Blessed be the inventor of photography! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my time - this art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable of their absent dear ones.
Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle
(1801 - 1866)
Source: Letter, 21 Oct 1859; in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, 1970.
