skip to content

Darwin Correspondence Project

To Josiah Wedgwood III   [20? August 1847]1

Friday

My dear Jos.

Thanks for your two messages.— You will see by enclosed letter, that by paying 51£ all calls to N.W. Railway will be completed. Will you please pay it.—

Have you paid into Robarts for me the 15£ which I before advanced through Erasmus?—2

I presume you have deducted your own payments & interest.— The account will stand thus diag 460.

N. W. Railway 51 £

409

15 £?

? ramme

So that there will be about 400£ to invest, which will just buy two shares of Leeds & Bradford.3 Each share being, as far as I remember £50 + £48. s 10. You told me that you had paid 40£ into Robarts: perhaps this included my 15£. You will have to receive the Grt. Western share for me, without indeed this 40£ was from the Grt. Western.—4

As you will have no doubt to write to Mr Stokes about the ahead paid shares, will you ask him to buy the two more: if they cost a trifle above the money in hand, I would pay it.—

I am sorry to say there is one other business question, I must ask. In 16th of Nov. 1835, your Father5 made over to me 518£ Debentures in Monmouth Canal, which pays now only 312 percent, so that I want to call it in, but Langton tells me, I ought to know whether the sum was lent for definite term.6 Can you tell me, or should I ask Frank to look amongst the papers at Maer. The money was originally lent in 1803.

Yours affectionately. | C. Darwin

Footnotes

Dated from details in CD’s Account Book and Investment Book (Down House MSS). See nn. 2, 3, and 4, below.
See letter to Josiah Wedgwood III, [22 June – 17 August 1847], n. 4.
CD’s Investment Book (Down House MS) records that forty guaranteed shares in the Leeds & Bradford Railway were purchased with money from Emma Darwin’s trust fund through Charles Stokes on 21 August 1847. The shares cost £45 each with a premium of £47 10s. Four further shares were purchased on 8 September, presumably with the £400 to invest that CD refers to in the letter.
The £40 referred to was ‘interest on undivided property’ and was entered in CD’s Account Book (Down House MS) on 24 August. On 31 August an entry in the Account Book records the receipt of dividend on Great Western Railway shares, the sum being £42 13s. 11d.
Josiah Wedgwood II, CD’s uncle.
Charles Langton was Emma Darwin’s brother-in-law. In the event, CD retained the Monmouth Canal debentures; in October 1847 it was resolved to pay 5% on them to investors who agreed to make no call on their capital for seven years (CD’s Investment Book (Down House MS)).

Summary

Discusses the buying and selling of certain railway shares.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-1042
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Josiah Wedgwood, III
Sent from
unstated
Source of text
DAR 210.10: 14
Physical description
ALS 4pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 1042,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-1042.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 4

letter