A thousand thanks my dear friendThomas Noon Talfourd | Born: 1795-05-26 in Reading, Berkshire, England. Died: 1854-03-13 in Stafford, Staffordshire, England.
Close friend, literary mentor, and frequent correspondent of Mary Russell Mitford. A native of Reading, Talfourd was educated at the Reading’s newly-established Mill Hill school, a dissenting academy, from 1808 to 1810. He attended Dr. Richard Valpy’s Reading School from 1810 to 1812. His career in law began with a legal apprenticeship with Joseph Christy, special pleader, in 1817. He was called to the bar in London in 1821 and ultimately earned a D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Laws) from Oxford on June 20, 1844. While establishing his practice as a barrister and special pleader, he worked as legal correspondent for The Times, reporting on the Oxford Circuit, and also continued his literary interests. After 1833, he was appointed Serjeant at Law, as well as a King’s and Queen’s Counsel. He was elected and served as Member of Parliament for Reading from 1835 to 1841 and from 1847 to 1849 ; he served with Charles Fyshe Palmer, Charles Russell, and Francis Piggott. Highlights of his political and legal career included introducing the first copyright bill into Parliament in 1837 (for which action Charles Dickens dedicated Pickwick Papers to him) and defending Edward Moxon’s publication of Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab in 1841 . He was appointed Queen’s Serjeant in 1846 and Judge of Common Pleas in 1849 , at which post he served until his death in 1854. He was knighted in 1850 .
Talfourd’s literary works include his plays Ion (1835), The Athenian Captive (1837) and Glencoe, or the Fate of the MacDonalds(1839).
—lmw, cmm, ebb
for all your kindness—I am better—the abscess has burst externally & all will soon be well—I hope you will approve of the enclosed—They do not—but it satisfies my own feelings and surely he will not & cannot make an ill use of it.[1] "They" perhaps refers to Mitford's parents. "He" refers to William Macready. Mitford enclosed a copy of her letter to Mr. Macready dated August 12th 1825 with this letter to Talfourd. The letter (in the Rylands Collection immediately following this one, JRL #22, and currently being edited for the Digital Mitford project) documents Mitford's rift with Macready, who believed she had written a piece under the pseudonym "Philo-Dramaticus" recently published in Blackwood's Magazine, complaining about the state of the London stage, criticizing the excessive power of actor-managers like Macready, and their abuse of authors. In the enclosed copy of the letter to Macready, Mitford assures him that she had nothing to do with the piece: "In answer to your enquiries I can only say that I knew nothing of the article in question till I saw it with great regret a few days afgter the publication in Blackwood's Magazine." Mitford appears to have seen the Philo-Dramaticus letter on the decline of the English stage as it was reprinted in The Observer of 20 June 1825, based on her letter to Talfourd of 29 June.—ebb—Pray tell me if you approve it for I am very anxious till I hear—You see that I have committed no one.—I shall tell William HarnessWilliam Harness | Born: 1790-03-14 in Wickham, Hampshire, England. Died: 1869-11-11 in Battle, Sussex, England .
A lifelong friend of Mary Russell Mitford who knew her from their childhood in the 1790s, Harness launched the first major effort to collect and edit Mitford’s letters into a series of volumes, which was completed by his assistant, Alfred Guy Kingan L’Estrange a year after Harness’s death, and published as The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends. This collection was originally intended to be six volumes, but was cut back to three by the publishers, to Harness’s distress. Harness and Byron were also friends from their schooling at Harrow, as Byron sympathized with Harness’s experience of a disabled foot, crushed in an accident in early childhood. Byron considered dedicating the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to Harness, but refrained so as not to taint Harness’s reputation as he was taking orders as an Anglican curate. Harness admired and encouraged Mitford’s playwrighting in particular, and she commented that he was one of the few of her friends who thought she should prioritize the drama over prose. When William Macready was attacked in an anonymous Blackwood’s Magazine piece in 1825 for his demands and rudeness to Mitford over revisions to Rienzi, Macready assumed that Harness was the author of the anonymous piece, though in 1839 after many years of distance, Harness assured Macready in person that he was not the writer, though he may have shared word of the poor treatment his friend had endured. William Harness was the son of John Harness, M.D. and Sarah Dredge; he was baptized at Whitchurch, Hampshire on April 13, 1790. He received his B.A. in 1812 and his M.A. in 1816 from Christ’s College, Cambridge. He served as curate at Kelmeston, Hampshire (1812) and Dorking (1814-1816). He was preacher at Trinity Chapel, Conduit Street, London and minister and lecturer at St. Anne’s in Soho. He was Boyle lecturer in London (1822) and was curate at Hampstead from 1828 to 1844. In 1825, he published an eight-volume edition of Shakespeare, including a biography; his friends would later endow a prize in his name at Cambridge for the study of Shakespearean literature. He also authored numerous essays and reviews, some for the Quarterly Review. From 1844 to 1847 he was minister of Brompton Chapel in London. He undertook to raise the funds to build the church of All Saints, Knightsbridge, in the parish of St. Margaret’s Westminster, which opened in 1849, and he then became perpetual curate of that congregation. At the 1851 and 1861 censuses, he lived at 3 Hyde Park Terrace, Westminster St. Margaret, Middlesex, with his sister Mary Harness and his first cousin Jemima Harness, daughter of his uncle William. He died while on a visit to one of his former curates in Battle, Sussex. At the time of his death he living at the same address at 3 Hyde Park Terrace; he is buried in Bath.Sources: Duncan-Jones, Miss Mitford and Mr. Harness (1955); Lord Byron and His Times: —ebb, lmw
To send "Charles"Charles the First; An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. Mary Russell Mitford. London : J. Duncombe . 1834. to you next week on his return—I write in great haste to save the cross post & am still weak—Tell dear Mrs TalfourdRachel Rutt Talfourd, or: Mrs. Thomas Talfourd | Born: 1793 in London, England. Died: 1875-02-12 in Margate, Kent, England.
The eldest daughter of John Towill Rutt, she married Thomas Noon Talfourd in 1822 . Coles observes that Talfourd secured a position through Henry Crabb Robinson to write legal reports for The Times to afford this marriage. Coles cites Vera Watson’s two-part Times’ Literary Supplement piece of April 20 and April 27, 1956, Thomas Noon Talfourd and His Friends for more information (Coles p. 193, note 2).
Thomas and Rachel had five children: Francis, Mary, Katharine, Thomas Noon [II], and William Wordsworth. In 1832, the family lived at 26 Henrietta Street, St Andrew, Holborn and St George the Martyr, Bloomsbury. In 1837, they lived at 56 Russell Square, St. George, Bloomsbury. On May 1, 1843, Rachael and the five children were all baptized into the Church of England. After the death of her husband, she lived at Margate, Kent, where she died on February 12, 1875.
—ajc, ebb, lmw & Mr. RuttJohn Towill Rutt | Born: 1760-04-04 in London, England. Died: 1841-03-03 in Bexley, Kent, England.
Political radical and writer. Dissenter and later Unitarian. He edited the The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley between 1817 and 1831 , as well as other biographical, political, and Unitarian religious works. Rachel, his eldest daughter, married Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. —ajc, lmw
how much I regret having been the occasion of a fresh worry & fright to them & to you—I hope the little girl is well—.