Item 52 - Miscellaneous papers of James Clerk Maxwell

1 bundle

Gift of Misses Margaret and Lucy Dunn, second cousins of James Clerk Maxwell, October 1960.

A small group of papers which were passed to Maxwell's cousin Elizabeth Dunn's daughters Margaret and Lucy Dunn. This includes two pieces of James Clerk Maxwell juvenilia: a pen-and-ink drawing dated 1845 of two small figures in a boat on a pond signed JCM 1845, which carries a note on the verso that it was bequeathed by his cousin William Dyce Cay to his niece Isabel Dunn. A home made card reads "James Clerk Maxwell at home Saturday evening Seven o'clock" in a childish hand with a watercolour of the front door of 31 Heriot Row, Edinburgh. This card had been mounted on a stiff album card alongside a photograph of Maxwell as a young man holding a colour top, both now separated from the album card.

There are 18 sheets and cards of geometrical multicoloured designs, described by the donors as "Designs for his tops &c when a boy." These are watercolours and pen-and-ink or pencil, and are accompanied by one round colour top with designs on both sides of a stiff card and a string through the centre. There are two cut out round cards, and two sheets featuring rounds, and one of these has "Miss Cay" written at the top. The other sheets are of various geometrical designs of multiple colours and have pin pricks in them in various places; of these 7 have designs on two sides, and one of these has a drawing of light refracted in a glass and two doodles of a man and a woman on the verso. One of the designs is a cut out paper lattice.

A letter from James Clerk Maxwell to Lizzie [Elizabeth Cay, later Dunn] dated 27-28 May 1858 contains details of preparations of his wedding to Katherine Dewar on 2 June.

There are two printed items: a newspaper cutting referring briefly to Maxwell's Rede Lecture, "On the Telephone" at the Senate House in 1878, and a print of the birthplace of Sir Isaac Newton in Woolsthorpe, drawn by Samuel Sparrow, and engraved by T. Tinkler dated 1772.

The letter to Elizabeth Cay was published in The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell P. M. Harman, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Vol. III, no. 150A.