1018. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 95–96.
[London]
Oct. 5– 1842.
My very dear friend,
I scarcely need assure you that anything in my power to do to benefit Miss Heard’s book, [1] shd be done for her as your friend without your request, both willingly & gladly: & trust you will not doubt my motive, when I say that the attempt to introduce her to the Athenæum people as a friend of mine, wd occasion more harm than good. The Athenæum is resolutely honest—professes honesty, & holds to it cruelly sometimes,—stabbing its own contributors with poisoned daggers ‘cum privilegio’. [2] It has even been said that whenever Mr Dilke shakes hands with an author in the street, he runs home crying “Shaken hands with an author?! my honesty is in danger”! & forthwith he exonerates his honesty by killing the author. I am perfectly sure that if I forwarded the book with the introduction you suggest, it wd be the sign for a massacre—my friendship wd do just so much for it.
Miss Heard’s publisher shd send her book to each of the different reviews, Literary Gazette, Athenæum, magazines &c—he will best understand where––with a request on a slip of paper, “The publisher desires a notice”. [3] But none of these reviewers like the most distant appearance of being interfered with by private tampering of an author or his friends. There is poor Mr Reade the poet, who wrote one or two civil notes to Fraser, & had the pleasure of seeing them publicly exposed, printed in the magazine, afterwards, with an insulting notice that such were the means devised by Mr Reade in order to be read!. [4]
Thank you for directing me to the reflective passages in Miss Heard’s book– But whatever we judge their merit to be, we must not expect that a little book of so slight a structure shd be taken up much by the reviews. It is more likely to be read & circulated than it is to be reviewed,—& so far it is happy–
Arabel heard from Annie two days ago,—& there is a message to you about her feeling too unwell to write much,—so you are not to wonder at her silence. It is a pain in her face—she calls it tic doulouroux [5] —& it seems to be, poor thing, a cause of great suffering to her, altho’ by no means dangerous–
Ever your affectionate
EBB–
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 21 Downshire Hill / Hampstead.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 252–253.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. The Shipwreck of the Dryade (1842) by Mary Eliza Heard (see letter 580, note 3). In letters from the author, it tells the story of the sinking of the Dryade in March 1841 off the coast of Madagascar. The book includes an elegy on the author’s sister Patience, who died while on a visit to Boyd in January 1840. The poem is headed by epitaphs from Boyd and EBB, the latter from “The Exile’s Return” (1838).
2. “With right” (“cum privilegio imprimendi solum”; “the sole right of printing”).
3. EBB sent Boyd, with a letter of 19 April 1843, two brief notices of the book, one from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (January 1843, p. 67) and the other from The Athenæum; the latter said: “This little narrative may pair off with the well known story of the burning of the Kent East Indiaman. In both catastrophes, the gentle but high-toned fortitude of our countrywomen is calculated to arouse our national pride. Here, one of them narrates the perils and sufferings of shipwreck, as unaffectedly as she bore them heroically” (no. 803, 18 March 1843, p. 259).
5. Sic, for tic douloureux, a neuralgic condition causing twitching of the facial muscles.
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