To Thomas Archer Hirst   Saturday¹

Manchester Saturday

Dear Tom.

The ‘incomprehensibility’ is easily made clear. I wrote the note quickly and did not read it over; the word Halifax was set down for Manchester.² The substitution of the latter would make all clear. If its a proof of any thing it is that I was thinking too much of your locality and you ought to feel yourself flattered on that account. If I am insane there is certainly a certain method in my madness.³ I remained in Edinburgh until Saturday morning – that day was devoted to excursions and in some measure to feasting, in neither of which I felt myself qualified to take a share – next day was Sunday. here were two days, requiring their adequate amount of board and lodging and nothing in return for it. True I might as well have bought my bread in Edinburgh as in Manchester but the great difference is that in Manchester there is a certain mendicity institution established on a friendly basis,⁴ where I can obtain temporary shelter without paying for it.– In Edinburgh I paid 1/6 a night for my bed and 1/s a day to servants. In Manchester I get half a bed for nothing. M^rs Ginty has put a table and one chair in a garret for me at the top of the house where I can retire when I will and speculate to my heart’s content. I have not stopped in Manchester ever since, I have been at Spring Bank whither I return on monday – I venture to say if I were to set down on paper all my acts since I saw you that a prudent man; I mean a plain, practical, worldly wise man would not censure them, but the contrary. My simple rule has been to live within my means, and my only moments of insanity, (which thank the gods are now few) are those moments when I shrink from complying with the restrictions which limited means necessarily impose; I calculated probabilities long ago, and as is my want took the worst into account, and I should be a selfdeluding theorist did I now repine when the test-hour is come: But the test is not very heavy after all, indeed it would be a mockery to call it a test – My friend at Spring Bank⁵ has an Academy. It is nicely situated in the Country, really a very beautiful place to live. Dont you see boy that I can make myself worth my board and lodging with him. I return there on Monday under those conditions and there I shall remain until something turns up for me. There my three diurnal meals can be purchased by 3 hours labour and I do feel a certain satisfaction in the attitude of independence which this enables me to assume. With regard to our one-ness if it be real it is a one-ness established by the fates to which we must resign – for my own part, in all the moods and mental phases through which I have passed since the writing of that letter to which you allude⁶ I never for the fraction of a second felt a desire to revoke a single word then and there penned – The ‘ideal’ is one from which I have never shrunk – and it will, please the gods, be perfected without any present commingling of cups. There is a certain state of mind and feeling shadowed by the words

Keep thyself now and free for ever

Free as an Arab

From thy beloved.⁷

A state which you seem to think must be assumed, a state which I know may be real, and a state which may exist between man and man as well between man and woman. Benefits throw a kind of chain round a man, and I have at the present moment, as far as you are concerned, just as much metal about my ancles as I can conveniently carry – any more might meddle with my freedom, and that I wont sell if I can help it. You may think all this inconsistent inasmuch as I have endeavoured to borrow money from others – I have, but were you to see my letters to those parties you would not say that there was any relinquishment of freedom on my part, and further these were parties well skilled in the calculus of prob-abilities, who knew something of insurance offices and the laws of mortality and of accidents; and if they made the loan would do it with their eyes wide open which I am inclined to think is more than you could do. You exclaim repiningly ‘Fantasy saith so!’ if she be not backed by fact Fantasy may go to the devils as soon as it suits her convenience – I don’t thoroughly understand this part of your letter.⁸ Which of us does the mocking world frighten by its ‘Ha! Ha!’ – As far as I am concerned the world has less to do in the affair than you imagine. – I enclose you a scrap from Debus,⁹ received yesterday. The part referring to you may be thus translated, ‘Hirst will I exactly so receive as I should receive John Tyndall should he again come to Marburg. I will treat Hirst as the friend of my friend John Tyndall’

I heard a lecture last night on the electric light in the mechanics institute¹⁰ – it was crowded – My God what a maggot the fellow would appear beside our Bunsen! The man talked incessantly of the necessity of getting to the bottom of the subject but it is a region which he himself had never approached. I may possibly lecture on the subject myself in the course of the winter.

John Tyndall

Knoblauch wrote me a long letter,¹¹ kind hearted fellow, his last words are ‘I wish from my heart you were once more here!’ Plucker still holds on by his former views. he threatens to explode us by an appeal to mathematics. in Crelle’s Journal we shall soon see a Memoir which is to overthrow us and place the matter on everlasting foundations. We shall see!

[…]¹²

RI MS JT/1/T/531