But unlike notebooks, letters are
supposed to be read by a recipient. Their language differs from the scattered, sometimes
undecipherable fragments left in scholarly notebooks. These difficulties notwithstanding, it
is precisely this apparent inaccessibility which can make the study of notebooks appealing.
Research notebooks are mirrors of unvarnished, private scholarly activity, giving insight into
working methods and reflections of the scholarly mind.
Many of Talbot’s published papers can be traced back to his notebooks. Unlike published
papers, however, notebooks do not necessarily contain definite results, but the processes and
roads that lead to their conclusion; they are ‘literary activities in their own right’.32
Notebooks also record faults, redundancies, alternatives, and doubts. Despite their scholarly
nature, they are subjective and private documents. Reading notebooks means observing
someone’s thoughts in an attempt to work something out or to understand a phenomenon.
In most notebooks, everything is provisional, the outcome is still open. But taking notes is
not always a means to an end; notes can also lead to the opposite of a conclusion and in some
cases even to the discernment of the impossibility of solving a problem. Studying Talbot’s
notebooks, therefore, requires the exploration of other sources such as his publications,
contemporary textbooks, records, artefacts and letters. As an historian studying these
peculiar sources, reading between the lines and seeking for intentions is as much required
as the decipherment of the often challenging handwriting. Note-taking is a process of its
own, entailing numerous factors such as time, space, light conditions, the kind of pencil,33
but also the mental state and the stage of life of the author.
Having outlined the meaning notebooks can gain for scholars, we need to clarify the impact
they have for the scholars who create them. Like diaries, notebooks are recording tools, which
are, at least in most cases, not meant to be read by other people, but primarily serve the author
himself. Note-taking means storing notes, entailing both ‘to write down’ and ‘to get to know’
from Latin notare or noscere, whereas the note, from notitia, means ‘to be known’.34 Note-taking
‘binds together the practices of observing and reading […]. Taking notes entails taking note –
that is, riveting the attention on this or that particular.’35 It is self-evident that through the process
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
7
Apart from the literature quoted in the following, see more generally e.g. David Locke, Science as Writing
(New Haven and London, 1992).
Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, ‘Introduction’, in Reworking the Bench:
Research Notebooks in the History of Science, pp. vii-xv, at p. x.
A similar opportunity is offered by the Darwin archive, which consists of letters and notebooks, accessible in
various electronic resources. See http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwins-letters and http://darwinonline.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html
Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, ‘Introduction’, in Reworking the Bench, p. viii.
Christoph Hoffmann (ed.), Daten sichern, p. 13.
Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook: A Paper-Technology’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy,
ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 582-9, at p. 584.
Lorraine Daston, ‘Taking Note(s)’, Isis. Journal for the History of Science Society, xcv (2004), pp. 443-8, at pp.
444-5.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
of reading, the interpretation of the reader becomes part of the story. In other words, notes create
intimacy between the reader and the read. Nevertheless, notebooks are not kept like diaries. They
do not keep reflections of the author’s personal life – though it can in some cases interact with
personal experience - but rather serve an object of interest. In this sense, notebooks are not only
a tool of recording, a technology of memory, but even more personally it is a diary of thoughts,
the recording of the scholarly self.
As a tool, they are epistemological devices, i.e. an aid for the author to store, develop, reflect,
analyse, and challenge knowledge. This might be done in various ways (using writing and
drawing alike), e.g. by simply copying a text, an image or a diagram, by repeatedly phrasing or
drawing a device in different ways, or systematizing data.
Having the progress of note-taking in mind, one of the main purposes of note-taking for the
author was the possibility of re-reading the notes that notebooks provided when scholars
developed their thoughts. One could say that note-taking is driven by an attempt to write in order
to read.36 Talbot’s notebooks present a mixture of personal experience and reading (often
contemporary journal articles from the Literary Gazette and the Athenaeum). Paraphrasing
would always go along with critical assessment, and therefore entail taking one’s own notes.
While the author as a reader of his own notes can make sense of them, today’s reader of
Talbot’s notebooks can neither be sure that the notebooks are complete in the sense that all
notebooks survived, nor can he or she assume that Talbot recorded a full set of thoughts when
writing down data. The notes may thus be a summary of Talbot’s own reading activity without
any references, or a complete set of ingenious thoughts. The notes might be a result of a complex
thinking process, an aide-mémoire for the latter, or traces of a first spontaneous thought, which
was then further developed in Talbot’s mind. It is therefore difficult to judge how the notes might
be related to a wider ‘diagram of thoughts’. With tools such as the inclusion and the highlighting
of data, paper provides a different way of organizing thoughts than the mind. When Talbot
expresses doubt by placing question marks behind etymological associations or adds the selfcommendation ‘very good for that time’37 in a notebook a few years after he stopped using it, his
note-taking style entails as much the possibility of scepticism and a reconsideration of the
recorded data. Thus, notes in Talbot’s case are by no means complete sets of data. In fact, the act
of writing seems to stimulate the thinking process. It has a catalysing effect on the mind.
Conveniently most of Talbot’s notebooks are dated, some of them containing a name of the
place where the notebook was started. In other cases, the notebooks had to be dated by looking
at the context of their emergence. What makes the notebooks most difficult to study is
presumably the structure of the notebook content, which differs strongly. Sometimes Talbot
arranges the content with keywords and headlines. Sometimes the content is presented as a
continuing accumulation of notes that are not clearly thematically divided. The text genre
varies just as strongly. While Talbot tends to write passages with complete comprehensible
phrases in his natural science notebooks (see, for example, the Series A-O) when studying
languages in his notebooks, his notes are mostly discrete chains of words followed by for
example their etymological roots, decipherment transcriptions or translations. These notes do
not form coherent texts, but are fragments forcing us to retrieve the missing information out
of different contexts. Note-taking fragments information, while connecting it at the same time.
An index at the end of some of Talbot’s notebooks systematizes the notes. Indexing involves
selecting key words38 which can on the one hand result in new knowledge systems but which
can on the other hand also mean that the index remains a private grid with the help of which
Talbot found his way around his many notes.
36
37
38
8
Christoph Hoffmann, ‘Schreiben, um zu Lesen. Listen, Klammern und Striche in Ernst Machs
Notizbüchern’, in ‘Schreiben heißt: Sich selber Lesen’. Schreibszenen als Selbslektüre, ed. Davide Giuriato,
Martin Stingelin and Sandro Zanetti (München, 2008), p. 200. See also Christoph Hoffmann, ‘The PocketSchedule. Note-Taking as Research Technique: Ernst Mach’s Ballistic-Photographic Experiments’, in
Reworking the Bench.
See notebook Add. MS. 88942/1/41, discussed in detail below.
Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook: A Paper-Technology’, p. 586.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
In both cases, one rarely finds a continuous argument or a perpetuate development of one
thought throughout one notebook, but rather scattered thoughts, often mixing different
topics, in the case of the ‘natural science notebooks’ even disciplines.
Talbot rarely crossed out entire sections. Nevertheless, there are examples where text has been
obliterated, or (as it is the case in fig. 6), additional comments had been added using a different
pen or pencil. These later entries are curious for their function as self-reflexive commentaries,
judging the previous work as either valuable or poor. Talbot’s most common way of improving
or correcting his work, however, was the inclusion of an additional remark on a later page of the
notebook, indicating that the entry contained ‘more on’ a particular subject. Sometimes this was
due to the fact that he had been informed by someone else of another possibility for seeing or
understanding a problem. The versos are often a blank space and also provided an opportunity
for Talbot to include later notes, corrections, comments and annotations. Notebooks for Talbot
are thus tools for self-observation. To exemplify the epistemic function the notebooks had, I will
describe some examples in detail.
Botanical Notebooks and Herbaria
Talbot’s first photogenic drawings made without the use of a camera were pictures of botanical
specimens (fig. 2).39 Flowers and leaves were among the earliest and most striking, exemplifying
the minuteness and precision with which the process could reproduce intricate natural forms.
Fig. 2. W. H. F. Talbot, Plant specimens, 1839. Cameraless photogenic
drawing negative. British Library, Talbot Photo 10 (8).
39
Carol Armstrong, ‘Cameraless: From Natural Illustrations and Nature Prints to Manual and Photogenic
Drawings and other Botanographs’, in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, ed. C. Armstrong and C. d.
Zegher (Princeton and Oxford, 2004), pp. 87-165, at p. 94.
9
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in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
These contact images were made by laying fresh or dried plants on light-sensitive paper and
exposing them to sunlight. The preference for botanical specimens in Talbot’s early
photographs can partly be explained by the growing interest in the study of botany. From an
early age Talbot was keenly interested in plants. As a boy he concentrated his studies on the
British mosses, and by the 1820s he was gathering plant material and meticulous botanical
observations during his lengthy expeditions to the Continent. He corresponded with some
of the highest botanical authorities of the day, including William Jackson Hooker (17851865), who would become the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the
celebrated Italian botanist Antonio Bertoloni (1775-1869). In his botanical garden at Lacock
Talbot planted seeds he had collected abroad or received from his correspondents,
experimenting with the latest horticultural techniques. By 1829 he was a respected botanist
and had been elected a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. His botanical
correspondents were among the first to receive photographic specimens of the new art in
1839. Hooker and Bertoloni, although appreciative, remained sceptical of the utility of
photographs as botanical illustrations.40
Five notebooks in the Talbot Collection list botanical specimens Talbot had identified
during his journeys in Britain and on the Continent. Additional Herbaria complete the
remains of this botanical interest. For Talbot, botany was much more than collecting plants.
