william fox talbot and thomas carlyle: connectionstundra.csd.sc.edu/vllc/articles/31/vol31-2.pdf ·...

CSA 31 2015/16

William Fox Talbot and Thomas Carlyle: Connections

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Thomas Carlyle lived into the daguerreotype and photograph age, and he submitted himself early on to the merciless processes of having his image recorded,

even though he had reservations about photography. He had his picture taken by various artists, but he was not photographed by the great pioneer of the new medium William Fox Talbot (1800–1877). This is not surprising, since Fox Talbot did not go in for photographing celebrities in any kind of systematic and commercial way. Carlyle was, however, familiar with Talbot’s process, for his wife experienced it when she sat for Anthony Coningham Sterling (1805–71),1 the elder brother of their great friend John Sterling (1806–44). Carlyle wrote of the sitting and its results on 15 March 1853 to his sister Jean Aitken Carlyle:

Jane is pretty well; has been out this bright mild day; and is now come in. She is somewhat concerned with Talbot -type Portraits, for which Anthony Sterling has an apparatus at present; I think she will by and by send you a specimen of the strange work he does in that way: portraits ugly to a degree, but recognisably like. (CLO : TC to JAC, 15 March 1853)

Both Carlyles recognized, of course, that photographed portraits were much different from oil paintings, especially

1 Sixty-four of Anthony Sterling’s photographs are held at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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those in the idyllic tradition of François Boucher (1703–70) or William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). The paradoxical relation between ugliness and likeness that photography captured both concerned and fascinated the Carlyles.

Carlyle seems also never to have met Fox Talbot, but here again there is a connection. In his Life of Sterling (1851) Carlyle writes about Sterling’s friends in Cornwall. One was Sir Charles Lemon, with whom Sterling went to stay in 1841. Carlyle includes letters from Sterling to his father Edward (1773–1847) that recount his pleasurable experience:

August 29th.— I returned yesterday from Carclew, Sir C. Lemon’s fine place about five miles off; where I had been staying a couple of days, with apparently the heartiest welcome. Susan was asked; but wanting a Governess, could not leave home.

Sir Charles is a widower (his Wife was sister to Lord Ilchester) without children; but had a niece staying with him, and his sister Lady Dunstanville, a pleasant and very civil woman. There were also Mr. Bunbury, eldest son of Sir Henry Bunbury, a man of much cultivation and strong talents; Mr. Fox Talbot, son, I think, of another Ilchester lady, and brother of the Talbot of Wales, but himself a man of large fortune, and known for photogenic and other scientific plans of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.2 He also is a man of known ability, but chiefly employed in that peculiar department. Item Professors Lloyd and Owen: the former, of Dublin, son of the late Provost, I had seen before and knew; a great mathematician and optician, and a discoverer in those matters; with a clever little Wife, who has a great deal of knowledge, quite free from pretension. Owen is a first-rate comparative anatomist, they say the greatest since Cuvier; lives in London, and lectures there. On the whole, he interested me more than any of them,—by an apparent

2 Sterling was wrong about the “Talbot of Wales.” He was not Fox Talbot’s “brother” but a more distant relative. Emma Thomasina Talbot (1806–81) married John Dillwyn Llewelyn (1810–82), an important early Welsh photographer. Emma was the daughter of Thomas Mansel Talbot (1747–1813) and Lady Mary Lucy, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester. He was one of the richest men in Glamorganshire, and built Magram castle near Swansea.

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force and downrightness of mind, combined with much simplicity and frankness.

Nothing could be pleasanter and easier than the habits of life, with what to me was a very unusual degree of luxury, though probably nothing but what is common among people of large fortune. The library and pictures are nothing extraordinary. The general tone of good nature, good sense and quiet freedom, was what struck me most; and I think besides this there was a disposition to be cordially courteous towards me. (Life of Sterling, Works 11: 214–15)

Fox Talbot photographed Charles Lemon’s home, Carclew House, at the approximate time of Sterling’s visit in August 1841. Beyond the connection to Sterling’s letter, the images are precious because they capture a glimpse of one of the many country houses that have disappeared in the past couple of centuries. It burned down in 1934. Certainly, the aristocrats who lived in these homes had the luxury of leisure and comfort, but they used their privilege well in pursuing interests across a wide spectrum, from political and social to scientific and artistic. Sterling’s presence and Carlyle’s records attest both to their historical and their cultural value.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Carclew House, with Charles Lemon on the left, August 1841. Salted paper print from paper negative. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art <www.metmuseum.org>.


