Lord Kelvin's early home : being the recollections of his sister the late Mrs. Elizabeth King / together with some family letters and a supplementary chapter by the editor, Elizabeth Thomson King ; with illustrations from Mrs. King's own drawings and those of her daughters.

  • King, Elizabeth, 1818-1896.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lord Kelvin's early home : being the recollections of his sister the late Mrs. Elizabeth King / together with some family letters and a supplementary chapter by the editor, Elizabeth Thomson King ; with illustrations from Mrs. King's own drawings and those of her daughters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a fortnight with leeches, and often blistered on the back of my neck. It was wonderful how quickly my strength now came back. In a few weeks I was able to walk a mile or two, and my brothers often trundled me in a wheel- barrow along a smooth greensward that bor- dered the shore; and so enabled me to reach further distances than would otherwise have been possible at first.^ ^[Note by E. T. K.—Comparing these Recollections with old family letters, there are some slight discrepancies here with regard to dates. The summers of 1834 and 1835 were both spent at Invercloy in Arran, and the two seem to have become blended into one in my mother’s memory, and their incidents mixed. How primitive and out of the way these summer quarters were is graphically described in a letter to her aunt in Lisbon dated June 6, 1834 • .... “We have no conveniences. We cannot even get a little salt or pepper, or a little flour, without sending to Saltcoats” [on the mainland]. “ Our bread comes from Saltcoats, and it is excellent. The eggs were fourpence a dozen, but they are now fourpence-halfpenny. The milk is very fine, but not a bit of tolerable butter is to be had. Butcher meat is seldom to be had, but we have never felt the want of it yet. We had a quarter of veal at fourpence per pound, which served us for a week with the assistance of eggs.” Anna also wrote to her aunt : “ Invercloy, Arran, June 18, 1834. . . . . “You may suppose that this is a very cheap place when I tell you that we got two legs and the tail of a calf for the mighty sum of one shilling. You are not to suppose that it was merely