Again, we find features related to memorizing, but also an interest and training in
observation and a sense for spotting anomalies in nature. In 1814 Talbot wrote to his mother
from Penrice, Wales:
I am so very happy here, that I feel it more than usually disagreeable to return to
Harrow. I do not think Mr Satterthwaite can have gone to [sic] the extent of botany,
as it is a science, which extends pretty far, & which by no means consists entirely of
nomenclature – It affords excellent exercise to the powers of discrimination, &
practises the memory very much. I am sure that I shall find Euclid much easier, after
having accustomed myself as I do here, to the attentive examination of plants; in the
descriptions of which, every term & expression must be well weighed in the mind, &
thoroughly understood. Far from there being no mind in it, I think that if you or he
ever read Smiths Introduction to Botany, you must confess that there is something
more in Botany than to know every plant when you see it. Aunt Mary says there is a
difference between a philosophical, & a stupid botanist. the variety of wonderful
contrivances which Nature employs for the protection of the flower, & due ripening
of the seeds, &c. excite one’s admiration at every step, & though not so useful, Botany
is as engaging as any science I have yet read about. It is a very great resource, when
one has nothing else to do - & unless we are in prison, or in London, we can always
find some little beauty, to fill up the time, which would otherwise be spent in ennui.41
Two large volumes containing more than 180 cryptogams, namely moss specimens, testify
to Talbot’s special interest in mosses, the study of which was far from popular. Talbot
collected moss specimens in small envelopes and classified them under their different
species, as conceived in the early nineteenth century (fig. 3).
40
41
10
For Talbot’s botanical interest in connection with photogenic drawings see also H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry
Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science, pp. 254-66, Malcolm Daniel, ‘L’album Bertoloni’, in
Fotografia & fotografi a Bologna 1839-1900, ed. G. Benassati and A. Tromellini (Bologna, 1992), pp. 73-8,
Katie Fretwell, ‘Fox Talbot’s Botanic Garden’, Apollo (2004), pp. 25-8, Douglas Nickel, ‘Nature’s
Supernaturalism: William Henry Fox Talbot and Botanical Illustration’, in Intersections: Lithography,
Photography and the Traditions of Printmaking, ed. K. S. Howe (Albuquerque, 1998), pp. 15-23, Graham
Smith, ‘Talbot and Botany. The Bertoloni Album’, History of Photography, xvii (1993), pp. 33-48, H. J. P.
Arnold, ‘A Problem Resolved’, British Journal of Photography (May 1989), pp. 25-7, Craigie Horsfield, ‘Ocean
Flowers: World and Word’, in Ocean Flowers. Impressions from Nature, pp. 181-205.
Talbot to Elisabeth Theresa Feilding, 6 Sept 1814, Talbot Correspondence, Document no. 610.
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in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Fig. 3. W. H. F. Talbot, Botany Herbarium with Moss Specimens (undated). British Library.
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‘Cryptogam’ was Linnaeus’s term for flowerless plants and were not precisely classified
in the nineteenth century. Though Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) started having an
interest in the cryptogams in the late 1780s42 and Johann Hedwig (1730-1799), had
published a book Talbot used,43 the classification system was still being refined in the 1800s.
Most botanists who were primarily interested in collecting plants in the field, while others
investigated them under the microscope, ignored mosses. One reason was the small size of
the plants and the difficulty of detecting them, which was dependent on identifying
microscopic characters.44 Microscopes in this period, however, were not standardized and
were expensive.45 The detection of mosses was even more difficult when one takes into
account that the ‘fruit’ by which the mosses were identified was mainly produced in the
winter months; an uncommon time for field excursions. Moss enthusiasts had to develop
extremely acute observation skills, to accommodate the variation in instruments as well as
observers. Botanists would study cryptogams precisely for the difficulty and challenge their
examination entailed, the exchange of new mosses being a usual habit amongst botanists.46
Talbot received moss specimens from well-known scholars as early as 1815. Still in the mid1830s Talbot’s correspondence documents the extensive exchange of mosses.47
Mathematics and Natural Sciences
As outlined earlier, Talbot was a devoted student of mathematics and the natural sciences
from a young age. An exercise book, dated 1809 (fig. 4), when Talbot was only nine years old,
contains twenty-three ink drawings and diagrams of geometrical figures, astronomical
diagrams, and cartographic exercises that demonstrate the level of his scientific and
technical learning even at a young age.
The drawings may have been produced with the help of a tutor though Talbot’s clear early
stage handwriting starts emerging at this time and several characters resemble the style of
notebooks of the early 1810s. The vellum bound notebook is inscribed ‘William Henry Fox
Talbot March 29th 1809’. The figures contain notes on the Solar system including: the
principle of Bode’s law for planetary distances (‘If the distance from the Sun to the Earth
be supposed to be 10, Mercury will be 4, Venus 7, March 15, Jupiter 52, Saturn 95, and the
Herschell [sic] 190’); the Tellurian system; a section called ‘Fixed stars’ which contains a
drawing about the solar system and movement of the moon in relation to the earth; notes on
the parallax in the difference of aspect of a planet seen from the centre of the earth and from
its surface; proportional distance and magnitudes between the earth and moon; the moon’s
curve in one lunation; differences in the aspects of the planets; and several other elementary
diagrams, distances in space, spherical projections, and questions in cartography such as
triangulation (for instance the determination of distances and angles between points on the
surface of the earth).
42
43
44
45
46
47
12
Ilse Jahn, Dem Leben auf der Spur: Die biologischen Forschungen Alexander von Humboldts (Leipzig, Jena and
Berlin 1969), p. 22.
Johann Hedwig, Stirpes cryptogamicae novae aut dubiae (Lipsiae, 1785).
Personal communication with Anne Secord. See her paper ‘Talbot’s First Lens: Botanical Vision as an Exact
Science’ at the conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography’, Crassh, University of
University of Cambridge (UK), June 2010.
Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago and Bristol
2008), pp. 72-4.
Anne Secord, ‘Corresponding Interests: Artisans and Gentlemen in Nineteenth-Century Natural History’,
British Journal of the History of Science, xxvii (1994), pp. 383-408, at p. 388.
Talbot to William Jackson Hooker, 7 May 1836, Talbot Correspondence, Document no. 5271.
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in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Fig. 4. W. H. F. Talbot, Exercise book, 1809. BL, Add. MS. 88942/1/201.
13
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Talbot further developed his scientific skills especially in the 1820s and 1830s. Talbot’s
series of research notebooks from this period attest to a wide variety of scientific pursuits.
Before the announcement of photography in 1839, Talbot had published nearly thirty
scientific papers, and had made important contributions to mathematics, optics, spectral
analysis, chemistry, and crystallography; he was also active in astronomy, and
electromagnetism. His range of scientific activities was broad even by the polymath
standards of the nineteenth century. Talbot travelled frequently to London, where he was an
active and respected member of the city’s scientific elite. He frequented the city’s artisan
instrument makers and chemists to obtain supplies for his optical and chemical experiments,
visited the city’s practical galleries of science and machine displays, and participated in
activities at the Royal Society and Royal Institution. The correspondence demonstrates that
Talbot was connected to a remarkable network of nineteenth-century savants, such as John
Herschel (1792-1871),48 Charles Babbage (1792-1871), David Brewster (1781-1868), James
David Forbes (1809-1868), Michael Faraday (1791-1867), William Whewell (1794-1866)
and Thomas Young (1773-1829), to name only a few. Many projects that were the subject of
letters between Talbot and his correspondents can be traced in Talbot’s mathematical and
scientific notebooks. In the 1820s Talbot joined a number of scientific societies (the Royal
Institution, Astronomical Society and Zoological Society). He became a fellow of the Royal
Society in 1831 and was an active member there during a period now seen as critical to its
reorganization and professionalization.49 He sat on various specialist committees and held a
number of prestigious institutional positions throughout his life.
Like the early mathematical notebook described above, the majority of mathematical and
scientific notebooks are discrete exercise books.50 There is, however, a row of notebooks that
can clearly be identified as part of a series, subsequently called ‘Series A-O’. The entire
range of Talbot’s interest in the natural sciences is reflected in this series, including
astronomy, chemistry (including photochemistry), spectroscopy, optics (crystallography,
spectral analysis, microscopy using polarized light, photometry, and the camera lucida
applied to a telescope) and applied sciences, some of which were later patented, such as
electrolysis, electrotyping, and electromagnetic motors.51 This series ultimately lead to the
famous notebooks P&Q , which contain mainly notes on photography now held in the
National Media Museum in Bradford.52 The series is particularly rich in content and variety,
though less systematic than other series.53 Even though Talbot kept mathematics and the
natural sciences separate from other fields such as philology and Assyriology, the
48
49
50
51
52
53
14
Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot and the Invention of Photography (New Haven, 1992), Larry
J. Schaaf, ‘Herschel, Talbot and Photography: Spring 1831 and Spring 1839’, History of Photography, iv (1980),
pp. 181-204.
