Correspondence

1931.  EBB to Allan Park Paton

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 244–246.

50 Wimpole Street

May 28. 1845.

Dear Sir,

I hasten to reply to the request with which you honour me, & beg to assure you that I should have pleasure besides, in receiving your visit & making our acquaintance personal, if it were not that my weak health makes it necessary for me to live comparatively alone & confined for the most part to one room. It is my only chance for being better ultimately, that I keep myself very quiet now—& this forces me, in despite of courtesy, to say that I cannot see you,—as indeed I have to answer to others, day by day.

For the newspapers, or rather for your verses in them, I thank you much,—as for those you have enclosed to me in your last letter– The stanzas on Kennedy’s Mill [1] road struck & pleased me so much, as being of a nature far above their newspaper sphere, that I looked about vainly for your address contained in a mislaid note of yours, in order to write to you on the subject & advise you to choose some worthier medium with the public, than a provincial journal, .. though it were but a magazine. And now you write to tell me that you think of printing a book!—to which I wish all manner of success, .. (to be in at the dawn of it with my good wishes!—) although you are prepared probably for the danger & difficulty attending all publications of poetry. In general the public will not buy—& the booksellers lock up their granaries in expectation of a famine. Moxon even—the poet’s publisher par excellence, as he is taken to be, .. refuses not only your book, & another one by an acquaintance of mine (which I heard of by the same post with yours—) but every form of m∙s∙ poetry, except under peculiar circumstances,——or I would offer my poor services, (though I do not know him personally) in trying to persuade him to look into your verses. It is the same with many other booksellers—but you certainly would find one somewhere in London to undertake the printing of a book on the terms of your paying the expences of it yourself——on no other terms, I fear—& you are aware perhaps that these expences are considerable & the chances of repayment, most insubstantial. Altogether, if you were to ask my advice—& I trust it is not unpardonable in me to offer it unasked, by this intimation,––I should certainly advise you to delay, for the present, the plan of publishing in an independent form,—& to wait & work & teach the public & the booksellers of the public, the meaning of your name & poetry, by some of the best magazines. If you cd get your verses accepted by Blackwood, & were to contribute regularly to that periodical, you wd be more successful, by that very act, in attaining to the popular ear, than by printing twenty separate volumes, which would cost you nearly a hundred pounds, each publication of them, & perhaps after all drop into oblivion from the publisher’s hands. You forgive me for speaking so candidly, I know—& I do assure you that, if I venture it, it is from respect for you, & not disrespect. One fact I will mention to you .. because it is historical & relates to a great name, sacred to the esteem & admiration of both you & of me, .. to no less a person in brief than Walter Savage Landor,——of whom I have heard, from one well informed, that, of his volume of poems, just four copies were sold in three years. I mention this to prove that even genius will not always save an author or his bookseller——and though some of us certainly are more fortunate, with less reason for being so, .. yet the risk is none the less great or less prudently to be weighed,—and I, in all cases, shd advise a young untried poet to pledge himself fully & try his wings in some popular periodical, so as to prepare both himself & the public for future mutual intercourse on the highest terms; & for no meeting as of strangers,—previous to the adoption of the independent form of utterance.

And now that I have spoken out all my wisdom to you .. such as it is,—& I believe I have far more for the use of others than for my own——(which is a fair confession), .. I go on to thank you for the pleasure I have had in the various lyrics you have allowed me to read, .. & for that “quiet little road round Kennedy’s mill,” first & chiefest– It is both sweet & characteristic—& is remarkable for the individualizing power which I have observed in you,—& which encouraged me to tell you “a good fortune,” when first you crossed my hand with the good silver in question–

With every cordial wish, I remain

Dear Sir,

sincerely yours

Elizabeth B Barrett.

Publication: Kind Words From a Sick Room (Greenock, 1891), pp. 6–8.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. “The Road round by Kennedy’s Mill” first appeared in the Greenock Advertiser for 16 May 1845 under the pseudonym “Heather.” It was collected in Paton’s Poems published by Saunders and Otley in September 1845.

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