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Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks in the Talbot Collection at the British Library Mirjam Brusius Referring to his photograph ‘Queen’s College Oxford’ (fig. 1) in The Pencil of Nature (1844- 1846), which was the first photographically illustrated book, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) stressed the photograph’s superior way of recording inscriptions: ‘It frequently happens, moreover – and this is one of the charms of photography – that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted many things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen, and upon it – unconsciously recorded – the hour of the day at which the view was taken.’1 Fig. 1. W. H. F. Talbot, Queen's College, Oxford. Entrance Gateway, The Pencil of Nature, Plate XIII, 1843. Salted paper print from a calotype negative. British Library, Talbot Photo 6 (13). 1 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London 1844), plate XIII. 1 eBLJ 2010, Article 14 Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks in the Talbot Collection at the British Library Talbot’s evidence that a photograph could capture features originally unnoticed by the photographer through a passionless mechanical process refers primarily to script; itself a recording device. When explaining to the reader the nature of the photograph, he talks about inscriptions, dates, printed placards, and dial-plates, which are unconsciously recorded. In his photographic experiments, his major pursuit between 1830 and 1840, inscriptions became common subjects of his images. While photography was one way of recording information and past moments, providing technical possibilities to refer to the information recorded in future times, another and more established way of doing so was keeping diaries and research notebooks as a means to memorize, understand and reflect upon what one had perceived. One could take this argument even further and state that script and drawings have been replaced by photography as a recording device.2 The notebook ‘as a paper-made device meant to store information and make it manageable and mobile, belongs to the field and the cabinet, to the time of travel and observation, and to the moment of return and recollection’.3 Photography being a mobile copying device could in Talbot’s opinion do just that. Like a person taking notes, a photographer would furthermore select information, for instance in choosing a certain point of view. Hence, the processes addressed by both photography and note-taking are selection, storage, summary and sorting. These processes can indeed be done with completely different media like a clay tablet, papyrus, or a photograph, though ‘each method of storage carries with it constraints of reliability, preservability, and accessibility’.4 That is to say, despite their common features note-taking and photography are also arguably different. This is especially the case if we disregard their usage and function, but take a closer look at the production processes. As Talbot pointed out in The Pencil of Nature, photography can for instance, unlike note-taking, also capture the unseen. Precisely for this and a number of other reasons the mechanical nature of photography lacks the understanding and reflecting impetus of note- taking as a ‘discipline of the mind’.5 The scientific meaning of note-taking will be addressed later on, where its distinction from photography will become apparent. Talbot is now primarily remembered as the pioneer of photography. This was reinforced by the disposition of his papers, notably the separation of photographs and the few notebooks that document Talbot’s photographic innovations from the rest of his archive mostly concerned with other scholarly activities beyond photography. This article is neither about photographs, nor about photography as a genuine recording device. Its aim is to explore Talbot’s notebooks that address subjects beyond photography. His notebooks ranged across the natural sciences, classical scholarship and Assyriology.6 From the beginning, Talbot’s interests were peripatetic, the 1830s when he made his photographic experiments being one of the most productive decades in his life. Around fifteen years after he first started experimenting with the medium, however, he stopped being an active photographer in the 1840s and turned his interest entirely to other fields, photogravure, his insistence regarding patent rights and his pursuits to advance the practical use of photography in the sciences notwithstanding. His notebooks are the reflection of his manifold interests beyond photography, even though some of the interests reflected in them can most certainly be linked to its invention in various ways. 2 Christoph Hoffmann (ed.), Daten sichern. Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren der Aufzeichnung (Zürich and Berlin, 2008), p. 9. 3 Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)’, Intellectual History Review, xx (2010), pp. 377-400. Bourguet refers to Alexander von Humboldt’s travel narrative (p. 378). 4 Ann Blair, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, Critical Inquiry, xxxi (2004), pp. 85-107, at p. 86. 5 Bourguet, ‘A Portable World’, p. 382. 6 For detailed studies taking this manifold interest into account see especially H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science (London, 1977), Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot and the Invention of Photography (New Haven, 1992). 2 eBLJ 2010, Article 14 Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks in the Talbot Collection at the British Library Amongst most Victorian scientists, keeping notebooks (these could be laboratory notebooks,7 field notebooks or simply a description of phenomena which had been studied) was an essential part of scientific practice. And yet this practice is particularly interesting in Talbot’s case. First of all the notebooks help us to situate the photographic achievements of Talbot in a broader context. Moreover, Talbot’s interest and achievements in photography render his notebooks more interesting as comparative mobile objects encapsulating knowledge8 and material culture relying on paper. In the following discussion I will give an overview of Talbot’s notebooks at the British Library.9 I will focus on exemplary items selected from around 200 non-photographic scholarly notebooks that draw a new picture of Talbot, in which photography merely appears as a single piece of a broader puzzle. Talbot’s habit of classifying his notes and keeping some of his notebooks as a series will be placed in the context of more general nineteenth-century note-taking practices. The Notebooks in the Talbot Collection The Talbot Collection was donated to the British Library by the family of Talbot’s descendents in 2006. It is the major part of a wider archive of the Victorian scholar. As previously mentioned, several photographic notebooks and thousands of important prints (originating in a donation to the Science Museum by Talbot’s grand-daughter, Matilda, in late 1937) are held at the National Media Museum, Bradford, and a smaller number of items in several public and private collections. From the perspective of scope and scholarly integrity, the British Library’s collection is significant. Apart from notebooks, it contains unbound Assyriological and mathematical folios, natural specimens, photographs,10 diaries, letters,11 offprints of Talbot’s articles, patents, artefacts and a small selection of books, presumably from Talbot’s library.12 As pointed out by ‘The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project’,13 directed by Larry J. Schaaf, Talbot’s precocious awareness of the preservation of his archive, ‘combined with the protection of a stable family structure through several generations, has led to an unusually complete archive’,14 reflecting scientific 7 Friedrich Steinle, ‘The Practice of Studying Practice: Analyzing Research Records of Ampère and Faraday’, in Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science, ed. F. L. Holmes, J. Renn and H.-J. Rheinberger (Dordrecht, Boston and London 2003), pp. 93-117. 8 Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (Cambridge, MA., and London 1990), pp. 19-68. See also Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge: Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 109-21. 9 The notebooks were largely unknown to researchers and warranted a fuller description. The notebooks catalogue was the subject of an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral project to research the wider aspects of Talbot’s work in Victorian scholarship. This catalogue was recently completed in a draft form that will be migrated into the manuscript catalogue at the British Library where it will be accessible shortly. 10 The photographs are catalogued in the Jerwood catalogue of photographs www.bl.uk/catalogues/photographs. 11 The letters have been transcribed and are available online. See the project description at http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/. Henceforward cited as ‘Talbot Correspondence’. 12 A larger library containing many of Talbot’s books can be viewed at Lacock Abbey. 13 See http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/index.html.

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