Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Sydney Smith to Lady Morgan, 5 June 1843
56, Green Street, Grosvenor
Lane,
June 5, 1843.
I had fully intended, my dear madam, to have
been of your party to-night; but I went to the Thames Tunnel, and
have destroyed myself by walking under the river, and descending
and ascending one hundred and twenty steps; there was a suffocating
heat and a want of ventilation for which I was not prepared. I am
astonished the Thames submits to the insult; one day or another it
will come down upon the subaqueous intruders with all the force of
a basin of water flung from the seventh story of a house in
Edinburgh.
Yours, my dear madam,
Very sincerely,
PS.—Mrs. Sidney (ill with the influenza) desires me
to say that she depends upon Sir C.
Morgan and you for Thursday; I beg you will keep
away from the Tunnel in the interim.
Sir Thomas Charles Morgan (1780-1843)
English physician and philosophical essayist who married the novelist Sydney Owenson in
1812; he was the author of
Sketches of the Philosophy of Morals
(1822). He corresponded with Cyrus Redding.
Catharine Amelia Smith [née Pybus] (1768-1852)
The daughter of John Pybus, English ambassador to Ceylon; in 1800 she married Sydney
Smith, wit and writer for the
Edinburgh Review.
Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
Clergyman, wit, and one of the original projectors of the
Edinburgh
Review; afterwards lecturer in London and one of the Holland House
denizens.