Ruth Barton, ‘“Men of Science”: Language, Identity and Professionalization in the Mid-Victorian Scientific
Community’, History of Science, xli (2003), pp. 73-119.
A possible further series apart from the one described in the following consists of notebooks Add. MS.
88942/1/196 (aa) 1836, Add. MS. 88942/1/197 (CC) 1836, Add. MS. 88942/1/198 (ee) nd, Add. MS.
88942/1/199 (kkk) nd.
For an overview of Talbot’s mathematical and scientific interests see H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry Fox
Talbot. See also David Travis, ‘Mathematics and Photography’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, xlvii (1994), pp. 23-45.
Reproduced and transcribed in Larry J. Schaaf, Records of the Dawn of Photography: Talbot’s Notebooks
P & Q (Cambridge, 1996).
This series contains notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/183 (A) 1823?, Add. MS. 88942/1/184 (B) 1822, Add.
MS. 88942/1/185 (C) 1825, Add. MS. 88942/1/186 (D) 1825, Add. MS. 88942/1/187 (E) 1827, Add. MS.
88942/1/188 (F) 1828, Add. MS. 88942/1/189 (H) 1830, Add. MS. 88942/1/190 (I), Add. MS.
88942/1/191 (J) 1832, Add. MS. 88942/1/192 (K) 1833, Add. MS. 88942/1/193 (M) 1834, Add. MS.
88942/1/194 (N) 1835, Add. MS. 88942/1/195 (O) 1836. Notebook ‘G’ is missing , Notebook ‘L’ is held in
the loan collection at the British Library. The photography notebooks P and Q are held at the National Media
Museum Bradford.
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mathematical/natural science notebooks are among themselves by no means coherent.
Especially the early notebooks Talbot kept in the 1820s and 1830s do not feature a clear and
organized system. Rather, he switched between topics, mathematics being the field coming
up regularly in most notebooks. The earliest notebooks of the series even still contain a few
classical inscriptions; topics Talbot would later treat in separate notebooks.
The notebooks of this series are characterized by an extreme density of entries and attest
to a fast and creative working method. The notes are a mixture of immediately recorded,
spontaneous thoughts as well as extracts from readings in which Talbot refers to other
scholars’ comments and publications, often without cross-references. Judging from the
rhetoric and style of note-taking, Talbot’s personal entries have a fresh and provisional
character. This experimental character of the notes is enforced by using expressions such as
‘I think […]’, ‘I wonder, if […]’, and ‘Would it be possible […]?’, maintaining the possibility
of a later critical assessment. Later addenda and corrections account for Talbot’s idea of
notebooks being an unstable, flexible tool, which allows him to reconsider and improve his
argument regularly. In doing so, Talbot, to give a few examples, asks himself questions,
emphasizes valuable thoughts with exclamation marks, leaves space for annotations on the
left, and uses signs in order to fill in missing information.
Talbot’s mathematical studies are documented in publications and in thirteen notebooks
on scientific and mathematical topics dating from the 1820s and 1830s, four from 1836 to
1837 devoted specifically to mathematics in this series (A-O), in addition to several currently
undated notebooks and many loose notes on mathematical topics yet to be examined by
researchers. When Talbot started his mathematical career at Cambridge, mathematics as
pointed out earlier in this paper was undergoing important changes around 1820 with a
strong Newtonian background slowly opening up to European mathematics, leading to the
foundation of the progressive Analytical Society.54 Talbot, sympathizing with both parties,
did not leave many mathematical notebooks from this early period. The earliest notebooks
on mathematics of the series mainly deal with curve analyses and the theory of numbers with
attempts to invent analytical techniques. His mathematical pursuits continue in the 1830s,
when notebooks are entirely on integration (besides other topics) in preparation for his
major work ‘Researches in the Integral Calculus’, read before the Royal Society in 1836,55
which was to become his most important publication in mathematics, resulting in an award
of a Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1838. Talbot published numeral papers on elliptical
integrals, analytical tools for mathematical physics, including the formula for what became
known as ‘Talbot’s curve’ (the negative pedal of an ellipse with respect to its centre).56
Though some notebooks of this particular series (A-O) of scientific and mathematical
notebooks explicitly deal with mathematics, it was a field to which Talbot returned regularly
during his lifetime, as we can tell from his later, discrete notebooks.57 He generally mentions
many sources of the eighteenth century, which reflects his interest in the history of
mathematics. The correspondence reveals his intense exchange with the French
54
55
56
57
15
See Simon Schaffer, ‘Paper and Brass’ and Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Researches in the Integral Calculus, Part 1’, Philosophical Transactions (1836), pp.
177-215, William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Researches in the Integral Calculus, Part 2’, Philosophical Transactions
(1837), pp. 1-18.
See e.g. William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘On a Curve, the Arcs of which Represent Legendre’s Elliptic Functions of
the First Kind’, Annales de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées, xiv (1823), pp. 123-8.
This information is based on a short report by Christian Gérini after consultation of the notebooks in the British
Library in 2008: ‘Talbot’s Notebooks and his Works in Mathematics: a Passion as well as an Entertainment’, with
thanks to the author as well as to Graeme Mitchison.
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mathematician Joseph Diaz Gergonne (1771-1859) to whose journal Annales de
Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées Talbot contributed frequently. Throughout his life, Talbot
showed an interest in Fagnani’s theorem, a topic Talbot returned to in the 1860s.58 It is also
in the 1860s when he develops his own demonstrations, while the 1830s calculations
resembled more common mathematics as it was practised within popular science circles.
Owing to the manifold nature of the series, mathematics (though carried out by Talbot with
serious scholarly intentions often resulting in publications) appears like a leisure activity
Talbot would enjoy in between other discourses of an optical or chemical nature. Thus, in
the understanding of Talbot as a savant, mathematics plays as much of a crucial part as
Classics. Not only do we need to understand mathematics as a general training that provides
structure and orientation in the working process; we can also speculate that mathematics
offered a working methodology for Talbot’s efforts in Assyriology to the extent that
decoding, which relies on analysis of (symbolic) terms, is a decisive part of decipherment.
What is also interesting about the nature of the mathematical notes in the series is their
connection to astronomical problems. In addition to mathematics, optics, light and
astronomy are substantial topics in the notebooks up to 1830. Talbot started astronomy,
another of his lifelong passions, in his early years with a notebook of astronomical drawings
(fig. 4).59 Astronomy is also the subject of the earlier notebooks of the series, and of
numerous letters between Talbot, his family and leading astronomers in Britain and abroad,
like Franz Xaver von Zach (1754-1832), François Arago (1785-1853) when conducting
observations of Jupiter, Saturn and the Orion Nebula in the 1820s, and the Astronomer
Royal George Biddell Airy (1801-1892), Professor and Director of the observatory at
Cambridge, John Herschel (1792-1871) and Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), Professor at
Edinburgh. The letters and notes attest to regular observations and highlights like eclipses
(also of the moon), subjects on which Talbot published and which were appreciated for their
observational quality.60 Comets were the most frequent subjects in his notebooks. The notes
consist of calculations of orbits, speculations, and observations. However, his astronomical
notes are more reflections of contemporary scholarship in astronomy, rather than
contributions. Nevertheless, Talbot delivered a paper to the British Association in 1842 on
innovative topics like reflecting telescopes, i.e. the copying of specula by the electrotyping
process, referring to suitable specula Wheatstone had produced. Even late in his life he
published a paper on measurement of the distances of fixed stars, the research for which he
began almost fifty years before.61 In numerous letters Talbot gave photographic advice to
Airy, Lord Rosse (1800-1867) and Warren de la Rue (1815-1889) at a time when the utility
of photography in astronomy started to become evident and technique improved.
Another salient interaction of scientific and photographic achievements in Talbot’s life
was an experiment on the velocity of electricity following up on Charles Wheatstone’s
(1802-1875) experiments with electric sparks.62 This not only led to several attempts to
patent electric motors (together with Wheatstone), but also to a photographic experiment
with an electric spark and a spinning disk, a ‘pre-history’ of instantaneous photography.63
58
59
60
61
62
63
16
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Notes on Fagnani’s Theorem’, Edinburgh Royal Society Transactions, xxiii (1863), pp.
285-98.
See Add. MS. 88942/1/201.
