33 Windsor Street, Toxteth Park | Liverpool, Tuesday morning | Aug. 1 1843
My dear Tyndall
Now for a long letter! I deposited my precious charge1 last night in the post office for the Editor of the M.G. Chronicle2 he has it this day. I sent a note marked ‘confidential’ along with it, giving my name and address! and requesting him to insert it, after briefly reminding him of his editorial secrecy &c. I beg him to state in his ‘notice to correspondents’ whether he could insert it or not. I told him, that if he would favour me by publishing it I would immediately transmit cash for 6 copies! and, if not, to return the letter at his earliest convenience! I said I dated it from Dublin merely to confuse suspicion! On the whole I think the affair is very well managed and likely to kick up a shindy.3
Before I received your last letter4 I had supplied a short bar5 about ‘Liverpool’ chiming in well after the fellows that were ‘not fit to take any part in the undertakings’6 And I did not want to cross it out and copy that 3 hour job! I altered the word ‘hesitancy’ – and why? not because it was improper! but in a thoughtless moment I asked Lowrie7 (a corpl.) to look the dictionary for the meaning of it! you will agree with me that this piece of a ‘slip’ might give rise to a suspicion, so I think I done wisely to alter it!
Jack Tidmarsh arrived here on Sunday evening. He left his father after him in Manchester, where he spent four hours and never went to see any old cronies, the lazy blackguard. The mother is against him going to the Cape,8 and some of the father’s commercial friends strongly advise him to get him into a mercantile establishment here for one or two years before he would send him out. The father was to be here last night on his way to Ireland he will arrange that matter so that I think Jack won’t go just yet. There is no doubt but he bids farewell to the Survey!
I received the final decision of my migratory project9 a few days ago – a letter from my father desiring me not to accept it, says Hall10 is a very bad paymaster, he owes my brother upwards of £12! That work would not do for me and so I am glad, very glad, I did not take my brother’s advice ‘and go over at once’. I hope for better! With regard to the cash which you so kindly lent me, I will return it in a few weeks with the thanks of a grateful Irish man. I have at present 30 shillings of it hoarded up in a fund to call upon any moment. I would not have used a rap11 of it had I not been so sure of removing, so that I was just beginning to prepare for the trip and consequently spent some of it.
I hear there is to be a reduction of 25 from each division.12 I infer from this that London is knocked in the head.13 Your letter will be a ‘coup de grace’14
Sinnett has sole charge of this establishment. He is very happy for the change. The more so as he has had an opportunity of gloating his eyes upon two exhibitions since he came here. I wish you were here to see the ‘Polytechnic Exhibition at the Collegiate Institution’.15 You can form no idea – not the most distant – of its superlative magnificence and splendour. Illustrations (practical ones) of all the trades and arts – Weaving, glass-blowing, printing, binding, calico-printing, combmaking, pinemaking, and about 5 and 30 different kinds of steam engines, all in full play! Gas cooking apparatus, patent stoves, egg-hatching apparatus, decorative gilding, nautical models (in hundreds), ship launch, miniature steamers in full action, locomotive on railway, Paisley shawl room, potters wheel , model of Hobart-town,16 fountains and plants, portraits of great men, type composing machine, electrical galvanic and magnetic apparatus, silk-weaving, fringe-loom, autograph room, containing autographs of all the great men of the last two or three centuries, antiquities innumerable, curiosities without number, seal engraving, ivory carving, lithography, and copper plate printing, philosophical apparatus, centrifugal railway,17 Chinese room, the ‘happy family’ – a great number of some of the most voracious and timid beasts and birds all together in one immense cage, in perfect amity, mercantile samples, and specimens, basket-making, the invisible girl! likeness cutting. Natural history (a complete museum), Gothic or Baronial Hall! Articles of taste and virtue. Sculpture gallery (some of Chantrey’s);18 West picture gallery !!! containing 420 oil paintings the best in existence! Some of the artists are: – Sir Joshua Reynolds! Maclise! Hogarth! (a portrait of himself painted by himself)! Patten! foreign viz Teniers! Claude Lorraine; Rubens! Vandyke! Salvator Rosa! Correggio! and Hans Holbein!19 &c. &c. &.c &.c. Sculpture gallery: – Rock &c Engravings 92 of the best ever printed (many by Hogarth!) Anatomical models and preparations! Such is man!!! Architecural drawings and models of all the principal buildings in the kingdom! East picture gallery – 110 oil paintings from the great fellows – Water color drawings – 114 of the most beautiful things ever any one seen! And more engravings! And all this for one sixpence – one kids age. There are about 30 or 40 men constantly working away at the different trades and professions. Add to this for another sixpence Dubufe’s painting of Adam and Eve. ‘The Temptation’ and ‘The Expulsion’20 — valued, and going to be sold, for £20,000, As for these I am not ass enough to say a word about them! Oh holy poker!!!! Sinnett could not drag his heels away until the gas was put out at 10 o’clock, altho’ he was there before 6!! and what think you of Latimer and Tidmarsh that never went to see the Polytechnic – I think they ought to be soused in the Mersey. It is now closed!!!
