Capturing shadows: audio excerpts

From the book Mamma gave me, that I might write about my journey.

Thursday 2nd August 1832

We have just changed horses at Birmingham. It rains very hard here. We just passed through a town where all the coal mines are. You can see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places.

The men, women, children, country and houses here are all covered in black. The country is very desolate everywhere. It continues black, engines flaming, coals in abundance, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.

I cannot by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance.

– Taken from Princess Victoria's journal entry about a trip to Birmingham, 1832

My fellows of the Royal Society…

Drawing on the work of esteemed members of this society… I formed an image of the rings using a solar microscope and I threw this image on paper dipped in a solution of silver nitrate, placed at the distance of about nine inches from the microscope.

In the course of an hour, three dark rings were very distinctly visible, coinciding – very nearly – with the rings of violet light that appeared upon the interposition of violet glass. The experiment is sufficient to complete the analogy of the invisible with the visible rays.

In this experiment and others, I have found so demonstrative a proof of the general law of the interference of two portions of light, that I think it right to lay them before you here in this Paper.

– Thomas Young, ‘The Bakerian Lecture: Experiments and Calculations Relative to Physical Optics,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Royal Society, 1 January 1804)

To Henry Fox Talbot Esqr MP.
Lacock Abbey
Chippenham Wilts

Dear Mr Talbot,

Thank you very much for sending me such beautiful shadows, the little drawing I think quite lovely. I had no idea the art could be carried to such perfection—I had grieved over the gradual disappearance of those you gave me in the summer & am delighted to have these to supply their place in my book—

You will be quite tired by so long an epistle but believe me ever yours affectionately

Laura Mundy

– Laura Mundy, in a letter to her brother-in-law William Henry Fox Talbot (13 December 1834)

Readers! See the truth of the image of nature made by the camera obscura. Add to it the action of solar rays which fixes this image fast, and you will have an idea of the beautiful designs with which M. Daguerre has gratified our curiosity.

M. Daguerre cannot act on paper; he requires a plate of polished metal. On this plate we saw several points of the Boulevards, Pont Marie, and many other spots, given with a truth which Nature alone can give to her works.

Alas – unlike the camera obscura – motion cannot be represented. In one of the views of the Boulevards all that was walking or moving does not appear in the design; of the two horses in a hackney coach on the stand, one unluckily moved its head during the short operation; and the animal is now without a head in the design…

Inanimate nature, architecture, are the triumph of the apparatus which M. Daguerre means to call after his own name—Daguerreotype.

– Hippolyte Gaucheraud in newspaper report published in Paris in 1839.

My dear members, I read this on behalf of my esteemed friend Mr William Henry Fox Talbot, who has implored me to announce to you tonight his discovery of photogenic drawing.

As Talbot writes:

I will endeavour to give a brief account of this new process, which I offer to you, the lovers of Science & Nature.

In the spring of 1834 I began to put in practice a method which I had devised earlier - employing that very curious property of silver nitrate: namely its discolouration when exposed to the violet rays of light.

I proposed to spread a sufficient quantity of the silver nitrate on a sheet of paper; & then to set the paper in the sunshine next to some object casting a well-defined shadow.

The light, acting on the rest of the paper would naturally blacken it, while the parts in shadow would retain their whiteness. Thus, I expected that a kind of image or picture would be produced, resembling to a certain degree the object from which it was derived.

Such was my leading idea.

– William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Some account of the art of photogenic drawing, or the process by which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil’, read before the Royal Society (31 January 1839)

At the Adelaide gallery in London we also saw the Daguerreotype, which is the most extraordinary production of modern times!

We know not how better to describe it than to say, that it is embodying a shadow; It permanently fixes upon a plate the reflection of houses, trees, &c., and the picture is more perfect than any painter can make it!

In a room fitted up as a Theatre, with shutters to exclude the light M. Dele Croix, a French gentleman, explained the whole process to us.

The appearance of these drawings is very peculiar. The shadows are a dull grey, varying until they become almost blacky and though the pictures they delineate are accurate in the extreme, they are not pleasing.

They appear unnatural and look somewhat like a moonlight scene.