See e.g. William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Account of a Total Eclipse of the Sun, 28 July 1851, Observed at Marienburg
in Prussia’, Astronomical Society Memoirs, xxi (1852), pp. 107-15.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘On a Method of Estimating the Distances of Some of the Fixed Stars’, British
Association Report, xli (1871), pp. 34-6.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Proposed Philosophical Experiments (on the Velocity of Electricity; and Proposed
Method of Ascertaining the Greatest Depth of the Ocean)’, Philosophical Magazine, iii (1833), pp. 81-2.
Chitra Ramalingam, ‘Stopping Time: Henry Fox Talbot and the Origins of Freeze-Frame Photography’,
Endeavour, xxxii (2008), pp. 86-93; Chitra Ramalingam, ‘Fixing Transience: Photography and Other Images of
Time in 1830s London’, in Time and Photography, ed. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger and Hilde Van Gelder
(Leuven, 2010), pp. 3-26.
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In 1824 Talbot met Herschel and Brewster, and began to research experimental aspects of
optics besides mathematics. Herschel was to become one of Talbot’s most frequent
correspondents and the two scholars shared common interests in astronomy and chemistry.
This led to sustained academic and institutional success. In 1836 Talbot was invited to give
the Royal Society’s prestigious Bakerian lecture on his work on crystallography. Talbot’s
earlier work on spectroscopy also indicates the chemical scope of his experimentation for
which he had developed aptitude and enthusiasm as a pupil at Harrow. Another paper of
importance was ‘Some Experiments on Coloured Flames’, which Brewster published in the
Edinburgh Journal of Science in 1826.64 Further studies and experiments on optics and light
were to follow. Talbot’s election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1831 enabled him to
intensify his contacts and scientific pursuits and was the beginning of an especially intense
period. The most productive result of the following liaison of chemistry and optics were the
experiments with photogenic drawings. The series A-O contains also the first notes on the
process, including first recording of the idea to use a positive/negative process. Here Talbot
coined the terms ‘Photogenic drawing’ and ‘Sciagraphy’ (notebook ‘M’).65 Traces of the
experiment can first be found in notebook ‘L’ (loan collection), and were further developed
in notebook ‘M’. The invention results in the famous notebooks P&Q.66 Besides
photography, notes on chemistry touch upon topics such as the deflagration of silver, gold
and copper leaf resulting in new spectra, spectrum analysis concerns, the spectrum of
sunlight and colour changes. Further optical notes concern microscopy using polarized light
in the context of Young’s theories of light. This led to the study of crystals,67 a field on which
Talbot published (and on which he gave the Bakerian lecture for 1837), and to which he still
contributed in the late 1840s.68 The research notes are grounded in and accompanied by an
intense correspondence between him, Herschel and Brewster. Occasional moves to other
areas and interests characterize the notebooks of the 1830s, such as studies about electricity,
or on how heat and water could change the colour of substances and the development of an
invisible ink, and telemetry as later examined by Wheatstone. Unlike Talbot’s publications,
his notebooks are thoroughly experimental, partly foreshadowing achievements such as
chemical recording paper, etching techniques, photoengraving, the photometer69 and
galvanism. The notes in the series cannot be seen as discrete records of different interests.
As the mathematical notes lay the ground for astronomy, Talbot’s notes on optics, light and
chemistry result in his attempt to undertake experiments with photosensitive plates.
Notebook ‘J’ (Add. MS. 88942/1/191, fig. 5), which is right in the centre of the series
A-O, is an extraordinary example of the variety of subjects Talbot addresses within a single
notebook.70 Talbot started notebook ‘J’ in London on 5 May 1832 and used it for around a
year. The range of the notebook can only be hinted at and it would be beyond the purpose
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
17
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Some Experiments on Coloured Flames’, Edinburgh Journal of Science, v (1826),
pp. 77-82.
See Add. MS. 88942/1/193. Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows, pp. 41-2.
See Larry J. Schaaf, Records of the Dawn of Photography: Talbot’s Notebooks P & Q.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Further Observations on the Optical Phenomena of Crystals (Bakerian Lecture)’,
Royal Society Proceedings, iii (1836), pp. 455-66, William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘On the Optical Phenomena of
Certain Crystals’, Philosophical Magazine, ix (1837), pp. 25-7.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Experiments on Light’, Philosophical Magazine, v (1834), pp. 321-34, William Henry
Fox Talbot, ‘On the Nature of Light’, Philosophical Magazine, vii (1835), pp. 113-18, 57.
A. D. C. Simpson, ‘Talbot’s Photometer, or Developments before Photography’, Studies in Photography (1996),
pp. 8-10.
For this more detailed description on the content of this notebook and for sharing her thoughts I am indebted to
Chitra Ramalingam.
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in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
of this paper to give a complete picture of its content. It contains notes on the camera lucida, on
experiments with electric sparks71 and revolving circles.72 It also includes the first mention of
optically fixing moving objects and extended passages on shaped crystals. Unlike this surprising
amalgamation of experimental chemistry and optics, the mathematical notes in the notebook are
straightforward; like the only stable component they keep appearing throughout the notebook,
normally not even filling an entire page, but stopping without being ‘completed’ when Talbot was
distracted by something else. Subsequently, Talbot turns to another topic.
Fig. 5. W. H. F. Talbot, Notebook, ‘J’, 1832-33. Add. MS. 88942/1/191.
71
72
18
Chitra Ramalingam, ‘Fixing Transience’.
The experiment was a modification of Charles Wheatstone’s experiment on the velocity of electricity, later
published in Wheatstone’s 1834 publication ‘An Account of Some Experiments to Measure the Velocity of
Electricity and the Duration of Electric Light’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, cxxiv,
pp. 583-91. Talbot attended Faraday’s and Wheatstone’s presentations on this ongoing work in 1833 at the Royal
Institution and published this proposal as part of William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Proposed Philosophical
Experiments’, Philosophical Magazine, iii(14) (1833), pp. 81–2. Consequently Wheatstone felt that Talbot had
pre-empted his work (Research notes by Chitra Ramalingam). For this incident see also Brian Bowers, Sir Charles
Wheatstone FRS (London, 2001), pp. 60-3.
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One surprising example for such an incident is a page (fig. 5) that starts with mathematical
notes at the top, and then continues with notes on a solution which turns from blue to clear
over months, and which can be used as ink to write letters which disappear but remain
visible in relief. The passage reads
Some months ago I placed in a cupboard a corked bottle containing a little sulphate
of molybdena a beautiful blue liquid – On looking for it, it was not to be found, but
in its stead was a bottle containing a liquid twice or thrice as much in quantity and
clear as water. I at length conjectured that the blue liquid had turned white which
proved to be the case. Letters written with this liquid are at first scarcely visible then
they become very plain as if written with oil, & then nearly disappear, except that they
are visible in relief on the side on which they were written only, which is curious.
When heated they turn coal black.
On the next page Talbot continues: ‘This white liquid when heated turns yellow, & then on
cooling suddenly turns deep blue! [...] March 1833 Mr Faraday informs me that Sulph. Acid
alone, makes an invisible ink which appears coal black when heated.’73 Entries like this not
only make one wonder if some of the notebook entries might have remained invisible to us,
but testify to a high amount of curiosity and joy in experiment.
Classics and Etymology
Talbot’s early scholarly successes in Classics when he was a student at Cambridge include
the Porson Prize for Greek Verse (1820) and the second medal of the Chancellor’s Classical
Medal. His first publications (Legendary Tales in Verse and Prose, 1830) lay in the field of
classical scholarship. Talbot’s archive contains seventy-five notebooks covering etymology,
philology and Classics, from the 1830s and 1840s, the time during which he was also most
active in photography. Etymology, a discipline in its infancy and therefore subject to strong
disagreement amongst scholars, became one of Talbot’s favourite fields of pursuit,
accounting for numerous notebooks and several publications.74 While the first publications
from the late 1830s focused on classical languages, his later notes reveal the gathering of
more than 1000 English etymologies.
In April 1838 and October 1839 Talbot published Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian
Researches in two volumes at his own expense and some 200 (vol. I) and 250 (vol. II) copies,
though sales were not very high.75 A third volume was planned in 1840, but was not realized,
probably because Talbot was going in other directions. In between, in April 1839, he
published The Antiquity of the Book of Genesis Illustrated by Some New Arguments.76
Several notebooks and series prepare the three publications. All of them comprise
etymological topics and literary criticism. Amongst the notebooks on these subjects are two
sub-series (which include the sub-sub series S.1-S.5). Further notebooks that are not part
of a series contain drafts for the publication of Hermes.77
73
74
75
76
77
19
W. H. F. Talbot, Notebook ‘J’, 1832-33, Add. MS. 88942/1/191.
On Talbot’s classical and etymological interests see especially H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot, pp. 88-92,
231-5. Graham Smith, ‘A Visual Etymology for the Calotype’, History of Photography, xix (1995), pp. 88-9,
Graham Smith, ‘Talbot’s Epigraph in The Pencil of Nature’, History of Photography, xxxiv (2010), pp. 90-5. More
specifically on Talbot as an etymologist see Anatoly Liberman’s paper ‘Talbot as a Student of Word Origins’ at the
conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography’, Crassh, University of Cambridge, June 2010.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian Researches (London, 1839).