This piece of poetry21 is admirable, I will copy your things sometime and send them to you.
My best respects to Geo.22 Latimer, Jim Evans,23 Marquis and Parker. Is Geo., getting fat?
I am happy to say that I am getting nearly as lank24 as yourself!
I shall write when I see <word[s] missing> about ‘The Letter’25 I will send you 4 <word[s] missing> papers.
Yours very faithfully
RI MS JT 1/11/3606
LT Transcript Only
my precious charge: presumably an early version of letter 0228; see letter 0224.
Editor of the M.G. Chronicle: presumably the Morning Chronicle, a London-based Whig newspaper whose editor was John Black (1783–1855). Black had succeeded James Perry in 1817, and would himself be replaced as editor by Andrew Doyle in 1844.
shindy: row or commotion (OED).
your last letter: letter missing.
bar: Ginty possibly uses the term in the sense of a legal plea or objection (OED).
‘not fit to take any part in the undertakings’: this statement appears in the penultimate paragraph of letter 0128.
Lowrie: see letter 0197, n. 5.
The mother is against him going to the Cape: Mrs Tidmarsh had previously given her reluctant assent; see letter 0215.
my migratory project: Ginty announced he was leaving the Ordnance Survey in letter 0203, but did not give details of his prospective project beyond noting that he was awaiting a ‘letter from my brother, stating the final arrangements of the matter’.
Hall: not identified.
rap: a counterfeit coin, worth virtually nothing, but used as currency in Ireland during the eighteenth century at the value of an English halfpenny or farthing, owing to the scarcity of genuine copper coinage (OED).
a reduction of 25 from each division: In a District Order issued on 7 June 1843 Captain Henry Tucker requested that ‘Division Officers … warn the Civil Assistants & Labourers that a further reduction will be necessary and … send to the District Office the names of 25 persons who are the least efficient and useful whom they recommend to be discharged’ (RI MS JT 8/1/4b).
London is knocked in the head: the proposed Survey of London; see letter 0154, n. 3.
‘coup de grace’: stroke of grace (French), a blow by which one condemned or mortally wounded is ‘put out of his misery’ or dispatched quickly (OED).
‘Polytechnic Exhibition at the Collegiate Institution’: The Collegiate Institution was a day school for boys on Shaw Street in Liverpool. Beginning in June 1843, the school hosted the Polytechnic Exhibition, of which the Liverpool Mercury reported, ‘This exhibition … is the most extensive which has been presented in this town to public notice. The articles occupy forty rooms, some of which are very large’ (‘Polytechnic Exhibition at the Collegiate Institution’, 7 July 1843, p. 226).
Hobart-town: the main conurbation on the island of Tasmania.
centrifugal railway: The ‘Centrifugal Iron Railway’ patented by Hutchinson and Higgins in which a single carriage rolls down a track on an inclined plane, traverses a central loop, and then ascends another inclined plane on the opposite side (‘Centrifugal Railway’, Mechanics’ Magazine 36 (1842), p. 360).
Chantrey: Francis Leggatt Chantrey (1781–1841), an English sculptor.
Sir Joshua Reynolds! Maclise! … Correggio! and Hans Holbein!: Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), an English painter and first president of Royal Academy; Daniel Maclise (1806–70), an Irish painter; William Hogarth (1697–1764), an English painter and satirist; George Patten (1801–65), an English painter; David Teniers the Younger (1610–90), a Flemish painter; Claude Lorraine (c. 1600–82), a French painter; Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), a Flemish painter; Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), a Flemish painter; Salvator Rosa (1615–73), an Italian painter; Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489–1534), an Italian painter; Hans Holbein the younger (c. 1497–1543), a German painter.
Dubufe’s painting of Adam and Eve. ‘The Temptation’ and ‘The Expulsion’: two large oil paintings by the French painter Claude Marie Paul Dubufe (1790–1864) based on scenes from the Old Testament and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The paintings were subsequently exhibited in Preston at the Bull Inn Assembly Room, where Tyndall saw them on 20 November 1843, recording in his Journal: ‘went to see Dubufe’s paintings of Adam and Eve in the temptation and expulsion – the former breathes the very essence of beauty almost divine – the latter puts forth all the attributes of grandeur and awful sublimity’ (vol. 13a, p. 4).
This piece of poetry: presumably that included in letter 0218.
Geo.: George.
Jim Evans: Phillip Evans.
lank: lean (OED).
‘The Letter’: presumably letter 0228.
Please cite as “Tyndall0222,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 10 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0222