The Dalton entail

Notes and Records of the Royal Society

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 219-233

  Ross, Sydney ^a  

^a RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0142236012     PISSN: 00359149     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.1997.0019     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Frank Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (Pantheon, 1996). Dalton is not cited among the many examples of creative lives in this book.
2. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 14, pp. 412-420 (Boston, Brown and Taggart, 1861).
3. Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. 1, pp. 23-24 (Duckworth, 1900).
4. Two well-known entails in British fictional literature were not barrable, though for different reasons. The Bennet entail in Pride and Prejudice was actually a strict settlement; these were commonly, but wrongly and misleadingly, called entails. They shared many of the properties of a simple entail but not that of being barrable; otherwise Mr Bennet could have got rid of his 'entail' by one of the barring procedures then available. The entail in John Galt's novel was a Scottish one, and Scottish entails were, at that time, not barrable. See Eileen Spring, Law, Land, & Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800, p. 33 and pp. 80-81 (University of North Carolina, 1993). Victorian novelists who were fascinated by the law, a group that includes Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope, found entails to be an excellent device to introduce conflict, farce, or satire into their tales.
5. Elizabeth C. Patterson, John Dalton and the Atomic Theory: The Biography of a Natural Philosopher, p. 322 (Doubleday, 1970). The precise year of Mary Dalton's death was unknown hitherto.
6. The legal situation is described as it existed in the late eighteenth century, before the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Information was obtained from Bacon, Works, XIV, pp. 416-418; A.A. Dibben, Title Deeds, 13th to 19th Centuries, pp. 19-21 (The Historical Association, 1968); A.W.B. Simpson, A History of Land Law, 2nd edn, pp. 130-136 (Oxford, 1986).
7. The legal situation is described as it existed in the late eighteenth century, before the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Information was obtained from Bacon, Works, XIV, pp. 416-418; A.A. Dibben, Title Deeds, 13th to 19th Centuries, pp. 19-21 (The Historical Association, 1968); A.W.B. Simpson, A History of Land Law, 2nd edn, pp. 130-136 (Oxford, 1986).
8. The legal situation is described as it existed in the late eighteenth century, before the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Information was obtained from Bacon, Works, XIV, pp. 416-418; A.A. Dibben, Title Deeds, 13th to 19th Centuries, pp. 19-21 (The Historical Association, 1968); A.W.B. Simpson, A History of Land Law, 2nd edn, pp. 130-136 (Oxford, 1986).
9. The procedure had originally been devised by the regular clergy to evade the statutes directed against mortmain, which is the state of lands or tenements held by ecclesiastical or other corporation in perpetual or inalienable tenure; later the same procedure was found useful as a way to bar an entail. The Fines and Recoveries Act of 1833 (4 and 5 Will IV, c. 74) abolished both actions and substituted a simple deed of disentailment.
10. Hugh Hunt was the name usually selected for this man of straw, and the introduction of that name would alone have sufficed to inform the court that the plaintiff was acting as agent of the tenant, but a blind eye was turned to the fact that the whole procedure was an obvious fraud. The law took its course as though dealing with a genuine action.
11. That objection could have been got around by another legal fiction in which the action was brought not against the tenant in tail but against another person (the family lawyer, for instance) to whom the property was said to have been conveyed. This ruse merely compounds the deceptions from a Quaker viewpoint.
12. Henry Lonsdale, The Worthies of Cumberland: Dr John Dalton, F.R.S., pp. 300-308 (Routledge, 1874).
13. These documents and a number of other Dalton papers were preserved by the descendants of John Fletcher for well over a century. They had been available to Dalton biographers W.C. Henry and Henry Lonsdale, who quoted from them. In letters to Canon Rawnsley, Albert Fletcher wrote: '12 September 1895. I hope you got some old letters I sent you to look at a week or two since. I now enclose for the like purpose, 4 letters from John Dalton to my g'father; Jonathan Dalton's Counter-statement; & tributes to old Elihu [Robinson] from the pens of Lindley Murray (how I used to hate his name) & John Wilkinson. I think you know that John Dalton was one of some Friends' boys to whom my g'father taught Latin after he left School & before he took to business. Please don't light your lamp with any of these productions.' '10/6/95 I now enclose another from Dalton to my g'father, but I can't find the one I spoke of on Monday (referring to his portrait). Perhaps this was one I sent you before. You have now a lot of my M.S.S. Pray bear in mind the text, "The Wicked borroweth & payeth not again, but the Righteous stumpeth up."' A number of these papers were sold to Winifred Myers (Autographs) Ltd., 80 New Bond Street, London, from whom I purchased them in 1976. The collection included three letters from Dalton to Peter Crosthwaite, which are listed as of unknown repository and incomplete text by H. Pratt in his recension of known letters from Dalton to Crosthwaite. These are numbers 2, 3 and 14 of his Table I; see H.T. Pratt, 'Peter Crosthwaite: John Dalton's "Friend and Colleague"', Ambix 31, 11-28 (1991).
14. Dalton MS letter dated 23 December 1792, located at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.
15. Eileen Spring, Law, Land, & Family, p.102 (University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
16. G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History: a survey of six centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria. p. 310 (Longmans, 1942).
17. At this time, when he was so exercised about his paternal inheritance, Dalton was also writing his first book, Meteorological Observations and Essays, which was published in 1793. On its title page he placed the following quotation from Horace, Epistolae, Book I, 1, 31: Est quoddam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra. A certain ambiguity about the intended application of this statement may have been intentional. If translated 'There is some point we may reach, even if we cannot go further', it could be taken to refer to the status of his subject of meteorology. But an equally valid meaning 'One may go only so far, if one is not allowed to go farther,' may be taken to refer to the author's strong sense of personal frustration. At least one Dalton biographer has so read it: see Sir H. Hartley, Studies in the History of Chemistry, p. 60 (The Clarendon Press, 1971). If so, Dalton had managed to convey his complaint to the world, but sufficiently obscurely to preserve his habitual reticence. The quotation was not repeated on the title-page of the second edition of 1834. The first interpretation about the status of meteorology was no less true, but the second interpretation no longer applied. Dalton now appended the letters D.C.L., F.R.S., to his name. He had 'arrived' and no longer needed to publicly voice his complaint.