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Antiquity of the Book of Genesis Illustrated by some New Arguments
(London, 1838-9).
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/7 ‘M’ 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/8 ‘Q’ 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/9 ‘3’ shortly
before 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/10 ‘3’ 1837?, Add. MS. 88942/1/11 ‘4’ 1838?, Add. MS. 88942/1/12 shortly
before 1838.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
The ground for Talbot’s vast interest in Classics and etymology was laid early on, when
his mother, Lady Elisabeth Fox-Strangways, taught him classical and Romance languages,
and at Harrow, where Talbot was a student from 1811 to 1815. Some early notebooks are
impressive testimonies of these early pursuits.78 The majority of these exercise books
contain Latin text, translation and grammar exercises including hymns and poems (with
very few notes about Greek or Romance languages) from 1811 and 1812 when Talbot was a
pupil. I will now look at one of these notebooks79 (fig. 6) in detail.
Fig. 6. W. H. F. Talbot, Notebook, 1811-1815. Add. MS. 88942/1/1.
78
79
20
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/1, Add. MS. 88942/1/2 and Add. MS. 88942/1/3 from circa 1809; and
further three notebooks with notes on Greek mythology and history, Greek literature, Roman literature: Add. MS.
88942/1/4, Add. MS. 88942/1/5 and Add. MS. 88942/1/6 from around 1811.
See Add. MS. 88942/1/1.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Some of the entries in this early notebook might be written by a tutor, but most of the
entries look like Talbot’s hand as it appeared when he was an adolescent. Talbot often came
back to his notebooks – sometimes even ten years later – in order to add advanced or
reconsidered thoughts on a particular subject. Judging by the different handwriting
charting Talbot’s development and the uses of ink and pencil, it seems that Talbot kept
editing, marking and evaluating his own notes several times in this notebook over the
following years, even years later adding or correcting notes to the original text. The note on
one verso with the remark ‘not to be written on’ supports this possible prospect. These
practices of self-correction can be followed until up to 1815; some of the entries might have
been added even later.
One page (fig. 6) contains on its first level a text in ink with direct and indirect speech,
which fills around a third of the page. The handwriting is clear and reminiscent of the hand
of Talbot’s mother, Lady Elisabeth, which Talbot seemed to have used as a model for a while.
Around half of the lines are crossed out with corrections in ink using handwriting that looks
slightly further developed. This section is followed by a few annotations with signs that seem
not to refer to anything on the entire opening, but contain Latin corrections in the same
handwriting used for the corrections in the section above.80 The same handwriting is used
again at the very bottom: ‘A. B. Last line very good. April 25 1814. I wonder whether I shall
think so on the 8th of October 1816. Query, why did I hit on that day in particular?’ In
another ink Talbot takes it even further: ‘It is now the 19th March 1815.’ No letter reveals
why Talbot hit on this day in particular. And it is the nature of notebooks that such questions
are rhetorical and no one but the reader is meant to answer them. On another page Talbot
comments on his own work in pencil ‘Very good W. H. F. Talbot’. Next to a text in Latin
Talbot later reminds himself: ‘first I ever did’. On an entry ‘Creatio Mundi’ from ‘14.
Februarii 1811’ he subsequently judges later with another ink: ‘very good for that time’. At
one point he even explains: ‘revised’. The very last pages of the notebook carry a drawing
with a headline ‘Magical Squares’ and several notes on the definition and history of
chemical substances (e.g. oxygen, phosphorus, muriatic acid, gold, platinum, silver,
mercury). This change of subject anticipates the variety of the later notebooks.
One series, the ‘Etymology Series S-Z’, from the 1830s81 leads to the subsequent
publication English Etymologies that appeared in 1847 at Talbot’s own expense in an edition
of 500 copies. The series contains a few random notes on ancient coins and translations, but
mainly notes on the etymology of names of mythological characters and places, as well as
etymological notes on various languages, including English. The S-Z series is therefore not
only a preparation for Talbot’s Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian Researches,82 but also for
the more detailed English Etymologies (and another series of notebooks English Etymologies
Series A-L (M)).83 Talbot makes numerous references to journal articles published at the
time. It probably continues with the much later (1855) notebook ‘M’.84
80
81
82
83
84
21
This kind of annotating note-taking practice in classical exercise books was already common in the early modern
period. See Ann Blair, ‘The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe’, Intellectual History Review, xx (2010),
pp. 303-16, at pp. 312-13.
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/13, ‘S.1’ 1836, Add. MS. 88942/1/14 ‘S.2’ 1836, Add. MS. 88942/1/15 ‘S.3’
1836, Add. MS. 88942/1/16 ‘S.4’ 1837 and Add. MS. 88942/1/17 ‘S.5’ 1837. The series then continues with Add.
MS. 88942/1/18 ‘T’ 1837, the small sub-subseries Add. MS. 88942/1/19 ‘U’ 1837 and Add. MS. 88942/1/20
‘U.2’ 1837, which continues with Add. MS. 88942/1/21 ‘V’ 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/22 ‘W’ 1838, Add. MS.
88942/1/23 ‘X’ 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/24 ‘Y’ 1838, and finished with Add. MS. 88942/1/25 ‘Z’ 1839. The
notebooks leading to ‘S-Z’ could not be clearly identified because of lacking captions.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian Researches.
William Henry Fox Talbot, English Etymologies (London, 1847).
See Add. MS. 88942/1/37. Further notebooks outside the series (Add. MS. 88942/1/7 ‘M’ 1838, Add. MS.
88942/1/8 ‘Q’ 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/9 ‘3’ shortly before 1838, Add. MS. 88942/1/10 ‘3’ 1837?, Add. MS.
88942/1/11 ‘4’ 1838?, Add. MS. 88942/1/12 shortly before 1838) contain early and amended drafts for Talbot’s
publication Hermes, some of them with markings and corrections by Talbot himself.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Hermes promised a new view on classical antiquity, comprising the antiquities of Greece,
Italy and Egypt and Etruscan mythology, using a mixture of more familiar classics and
unfamilar writers. The critiques were positive, pointing out the depth of research and
knowledge involved and highlighting the stimulating etymological connections made.
Precisely the speculative element and the lack of a philological framework and knowledge of
European research into Indo-European languages, however, lead to some criticism.
Etymology, especially in Britain, was still in its early stages in the first half of the century,
even when Talbot published his other work on etymology, the English Etymologies, later in
1847. The Antiquity of the Book of Genesis Illustrated by Some New Arguments (published in
an edition of 200 copies and with slightly better sales) expanded on the idea of allusions to
biblical stories in different histories and mythologies.
The second important series, the ‘English Etymologies Series A-L (M)’, serves as a
preparation for the English Etymologies of 1847.85 Talbot’s publisher John Murray had
prepared him for the criticism Talbot might have to face, and despite an initial positive
review86 in the Literary Gazette and praise and appreciation of the book by Talbot’s
correspondents, a reviewer in the Quarterly Review accused it of methodological and
scholarly failings. Talbot was given the possibility by the editor of the Literary Gazette to
reply to the criticism.87 Despite its errors the publication became significant in the history
of etymology. Talbot’s vast impressive knowledge of classical and modern languages,
including Hindu, Farsi, Celtic or Icelandic, to name only a few, inspired him in his findings,
which can be traced in the vivid and intuitive way he kept his many etymological notebooks.
He was, however, lacking a systematic and scientific method despite his knowledge and
reflection on work in the field already being done. The use of question marks in his notes
suggests some insecurity, while at the same time the willingness to take risks in creating
uncertain, spontaneous links. No further attempts were made by Talbot to enter the
scientific age of etymology that began to emerge thereafter. A break in scholarly activities
after the death of his mother in 1846 and interest in ancient languages such as hieroglyphics
and Assyrian might have prevented Talbot from pursuing further scholarly developments in
the field. Despite the criticism and errors English Etymologies sold well and has its place in
the historiography of English etymology.
Even though the name of the series A-L(M) might suggest a different order, the series
might actually continue notebook ‘Z’ (Add. MS. 88942/1/25) from 1839 of the Etymology
Series from the 1830s S-Z described above. The notes in the series A-L(M), however, are
systematically more organized than previous etymological notebooks. Single words are
underlined and can be found in the publication. There are also notes on other languages and
Greek mythology. Talbot includes comments on the versos, while the main notes are on the
rectos. Within this series, Talbot starts taking notes on Assyrian archaeology, biblical
Assyriology, ancient Mesopotamian languages, Assyrian history and the work of Austen
Henry Layard (1817-1894). In notebook ‘K’ from 1847 the notes are no longer systematic as
they no longer serve the publication. Talbot now refers to his publications English
Etymologies and Hermes, possibly in reaction to the critiques of English Etymologies and in
preparation for a counter-statement. One finds also many references to contemporary
85
86
87
22
It consists of notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/26 ‘A’ 1840, Add. MS. 88942/1/27 ‘B’ 1841, Add. MS. 88942/1/28
‘C’ 1841, Add. MS. 88942/1/29 ‘D’ 1842, Add. MS. 88942/1/30 ‘E’ 1842, Add. MS. 88942/1/31 ‘F’ 1843, Add.