In Bombay, where the; sun is always powerful, pictures of beautiful scenery could be produced daily!

We cannot take leave of the Adelaide Gallery without expressing our admiration for the usefulness of such an institution.

– Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, of Bombay, naval architects, Journal of residence of two years and a half in Great Britain, 1841

Dear and dearest,

After breakfast Lestock took Honora and Captain Beaufort and me to the Polytechnic and we all had our likenesses taken.

It is a wonderful mys­terious operation. You are taken from one room into another upstairs and down and you see various people whispering and hear them in neighbouring passages and rooms unseen and the whole apparatus and stool on high platform under a glass dome casting a snap-dragon blue light making all look like spectres and the men in black gliding about like.

Though I fear you will not like any of my daguerreotype faces—I am sure I do not—the truer, the worse!

– Maria Edgeworth in letters to half-sister Fanny Wilson, 1841

Now sit, if ye have courage, cousins all!
Sit, all ye grandmamas, wives, aunts, and mothers;
Daughters and sisters, widows, brides, and nieces;
In bonnets, braids, caps, tippets, or pelisses,
The muff, mantilla, boa, scarf, or shawl!
Sit all ye uncles, godpapas, and brothers,
Fathers and nephews, sons, and next of kin,
Husbands, half-brother's cousin's sires, and others;
Be you as Science young, or old as Sin:
Turn, Persian-like, your faces to the sun!
And have each one
His portrait done,
Finish'd, one may say, before it's begun.

Apollo's agent on earth, when your attitude's right,
Your collar adjusted, your locks in their place,
Just seizes one moment of favouring light,
And utters three sentences—"Now it's begun,"—
"It's going on now, sir,"—and "Now it is done;"
And lo! as I live, there's the cut of your face
On a silvery plate,
Unerring as fate,
Worked off in celestial and strange mezzotint,
A little resembling an elderly print.
"Well, I never!" all cry; "it is cruelly like you!"
But Truth is unpleasant
To prince and to peasant.

The face you have worn fifty years doesn't strike you!

– S L Blanchard, ‘Photographic Phenomena’ (1842)

“Othello’s occupation’s gone,”—‘tis o’er,
The mask has fallen, I’m actor here no more,
But still your pupil, protegé, whate’er
Your kindness made me, and your fostering care.
“This mournful suit”, perchance offends your sight,
But nature triumphs, and asserts her right,
Expands my heart, and bids my tongue explain,
The pride, the gratitude, that swells each vein,
That floods unseen my dusky cheek, and dwells
Enshrin’d within my bosom’s deepest cells.

Nurs’d in the land where rolls the giant tide
Of sluggish Senegal, through deserts wide,
Where every tainted breeze comes winged with death,
And nature sickens in the poison breath;
Amid such scenes the negro strays alone,
In happy innocence, untaught, unknown;
Happy, because that desert’s pathless sand,
He claims his own, his long loved native land.
But soon the white man comes, allured by gain,
O’er his free limbs flings slavery’s galling chain,
Robs him of Heaven’s best gift, and casts him then,
Forth from his equal rank with fellow men,
Transforms him to a brute, or worse—a slave,
Who loathes to bear the life that nature gave.
Oh! justice! Heav’n! but hist, the time is nigh,
Freedom approaches from the western sky,
Sheds her bright glory tow’rd the Indian seas,
And shakes her banner o’er the Carribees:
The tortured black man hears her thrilling voice,
And checks his groans one moment to rejoice.

– A poem declaimed by Ira Aldridge at the Theatre Royal in Dublin in December 1832, at the end of a performance. “Written by a Gentleman of this City expressly for the occasion”

Saturday 17th January 1852  

Mr Kilburn took a daguerreotype of me and five of the dear children today at Windsor.

Daguerreotypes are now much improved to what they were originally.

The day was splendid for it. The children’s images were pretty. Mine was horrid! An entire failure.  

Monday 19th January 1852  

Had our daguerreotypes taken by Mr Kilburn again today in one of the hot houses. Wore a bonnet and sat not facing Kilburn’s apparatus. A much more successful likeness this time!

– Taken from two of Queen Victoria's journal entries