Ɛpsilon

To Dear Friend1   3 January 1822

January the 3 1822

My dear friend

I hope you like that inquisitive man Monseur Beodoes,2 when I was a boy I used to think him a most impertinent man but you may differ in your opinion, he always used to be asking about my father and other things; In you last letter you told me you knew, who, my sisters at Shrewsbury were talking of, I think Papa3   you will inform me in return of post

I remain—yours Tobe Case4

P.S. Mr Bayly5 was formerly a devlish boor but I dare say he is not so to you

AL

1
The friend has not been identified. See this volume, Supplement, letter to Dear Friend, 1 January 1822, n. 1.
2
‘Monseur Beodoes’ has not been identified. The reference may be to the poet and physician Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose father, the physician Thomas Beddoes, had been a close friend of the Wedgwood and Darwin families (B. Wedgwood and Wedgwood 1980). ‘Beddoes’ was, however, a fairly common name in early-nineteenth-century Shropshire.
3
CD refers to two or more of his sisters, Marianne, Caroline Sarah, Susan Elizabeth, and Emily Catherine Darwin, and to his father, Robert Waring Darwin.
4
The form of the signature is unexplained. CD had previously attended a school run by George Augustus Case in Shrewsbury (Autobiography, p. 22 and n. 1).
5
CD possibly refers to William Bayley, of the banking firm Rocke, Eyton, Campbell, Leighton and Bayley in Market Square, Shrewsbury, who had been instructed to act in a financial transaction on Robert Waring Darwin’s behalf in January 1820 (DAR 227.6: 339 and 340, Commercial directory for Shropshire). CD’s sister Emily Catherine wrote in her letter of 15 January [1826] that a Major Bayley desired ‘most particularly’ to be remembered to CD (Correspondence vol. 1).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 3] altered from ‘2’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1H,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1H