William Henry Fox Talbot, Carclew House, near Truro, Cornwall, August 1841, Salted paper print from a Calotype negative, 15.1 x 9.5 cm. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The Ruins of Carclew House, Creative Commons License.

Yet another connection between Carlyle and Fox Talbot is of a different kind. It occurs at a particular place on the map, one that joins them together, however evanescently. In May 1843 Fox

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Talbot visited Paris, a city Carlyle had brought to life in his French Revolution (1837) and would visit and describe in his letters. Fox Talbot was there in 1843 in order to secure patents for his new photographic process. During his stay he took a number of photographs. One group of five was taken from the Hôtel de Douvres, on the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard des Capucines.3 Although taken from at least two different vantage points, when these photographs are joined together they form a “stitched” panorama. This is the first example of the phenomenon in photography, and heretofore it has not been noticed.4

William Henry Fox Talbot, Boulevard des Capucines, May 1843

The calotype on the right is famous because Fox Talbot reproduced it as Plate II in his landmark study The Pencil of Nature (1844). Each plate was accompanied by a brief explana-tory essay:

This view was taken from one of the upper windows of the Hotel de Douvres, situated at the corner of the Rue de la Paix. The spectator is looking to the North-east. The time is the afternoon. The sun is just quitting the range of buildings adorned with columns: its façade is already in the shade, but a single shutter standing open projects far enough forward to catch a gleam of sunshine. The weather is hot and dusty, and they have just been watering the road, which has produced

3 Rue de la Paix now terminates at the southern end of the Place de L’Opéra. 4 The evidence for my Fox Talbot identifications is substantiated by maps, and

here I owe a debt to a French anorak (if the French have anoraks) called Laurent Gloaguen. He produces blogs, mainly trying to find out where Charles Marville took his photographs before Haussmann swept everything away. But he has also looked at Fox Talbot, and his work is readily visible on the internet; see <http://vergue.com/>.

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two broad bands of shade upon it, which unite in the foreground, because, the road being partially under repair (as is seen from the two wheelbarrows, &c. &c.), the watering machines have been compelled to cross to the other side.

By the roadside a row of cittadines and cabriolets are waiting, and a single carriage stands in the distance a long way to the right.

A whole forest of chimneys borders the horizon: for, the instrument chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere. (17–18)

Fox Talbot states what has often been stated: that there is a ruthless impartiality about the photographic image, or as Carlyle described it to his sister, “ugly to a degree, but recognis-ably like.” Photography departed from the diktats of art, which had traditionally been concerned with selection, discrimina-tion and arrangement. So that by the time Flaubert presented frank scenes in Madame Bovary (1856) they were affiliated with nature, rather than art, and in particular nature as it was captured in the daguerreotype.

William Henry Fox Talbot, “View of the Boulevards at Paris,” Salted paper print from a Calotype negative, 16.4 x 21.4 cm. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.


On the far left of the upper-floor calotype (The Pencil of Nature, Plate II) is L’Hôtel Radix de Sainte Foix, built circa 1775 by the great architect Alexandre Théodore Brongniart (1716–1803). It was a “hôtel particulier” rather than a hotel for tourists. On the right is L’Hôtel Montmorency, built by the brilliant maverick architect Claude Ledoux in about 1769. By Fox Talbot’s time it had been renamed L’Hôtel Sommariva. Also visible are two “Colonnes Rambateau,” i.e. street urinals.

L’Hôtel Radix de Sainte Foix [left] and L’Hôtel Montmorency [right], undated pen and India ink wash, by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716–1803). Wikipedia, public domain. The original drawing is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Hôtel Montmorency and the dépot des gardes françaises, by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand. On the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. Wikipedia, public domain. The original drawing is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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The corner that is captured in Fox Talbot’s upper-floor calotype (see above, 91) shows up on the right hand side of a street-scape painting by Thomas Shotter Boys (1803–74), The Boulevard des Capucines at the Corner with the Rue de la Paix (1833, British Museum).

Wikipedia, public domain, Creative Commons License.

In May 1843, Fox Talbot made a sixth calotype that precisely re-creates Boys’s point of view.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org).


Flickr, Creative Common License; see detail below.

