1013. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 85–88.
[London]
Sept. 27th 1842– [1]
Yes, my beloved friend .. now I see quite what the tears meant. You are not satisfied with the marriage [2] —rather hopeful than satisfied—rather fearful than hopeful. And since your telling me of some things & being silent of others, I do not wonder at the fearfulness & the tears—& I dont like what you say & what you avoid saying of the bridegroom—& I dont like the fashion of the courtship, .. & least of all, do I like the portion. Oh, for a woman to have a dowry which can by any possible calculation be worth a man .. how great is her misfortune! Grant to me my dearest friend that, after all, the heiress is accursed above the poetess: & I will grant to you, & willingly, that the happiest woman of all, hides deepest & most quietly by the hearthside of domestic duty—without an aspiration beyond.
As to this bride & bridegroom, you are not to mind much, the contrast between them,—knowing how contrasts in love & marriage have flourished into proverbs & borne very fine fruit. Yet I confess I dont like my own idea (however I came by it) of the [‘]‘merry bridegroom”, [3] —& am of opinion that if a lover of mine shd laugh at the churchdoor, I wd spare his walking any farther. Why surely a merry man out of Robin Hood’s gang, might by one ‘touch of nature,’ [4] be grave on his wedding morning. I do not like such merriment out of place!– Yet he might love her .. he might love her, after all—and may God’s mercy avert whatever evil is ‘just possible’ too.
No—I cannot express to you how it touched me that you shd have wished to give away your treasure, your “Lucy Anderdon”, to a brother of mine. But then you see, none of them are rich enough yet to think of settling—and George who in virtue of a profession by which he makes five pounds at intervals, is nearest the mark, could only have fallen in love & been miserable at the very best of it. And then George has a magnanimous theory about the impropriety of accepting a fortune from a wife! I believe he thinks it very immoral indeed, [5] —even worse than marrying without any fortune. He is waiting now to have “three thousand a year” for a minimum, as a preliminary to falling in love. If he had seen your darling, probably his opinions upon various subjec<ts> wd have suffered a change—and he is so good, so upright, so persevering to work & so high-minded to work out of the mud, so strong where strength shd be, & so soft where softness is admissable, that I cd not wish him to change otherwise, even for a darling of yours. And she might not have liked him, you know, as he is. Who can tell?– Love is a mystery. It must be best as it is—and I do hope, happiest. Try to think it so.
I wrote the most of this yesterday: upon which, Flushie wd come & lie on my right shoulder, & I cdnt compliment him away, or scold him away. As to scolding, he laughs me to scorn. [6] George declares that the expression of utter contempt in Flushie’s face when I lift up my voice in anger against him, is ‘impayable’. [7]
I have received your letter my beloved friend, & Herr Dobler’s testimonials. Oh—do not say so much! One smile of your countenance wd be worth all the work. Not a word is written yet but it will be done, I hope, in time,—& as ‘pretty well’ as I can. If I disgrace you!!– And to take such very small measure of one’s thoughts, & to write compliments to so many people who are by no means ‘small’, is a business out of my ordinary line. That is no murmur, (be certain) but the preparation for an excuse for every contingent imperfection,—in case the ‘as well as I can’ turns out to be not well at all.
Oh my dearest dearest friend,—your Mrs Cockburn, although Ld Byron’s Mrs Cockburn besides, [8] has been bewitched at Three Mile Cross into “heathenish talk”! No—I do not deserve that. But I must deserve to hear your interesting account of her, & I might deserve to look once in her face,—because it does, & would, give me so much pleasure.
Her conversation will revive you my beloved friend—and yet that you shd watch all night & talk all day, cannot be. You bear heavy trials indeed. Take [all] possible care of yourself for the sake of
Your own
EBB–
There is a little more time—and now I will tell you what helped to make me so silent some time ago. [9] I was naughty first, you know—that is agreed—& besides troubled in my imagination. Once upon a day, towards noon, I heard that Papa had gone away early as the dawn. Gone—vanished—& I never dreaming of his going! Gone down into Herefordshire, to look at an estate for an investment!– Well—scarcely had I [‘]‘triumphed gloriously” [10] over the ruffling of this news, when Septimus diverged from Latin & Greek into fencing with his tutor upon that part of our domains commonly called “the leads”, [11] without ‘buttons’ & without masks,—the consequence of which was that the tutor’s weapon flying out struck the pupil’s eye. Poor Set nearly fainted—and upon the nearest physician being sent for, Dr Mayo, [12] he shook his head,—‘knew nothing about it’,—the ‘bone between the eye & brain was slight’,—“did not however think the brain injured,”—‘did not think the eye destroyed’—but ‘they had better send for a surgeon’. Liston [13] was here directly of course: and I am thankful to say, no real injury had occurred,—altho’ one half a quarter of an inch higher, & the stroke wd have been, he said, instantaneously mortal.
I knew nothing of all this until the next day, through the consideration of my kind dear people—but even to hear that such things had been, made me turn quite sick & throw down my pen. A black eye with the sign of a cut upon the lid, remains to signify the evil—& no more. The Divine mercy is great. He might have died—died on the spot—& Papa away!– Papa is not away now. Three days or four brought him back again,—& the estate does not seem to be very much worth going so far to look at—so that my troubles have come to a timely end.
God bless you in the midst of yours, & soften them out of their name–
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 34–37 (as 27 [–28] September 1842).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. From the internal reference (“I wrote the most of this yesterday”) and the apparent alteration in the date to a “7,” it seems probable that EBB began this letter on 26 September.
2. Of Lucy Anderdon to Mr. Partridge. As EBB’s later comments show, Miss Mitford suspected that Miss Anderdon’s fortune played some part in Partridge’s pursuit of her.
3. Cf. Donne, Epithalamions, or Marriage Songs (1633), line 130.
4. Troilus and Cressida, III, 3, 175.
5. This opinion caused George to oppose EBB’s own marriage, as he felt that the penniless RB was partly motivated by her money.
6. Cf. Macbeth, IV, 1, 79.
7. “Priceless; inimitable.”
8. Miss Mitford’s friend, Mary Cockburn (née Duff, 1788–1858), was Byron’s childhood sweetheart. Writing in his diary in 1813, he noted: “I have been thinking lately a good deal about Mary Duff.... my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder-stroke—it nearly choked me—to the horror of my mother … And it is a phenomenon in my existence (for I was not eight years old) which has puzzled, and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it” (Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life, by Thomas Moore, 1830, I, 18). The editors of EBB-MRM believe that Mary Duff figures in Byron’s “When I Roved a Young Highlander,” but this is not supported by Hartley Coleridge; in a note in his edition of The Works of Lord Byron he identifies the Mary of that poem as Mary Robertson. He also states that Mary Duff was Byron’s distant cousin.
Mrs. Cockburn later (1847) introduced Ruskin to Miss Mitford (Vera Watson, Mary Russell Mitford, p. 278).
9. EBB refers to her delay in writing, mentioned in letter 987.
10. Exodus, 15:1.
11. The flat part of the roof.
12. Thomas Mayo (1790–1871), of 56 Wimpole Street, was Physician-in-Ordinary to the Duke of Sussex and later (1857–62) president of the Royal College of Physicians.
13. Robert Liston (1794–1847), F.R.S., an eminent surgeon, was Professor of Clinical Surgery at London University and a member of the council of the Royal College of Surgeons.
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