Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd: A member of the “Q” Continuum?

Here’s a rather impressive sight of Thomas Noon Talfourd as painted by Henry William Pickersgill (National Portrait Gallery number 417), in which perhaps he shares at least a passing resemblance to “the Q” of Star Trek:

Talfourd was a friend and very frequent correspondent of Mitford’s and a native of Reading, Berkshire, as well as a jurist practicing in the Temple court in London. Charles Dickens dedicated his novel The Pickwick Papers to Talfourd. Talfourd, like Mitford before him, wrote plays, including Ion (1835), The Athenian Captive (1837) and Glenco, or the Fate of the Macdonalds (1839), and he helped Mitford negotiate with the actor-managers of the London Royal Theatres, William Macready and Charles Kemble.

Advertisement

Tags: 19th-century, Charles Dickens, drama, Ion, Mary Russell Mitford, nineteenth-century, Pickersgill, Pickwick Papers, Q, Q Continuum, Star Trek, Talfourd, the Q