From right to left: L’ Hôtel Radix de Sainte Foix, then 10 and 12 Rue Basse du Rempart on the left. Rue Basse du Rempart, on the site of the old City Ramparts, was a sunken road parallel with the Boulevard de Capucines.

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William Henry Fox Talbot, “Boulevard des Italiens” [the correct address is Boulevard des Capucines], Paris, May 1843, Salted print from a Calotype negative, 16.8 x 17.3 cm. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

From right to left: nos. 12, 14, and 16 Rue Basse du Rempart. No. 14, Impasse Heron, is at the end of the narrow alley. No. 16 was where the architect Jacques Verbreck (1704–77) lived. It is possible to see the railings preventing passers-by from falling off the Boulevard des Capucines into the lower Rue Basse. It was swept away in 1858.


Flickr, Creative Commons License; see detail below.

From right to left: nos. 18 and 20 Rue Basse du Rempart. In the foreground a Colonne Rambateau topped by it characteristic “bilboquet.”

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William Henry Fox Talbot, [Boulevards of Paris], May 1843, Salted Paper Print, 16 x 18.3 cm, courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; see detail below.

From right to left: 20, 22, 24 and 26 Rue Basse du Rempart. 20 is immediately to the left of the Colonne Rambateau.


The connection of these images to Carlyle begins with the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, an intersection visible on the Fox Talbot photograph from The Pencil in Nature to the far right the Hôtel Montmorency. It was the scene of a brief engagement at the outbreak of the French Revolution on 12 July 1789 when Prince Lambesc (1751–1825) and his Royal Allemand Regiment engaged with the Gardes Françaises in front of their Depôt. Carlyle describes the event in The French Revolution (1837):

Such issue came of Lambesc’s charge on the Tuileries Garden: no striking of salutary terror into Chaillot prome-naders; a striking into broad wakefulness of Frenzy and the three Furies,—which otherwise were not asleep! For they lie always, those subterranean Eumenides (fabulous and yet so true), in the dullest existence of man;—and can dance, brandishing their dusky torches, shaking their serpent-hair. Lambesc with Royal-Allemand may ride to his barracks, with curses for his marching-music; then ride back again, like one troubled in mind: vengeful Gardes Françaises, sacreing, with knit brows, start out on him, from their barracks in the Chaussée d’Antin; pour a volley into him (killing and wounding); which he must not answer, but ride on. (1: 186)

Wikipedia, Public Domain.

The skirmish occurred on the corner of the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and the Boulevard des Capucines. The

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Hôtel Montmorency is on the left. After the Montmorency was demolished, this corner became the Vaudeville theatre in 1869 (a typically vulgar concoction of the period).

Charles Marville (1813–1879), “Théatre du Vaudeville,” Photographic views of Paris [ca. 1877], Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

The Vaudeville in turn was demolished (to much outcry) in 1925 to make room for the cinema that is there now, the Gaumont Opera.

Gaumont Opera, Wikipedia, Creative Commons License.


Carlyle’s impressions of the city, available in letters and his Reminiscences (1881), suggest other connections between himself and Fox Talbot. On his twelve-day visit in October 1824 with Edward Strachey (1774–1832), the grandfather of Lytton Strachey, and Kitty Kirkpatrick (1802–89), the “Hindoo Princess” of his early days, 5 Carlyle rented a “clean and good Hôtel” (Reminiscences 307), the Hotel Wagram, in the Rue de la Paix near the Hôtel de Douvres.

Carlyle’s “Hindoo Princess”: Kitty Kirkpatrick (1802–89). Geni.com, Creative Commons License.

Carlyle’s first view of the city was impressive and memorable:

[O]n mounting the shoulder of Montmartre, an iron-gate, and douanier with his brief question before opening, and Paris wholly and at once lay at our feet. A huge bowl, or deepish saucer of seven miles in diameter, not a breath of smoke or dimness anywhere, every roof and dome and

5 For Carlyle’s infatuation with and Jane Baillie Welsh’s jealousy of Kitty Kirkpatrick, see CLO : TC to MAC, 10 June 1824; TC to JBW, 5 October; and JBW to TC, 14 October 1824. Baillie Welsh had no need to be jealous, since “marriage-hindering Mammon” (Tennyson, “Aylmer’s Field” [1864]) put an end to his chances with this high-caste Indian. She was daughter of James Achilles Kirkpatrick (1764–1805), a colonel in the British East India Company’s army and British resident at Hyderabad, 1798–1805. In 1801 he scandalized polite society by converting to Islam and marrying Khair-un-Nissa (ca. 1786–1813), a Hyderabadi noblewoman (see William Dalrymple, White Mughals). Their two children, Noor-un-Nissa Sahib Begum (Kitty) and her brother Mir Ghulam Ali Sahib Allum (William George Kirkpatrick; 1801–28), were brought back to England after their father’s death to live with their grandfather. In 1829 Kitty married James Winsloe Phillips (d. 1859), a captain in the 7th hussars, with whom she had seven children.

