1637. RB to Frederick Oldfield Ward
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 30.
[London]
Monday Night. [?24] [June 1844] [1]
My dear Ward,
Many thanks for your very kind note: so far from “boring me” with corrections, you helped me essentially—but here was the blunder, your last note, with the good “gossamer” emendation came after the proof had been received and corrected according to the last-but-that (in which you said—“Hood thinks that “not too much” is better than “never a,” .. and he would omit “whole,” as making a long line of it &c &c”––) [2] when the proof had been duly returned, your note reached me, after some inexplicable delay—and I thought it no use to countermand what I had written. Another time we will manage better. I have only had time to read your Old-Man’s lyrical praise of Sixteen, [3] very happy it is. Your other piece presently—I was in town all the morning.
Thank God, my poor uncle, to whom you allude, is happily set free from a most sorrowful life, or death-in-life– [4] There was no such deplorable event, as that frightful visitation you mention. The increasing duskiness—(nine oclock, nearly)—only lets me say, I will do my best for you next month. Once more thank you very heartily.
Yours, my dear Ward,
Very faithfully,
RB.
Mr Hood’s admirable designs, The Dog—being one, after that ghastly emptying of the vials! [5]
Publication: LRB, p. 10 (as July 1844).
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. Dated by the reference to RB’s contributions to Hood’s Magazine, and to the death of his uncle.
2. We believe RB’s comments refer to his contributions to the July number of Hood’s Magazine, but the concordance to his works does not clarify the suggested changes.
3. The July issue of Hood’s Magazine contained a prose paper, “Sensations of Sixteen: By a Very Old Man” (pp.36–44).
4. William Oliver Silverthorne (b. 1773), a brewer who had married RB’s aunt, Christiana Matilda Wiedemann, had died on 16 June.
5. Quick sketches by Hood are sprinkled throughout the magazine. RB apparently refers to “Physic to the Dogs” on the final page of the July number; the “ghastly emptying of the vials” is a reference to the vials of poison that figure in “The Laboratory” (pp. 513–514 of the June issue).
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