Letters from various scientists to Walter White, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society. With occasional material addressed to Charles Richard Weld and others. Usually on Royal Society business.
The archive correspondence can be characterized as the routine treatment of important events. In 1863, for example, Richard Owen wrote to White with brief instructions for his paper describing the feathered dinosaur archaeopteryx. Occasionally the letters are more significant for the Society's history. In an extended note of 1865, ex Royal Society President the Earl of Rosse 'a plain well-grown man, farmer like in appearance' discussed the merits of signing an election certificate for Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). 'My opinion...was that it would be better to take the broad view and to elect men of great abillity...so as to strengthen the Society in carrying out, in the largest sense, its great object, that of improving natural science'. Tennyson was duly elected, an event which must have pleased White. The assistant secretary had become friendly with the Poet Laureate in the 1850s and White's published diary left a vivid picture of Tennyson reading aloud his Arthurian romances in the offices of the Royal Society.
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