Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks in the Talbot Collection at the British Library

Abstract

William Henry Fox Talbot is now primarily remembered as the pioneer of photography. This was reinforced by the disposition of his papers, notably the separation of photographs and the few notebooks which document his photographic innovations from the rest of his archive mostly concerned with other scholarly activities beyond photography. Talbot’s interest was vast, ranging across the natural sciences, classical scholarship and Assyriology. The aim of this article is to explore his interest beyond photography by examining his scholarly notebooks that have been donated to the British Library by the family of Talbot’s descendents in 2006 as part of a larger archive.