‘Out of danger’? & More Portraits
Dawson Turner’s letter to Ellen on 1st November, ‘On This Day’ 210 years ago, expresses his relief at the news, heard from Thomas Taylor, that Ellen was thought to be recovering from her ‘dreadful illness’ and ‘even pronounced to be out of danger’. Dawson Turner repeated his hope that Ellen would be able to journey to stay with him, his wife, Mary (see her self-portrait above) and his family. Read the 1st November letter HERE.
The letter that Dawson Turner received from Thomas Taylor with the good news was written on 26th October and the full text of it is HERE.
Thomas Taylor (1786-1848) was Ellen’s third cousin. Thomas’ grandmother and a few other members of his family lived at Inchiclough, near Ellen’s home at Ballylickey and he visited them and called in on Ellen when he could.
His letters to Turner are the main source of information about the issues with Ellen’s eldest brother, and often expressed in dramatic language. I am still trying to piece together quite what was going on. We know that Ellen’s father had died in 1787 without making a will and the eldest brother, Emanuel, (who was a lawyer/ barrister working in London for some time before returning to Ireland about 1812), claimed ownership of property that his mother thought was rightly hers. In addition, Emanuel and the next brother, Arthur, seem to have been at loggerheads with each other for years, with Emanuel taking Arthur to court at least once (after 1814). In May 1814 Ellen, mostly bed bound and very ill, moved from Bandon (where she and her mother had moved to get better medical attention) to live with Arthur and his wife, Matilda, at Ardnagashel. Emanuel was a few miles away at Ballylickey, which had been the home of Ellen’s mother, Ellen and her disabled brother, Thomas.
In 1814 Thomas Taylor had just completed his training in medicine at Trinity College Dublin and he was a keen and knowledgeable botanist. He specialised in the study of mosses, liverworts and fungi. Also in 1814, he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society. Like Ellen and William Jackson Hooker, he was a talented botanical artist.
Thomas Taylor was in correspondence with and had met Dawson Turner and William Jackson Hooker at their homes in Norfolk the previous year when his visit to Hooker lasted nearly a month. He was living in Dublin and in contact with James Townsend Mackay. Later, in 1818, Hooker and Taylor published Muscologia Britannica (mosses of Britain / Ireland) and in Mackay’s Flora Hibernica published in 1836, the sections on ferns, mosses and lichens were written by Taylor.
There is a good biography of Thomas Taylor HERE.
In order to be able to read and transcribe the Thomas Taylor letter of 26th October 1814, I requested and paid for photographs of it from the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge. The downloads came with the image of an etched portrait of Thomas Phillips (see below) made by Mary Turner, Dawson’s wife. By coincidence, Thomas Phillips featured in the last ‘On This Day’ post HERE. The etching is bound in the volume of letters near the Taylor letter.
From the Dawson Turner book that I mentioned in that last ‘On This Day’ I learnt that Dawson Turner had an extensive collection of portraits of botanists, which in 1820 he gave to William Jackson Hooker when Hooker left Norfolk to move to Glasgow where he had been appointed to the chair of Botany at the University.
I had thought that there was no portrait of Thomas Taylor, the same as with Ellen, but doing an internet search on his details yesterday, up came an article from the Journal of Bryology with a silhouette of him (see below) and it is now on his Wikipedia entry as well. See the article HERE.
A great online find last year was some of Mary Turner’s etchings for sale, three of which I now own. Shown above is a self-portrait, dated 1814. In a letter some six years earlier, 2nd September 1808, Dawson Turner had written to Ellen:
If anything should bring you to this side of the channel, & you would allow Mrs Turner to be favoured with your company here, she would have as much pleasure as myself in repaying to a native of Ireland a portion of the hospitality, for which you are so famous, & for which we know that fame only does you justice, & she would have an additional pleasure in making the acquaintance of a woman with a mind formed & cultivated like yours; she was herself as ardent a botanist as you, & is now no less fond of it, though the care of a family has given a different turn to her thoughts.
In parallel with having children, Mary Turner had lessons in painting from John Sell Colman and learnt etching from William Camden Edwards. See the collection of portraits by her held at the National Portrait Gallery, London HERE. In 1812, Dawson Turner had sent Ellen an etching of Madame Rembrandt and others that Mary Turner had made.
What if Ellen had been ‘snatched’ from Bantry, had recovered sufficiently to travel and had met the Turner family including Mary? If she had seen the family portraits and great works of art hung in the Turner’s home, Bank House, and met William Jackson Hooker, James Edward Smith and other botanists in Turner’s circle. What if her story had had another chapter or two, or, given her age of just 29 years, a whole second half?
Read the letter from Dawson Turner to Ellen on 1st November 1814 HERE.
The next letter in this series of ‘On This Day’ posts will be on 30th November and is the very last letter in the seven year correspondence between Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner.
See previous posts for access to letters from the years 1812 and 1813. The plan is to have the complete Ellen Hutchins / Dawson Turner correspondence available online by 9th February 2025 – the 210th anniversary of Ellen’s death.
Madeline Hutchins: 1st November 2024
Thomas Taylor