Cove1 | Dec. 15th 1842
My dear Tyndall
I dare say you have been surprised at my not writing to you for so long a time but the truth is that I have been rather busy lately reading for and putting in my examinations in college add to that, that I have as great a hatred to writing as ever a good orange man had to the Pope2 I dont suppose I wrote half a dozen letters since I heard from you last – I have now something to ask you to do for me the first little spare time you have it is to draw for me a block of houses with yards walls and a street and a shed all coloured as the Cork City streets and also written on a slip of paper the colours you use in washing them in and if you would send me a river coloured, with mud banks at the sides the way it was drawn in the Cork plans I hope I am not giving you too much trouble – I have left Cork and am now staying at Cove with my Father – Circumstances have occurred since I last wrote which prevent me joining at present the English survey of which I am very sorry as I expected much improvement and pleasure from it. Major Waters has left Cork I suppose you heard that he has been ordered to Barbadoes;3 I believe I never thanked you for your long account of the Preston riots4 but I now give you my best thanks they afforded me a great deal of pleasure Will you send me just one line in acknowledgement of this and tell me if you have time to do the little or rather great job that I want, remember me to all that remember me at Preston
and believe me | very sincerely and faithfully | yours | J. B. Edgeworth.
RI MS JT 1/11/3560
LT Transcript Only
Cove: see letter 0068, n. 3.
a hatred to writing as ever a good orange man had to the Pope: Members of the Protestant Orange Order, founded in 1796 in County Armagh, were notorious for their animosity towards ‘Popery’.
Major Waters has left Cork …ordered to Barbadoes: After Major Marcus Antonius Waters left the Ordnance Survey in Cork in November 1842 he served with the Royal Engineers in the West Indies from 1843 until 1849.
Preston Riots: see letter 0164, nn. 2 and 3. The letter to Edgeworth with Tyndall’s ‘long account’ of the riots is missing. Much later, Tyndall recalled of the riots: ‘processions …filled the streets – crowds of shiftless and hungry men who had been discharged from the silent mills. In their helplessness and misery they had turned out, so that their condition might be seen of all. Well, in Lune Street, down which we could look from our office, the tumult one day became unmanageable. Heated by its own interaction and attrition, the crowd blazed out into open riot, and attacked the bakers’ shops. Soldiers had been summoned to meet this contingency. Acting under orders, they fired upon the people, and the riot was quelled at the cost of blood’ (‘On Unveiling the Statue of Thomas Carlyle’, New Fragments (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), pp. 392–7, on pp. 392–3).
Please cite as “Tyndall0179,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0179