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spire and chimney-top clearly visible, and the skylights sparkling like diamonds: I have never, since or before, seen so fine a view of a Town.

The first evening he smoked a cigar on the steps of the Vendôme Column, just down the street from his hotel, and admired a little detachment of “clean, trim, handsome soldiers, blue-and-white” (Reminiscences 307).

On the whole though, despite some good first impressions, he was caustic about the city, and it prompted his characteristically humorous style to present itself to Baillie Welsh:

France has been so betravelled and beridden and betrodden by all manner of vulgar people that any romance connected with it is entirely gone off ten years ago; the idea of studying it is for me at present altogether out of the question; so I quietly surrender myself to the direction of guide books and laquais de place [local flunkeys], and stroll about from sight to sight, as if I were assisting at a huge Bartholomew fair; only that the booths are the Palais Royal or the Boulevards, and the shews the Theatre Français instead of Punch, and the Jardin des Plantes instead of the Irish giant or Polito’s menagerie. For a few days such a life is tolerable enough; in a month, I think it could not fail to kill me with utter tedium. . . . [I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the maniere d’être [way of life] of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately titil-lated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the hand they make of life. Eating, everlasting eating from the hands of patisseurs [pastry-cooks], restaura-teurs, traiteurs [restaurant-keepers] and cooks of every size and shape; with gambling ad infinitum, and looking glasses to the same extent seem to form the great staple of their enjoyments. They cannot live without artificial excitements, without sensations agréables. Their houses are not homes, but places where they sleep and dress; they live in cafés and promenades and theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and fillagree, addressed to the eye not the touch. Their shops and houses are like toy-boxes; every apartment is tricked out with mirrors and expanded into infinitude by their illusion. This parlour is about twenty-feet square; but glass and tinfoil spread it out into galleries


like that of the Louvre; and not one but twenty score of men are writing to you. The people’s character seems like their shops and faces; gilding and rouge without; hollowness and rottenness within. They are elegant, the pink of elegance; polite as ushers of the black rod; full of lofty talk about generosity and delicacy, yet openly addicted to the basest practices and most beastly vices. Oh the hateful contrast between physical perfection and moral nothingness! Between the extreme of luxury and the extreme of wretchedness unrelieved by hope or principle! (CLO : TC to JBW, 28 October 1824)

For many tourists a visit to the Morgue was obligatory; Carlyle was no different:

Yesterday I walked along the Pont Neuf ; jugglers and quacks and cooks and barbers and dandies and gulls and sharpers were racketting away with a deafening hum at their manifold pursuits; I turned aside into a small mansion with the name of Morgue upon it; there lay the naked body of an old grey-headed artisan whom misery had driven to drown himself in the river! His face wore the grim fixed scowl of despair; his lean horny hands with their long ragged nails were lying by his sides; his patched and soiled apparel with his apron and sabots were hanging at his head; and there lay fixed in his iron slumber, heedless of the vain din that rolled around him on every side, was this poor outcast stretched in silence and darkness forever. I gazed upon the wretch for a quarter of an hour; I think I never felt more shocked in my life. (TC to JBW, 28 October 1824)

There also survives a description of Paris in a letter from Carlyle to his brother John Aitken Carlyle, 7 November 1824:

Of Paris I shall say nothing till we meet. It is the Vanity-fair of the universe, and cannot be described in many letters. As a city its aspect resembles that of Edinburgh; high houses of white stone, with immense stacks of chimneys occupying nearly all the gable; and projections with perpendicular windows in the roof. With very few excep-tions the streets are narrow and crowded and unclean; the kennel in the middle, and a lamp hanging over it here and there, on a rope from side to side. There are no foot-paths; but an everlasting press of carriages and carts, and dirty people hastening to and fro among


