To John Topham   10 December 1872

The letter is in an album of autograph letters compiled for Edith Emma Topham by William Sharpey; most of the letters in the album are addressed to Sharpey, but this letter is to Edith’s father, John Topham, from CD. John Topham was a medical student at University College, London, during the time that Sharpey was professor of anatomy and physiology there. Topham had written to CD after reading Expression, remarking that when Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet suggested that Juliet did not blush in the dark, he meant that the blush was unseen, not that it was absent. Topham’s letter has been lost, but the sense of it was preserved in a note in Expression 2d ed., p. 355 n. 38; see also Correspondence vol. 20, letter from Mr Topham, 5 December 1872.