This site contains the full text of William Henry Fox Talbot’s writings contained in The Pencil of Nature published in London between 1844 and 1846. The purpose of this site is not to present the text as a faithful facsimile of the original (impossible anyway in freeflow HTML), nor even to present the photographs» , but to make Talbot’s fascinating initial thoughts on photography more widely accessible to serious students of photography.
Care has been taken to retain the original Victorian English usage. The exceptions are the omission of some diacritical marks associated with a few Latin terms, here and there, that would probably display as question marks on older browsers anyway. Footnotes and end-notes do not exist in the original. The “sliding notes” are a work in progress, and it is hoped that they will prove to be valuable to readers. Reader submissions are welcomed. To submit your information or link for consideration, click here.
The current site-design is not set in stone, and can be changed easily as the content is separated from the presentation in a WordPress theme.
Questions and comments may be submitted here.
A few facts about The Pencil of Nature:
- The Pencil of Nature was published in London between 1844 and 1846 in six separatefasicles.»
- Printing technology at that time» was unable to reproduce photos in ink, so the published documents contained actual photographic prints.
- Talbot planned 50 plates for publication, but he only was able to produce 24.
For more information on Talbot or The Pencil of Nature, see the following links:
- Lacock Abbey, Fox Talbot Museum and Village
- The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
- Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department, Book of the Month, February 2007, The Pencil of Nature
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, W.H.F. Talbot and the Invention of Photography
- BBC Biography of W.H.F. Talbot
An interesting exhibit for those who have access to London over the next few months: