3rd July, 1852.
The morning post brought a letter from London, its familiar script a welcome sight. I confess, Mrs. Finch’s dispatches have become a fixed point in the otherwise variable astronomy of my week. Upon breaking the seal, however, I found not only her customary pages of keen observation, but a small, handsome case of morocco leather tucked within.
Inside, nestled on a bed of velvet, was a daguerreotype plate.
It is a startling thing, this Daguerrean process. Unlike the soft, brownish impression yielded by Mr. Talbot’s paper calotypes, this is a thing of cold, mirror-like truth. The image is captured on a sheet of silvered copper, its details rendered with an unflinching, almost cruel, precision. And on this particular plate was the likeness of Mrs. Finch herself.
It is not a likeness, so much as a captured moment of light itself. Here is the same melancholic intelligence in the eyes, the same quiet scepticism I noted upon our first meeting, a look that seems to assess the world and find it slightly wanting in rigour. She is seated, composed, a perfect model of Victorian decorum, yet the silver seems to have caught the very texture of her inner life—the subtle tension between the stillness of her pose and the restless energy of her mind.
Beneath the image, on the card mount, is a line in her delicate hand: “A record of light from a salon full of shadows. Yours, A. F., 1852.” It is a piece of scientific poetry of the highest order—a perfect, concise summary of her existence, presented with the clarity of a theorem. She has classified her own environment with the precision of a naturalist.
I could not help but compare this artefact to the product of my own recent ordeal at the hands of Mr. Blackwood. His calotype rendered me a mere fossil record, a hazy impression of tweed and irritation fixed upon paper. It was a study in texture. This, however, is a different phylum of image altogether. The daguerreotype does not merely represent; it presents. It is a captured reflection, a ghost in silver.
I find myself strangely moved by this small token. Not by the sentiment, which is a commodity I generally mistrust, but by the sheer fact of it. It is a piece of verifiable data, a fragile silver plate sent across the miles, preserving a single moment against the great, slow grind of entropy. I have placed it on my mantelpiece, where it catches the light from the window. It is, I concede, a most remarkable specimen.
Editor’s Note: This entry marks the arrival of the only known portrait of Adelaide Finch into the archive. Bennet’s fascination with the technical differences between his own calotype and her daguerreotype is a telling detail. The calotype, a British invention, was known for its softer, more artistic feel, while the French daguerreotype was famed for its sharp, almost hyper-real detail. Bennet’s preference for the latter’s “unflinching truth” while describing his own image as a “fossil record” speaks volumes about his self-perception. - Dr. E. Reed