them, amid a thousand gare-gares! [look out—look out!] and sacrés [damns] and other oaths and admonitions; while by the side are men roasting ches[t]nuts in their booths; fruit-shops, wine-shops, barbers, silkmerchants selling à Prix juste (without cheating), restaurateurs, cafés, traiteurs [restaurant keepers], magazins de bon-bons [sweet shops], billiard tables, estaminets (gin-shops) débits de tabac (where you buy a cigar for a half-penny, and go out smoking it), and every species of dépôt [storeroom] and entrepôt [warehouse] and magazin [shop] for the comfort and refreshment of the physical part of the natural man; plying its vocation in the midst of noise and stink, both of which it augments by its produce and its efforts to dispose of it. The Palais Royal is a spot unrivalled in the world; the chosen abode of vanity and vice; the true palace of the tigre-singes (tiger-apes) as Voltaire called his countrymen; a place which I rejoice to think is separated from me by the girdle of the ocean, and never likely to be copied in the British isles. I dined in it often; and bought four little bone étuis (needle-cases) at a frank (9½d) each for our four sisters at Mainhill. It is a sort of emblem of the French character; the perfection of the physical and fantastical part of our nature, with an absence of all that is solid and substantial in the moral and often in the intellectual part of it. Looking-glasses and trinkets and fricassées and gaming-tables seem to be the life of a Frenchman; his home is a place where he sleeps and dresses; he lives in the salon du restaurateur, on the boulevards or the garden of the Palais royal. Every room you enter, destitute of carpet or fire, is expanded into boundlessness by mirrors; and I should think about fifty thousand dice-boxes are set a rattling every night (especially on Sundays) within the walls of Paris. There the people sit and chatter, and fiddle away existence as if it were all a raree-shew; careless how it go, so they have excitement, des sensations agréables. Their palaces and picture-galleries and triumphal arches are the wonder of the Earth; but the stink of their streets is consid-erable, and you cannot walk on them without risking the fracture of your legs or neck. (CLO)

In addition to the general scenery there was the human scenery, of which Carlyle provides us with some very caustic and amusing glimpses. He met Adrien Legendre (whose Éléments de


géometrie he had translated in 1822) and the orientalist Antoine Chézy. He touched the hem of the garment of Pierre-Simon Laplace. He heard Georges Cuvier lecture and saw Talma in a performance of Voltaire’s Oedipe : “A heavy shortish numb-footed man; face like a warming-pan for dull glowing black eyes and it: incomparably the best actor I ever saw” (Reminiscences 311). Louis XVIII has just died and was lying in State in St. Denis. While visiting the Louvre to inspect a picture of the Duc de Berri’s posthumous son Henri, Carlyle caught sight of Charles X, who was on the throne for a brief time (as was Henri) in 1830. Last of the Legitimate Bourbon Line, Charles was “a swart, slightish insipid-looking man, but with much the air of a gentleman” (Reminiscences 309). Carlyle did not feel inclined to engage in deep or systematic study of Paris, but the impressions provided a useful body of material from which he drew in The French Revolution.

His next visit was in October 1851, when he agreed to join the Ashburtons in Paris. Carlyle was escorted by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, who molly-coddled him through customs, railway stations, and other inconveniences of travel like a babe in arms. The trip is described in a highly readable essay entitled “Excursion (Futile Enough) to Paris.” A few extracts serve to convey the detailed quality of Carlyle’s observations. Paris had improved since the 1820s, but it had not become much smarter in Carlyle’s eyes. The Place de la Révolution now had the “Obelisk of Luxor, asphalt spaces and stone pavements, lamps all on big gilt columns, big fountain (its Nereids all silent)” (“EP” 232). The Rue de Rivoli boasted impressive buildings that reminded Carlyle of Edinburgh New Town, although he wrote, “Streets straight as a line have long ceased to seem the beautifullest to me” (“EP” 231). The Boulevards, “very stirring, airy, locomotive to a fair degree” (“EP” 248). But he found the Champ de Mars neglected and depressing: “Grassless, graceless, untrim and sordid everything was” (“EP” 243). The Bois de Boulogne, “a dirty scrubby place” (“EP” 244), was not an environment for Proust’s Gods and Goddesses. What he concluded about the grubby city was that “the humble besom is not perhaps the chosen implement of France” (“EP” 233).

