2758. EBB to Susanna Thorold
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 178–179.
Florence–
Decr 3– [1848] [1]
Dear Miss Thorold [2] .. am I right in saying Miss Thorold? if I am against dignities, let them forgive me.
Your letter follows me to Italy where I have resided since my marriage, & takes rank immediately among pleasant proofs of remembrance given to me by my friends in England. As such I feel it & thank you for it most cordially, desiring to express for my part, some hope & much desire that so generous an appreciation & sympathy may be better justified by future work of mine than by what is already done–
For Schiller, I know him of course—but only something of Richter, & that knowledge has come since the date of the poems– [3] Irving’s ‘Orations’ I have read, & also his preface to “Ben Ezra,” [4] giving much admiration to his fervour & elevation, & richness of poetical imagery—but I heard him preach only once, when I was very young, and the fragment of the “remembered discourse,” [5] attached to one of my early poems as a motto, was from the lips of a different & obscurer person, a personal friend of my own, officiating at the time as minister of the Independent chapel at Sidmouth.
I write this reply to two questions of yours, on the thinnest & smallest of possible papers, that it may reach you over mountain & sea in an enclosure with other letters, without causing you expense– [6] You will not, I hope, have interpreted the intermediate silence, caused by the long distance, into a want of courtesy or gratitude on the part of
Your sincerely obliged
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Address, on integral page: Miss Thorold / Thorpe Hamlet / near Norwich.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. Susanna Thorold (1822–1900), eldest daughter of William Thorold (1798–1878) of Thorpe next Norwich, and his wife Susanna (née Coe, 1799–1884). Miss Thorold’s father “was well known in East Anglia as a farmer, millwright, engineer and surveyor. He also practised as an architect. … In 1835 he submitted plans for the Houses of Parliament” (Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects: 1600–1840, 3rd ed., 1995, pp. 978–979).
3. Evidently, Miss Thorold’s question was prompted by the headnote to “The Dead Pan,” first published in Poems (1844), in which EBB credits Schiller’s “Götter Greichenlands” for part of her inspiration. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (pseud. Jean Paul, 1763–1825), German novelist and philosopher, was greatly admired by Carlyle.
4. The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, by Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, A Converted Jew: Translated from the Spanish, with a Preliminary Discourse, by the Rev. Edward Irving, A.M. (1827) and For the Oracles of God, Four Orations (1823) by Edward Irving (1792–1834), founder of the Irvingite church. EBB was familiar with the latter book as early as 1827; see letter 249. Her father often heard Irving preach at his church in Regent Street; see letter 304.
5. Miss Thorold must have enquired about the epigraph to “A Supplication for Love: Hymn I” (1838): “Recalled words of an extempore Discourse, preached at Sidmouth, 1833,” which refers to EBB’s friend George Barrett Hunter (d. 1857).
6. EBB enclosed this letter in one sent to RB’s family, and Sarianna forwarded it. Preserved with the letter is the envelope Sarianna used, with a Norwich receiving postmark dated 16 December 1848.
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