Royal Institution | Monday.
My dear Mr Dean,
I have just received your letter:2—At this season of the year it is all but impossible for me to get more than three successive days: these three in your case were to have been Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I must be in town on Thursday at 5.P.M., and I must be in town tonight at 10. P.M. Thus am I circumstanced. I may be more fortunate when I come from Switzerland at all events we will defer matters as you propose until then.
I wish most earnestly that you were nearer to London.3 I have often wished this, for I scarcely know a roof under which it would give me greater pleasure to take shelter than yours.
Give my kindest regards to Mrs Dawes,4 and tell her a man may have a heart to appreciate kindness and to love his friends though he may not be prepared to join in prayers for rain and for fair weather.5
Yours ever | John Tyndall.
I cannot say whether it will be possible for me to attend the British Association.6
I have given up Norway in favour of the Engadine and the Dolomite Alps.7 I start as near the 1st of July as I can and hope to be back about the 10th or 12th of August.
RI MS JT/1/TYP/1/318
LT Typescript Only
[before 12 June 1864]: LT suggested June 1856 for this letter. However, this seems unlikely given Tyndall’s expressed intentions for his climbing trips that year. Further, on 3 December 1863 he wrote to Clausius that he was thinking of going to Norway to climb (see letter 2048). Tyndall in fact went to Switzerland on 2 July 1864. It appears that Tyndall was able to visit Dawes later in June, since in letter 2107 to Juliet Pollock, dated 12 June 1864, Tyndall mentioned heading to visit Dawes for two or three days, saying ‘I broke one engagement but I must keep this one’. In letter 2163 to Dawes, dated to October 1864, he wrote that he again was unable to visit Dawes and was not able to attend the BAAS meeting in Bath (see n. 6 below).
your letter: letter missing.
nearer to London: Dawes lived in Ledbury, Herefordshire in central-western England, near the border with Wales.
Mrs Dawes: Mary Ellen Dawes.
to join in prayers for rain and for fair weather: in 1860 there had been a national day of prayer for fine weather in hope of ending months of endless rain. The Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley (1819–75) had refused to offer such a prayer, sermonising against interfering with God’s plan. He wrote to the geologists Charles Lyell and Charles Bunbury (1809–86) about this, which became well known in scientific circles. See K. Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 161–7; and F. M. Turner, ‘Rainfall, plagues, and the Prince of Wales’, in Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 151–70.
British Association: although LT noted that the BAAS held its 1856 meeting in Cheltenham, it is more likely that this letter is from 1864, when the BAAS met in September in Bath. Tyndall did not attend the meeting. See letter 2163, also to Dawes.
Engadine and the Dolomite Alps: the Engadine Alps are in Switzerland; the Dolomites in Italy.
Please cite as “Tyndall2106,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on