He met some celebrities also during this trip, including Louis Adolphe Thiers, Prosper Merimée, and the art historian


Léon de Laborde. On the figures he encountered he lavished tart and sceptical prose, which is Dickensian in its response to the grotesque. He is very good on the voice of Thiers. He also met one Comte Roget, “a poor thin man with two voices, bass and treble alternating, who said almost nothing with either of them” (“EP” 252–53). I agree with the editors of the Collected Letters that this is possibly the historian and linguist Baron Dominique-François-Louis Roget (1795–1872). He wrote to Jane Welsh Carlyle on 1 Oct. 1851 that the French he fell in with “are mere affliction to me” (CLO). He made a pilgrimage to the Temple, where Louis XVI and his family had been imprisoned. He mentions the Rue de la Paix from time to time, and it is not hard to imagine him on that corner in the beautiful Shotter Boys painting (he gives Turner a run for his money), where he bought a collar for Jane’s dog Nero in one of the shops.

He bewails in the various accounts of this trip the lack of sleep caused by noise from the street—as Ruskin did on virtually all of his continental excursions. And the final impression is grim: “In the narrow streets and poor dark shops, etc., such figures, poor old women, little children, the forlorn of the earth. ‘How do they live?’ one asked oneself with sorrow and amazement” (“EP” 247).

The after-story of the bit of Paris around La Rue de la Paix, which Fox Talbot photographed and where Carlyle stayed in 1824 is melancholy. It has all disappeared physically without trace. A new boulevard was cut through the old streets, leading to the obscenely gigantic Opera House, and Louis-Émile Durandelle (1839–1917) recorded the demolition and construction as they happened. In an 1868 image, from in front of the Opera, one looks towards the Hôtel de Douvres in the process of demolition, and the Hôtel Canterbury across the street.


Louis-Émile Durandelle (1839-1917), view from Loggia of L’Opera, 1868. Vergue, Creative Commons License.

The Hôtel de Douvres is behind the shuttering on the right, and the building across the street with the three arches (No. 24 Rue de la Paix) is the Hôtel Canterbury, which was opposite from the Hôtel de Douvres and the subject of another 1843 calotype by Fox Talbot (see opp.).

Avenue de L’Opera, projected map, 1869, Creative Commons License.


William Henry Fox Talbot, “The Hotel Canterbury,” Paris, May 1843, Salted paper print from a Calotype negative, 10.7 x 10.2 cm, courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The sign on the right reads “EUG. [Abbreviation of Eugène] SARAZIN.” It is possible that John Ruskin stayed in Hôtel Canterbury or Hôtel de Douvres in 1834. His poetic “A Letter from Abroad” to his friend Richard Fall of 14 June of that year opens as he reviews “Last Midsummer” of 1833 from “Rue la Paix” (Ruskin, Works 2: 429).

The comparison of Carlyle and Fox Talbot juxtaposes their marked differences on the cultural spectrum. Carlyle had a hankering after traditional dispensations, and like his protégé Ruskin is suspicious of the new technological world, even though he was prepared to take advantage of what it could offer: railway and steamship travel for instance. Talbot and his relatives were much more progressive in their attitudes, and were instrumental in forwarding the new sciences, especially photography.6 If the

6 It is all summed up in the photographs of Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, who married in 1858 the Oxford professor of minerology, Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story Maskelyne (1828–1911; ODNB). She was the eldest daughter


connections are tenuous, one can say without hesitation that both Fox Talbot and Carlyle managed to provide important visions of a city that can now only be viewed in the faded palimpsests of Fox Talbot’s calotypes and Carlyle’s pen portraits.

Brasenose College, Oxford University

Works CitedCarlyle, Thomas. “Excursion (Futile Enough) to Paris; Autumn 1851”

[“EP”]. Last Words of Thomas Carlyle . New York: Appleton, 1892. 207–66.

——. The French Revolution. Ed. K. J. Fielding and David Sorensen. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

——. Reminiscences. Ed. K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

——. Works Ed. H. D. Traill. 30 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897–1900.

Carlyle, Thomas, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. The Carlyle Letters Online. [CLO]. Ed. Brent E. Kinser. Durham: Duke UP, 2007–16, www.carlyleletters.org.

Talbot, H. Fox. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844. Project Gutenberg eBook.

of John Dillwyn Llewelyn (1810–82; ODNB), astronomer, botanist, and pioneer of photography. In 1833 he married Emma Thomasina Talbot (1806–81), cousin of Henry Fox Talbot, with whom Llewelyn collaborated. In 1852 he built an equatorial observatory for his daughter in the garden at their estate, Penlleregare, and together took one of the first collodion images of the moon.

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