Tuesday
My dear Chapman,
I regret to say that I am pledged to the “Thatched House”3 for Thursday next.
I have been reading that excellent article on Neo-Christianity.4 Wont it open the eyes of those Oxford men! It is an extremely able production—If I can get away sufficiently early from St. James’s Street5 I will join you, but that I can hardly hope for.
[sincerely] yours | John Tyndall
Huntington Library Harr 1/111.66
John Chapman: John Chapman (1821–94) British publisher and physician. In 1851 he became proprietor and editor of the Westminster Review, which was a quarterly liberal publication, initially founded by Jeremy Bentham.
October 1860: October 1860 is written in another hand at the top of the letter. See also n. 4, which implies an October date.
“Thatched House”: this probably refers to Thatched House in St. James’s Street, which was the meeting place of a number of clubs until the building was demolished in 1863. Thatched House was the meeting place for ‘The Literary Club’, but Tyndall was not elected until 1871. See N. A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin, a Revised Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 62.
that excellent article on Neo-Christianity: ‘Art. I —Neo-Christianity’, Westminster Review, 18 (October 1860), pp. 293–332. It is a review of the second edition of Essays and Reviews, by the historian and positivist Frederic Harrison (1831–1923).
St. James’s Street: see n. 3.
Please cite as “Tyndall1735,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on