MS. 88942/1/32 ‘G’ 1844, Add. MS. 88942/1/33 ‘H’ 1844?, Add. MS. 88942/1/34 ‘J’ 1845, Add. MS.
88942/1/35 ‘K’ (in pencil, possibly not in Talbot’s hand) 1847, Add. MS. 88942/1/36 ‘L’ 1848, and possibly of
Add. MS. 88942/1/37 ‘M’ 1855. There is no notebook ‘I’.
Anonymous, ‘Review of W. H. F. Talbot’s English Etymologies’, Literary Gazette (January and February 1847), pp.
57-8 and pp. 109-11.
See Talbot’s reply: William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Statement’, ibid. (1848), pp. 1-6. H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry
Fox Talbot, pp. 231-5.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
publications, e.g. in the Literary Gazette up to 1852, where the reviews of the book had been
published.
If notebook ‘M’ 185588 is part of the series, then Talbot has returned to the series after a
break of seven years, taking up etymological study again, as he did in previous notebooks.
According to some references that appear in it, Talbot used this notebook up to 1877, the
year of his death.
The two series A-L (M) and S-Z are characterized by the loose boundaries between Classics
and etymology, as classical mythological knowledge is used to explicate etymology and the other
way round. It appears as if Talbot used etymology to understand the past, as when he looks for
the deeper meaning of the names of Greek gods. In later philological notebooks, Talbot’s interest
in hieroglyphics and Assyrian languages starts to emerge, with the historical dimension still
dominating owing to his lack of knowledge about decipherment.
Assyriology
Even less is known about Talbot’s Assyriological scholarship than his scientific
achievements, for which the work of comparable figures such as Thomas Young suggests
precedents. Talbot’s background in etymology and mathematics laid the ground for his work
in Assyriology.
A corpus of 116 notebooks on Assyriology that contain approximately six Assyriology
sub-series forms the majority of the notebook collection. Around 1850 Talbot became
interested in the decipherment of clay tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia, another medium
of record-keeping and inscription. Decipherment became a task which was to last for the
rest of his life.89 Talbot became a significant scholar within a field which was only in its
infancy. Assyria with its major biblical sites Nineveh and Nimrud was located on the higher
reaches of the River Tigris. In 1839 the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard set off
to the area for diplomatic reasons first, and returned to Britain in 1847 with artefacts from
Nimrud and then Koyunjik north of Nimrud, the site of Nineveh. Amongst them were the
famous tablets and inscriptions, which would later form the Koyunjik collection90 and
become crucial for the study of Assyriology and the decipherment of Babylonian and
Assyrian cuneiform. The inscriptions had a great impact on biblical research for most of
them touched directly on events and names appearing in the Bible.
Thanks to work which had already been done on a trilingual inscription of the Persian
King Darius I (522-486) (in Persian, Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform) at Kirmanshah on
the Great rock of Bihistun – in its philological significance comparable to the trilingual
Rosetta stone – decipherment advanced quickly. The British Consul at Baghdad, Major
88
89
90
23
See Add. MS. 88942/1/37.
Talbot’s achievements as a decipherer is mentioned in various secondary sources. See e.g. H. J. P. Arnold, William
Henry Fox Talbot, pp. 298-310, Christopher B. F. Walker, ‘The Kouyunjik Collection of Cuneiform Texts:
Formation, Problems, and Prospects’, in Austen Henry Layard tra l’oriente e Venezia: International Symposium:
Selected Papers, ed. F. M. E. Fales and B. J. E. Hickey (Rome, 1987), pp. 183-93, at p. 184. Walker acknowledges
Talbot’s part in these early attempts of decipherment and mentions that he had offered Layard to take a camera to
Nineveh (without providing an archival record for this offer). See also Peter T. Daniels, ‘Edward Hincks’s
Decipherment of Mesopotamian Cuneiform’, in The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures, ed. K. J. Cathcart
(Dublin, 1994), pp. 30-57, at p. 49. Cyrus Herzl Gordon, Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and
Decipherment (New York, 1982), p. 67, Frederick Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge and New York, 2003), p. 127, Mogens Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria:
Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840-1860 (London, 1996), p. 336.
The natives called the site Koyunjuk or Kouyunjik. The K-number on the tablets refers to ‘Kouyunjik Collection’,
which remains the British Museum’s largest and most important collection of cuneiform tablets, now numbering
some 24,000 pieces. See C. Bezold, Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British
Museum (London, 1998).
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
(later Sir) Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895), who was knowledgeable in Persian, was
the driving force of its first advancement, devoting great effort to the Bihistun inscription.
Edward Hincks (1772-1866), an Irish protestant minister with knowledge of hieroglyphics,
published more than seventy papers, thereby contributing considerably to the decipherment
of cuneiform. Both Rawlinson and Hincks first worked on Babylonian cuneiform,
comprising Assyrian historical texts and Assyrian copies of Babylonian literary texts,
independently. Additionally, Edwin Norris (1795-1872), librarian and assistant secretary of
the Royal Asiatic Society, worked on the decipherment. A high number of letters, which can
be found in the Talbot online correspondence, testify to a lively and expert exchange
between Talbot and these scholars. Talbot, with his solid grounding in ancient and modern
languages including Egyptian and Hebrew, had followed Rawlinson’s and Hincks’s work for
a while. He frequently contacted Samuel Birch (1813-1885), an Egyptologist and later
Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, getting access to
some of the tablets. In 1854, after Talbot had studied Assyrian, his notebooks of a short
series (Miscellanea Assyria)91 reveal he privately published Notes on the Assyrian
Inscriptions.92 While Rawlinson and Hincks had deciphered many characters, Talbot would
use their body of work and study the meaning of the characters.
The British Museum obtained several inscriptions of great importance in the decipherment
and translation of which Talbot was actively involved. In addition to his contributions to
decipherment, Talbot also became a supporter of the idea of using photography for
Egyptological studies,93 for excavations and for the distribution and circulation of the tablets
of the Koyunjik collection for the purpose of decipherment in the early 1850s. After Roger
Fenton had been hired to fulfil this task, Talbot requested photographs of tablets in 1854.
Besides the notebooks, letters, loose folios with Assyrian notes, and offprints, the Assyrian
corpus of the Talbot collection also holds a set of these photographs by Roger Fenton from the
1850s, containing notes by Talbot on their surfaces (fig. 7).94
Predecessors of photographic copying are several tracings which depict tablets of the
Koyunjik collection. A sheet of tracing paper with drawings of two tablets from the
Kojuncik collection with the headline ‘I can’t recognize half these characters’ (fig. 8) with
vague annotations next to the line in pencil shows how much Talbot was struggling at the
beginning and anticipates the interplay between the reproduction of a tablet and the text.
Talbot showed commitment and endurance in decipherment. As in other notebooks, he
came back to them after years, even decades, adding a new entry when he felt that the topic
was related or he revised previous entries. ‘R’ stood for ‘Rawlinson’ and was frequently used
in the notebooks.
Some single notebooks95 reflect an important incident in Talbot’s career as an
Assyriologist. Talbot had been given access to a clay cylinder from the reign of the Assyrian
King Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BC), which had been discovered around this time.
Restricted by conditions of Rawlinson regarding access to objects in the British Museum
and the consequent possibility of decipherment, Talbot suggested that he and Rawlinson
91
92
93
94
95
24
Add. MS. 88942/1/135 ‘Miscellanea Assyria Vol. I’ 1853, Add. MS. 88942/1/136 ‘Miscellanea Assyria Vol II/
Signs Whose Value is Required’ 1853, Add. MS. 88942/1/137 ‘Miscellanea Assyria Vol III’ 1855.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Notes on the Assyrian Inscriptions (Privately printed, 1854).
See Ricardo Caminos, ‘The Talbotype Applied to Hieroglyphics’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, lii (1966),
pp. 65-70. Ingelore Hafemann, ‘Richard Lepsius, William Henry Fox Talbot und die frühe Fotografie’, Göttinger
Miszellen: Beiträge zur ägyptologischen Diskussion (2009), pp. 119-25.
See Mirjam Brusius, ‘Inscriptions in a Double Sense: An Early Scientific Photograph of Script’, Nuncius. Journal
of the History of Science, xxiv (2009), pp. 367-92 and ‘From Photographic Science to Scientific Photography:
Photographic Experiments at the British Museum around 1850’, Pre-print, Max Planck Institute for the History
of Science.
Add. MS. 88942/1/146 ‘Egyptian Archaeology / Inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I’ 1856/1857, Add. MS.
88942/1/147 ‘The Octagon of the Tiglath Pileser I’ 1857, Add. MS. 88942/1/148 ‘Tiglath’ c. mid-1870s.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Fig. 7. Roger Fenton, Photograph of a cuneiform tablet with Talbot's handwriting on the surface, 1854-1856.
