2828. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 42–45.
Florence.
Jan. 9. [1850] [1]
Thank you, ever dearest Miss Mitford, for this welcome letter written on your birthday! May the fear of smallpox have passed away long before now, & every hope & satisfaction have strengthened & remained! If I had been you, I would have inclined towards re-vaccinating the child. [2] We were all re-vaccinated a few years ago in Wimpole Street, when a danger of the kind presented itself—& so was my husband still more lately. Vaccination is very availing, but there seems to be an opinion of its being wearable out of the constitution: and then, so often, it has been ill administered in the first place. When our baby was born, smallpox raged in Florence, & we would not let him breathe the outer air till the operation had been performed. Now I do hope that these observations will sound completely rococo to you, & of no kind of present interest. May God bless you & give you many happy years, you who can do so much towards the happiness of others. May I not answer for my own? If neuralgia depends on the weather, I do hope that you have milder days for England than we have had for Italy. Such a miracle of cold has come to us to be sure! [3] Arno frozen, snow in the streets, icicles in certain situations. Last winter was considered peculiarly cold, but we have outwintered it this time. Not for five & twenty years has there been such a frost—and in Rome & Naples they have had their turn of it: I only hope it does’nt mean an earthquake, or a plague, or something prodigious. My voice vanished as usual: but we are thawed again, & I am able to talk much more audibly. For the rest, yes, I believe I am going on. All I can say is, that it’s a very resolute baby. [4] Little Wiedeman began to crawl on Christmas Day. Before, he used to roll. We throw things across the floor & he crawls for them like a little dog, on all fours. Then, the day he was nine months old, he said ‘Mama’, & now he sits on the floor saying to himself, ‘Mama, Papa, baba’. I doubt whether he applies a syllable of it, though he has known for months everybody’s name as pronounced by other people. He has just caught a cold which I make more fuss about than I ought, say the wise, but I cant get resigned to the association of any sort of suffering with his laughing dimpled little body—it is the blowing about in the wind, of such a heap of roses.
So you prefer Shirley to Jane Eyre. Yet I hear from nobody such an opinion—yet you are very probably right—for Shirley may suffer from the natural reaction of the public mind. What you tell me of Tennyson interests me as everything about him must—I like to think of him digging gardens, .. room for cabbages & all. At the same time, what he says about the public “hating poetry” is certainly not a word for Tennyson. Perhaps no true poet, having claims upon attention solely through his poetry, has attained so certain a success with such short delay. Instead of being pelted, (as nearly every true poet has been) he stands already on a pedestal, & is recognized as a master-spirit not by a coterie but by the great public. Three large editions of the Princess have already been sold. If he is’nt satisfied after all, I think he is wrong. Divine poet as he is, & no laurel being too leafy for him, yet he must be an unreasonable man, & not understanding of the growth of laurel-trees & the nature of a reading public. With regard to the other garden-digger, dear Mr Horne, [5] I wish as you do that I could hear something satisfactory of him. I wrote from Lucca in the summer, & have no answer. The latest word concerning him is the announcement in the Athenæum of a 3d edition of his Gregory the Seventh, [6] which we were glad to see; but very, very glad we should be to have news of his prosperity in the flesh as well as in the litteræ scriptæ. [7] Did I tell you that Mrs Jago, has a little girl? You used to lavish your kind wishes on her. It is long since you told me anything of Mrs Partridge, & I should like to hear how she gets on with her baby. I am not sure that you are aware through me or another, that Mrs Trollope, with her son & daughter in law & Mr Garrow, Mrs T. Trollope’s father, are on their way back to Florence, & are about to take an apartment, furnish it, & live under the same roof. Mrs Tom Trollope is recommended by the physicians not to venture to live in England, and this seems to be a determinate act of settling. We heard it from an Italian friend of Mr Garrow, who had written to him. Mrs Trollope is said to have liked everything in Florence except the revolutionists. She used to have ‘mornings’ & to receive crowds of people, a year ago. By the way .. dont let me forget to tell you that Dr Harding’s daughters are going to call on me. So he said—and we shall talk of you, to make a bright dawn of acquaintance. I have not been out of doors these two months, but people call me ‘looking well’—and a newly married niece of Miss Bayley’s, the accomplished Miss Thomson, who has become the wife of Dr. Emil Braun, (the learned German secretary of the archielogical [sic] society), & just passed through Florence on her way to Rome where they are to reside, declared that the change she saw in me was miraculous—“wonderful indeed.” I took her to look at Wiedeman in his cradle, fast asleep—& she won my heart (over again, for always she was a favorite of mine) by exclaiming at his prettiness. Charmed too, we both were, with Dr Braun .. I mean Robert & I were charmed. He has a mixture of fervour & simplicity which is still more delightfully picturesque in his foreign English– Oh—he speaks English perfectly—only with an obvious accent enough. I am sure we should be cordial friends, if the lines had fallen to us in the same pleasant places; [8] but he is fixed at Rome, and we are half afraid of the enervating effects of the Roman climate on the constitution of children. Tell me,—do you hear often from Mr Chorley? It quite pains us to observe, from his manner of writing, the great depression of his spirits. His mother [9] was ill in the summer—but plainly the sadness does not arise entirely or chiefly from this cause. He seem<s> to me over-worked, taxed in the spirit. I advise nobody to give up work; but that Athenæum-labour is a sort of treadmill discipline in which there is no progress, nor triumph—& I do wish he wd give that up & come out to us with a new set of anvils & hammers. Only of course he could’nt do it, even if he would, while there is illness in his family. May there be a whole sun of success shining on the new play. [10] Robert is engaged on a poem, and I am busy with my edition. So m<uch to> correct, I find, .. & many poems to add.– [11]
Plainly, Jane Eyre was by a woman. It used to astound me when sensible people said otherwise. Write to me, will you? I long to hear again. Tell me everything of yourself & accept my husband’s true regards, & think of me as
your ever affectionate
EBB–
Address, on integral page: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 287–290.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. In a letter to Charles Boner, dated 1 February 1850, Miss Mitford reported that her gardener and her maid’s son Henry had contracted small pox immediately after being vaccinated for it. Both recovered, however (see Memoirs and Letters of Charles Boner, ed. R.M. Kettle, 1871, I, 176).
3. The Times for 26 January 1850 noted that “the cold had been excessive throughout Tuscany and Piedmont. At Florence the thermometer had fallen to … 5 deg. Fahr.” (p. 6). Earlier, on 14 December 1849, The Times reported that the Pope had “pleaded the inclemency of the weather and the state of the roads covered with snow” as a reason for his not yet returning to Rome (p. 3); and the 19 January 1850 issue spoke of snow in Rome on 29 December 1849, as well as on 6 January 1850 (p. 6).
4. See letter 2821, note 3.
5. A reference to Horne’s gardening; see the end of letter 2760.
6. The “announcement” appeared in The Athenæum of 29 December 1849 under the heading “Our Library Table”: “We acknowledge, also, a third edition of Horne’s Gregory VII.; accompanied, besides the ‘Essay on Tragic Influence,’ with a preface in which the poet makes his acknowledgements to Mr. Leigh Hunt and Mr. John Forster for having aided him in revision” (no.1157, p. 1336).
7. “Literary reports.”
8. Cf. Psalm 16:6.
9. Jane Chorley (née Wilkinson, 1779?–1851).
10. Old Love and New Fortune (1850), which opened at the Surrey Theatre on 18 February 1850.
11. EBB was working on Poems (1850), Sonnets from the Portuguese being the most significant among “poems to add.” The collection also included revisions of “Prometheus Bound” and “The Seraphim.” RB was finishing Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850).
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