1408. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 3–6.
[London]
[21] Oct. 1843. [1]
Ever dearest friend, I write in haste, but must write notwithstanding. You are out of spirits, my dearest friend! What do the witches mean by it? Let me beseech you to take counsel from Mr May, & not to indulge in this presentimental sadness for which I am very sure there is no worse ground than an accidental & undangerous although exceedingly depressing kind of illness. Approaching the term of existence, .. you!! My dear dear friend, how can you think so, long enough to be able to say so? You, who have life in you for forty years I trust, with which to revive & refresh the world around you! you! Still, incredulous as I happily for myself & with all reasonableness am, in respect to the evidence of a worse evil than even your suffering, .. it is so rank an evil in my eyes that you should suffer at all, that I cannot indeed resist tormenting you about seeing Mr May. I & Dr Chambers are different from you, indeed & altogether. I have had the best advice of England, & when it was necessary, was visited twice & thrice a day by physicians. All the resources of their art in application to my case, I am perfectly acquainted with,—& in my present state, when a chronic delicacy of the chest & general debility are my only evident complaints, I am acting on their advice in simply taking precautions & abstaining from active measures. If Dr Chambers came to me today, he must do something—& the chances are that the something wd be far worse for me than this nothing at all. Poor Dr Scully said to me of myself, & so often that it rung in my ears like a proverb, .. “Where we cant do good, the great object is to do no harm.” [2] —So now you must not hold me up as an example of perversity,—because, in regard to health, I am by no means perverse, & I wont be considered perverse &, so, serve as an excuse to naughty people. See Mr May, my dearest friend! He may relieve you from some of these distressing symptoms, by means, of which you know nothing. As to shutting you up in the house, I am certain he will do no such thing—I would even be surety against it. Do, do see him! I am eager that the ground shd be drained, which is overhung by all these vapours, .. vapours unnatural to the soil & climate. Why, when you fall into low spirits, my dearest Miss Mitford, the sun seems masked with the moon.
And so you ring me down on the counter as a better coin than yourself? and I fall flat & light by the side of you, dishonored by her Majesty’s proclamation! [3] Ah my dearest friend! Now you shall not write nonsense, because you are out of spirits! With all my selflove, I cant count up my “value” to an equality with yours … and you shant! Why there is nobody, scarcely, who has so few personal friends as I have—& nobody certainly, who has so many as yourself .. so many personal friends shading out into the external circles of literary admirers! Therefore do not fancy yourself uncared for—oh surely, surely, you could’nt fancy such a thing seriously! The whole world has love for you—and friend upon friend presses forwards,—jealous who should be nearest to your heart. My jealousies I never pretend to conceal—and I have forty rivals in this land of Cockaigne! alas!– [4]
Dearest friend, you were very kind in procuring the invitation for Mr Horne—but what is this dinner at Reading? for what purpose? [5] .. in commemoration of what? You mention it twice, thrice .. and not a word of the meaning of it! And you go with Miss Brougham. [6] Now what can it be?
Think of Flush positively refusing to eat anything yesterday, because I had soup for dinner which he did not like as he does partridge,—& because although his meat was cut up in very little pieces on a plate, nobody had thought of helping him with a fork. At eleven oclock at night I asked Crow, who had taken him down stairs for half an hour, whether he had eaten his dinner yet. “No’[’] she said—but at the sound of ‘dinner,’ he leapt to my hands & kissed them with various ejaculations significant of a sincere interest in the subject of conversation. So I said .. ‘Where is the plate’ .. which was brought in vain,—Flushie turning away his ducal brows, wd not touch it. Then I thought of helping him,—& this time, the trial was effective, & he ate every morsel without hesitation. Was it not strange? And it constantly happens that he refuses to eat anything, except from a fork or one’s hand—and even in the ‘peculiar case’ of spunge cake, if you offer him too large a piece, he looks disdain & denial, astonished at your solecism!– A born Duke, to be sure he is. “A luxurious fellow,”—as Papa says,—when he finds him sometimes, or rather the end of his nose, issuing out of the folded furs on my sofa!– By the way, Papa sometimes brings him cakes from the city, & thus secures a most cordial greeting every evening on returning home. Oh! how the hands are kissed, & the boots examined!– The “all hail” [7] is on the grandest scale.
Mr Horne said in a note I had from him yesterday, “dear Miss Mitford,” speaking of the “great regard” he had for you. Depend upon it, he is generous & truehearted,—& you will be convinced of it the more you come to know of him. <Not that it is generous to care for you– That is only natural. Dont mistake my logic.> [8]
The last Chuzzlewit is assuredly very clever,—but the number preceding, I did not like under a single point of view. Is it not probable that the price of a guinea an autograph, was fixed by the bazaar-people; [9] & that with the exception of writing his name according to the direction of the aforesaid, Mr Dickens had nothing whatever to do with that species, that very peculiar species, of commerce? I confess I do not take your view of his gloomy view of human nature. Let the Mrs Gamps be exceptions, they are still as natural as the general rule, & as fit for purposes of Art. [10] And then, the general impression of his books is surely favorable to Human Nature. It strikes me so at least—and the majority of his readers is of the same mind.
Mr Merry has had the kindness to send me his book [11] —& a kind note,—which of course I shall reply to soon.
May God bless you– Do let me hear how you are—& that you are better, if possible.
Your attached EBB.
I am tolerably comfortable today—but I had to struggle with the late cold weather to keep any voice–
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 329–330 (as [?16] October 1843).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Day provided by postmark.
2. Cf. the intent of the Hippocratic Oath, sworn by members of the medical profession.
3. A Royal Proclamation issued at Windsor on 2 October 1843 noted the amount of gold coin under the legal weight still in circulation, despite previous efforts to withdraw it, and enjoined “all our loving subjects … to cut, break, and deface such pieces of the said gold coin as shall be found deficient in weight” (see The Times, 4 October).
4. A 13th-century French poem depicted the Land of Cockaigne as one of luxury and idleness, where the houses were made of barley sugar and the streets were paved with pastry. The term was also used jocularly to denote London, the country of Cockneys.
5. The dinner, to be held on 24 October, was to mark the dedication ceremonies of the new Public Rooms of the Literary, Scientific, and Mechanics’ Institution.
6. Lord Brougham’s sister, Mary, described in letter 989 as “thrice-charming and thrice-excellent.”
7. III Henry VI, V, 7, 34. In this and subsequent Shakespearean quotations, the line numbers correspond to those used in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).
8. The words within angle brackets were squeezed in as an afterthought.
9. Dickens had agreed to participate in activities in October to rescue the Manchester Athenæum from debt; these included a week-long bazaar in the Town Hall and a soirée. The Manchester Guardian of 11 October reported the total proceeds to be £1,820.
10. Sarah Gamp, introduced in the October number of Martin Chuzzlewit (chapters 24–26), was a disreputable midwife and nurse, renowned for her unwieldy umbrella and constant references to the imaginary Mrs. Harris, whose opinions always confirmed her own.
11. His just-published book, Predestination and Election (see letter 1401, note 7).
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