TALBOT, William Henry Fox (1800-1877), of Lacock Abbey, Wilts.

A polymath and prodigy, Talbot gave general support to Grey’s ministry during his brief parliamentary career, which he abandoned to focus on scientific pursuits, most famously the development of photography, a concept he had thought of whilst an MP.

Talbot never knew his father, William Davenport Talbot, a soldier, who died less than six months after his birth, leaving the family seat of Lacock Abbey heavily encumbered. Thereafter Talbot and his mother lived at a succession of properties whilst renting out Lacock, whose occupants included John Rock Grosett, MP for Chippenham, before their return in 1827.1G. Buckland, Fox Talbot and the invention of photography (1980), 11-12. By then Talbot had won numerous accolades during a glittering Cambridge career, had published several mathematical papers, and had been admitted to the Astronomical Society in 1822.2L. Schaaf, ‘Talbot, William Henry Fox (1800-1877)’, www.oxforddnb.com. He was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1829, and admitted to the Royal Society in 1832.3Buckland, Fox Talbot, 199.

Talbot possessed Whig connections, his mother’s sister being married to Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd marquis of Lansdowne, and at the 1831 general election he offered for the borough of Chippenham, three miles from Lacock.4Burke’s peerage (1949), 1166; ‘Chippenham’, HP Commons, 1820-32, iii. 176. Although he retired as defeat was inevitable, the following year he was elected in second place, behind the local Tory patron, but ahead of a Radical.5Ibid., 176-7; McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (8th edn., 1972), 59; William Henry Fox Talbot to his stepfather Charles Feilding, 26 Nov. 1832, 6, 14 Dec. 1832, Fox Talbot Collection, British Library, LA (H) 32-014, 016, 018. This and all subsequent correspondence cited are taken from the digitised letters, available through ‘The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot’ project, http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/project/project.html. In Parliament he gave general support to the Whigs and ‘their measures of reform’ but ‘voted against the destructive schemes of the Ultra-Radical Party’ such as the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, the disestablishment of the Irish church, 20 May 1833, and shorter parliaments, 15 May 1834.6‘Address to the independent electors of Chippenham’, 1 Dec. 1834, Fox Talbot Collection, BL, LAM-116 & 28871. Although he is not known to have spoken, judging by his complaints of attending late sittings Talbot did not shirk his duties and when a bill for a proposed railway from Chippenham to Trowbridge came before the House he supported it, even though it would ‘pass unpleasantly near’ to Lacock.7Ibid.; Talbot to William Jackson Hooker, 22 Feb. 1834, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, EL 6.234. Applying his mathematical skills to policy, Talbot privately advised Lansdowne that malt, house and window taxes be repealed, the revenue shortfall to be met by loans in the short term, but in the long term by the ‘increased consumption of taxable articles’.8Talbot to Lord Lansdowne, n.d. 1833, private collection, listed as document no. 2554 by ‘The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot’.

Talbot retired at the 1835 general election, informing his constituents that ‘in these days of party conflict, a seat in Parliament has become less an object of my ambition, than in more tranquil, and, may I add, more reasonable times’.9‘Address to the independent electors of Chippenham’, 27 Dec. 1834, Fox Talbot Collection, BL, FT10036. Although his support for the Whigs was undiminished, Talbot did not regret relinquishing duties which had prevented him from pursuing his interests, which included the development of photography.10See Talbot to Hooker, 22 Feb. 1834, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, EL 6.234. Whilst on holiday in Italy in October 1833, frustrated at his inability to sketch a landscape, he had conceived the idea of making the image projected by a camera obscura permanent. This was followed up by a series of brilliant discoveries by Talbot over the next two years, which included the use of silver salts to create a latent image on paper, making multiple copies from a ‘negative’, ‘fixing’ the image with potassium iodide, and deriving ‘positives’ from ‘negatives’. Despite his achievements, Talbot, a ‘shy and reclusive’ man, only made public his experiments at the Royal Society, 31 Jan. 1839, after hearing rumours that the Frenchman Daguerre had developed a similar process. Further experiments resulted in much shorter exposure times and the ‘calotype’ in 1840, a technology that Talbot put to use in his unfinished serial The pencil of nature (June 1844-Apr. 1846).11Buckland, Fox Talbot, 25-59; Schaaf, ‘Fox Talbot’; idem, The photographic art of William Henry Fox Talbot (2000), 11, 13-22 (qu. at 11).

Talbot spent his later years translating Assyrian texts and perfecting photographic engraving, which he had invented in 1852. During his lifetime Talbot made distinguished contributions to botany, physics, astronomy, and mathematics, and his achievements were recognized through numerous honours including, from the Royal Society, the Bakerian Prize (1836), Royal Medal (1837) and Rumford Medal (1842). He was admitted as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1858 and in 1863 received an honorary doctorate of law from that city’s university. On his death in 1877 he was succeeded by his only son, the childless Charles Henry (1842-1916), after whom the estates passed to Talbot’s female descendants.12Ibid., 28; idem, ‘Fox Talbot’; Buckland, Fox Talbot, 199-203.