1403. Richard Hengist Horne to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 373–374.
[London]
Tuesday Octr 17/43
Well—I ought to have had your portrait, you know– I shall always think so, my dear Miss Barrett. However, as I cannot—we cannot—the work cannot—nor all its readers here—in France and in Germany (where it will appear translated in a very few weeks after its publication here [1] —I am told) as all this is, and is not to be (I have lost myself in the other page of this note but have no time to turn back) why my best resource is to ask for something else. As I cannot have your head in it, let me have your hand in a few pages of it? Have you time, and inclination to write one of the papers for me—in strict confidence, of course, if you wish it. And the secrecy w’d I think be in best taste, as you will appear in some shape or other substantively in the work.
By the bye—you do not seem aware that it is not the object of this work to add laurels upon laurels, and to heap more upon those who have much; but rather to do the initiative—to show new heads worthy of laurels. Other works have given all honour to the names of Moore, Campbell, Joannah Bailey [sic, for Joanna Baillie], Mary Russel[l] Mitford &c it is time that such people as Carlyle and Harriet Martineau had their turn—Eh? Besides the publishers have some “voice.”
Therefore O, B: will you take a paper ‘on Harriet Martineau and Mrs Jameson’ working them out partly by force of contrast—both excellent. [2] I could send you any books.?
Yours truly
H.
P.S. I called on Mrs Orme yesterday. She had just arrived in town, and had such a cold.
Address: Miss E. B. Barrett / 50 Wimpole St / Cavendish Sq.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. No such translations are listed in the British Library catalogue or in A Concise Bibliography of the Complete Works of Richard Henry (Hengist) Horne (1802–1884), by Eri J. Shumaker (1943).
2. Apart from anything EBB herself wrote at Horne’s request, he showed her his own essays and she would have offered comments and suggestions; it is thus impossible to determine the exact extent of her share of authorship of A New Spirit of the Age (see the assumptions in Taplin, p. 117 and in Ann Blainey’s The Farthing Poet, pp. 142–143). Her contributions on Carlyle, Landor and Tennyson survive in part (see Reconstruction, D1282, D1310–13 and D1374).
It is of interest to note that Thomas Powell claimed that the work was “Projected and first written” by him, then edited by Horne, “who barbarously expunged all the extracts illustrating the opinions expressed in the work” (see Powell’s manuscript comments in his copy of A New Spirit of the Age, now in the New York Public Library). If this assertion be true, it was never acknowledged by Horne.
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