Abstract
In November 1996 St Andrews University Library acquired an informative fourteen-page letter written by Julia Margaret Cameron to an unidentified correspondent. This letter, which is preserved in the Department of Manuscripts (MS 38345), is devoted entirely to matters relating to Cameron's photography. It is intriguing, for instance, to learn from the letter that Cameron had taken her renowned portraits of Thomas Carlyle in George Frederic Watts's studio in Little Holland House, in London, ‘a midst of pouring rain & cloud’. As a whole, the St Andrews letter conveys the intensity of Cameron's commitment to photography, the labour and personal cost involved in its production, and the difficulties she has had in increasing public awareness of it. The letter is also informative with respect to the range of Cameron's subjects, touching on her activities as a creator of ‘fancy pictures’ as well as her work as a portrait photographer. It is interesting too for communicating Cameron's own views with respect to the critical reception of her photographs. ‘I am not popular’, she acknowledges, ‘because only the artistic eye yet trusts itself boldly to praise my Photographs’.
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