A highly valued friendship
On this day, 11th September, 210 years ago, in 1814, Dawson Turner wrote a long, friendly, and carefully composed letter to Ellen Hutchins. Read the whole letter HERE.
Ellen, in her letter to Dawson Turner on 4th August, wrote of ‘the value of your friendship. It has been one of the best blessings of an unhappy life, one from which I have enjoyed pleasure unmixed with any sorrow.’
Reading this 11th September letter, I think that I can see why Ellen valued the friendship so highly. What thought and sensitivity has gone into choosing the topics to cover. It is not an account of things that Ellen would have been unable to do, but a few details about Turner’s own situation and that of fellow botanist William Jackson Hooker, then interesting information about an artist, poets and travel writing that Ellen would appreciate and with which she could feel a connection from her ‘suffering on the bed of sickness’.
Turner’s youngest daughter, ‘Little’ Ellen, named after Ellen Hutchins, was born in 1811, so was three years old. Turner’s description of having the builders in and being unable to work on his book (the Fuci) resonates down the centuries!
The artist, Thomas Phillips (1770 – 1845), painted more than one portrait while staying with the Turner family. I know that there is an individual portrait of Dawson’s wife, Mary, and a painting of a family group: Dawson, Mary and their two eldest daughters, Maria (who married William Jackson Hooker the following year and they honeymooned in Ireland) and Elizabeth (who married Sir Francis Palgrave). The family painting (see above) appears on the cover of and inside the book, Dawson Turner: a Norfolk Antiquary and his Remarkable Family edited by Nigel Goodman(Phillimore, 2007).
The portrait of Byron is a famous one. See it and a bit of its story HERE
The names in the list with Walter Scott are all poets, some of whom – Robert Southey, Thomas Campbell and Samuel Rogers – are not now well known.
The portrait by Thomas Phillips of the Prince Regent from 1813 is HERE
I had wondered how much travel had been involved in making the portraits of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia, and discovered that Thomas Phillips had not left England and only had to travel from his London home to Petworth House in West Sussex, where, on 24th June 1814, there had been a significant event – captured in a painting he completed in 1817 – The Allied Sovereigns at Petworth. See the painting and information about it HERE
Henry Salt, who published his A voyage to Abyssinia, and travels into the interior of that country in 1814, was an artist, diplomat and early Egyptologist. See its full, incredibly long title and the whole of the book online HERE.
Read Dawson Turner’s letter of 11th September 1814 HERE.
The next letter in the correspondence between Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner in 1814 is on 1st November and will be posted here on that date.
See an earlier post ‘With gratitude and affection’ HERE for access to letters in January to August 1814 and the full correspondence from 1813 and 1812.