Letter
to
Summary
“Monseur Beodoes” is inquisitive and impertinent; Mr Bayly “was formerly a devlish boor”. Asks who his sisters have been talking about.
Transcription
January the 3 1822
My dear friend
I hope you like that inquisitive man Monseur Beodoes,f2 when I was a boy I used to think him a most impertinent man but you may differ in your opinion, he always used to be asking about my father and other things; In you last letter you told me you knew, who, my sisters at Shrewsbury were talking of, I think Papaf3 you will inform me in return of post
I remain—yours Tobe Casef4
P.S. Mr Baylyf5 was formerly a devlish boor but I dare say he is not so to you
Footnotes
- f1
- The friend has not been identified. See this volume, Supplement, letter to Dear Friend, 1 January 1822, n. 1.
- f2
- `Monseur Beodoes’ has not been identified. The reference may be to the poet and physician Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose father, the physician Thomas Beddoes, had been a close friend of the Wedgwood and Darwin families (B. Wedgwood and Wedgwood 1980). `Beddoes’ was, however, a fairly common name in early-nineteenth-century Shropshire.
- f3
- CD refers to two or more of his sisters, Marianne, Caroline Sarah, Susan Elizabeth, and Emily Catherine Darwin, and to his father, Robert Waring Darwin.
- f4
- The form of the signature is unexplained. CD had previously attended a school run by George Augustus Case in Shrewsbury (Autobiography, p. 22 and n. 1).
- f5
- CD possibly refers to William Bayley, of the banking firm Rocke, Eyton, Campbell, Leighton and Bayley in Market Square, Shrewsbury, who had been instructed to act in a financial transaction on Robert Waring Darwin’s behalf in January 1820 (DAR 227.6: 339 and 340, Commercial directory for Shropshire). CD’s sister Emily Catherine wrote in her letter of 15 January [1826] that a Major Bayley desired `most particularly‘ to be remembered to CD (Correspondence vol. 1).