Salted paper print from a glass negative. British Library, Talbot Photo 22 (86).
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eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Fig. 8. W. H. F. Talbot, Tracing paper of two tablets from the Kojuncik collection ‘I can’t recognize half these
characters’.
26
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Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
should submit sealed comparative translations of the cylinder. In agreement with the Royal
Asiatic Society, which approved of the idea, Hincks and the German-French scholar Jules
Oppert (1825-1905) were also invited to join the experiment. Numerous letters document
the following event. In the letter accompanying his translation96 Talbot emphasized the
‘truth’ behind such an undertaking and clearly tried to push the discipline in a new
direction, providing a more objective ground. Talbot’s idea proved to be a success. The panel
invited by the Royal Asiatic Society declared the close agreement of the four translations.
Talbot’s role in this episode was later widely acknowledged. As in other fields, he used the
notebooks not only to continue, but also to revise and correct his previous work. He
continued publishing extensively and supported publications financially. Talbot started this
notebook97 (fig. 9) in 1856 with a short passage entitled ‘Egyptian Archaeology’. He soon
abandoned Egyptology in favour of cuneiform decipherment.98 In 1857 he turned the
notebook around and restarted it, upside down, with notes on Assyriology.
This opening shows the beginning of an intermediate draft of a transcription and
translation of the famous ‘Inscription of Tiglath Pileser I’. Talbot organizes the translations
in two columns with transcription on the left and the English translation on the right. The
translation seems incomplete. Annotations are on the versos. Talbot translated the
inscription shortly before he proposed the project in which the three other scholars would
also independently decipher the inscription.99
Two series arose from Talbot’s time at the Athenaeum Club, where Talbot was elected in 1824
and where he resided from time to time.100 Both series contain notes and translations of further
cuneiform inscriptions from Nimrud and Nineveh in the British Museum. The series are not
consistent and lack a specific goal, their content varying, which makes them early experimental
records of Talbot’s attempt to acquire expertise in a new discipline.
A number of notebooks from the 1860s discuss the meaning of individual Assyrian words.
Talbot starts creating his own dictionaries and indices with references to his other notebooks
or publications. These exercises result in several parts of an ‘Assyrian Glossary’. One series
with ‘Rough notes’102 originally consisting of twenty notebooks (with one notebook missing),
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
27
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Inscription of Tiglath Pileser I, King of Assyria 1150 B.C. – as translated by Sir Henry
Rawlinson, Fox Talbot Esq., Dr Hincks and Dr Oppert’, Royal Asiatic Society (1857), pp. 3-4. See also: W. H. Fox
Talbot E. Hincks, Dr. Oppert, Henry C. Rawlinson ‘Comparative Translations’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
of Great Britain and Ireland, xviii (1861), pp. 150-219.
See Add. MS. 88942/1/146.
Another example of the slight transition to Assyrian in the 1850s is e.g. Notebook Add. MS. 88942/1/37.
W. H. Fox Talbot, E. Hincks, Dr. Oppert, Henry C. Rawlinson ‘Comparative Translations’. For a critical view on
the historiography of this event see Eleanor Robson’s paper ‘Bel, the Dragon, and Henry Fox Talbot: Deciphering
Cuneiform after Decipherment’ at the conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography’, Crassh,
University of Cambridge, June 2010.
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/112 ‘Vol I A’ 1855, Add. MS. 88942/1/113 ‘II. B’ 1855, Add. MS.
88942/1/114 ‘Vol III C’ 1855, Add. MS. 88942/1/115 ‘Vol IV. D’ 1856 and ‘Athenaeum Club’ Series, Add. MS.
88942/1/116 1855 or 1856, Add. MS. 88942/1/117, Add. MS. 88942/1/118 ‘H. F. Talbot Athenaeum Club
London’ 1860, Add. MS. 88942/1/119 ‘Athenaeum Club’ 1870 or shortly afterwards, Add. MS. 88942/1/120
Athenaeum Club after 1864.
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/133 ‘Φ’ 1867, Add. MS. 88942/1/132, ‘χ’ between 1866 and 1868, Add. MS.
88942/1/131 ‘Where is it?’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/134 ‘Ψ’ 1870.
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/68, ‘Rough I’ between 1866 and 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/69 ‘Rough 2; 2;
Rough Copy volume 2.’ between 1866 and 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/70 ‘3; Rough No. 3’ between 1866 and 1868,
Add. MS. 88942/1/71 ‘4’ between 1866 and 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/72 ‘Rough 6’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/73
‘Rough 7’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/74 ‘8’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/75 ‘9’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/76 ‘10’ 1868,
Add. MS. 88942/1/77 ‘11’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/78 ‘12’ 1868, Add. MS. 88942/1/79 ‘13’ 1869, Add. MS.
88942/1/80 ‘14’ 1869, Add. MS. 88942/1/81 ‘15’ 1870, Add. MS. 88942/1/82 ‘16’ 1870, Add. MS. 88942/1/83
‘17’ 1870, Add. MS. 88942/1/84 ‘18’ 1870, Add. MS. 88942/1/85 ‘19’ 1870, Add. MS. 88942/1/86 ‘20’ 1870.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
Fig. 9. W. H. F. Talbot, Notebook, 1856/1857. Add. MS. 88942/1/146.
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eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
includes material for part 1 and 2, while the subsequent series A-S103 includes material for
part 3 and a possible part 4. Talbot published the material of the series in
a three-part article, ‘Contribution Towards a Glossary of the Assyrian Language’, in the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society between 1868 and 1873.104
Another highlight in Talbot’s career as an Assyriologist was the ‘discovery’ of an Assyrian
account of the Flood myth by George Smith (1840-76) and work on the famous Persian
Naqsh-e Rustam inscription.105 George Smith, an engraver by trade who was much
supported by Talbot, had joined the Museum as a repairer of tablets from Nineveh. Smith
became interested in Assyriological research and was appointed as an assistant. He then
found pieces that suggested an account of the Flood narrative. The story resembled the
account in Genesis, but was older than the Bible (now known as the eleventh tablet of the
Epic of Gilgamesh). Stephen Thompson contributed the photographs to illustrate Smith’s
Chaldean Account of the Deluge, from Terra Cotta Tablets, found at Nineveh, and now in the
British Museum in 1874.106 Thompson was a photographer employed by the Museum who
like Talbot in the early 1850s had suggested to Samuel Birch (1813–1885), Keeper at the
British Museum, using photographers at the excavations in Mesopotamia.107 Subsequently,
after Smith’s sensational discovery, Talbot privately published Commentary on the Deluge
Tablet, together with a Second Tablet in the British Museum Relating Apparently to the Deluge.108
Furthermore, Talbot dedicated his time from the mid-1850s onwards and again in the
1870s to inscriptions by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (681-669 BC). Several notebooks
including publication drafts remain on this inscription.109 Another important inscription
with which Talbot dealt was the Bellino Cylinder, named after the German philologist Karl
Bellino. Bellino had copied the inscription for G. F. Grotefend, the earliest decipherer of
cuneiform.110 The finely preserved clay cylinder (22502, K. 1680o) with its unusual hollow
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
29
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/88 ‘A’ 1871, Add. MS. 88942/1/89 ‘B’ 1871, Add. MS. 88942/1/90 ‘C’ 1871,
Add. MS. 88942/1/91 ‘D’ 1871, Add. MS. 88942/1/92 ‘E’ 1872, Add. MS. 88942/1/93 ‘F’ 1872, Add. MS.
88942/1/94 ‘G’ 1872, Add. MS. 88942/1/95 ‘H’ 1872, Add. MS. 88942/1/96 ‘I,J’ 1872, Add. MS. 88942/1/97
‘K’ 1872, Add. MS. 88942/1/98 ‘L’ 1872, Add. MS. 88942/1/99 ‘M’ 1873, Add. MS. 88942/1/100 ‘N’ 1874,
Add. MS. 88942/1/101 ‘O’ 1874, Add. MS. 88942/1/102 ‘P’ 1874, Add. MS. 88942/1/103 ‘Q’ 1875, Add. MS.
88942/1/104 ‘R’ 1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/105 ‘S’ 1877.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Contribution towards a Glossary of the Assyrian Language. Part I’, Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, iii (1868), pp. 1-64, William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Contributions
towards a Glossary of the Assyrian Language. Part II’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland, iv (1870), pp. 1-80, William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Contribution towards a Glossary of the Assyrian Language.
Part III’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1873).
The series contains notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/128 ‘Deluge. I Nabonidus, Nakshi Rustam’ 1875 or 1876, Add.
MS. 88942/1/129 ‘Deluge. 2’ n.d., Add. MS. 88942/1/130 ‘Deluge. 3’ n.d.
George Smith, Chaldean Account of the Deluge, from Terra Cotta Tablets, found at Nineveh, and now in the British
Museum (London, 1874).
See Mirjam Brusius, ‘Inscriptions in a Double Sense: An Early Scientific Photograph of Script’.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Commentary on the Deluge Tablet, together with a second tablet in the British Museum
relating apparently to the Deluge (Privately printed, 1875).
