1170. RB to Alfred Domett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 352–353.
New Cross, Hatcham. Surrey.
March 5. 1843.
My dear Dowson [sic, for Domett],
Chris. Dowson has just called here and told me that a ship sails to-morrow for your world: I should have heard of it sooner, no doubt—but he did not receive a note in which I had charged him to watch for me. We two went up our hills (what are your hills, now!) and talked about you, and wished you well, and ourselves well, too, in soon hearing from you—“every day one may expect news now”—said Dowson; and then he bade me say we had so walked and talked. I hope therefore that my next letter will be from a new starting-place, will be about news of you–
I send the “Druses”—(which missed a conveyance)—and my new Play [1] —expect more & better things– I get heart, if not strength, I think. But you—what are you doing, or have you done? I do, most truly, look for great works from you: send them to me, and I will manage everything. Here we are sound asleep. Bulwer’s new Novel, “The Last of the Barons,” is to be, he says, the last of Bulwer’s—and seems a poor affair, if one may judge by the single extract I have seen. [2] Dickens is not asleep, but uproarious and, (I think) disgusting, in his Pecksniffs [3] & (what Strafford said of the Parliament) “that generation of odd names & natures”. [4] Tennyson has gone off to some place of no name on the seacoast, [5] whereto goes a post, once a week in the person of the next town’s muffin-man. Milnes is, or was, in Egypt or Syria. [6] Campbell I saw a couple of days since in a kind of maudlin drowse over the fire in Moxon’s shop—“very likely Campbell”—said Moxon, when I asked who it was “he does not know where to go to kill time, & we take no notice of him”—or words to that effect. See what you lose!
How do you get on with German? I read tolerably—and find the best help is Schlegel & Tieck’s translation of Shakespeare. [7] I have not seen Carlyle lately—this confounded play having martyrized me—but I will see him.
All this while, characteristically enough, I do not write about our friends—yours always, and certainly mine, now. Arnould is on the circuit —but he and his wife have been zealous as Chris. himself on my side. Dear old Pritchard is always prophecying about you, too. My Mother is, I think, better than she has lately been; my father & sister are quite well—they all bid me give their true love to you, as you may suppose. I enclose for Young the copies I had meant to have accompanied by a letter—but my minutes are counted and he will, I know, let me wait a week till I can do myself better justice than by this twilight, in this hurry. Meantime remember me to him, as I would wish to be remembered: and good, good bye, dear Domett—you will not forget me, I am sure. God bless you.
R Browning
Publication: RB-AD, pp. 50–53.
Manuscript: British Library.
1. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.
2. Extracts were included in the review in The Athenæum of 4 March (no. 801, pp. 205–206).
3. Seth Pecksniff and his daughters, Charity and Mercy, were delineated in Martin Chuzzlewit, then appearing in monthly numbers.
4. Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), the protagonist of RB’s play, was executed for treason on 12 May 1641. On 16 December 1634 he wrote to William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1573–1645): “how I shall be able to sustain myself against your Prynnes, Pims and Bens, with the rest of that Generation of odd Names and Natures, the Lord knows” (The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches, ed. William Knowler, 1739, I, 344).
5. Tennyson had gone to Mablethorpe, on the Lincolnshire coast.
6. Writing from Turkey on 27 November 1842, Milnes told his friend, C.J. MacCarthy: “I have been in Greece again … I am going to Egypt … The time of year compels me to give up Syria, which I do not care much about except for Jerusalem.”
7. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) and Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) published their translations of Shakespeare between 1825 and 1833.
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