Footnotes

William Tipping was born in 1816, the son of John Tipping, a successful Liverpool merchant, the early letters employing Quaker appellations (thee and thou). He travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East when in his twenties, before settling to the family business; the present letters – some of which, written on large extended sheets of paper, are very long – show something of the élan a young Englishman was expected to display. For example, when he rode out to see the Pyramids, he contents himself with the remark: "although there is nothing beautiful about them – they are objects of interest". Or when in Beirut, he tells his father, on 6 March 1840: "travelling on the East is like travelling anywhere else, the simplest thing in the World – We left Cairo on Tuesday 7th and what with ourselves and baggage formed a Caravan of 10 Camels – our route lay for 5 days on the extreme edge of the desert having Palm Trees on our left and eternal sands on our right – until we arrived at the Village of Salaheih, from this place we struck into the desert... the novelty of this species of travelling once worn off it becomes a tedious task, and monotonous in the extreme – if I describe one day, I describe all the rest" (which he proceeds to do). Once home, he publishes his sketches, and his outgoing letters show him to be an exacting taskmaster. Chief among these, and seemingly issued as a separate plate, is an engraving of the Herod Viaduct in the Tyropoeon Valley, Jerusalem, published as Conjectrual View of the Viaduct as it was at the Time of Herod by Houlston & Wright, and one of the City of Gadara, Galilee. The letters also discuss Robert Traill's translation of Josephus, The Jewish War, edited by Isaac Taylor, which was issued with a portfolio of engravings after Tipping's drawings. He married Maria Walker in the Friends Meeting House, Leeds, in 1844 and afterwards bought Brasted Park in Kent, serving twice as MP for Stockport and dying in 1897.