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/156 1858, Add. MS. 88942/1/157 ‘Esarhaddon – A’ between 1875 and 1877,
Add. MS. 88942/1/158 ‘Esarhaddon – book 2’ between 1875 and 1877, Add. MS. 88942/1/159 ‘Inscription of
Esarhaddon’ between 1875 and 1877, Add. MS. 88942/1/160 ‘The Second Inscription of Esarhaddon’ between
1875 and 1877. See the resulting publications William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘The Annals of Esarhaddon, Translated
from Two Cylinders in the British Museum’, Journal of Sacred Literature, ix (1859). William Henry Fox Talbot,
‘Inscription of Esarhaddon’, Records of the Past (1878), p. 101. William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Second Inscription of
Esarhaddon’, Records of the Past (1878), p. 109.
C. J. Gadd, ‘Assyrian Antiquities, 1825-56’, The British Museum Quarterly, xxviii (1953), pp. 56-7.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
shape from Nineveh was inscribed with an account of Sennacherib’s first two campaigns
(dated 702 BC).111 Talbot had also been involved in the discovery and the decipherment of
Cypriot inscriptions. Two notebooks are related to them.112 At least three notebooks are
related to ‘The Revolt in Heaven’, a narrative found on a cuneiform tablet in the British
Museum.113 Friedrich Delitzsch published the original text in his Assyrische Lesestücke in the
same year (1876).114 Talbot referred to Delitzsch’s publication in several notebooks.115
The tablet describes a revolt of angels/gods against their creator. Talbot published the
translation ‘The Revolt in Heaven’, in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in
1877.116 Two notebooks related to ‘Bel and the Dragon’, from the extended book of Daniel now
known to be part of the Babylonian ‘Epic of Creation’. Talbot read ‘The Fight between Bel
and the Dragon, and the Flaming Sword which turned Every Way’ at a meeting of the Society
of Biblical Archaeology on 30 June 1876. The draft was published in the Transactions of the
Society in 1877.118 The notebooks reveal that Talbot edited the translation and a later version
was published in 1878.119 Like the impressive record of the notebooks, the correspondence
with other experts in and beyond Assyriology in Britain and other European countries is vast.
Talbot’s achievement in this field resulted in the foundation of the Society of Biblical
Archaeology in 1870, bringing philologists (Assyriologists and Egyptologists) and theologians
together. Talbot refused the offer to become first president, but contributed extensively to the
publications of the Society, Transactions and Records of the Past.
Decipherment was to become Talbot’s pursuit until his death, his very last notebook
containing weak traces of Assyrian cuneiform signs in pencil. Despite his passionate interest
in Assyriology, however, Talbot never travelled to Assyria or anywhere beyond Europe.
In general colonial Britain seems surprisingly absent in Talbot’s archive.120 Thus, apart from
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
30
The notebooks connected to ‘Bellino’ are Add. MS. 88942/1/143 ‘Additional Matter’ 1865 or 1866, Add. MS.
88942/1/144 ‘Bellino’ 1859 and Add. MS. 88942/1/145 ‘Michaux continued’ 1860 and contain drafts related to
the Bellino cylinder. See William Henry Fox Talbot, Bellino’s Cylinder. The Cylinder of Esarhaddon. A Portion of the
Annals of Ashurakhbal (Privately printed, 1856), William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Bellino’s Cylinder of Sennacherib’,
Records of the Past (1878), p. 23, William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘A New Translation of Bellino’s Cylinder’, Journal of
the Royal Society of Literature, viii (1866), p. 369.
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/154 1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/155 ‘Cypriote inscriptions’ 1876. See William
Henry Fox Talbot, ‘On the Cypriote Inscriptions’, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, v (1877),
p. 447.
Add. MS. 88942/1/149 ‘The Revolt in Heaven from a Chaldean Tablet’ 1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/150 ‘Appendix
(to paper entitled Revolt in Heaven)’ 1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/151 ‘The Revolt in Heaven from a Chaldean
Tablet’ 1876.
Friedrich Delitzsch, Assyrische Lesestücke, nach den Originalen theils revidirt theils zum ersten Male herausgegeben und
durch Schrifttafeln eingeleitet von Dr F. Delitzsch (Leipzig, 1876).
See notebooks Add. MS. 88942/1/124 ‘Notice of a new work on Assyriology by F. D.’ 1876, Add. MS.
88942/1/125 ‘Notes’ 1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/126 ‘Notes on Tablets of Creation Series’ 1876 or 1877, Add. MS.
88942/1/127 ‘On the creation Tablets on the First Institution of the Sabbath’ 1876. The latter is connected to Add.
MS. 88942/1/176 and Add. MS. 88942/1/177.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘The Revolt in Heaven’, Transactions of the Sociey of Biblical Archaeology, iv (1877), pp.
349-62.
Add. MS. 88942/1/121 ‘The fight between Bel and the Dragon’ 1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/122 ‘Bel & Dragon’
1876, Add. MS. 88942/1/123 ‘Notes and Observations’ 1876.
William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘The Fight between Bel and the Dragon’, Transactions of the Sociey of Biblical
Archaeology, v (1877), pp. 1-21.
Ibid. See also Eleanor Robson’s paper ‘Bel, the Dragon, and Henry Fox Talbot: deciphering cuneiform after
decipherment’ at the conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography’, Crassh, University of
Cambridge, June 2010.
See Simon Schaffer’s commentary at the conference review of the conference ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond
Photography’, Crassh, University of Cambridge, June 2010. http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1113/40
eBLJ 2010, Article 14
Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks
in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
his scholarly notebooks, Talbot left behind only a few diaries and botanical notebooks from
his journeys to the Continent and the country houses of his extended family, but no vast
archive of field notebooks emerging, for example, from scientific discoveries or
archaeological expeditions far away from home. Talbot can therefore scarcely be compared
to scientific voyagers like Darwin, Herschel, Hooker and Alexander von Humboldt or
contemporary adventurous antiquarians like Layard and Rawlinson keen on travelling to
areas new to Europeans. For Talbot, the field was Lacock Abbey and gentlemanly
institutions in London or Edinburgh. His notebooks are mainly an aid to memory of books
he had read and experiments he made in Britain. Perhaps it was precisely for this reason that
Talbot thought of photography as an additional way to record distant objects hereby making
them less remote and mobile, when he suggested that for instance archaeological sites and
objects at the British Museum should be photographically copied. Photography for Talbot
worked as a substitute, like plant specimens exchanged between botanists.121 His idea would
allow him to take photographs of objects like clay tablets home to decipher them, no matter
if the originals were still in the field or at the British Museum.
Conclusion
Like his notebooks, photographs for Talbot were a recording device that provided a resource
in order to retrieve information; mobile archives to which one can return when needed.
Roger Fenton’s photograph with Talbot’s handwriting on the surface (fig. 7) is the
embodiment of a productive fusion between photography and note-taking. The notebooks,
also in relation to Talbot’s notion of photography, are first of all the key to understanding
the meaning of his intellectual mindset, leading to Talbot’s scholarly achievements only
through a particular combination of coexisting inspiration and interest, photography being
one of these achievements. They enable us to understand and reinvigorate Talbot’s work
from a perspective beyond that of the history of photography in order to provide a fuller
account of the range of Talbot’s endeavour, while mapping the network, institutions and to
a great extent the intellectual landscape which characterized Victorian scientific and
intellectual enterprise through the lens of Talbot. On a further level, the medial variety of
the archive with all its different genres, comprising natural specimens, diaries, letters,
notebooks and photographs alike, enables us to make sense of the supporting versatility of
Talbot’s scholarly methods. Exploring the complementary character of note-taking and
photography as two different and yet comparable methods of recording might be one
example for this approach.122
121
122
31
Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘A Portable World’. Bourguet exemplifies the substitution of note-taking with specimens
and drawings in the work of the French botanist André Michaux: see p. 394.
I am deeply indebted to the following scholars who have contributed to the notebook catalogue of the Talbot
Collection and this article with their expertise: Tony Crilly, Lorraine Daston, John Falconer, Oliver Flebbe, David
Gange, Thomas Gerhardt, Christian Gérini, Nils Robert Güttler, Arnold Hunt, Anatoly Liberman, Graeme
Mitchison, Chitra Ramalingam, Larry J. Schaaf, Anne Secord, and Ursula Sims-Williams. Furthermore, I would
like to thank the participants of the 2010 Talbot conference at CRASSH (Cambridge), and the librarians and the
note-taking reading group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science where I had the opportunity to
hold a visiting fellowship at the time of the completion of this article. I am grateful that the AHRC, the Cambridge
European Trust, the Rausing Studentship, the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Kurt Hahn Trust sponsored this
project. My greatest thanks go to my supervisors and advisor of the collaborative doctoral research project ‘Science
and the Antique in the work of William Henry Fox Talbot’ Simon Schaffer, Katrina Dean and Eleanor Robson for
their indispensable support.
eBLJ 2010, Article 14