A signed letter from Charlotte Brontë to a Scottish pharmacist will be auctioned in Broughton Place next week, and has interesting connections to this area's past.
Lot 141 will appear in Lyon & Turnbull's Rare Books, Maps, Manuscripts and Photographs sale on 4 September. It is Brontë's handwritten reply to a letter from David Waldie Esq. (L.R.C.S.), originally of Linlithgow, who had corresponded to her in 1853 saying how much he'd enjoyed her novel Jane Eyre (published in 1847).
Brontê – using her surname and the initial 'C', partially to disguise her gender – thanked him for the letter and his gift of a few little books, replying:
'The sincere affection of a reader's gratification is – I scarcely need to say – one of the much acceptable favours in which an author can be repaid for his labours. I shall be glad if any future work of mine gives you equal pleasure to that you speak of having found in "Jane Eyre".
Simpson, as many readers will know, lived at 52 Queen Street, where – on 4 November 1847 – he experimented for the first time with chloroform:
'I poured some of the fluid into tumbers before my assistants, Dr Keith and Dr Duncan, and myself. Before sitting down to supper, we all inhaled the fluid, and were all 'under the mahogany' in a trice, to my wife's consternation.'
Simpson had been supplied with the chloroform by one William Flockhart, a chemist who practised at 52 North Bridge (now the site of the Balmoral Hotel). A plaque on the wall there records the fact, and was erected in 1981 by the International Association for the Study of Pain. Flockart lived at Seaforth Cottage (29 York Road) in Trinity, and was buried in 1871, practically opposite his most famous customer, Simpson, in Warriston Cemetery.
Charlotte Brontë died in 1853, whilst pregnant with her first child. Her letter to Waldie is estimated to fetch between £10,000 and £12,000.
[Images: Top – Wikipedia, Creative Commons; Others – Courtesy of Lyon & Turnbull]
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