2001. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 33–35.
[London]
Saturday. [?16] [August 1845] [1]
Ever dearest Miss Mitford,
Indeed the hands of my gratitude seem half inclined to let go their hold of the wet draggled train of the summer, it is so cold today! [2] I find myself with a fire in the room & feeling rather melancholy at the thought of the winter which shall be. Your rheumatism too cannot be the better for the cold’s coming to join the wet, & I would gladly know that you are not the worse for the two. Let me hear, will you?– Oh—of course you must not think of turning your face this way, as long as you have such a tendency to rheumatism—you must keep yourself warm my dear friend & quiet, & think that I would rather have you well than face to face with me. You are kind too in wishing to see me in my chair—although you made a mistake in fancying before, that I never changed my position from a reclining one. You saw me lying down because I could bear most, talk most, & forget myself easiest in the posture of least exertion,—but I have been in the habit of sitting up every day since I have ceased to be very ill & confined to my bed, you know. [3] Also .. it was a mistake (rather) of yours, when you lamented to Arabel that I liked to shut my windows & live in the dark—. But do you know what it is to live in what dear Mr Kenyon calls “an empyrean, up two pair of stairs,” .. nay, up three .. where the windows show nothing but white sky? Only one of my three large windows is open—and yet I observe that if the blind of even that one window is not half down, my visitors, .. one after another, beg me to let them draw it down, .. “because of the glare,” they say! Not only women do this—but men—my own brothers. I, sitting with my back to it, am less sensible to the inconvenience, & was wondering the other day how it happened that with all the windows open down stairs, people shd grow so suddenly sensitive when they come in to me. Nobody knew! they only felt that it was so—that it was intolerable, this glare from my one window. And at last & on examination, we discovered the cause of it, & that the great white blank of sky drew itself out between the eyelid & eye & made the whole world cry out. So you are not to think me fanciful,—which indeed & indeed, in the course of my weary illness, I have not been, in any morbid degree. If I had lived .. with so much lying down too, .. under the white glare of these three large white windows all this while, why I should be blind by this time, & be writing to you to “pity my sorrows” [4] instead of to excuse my fancies.
Elie Berthet is pure milk .. I wont say ass’es milk from respect for the asses. Nay, but he is a level, not unpleasant writer .. innocuous—with neither much will nor power to do harm. The ‘Mine d’or’ [5] I have in my hands just now. Miss Harrison’s poem is not yet in the Athenæum. [6] And talking of the Athenæum, did you see .. in a review, I think of Whitehall .. that among various writers cited by the critic as conceivers of the character of Cromwell .. Victor Hugo among them .. the palm of success is accorded to Miss Mitford? not of complete, but of comparative success? [7] ——I can find no continuation of ‘Le compagnon.’ Where is it to be found, I wonder? [8] And Dunois I do not know––nor Mlle Cochelet. [9] And for Eliza Cook .. the shyness as to manners may be remarkable .. only it does not, in her case, express any modesty of self-appreciation, or she wd not address the public as she has done [10] ––and for her position as governess in Alderman Harmer’s family .. I am told that her position in his family is of a far tenderer, if of a less moral & didactic a character. That is the scandal … a scandal, perhaps! I will not answer for it or against it—& you have it as a piece of “telling,” just as it came to me. Her poetry, so called, I really can not admire—though of course she has a talent in the way of putting verses together, of a very respectable kind.
I gave your Village to little Ibbit Hedley,—& you ought to have seen the delight of that child as she kissed the books & kissed me & kissed the books again. She has been half learning chapter after chapter by heart ever since, & wishing she knew you, & asking a whole catechism of questions not to be answered by M or N. [11] The Hedleys are about to return to Paris after their English summer—another sign (mournful in all ways to me) of the waning season.
Dearest dear Miss Mitford, think affectionately of
your ever affectionate
EBB–
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 135–137.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to the unusually cold weather.
2. A letter to the editor of The Times of 18 August stated that “the past week has presented the same unsettled weather which has been so continuous this summer … the thermometer was down to 43 deg. on Friday night, on which day I have no doubt that the bulb exposed to the downfall must have sunk to very nearly freezing point.”
3. According to her cousin, the day before she had been out “driving”; and the previous week when he went to 50 Wimpole Street, he found “Henrietta out with Ba” (Surtees, 15 and 7 August 1845, respectively).
4. Cf. Thomas Moss (d. 1808), “The Beggar’s Petition” (Poems on Several Occasions, 1769), line 1.
5. La Mine d’or (1845) by Élie Bertrand Berthet (pseud. d’Élie Raymond).
6. Henrietta Euphemia Harrison (pseud. Diana Butler, d. 1879), later Mrs. Acton Tindal, was a friend of Miss Mitford. A collection of her poetry was published in 1850 under the title Lines and Leaves. In the preface to this volume, she states that “several of the pieces have appeared in various periodicals”; however, we have been unable to identify any poems by her in The Athenæum for this period.
7. In a review of Whitehall, or The Days of Charles I., An Historical Romance by Emma Robinson (1814–90), The Athenæum for 2 August 1845 said: “Scott, Victor Hugo, Bulwer, Miss Mitford, have all had a shot at the son of the Huntingdon Brewer; yet not one has hit him: though the lady probably came the nearest” (no. 927, p. 763). Miss Mitford’s Charles the First, An Historical Tragedy was published in 1834.
8. In letter 1972, EBB described Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1841) as one of Sand’s “best romances, & full of curious interest of different kinds.” Sand’s novel, Horace (1842), was the next of her works to follow Le Compagnon du Tour de France, but it was not a continuation of the latter.
9. Louise Parquin (née Cochelet, fl. 1809) was the author of Mémoires sur la reine Hortense et la famille impériale (1836–38). Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d’Aulnoy (1650?–1705) wrote Contes nouveaux ou les Fées à la mode (1698).
10. EBB doubtless refers to the preface of Melaia, and Other Poems (1840) by Eliza Cook (1812–89); see letter 720. James Harmer (1799–1853) resigned as alderman in 1840 because of his proprietorship of The Weekly Dispatch in which he published many of Eliza Cook’s poems (DNB).
11. In The Book of Common Prayer, the form of catechism prior to confirmation starts with the question “What is your name? N. or M.” The candidate for confirmation gives his name or names (M being a contraction of NN).
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