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Abstract
Roger Taylor, in his response to my paper, may unwittingly have provided us with the answer to why Antoine Claudet distanced himself so firmly from the drawn out machinations and negotiations that led in January 1853 to the formation of what is now the Royal Photographic Society. It was snobbery. Taylor highlights the social chasm that existed between those in trade and those in polite society in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘It is difficult to appreciate’, he reminds us, ‘just how conspicuously separate the two photographic communities (daguerreotype and calotype) were in the 1850s’.