Item 16 - Letter from Henry Sidgwick to his mother

1 doc

Announces that he shall be home by Thursday of the following week, or Friday at the latest, and will spend two weeks with her. Refers to his study of Arabic. Hopes that he will receive the letter from Lucerne before he goes. Asks her to forward the enclosure [not included] to Cambridge. Hopes to find Arthur at home, and regrets that he is gone to Wellington. Intends not to go up to Cambridge until the last moment. Declares that he has been very happy in Dresden, and that his friends [Dakyns, Green, and Rutson], who have been with him the whole summer, are all going off now. Hopes that Graham Dakyns will like his work. Expresses his satisfaction with the boarding-house in which he is staying, and states that the only 'bitter drop in the cup is an Englishman to whom [he has] an unreasonable but unconquerable antipathy'. Comments on the news from America, and the 'an interesting crisis going on in Prussia'. Declares that it is 'great fun reading the Arabian Nights in the original even though it be only at the rate of 5 lines an hour'.

Part transcription in Sidgwick, Arthur, and Sidgwick, E. M, 'Henry Sidgwick'. London: Macmillan, 1906, p 86.