Correspondence

988.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 41–43.

[London]

July 22– [1842] [1]

I hope you have received the newspaper my dearest friend, containing Col. Dundas’s high treasons. [2] The want of chivalry all around us is rather more singular than becoming—& whatever the poor queen’s faults may be, I am at a loss to understand how she can have deserved it all. Oh yes!—the whipping, as Dr Mitford suggested it, is the only fit remedy for the assassinations—and you will see that Sir Robert Peel has decided it so. [3] The paper spoke of her being ‘much affected’ by the last attempt,—I wonder if it is true. In any case, she must feel—whether the outward sign be given or not.

Yes, Yes! I saw your name & your village in illustration of that paradise patronized by Mr Robbins, [4] —& smiled & thought at the moment how likely that association was to take in some victim to the rural enjoyment of a public house & a pigsty. Are you aware that one of his sons is a clergyman,—celebrated, in a degree, for his eloquence of sermons—by no means equal to the father in rhetoric of course,—but still & really a very excellent man & doing a great deal of good? He used to preach somewhere near St John’s wood—and has lately removed into the country. [5]

As to the cross-stitches [6] —or stitches alas! of any sort, .. I am ashamed to say how useless & unaccomplished my fingers are in respect to them—& the more ashamed because I feel conscious that people may suspect the fault, of the vanity of a merit––by way of pedantry or the like. So when talk begins of work—German wools English threads & the rest, .. I make haste to change the subject or to look on one side & escape the imminent exposure. Oh! you cant think .. you can scarcely imagine, my awkwardness when I pretent to work! Such pricking of fingers, & knotting of thread, & sowing backwards in certain evolutions, instead of forwards!– I ought to have been well whipped at six years old, & then—that is, now—I shd whip [7] better. As it is, I once knitted an odd garter, and embroidered an odd ruffle, & committed fragments of several collars, & did something mysterious, the name of which operation has past from my head, toward producing the quarter of a purse—yes, & made several doll’s frocks, and one or two frocks for a poor child of mine adoption [8] —and that is [‘]‘the head & front of my attending” [9] to the duties belonging to my femineity. You who are excellent in all things, will make an effort to forgive me—but the effort will be necessary. The best excuse for me is—that the occupation was never put to me in the form of a duty. I had nothing to mind or do, needle-ways for myself or others. And then, my beloved friend, I was always insane about books & poems—poems of my own, I mean,—& books of everybody’s else—and I read Mary Wolstonecraft when I was thirteen: no, twelve! [10]  .. and, through the whole course of my childhood, I had a steady indignation against Nature who made me a woman, & a determinate resolution to dress up in men’s clothes as soon as ever I was free of the nursery, & go into the world “to seek my fortune”. [11] How’, was not decided; but I rather leant towards being poor Lord Byron’s page. [12]

So, altogether, you see,—you will allow, my dearest indulgent friend .., that I am one degree less “good for-nothing” than might have been, à priori, [13] expected. Ever your

(as proven) unworthy & attached EBB–

Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 6–8.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Year provided by the further reference to Col. Dundas.

2. See letter 987, note 8.

3. Following the attempts on the Queen’s life, on 12 July Peel submitted to Parliament the Queen’s Person’s Protection Act, suggesting “the degrading punishment of personal chastisement” for persons convicted of such attempts. The Act received the Royal Assent on 16 July and contained a proviso that, during imprisonment, the offender be “publicly or privately whipped, as often and in such manner and form as the said Court shall order and direct, not exceeding thrice.”

4. See letter 981, note 12.

5. Two of Robins’s sons, George Augustus and Arthur, were clergymen; we have not established to which of them EBB refers.

6. See the opening sentence of letter 981.

7. i.e., “to sew over and over, to overcast; to draw into gathers, as a frill, by a combination of overcast and running stitch” (OED).

8. See letters 137 and 145.

9. Cf. Othello, I, 3, 80.

10. In 1821, EBB’s mother had referred to “yours and Mrs. Wolstonecrafts system” (letter 135).

11. This desire to escape the limitations of her sex was voiced in the essay printed in volume 1 (pp. 360–362).

12. In Byron’s Lara (1814), the slave Gulnare disguises herself as Kaled, a page.

13. “Presumptively; by deduction.”

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