Sir John Herschel, Bt

During his later years Herschel’s friendship with another prominent woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, flourished. Cameron, the great-aunt of Virginia Woolf, became one of the premier photographer of the age, and would capture the image of some of the most famous Victorians; Charles Darwin; the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browing; the artists, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and George Fredric Watts; the actress Ellen Terry; and Herschel. Most biographies of Cameron note that her daughter gave her a camera as a gift in 1863, when she was forty-eight years odl, tracing her interest in photography to that even in later life. But the truth is rather more interesting than the legend. As early as 1841 at the very dawn of the photographic process, John Herschel send her specimens of his photographs, and began to teach her the methods he had used to create them. ~ Page 349

There is, in the National Portrait Gallery of London, a famous photography of Herschel taken by his former protégée, Julia Margaret Cameron, in 1867. By this time Whewell and Jones were dead, and Babbage and Herschel were soon to follow them. Herschel’s face, grizzled and framed with white hair, is half in darkness, half in light, like the celestial bodies he had spent so much time gazing upon. He looks ahead, a bit stunned by what he seems to see. Perhaps even Herschel was surprised at how much he and his friends had accompanied: they had truly transformed science and helped create the modern world. ~ Page 368