2122. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 212–215.
[London]
Monday. [1 December 1845] [1]
Your Mr Babier [2] .. or my Mr Babier .. but he must be yours now, since you have seen him, & talked to him, & taken him with your enchantments, .. your Mr Babier seems to be an orator as well as a lecturer, dearest friend, .. & I am glad that I was pleased enough by the tone of his letter to answer it as I did—though I never had a presentiment of the oratory, I assure you, & did what I did, simply from being touched by what struck me as the ingenuousness & fervour of a very young man. Very young I understood him to be,—& he told me that my poetry (beginning with the Seraphim .. of six or seven years ago) had done much for him—& of course I was glad to hear such a thing said. The dissenting congregations admit ministers sometimes who are far too youthful, to my mind—mere youths, with unformed characters & habits of thought. If it was too soon to marry .. how much too soon to teach!
What is this Reading bazaar? [3] for the hospital .. or to what end? But I ask questions when I should be giving answers, .. the reason being that I scarcely know how to give my answers. Dearest Miss Mitford .. the gladness & pride I should feel in letting my name or the work of my hands lie by yours even for a moment & in a little thing, it cannot be needful for me to tell you. That is obvious .. you can want no professing of it nor proving of it. But the truth is .. that, having been idle past all belief & imagination, I, at the present moment, know not to which side to look, to do the work pressed upon me. I have been completely upset of late .. all through the autumn & the latter part of the summer .. & people invoke me from America, as if I might be dead .. or what besides?– I have to write for the anti-slavery people at Boston, [4] .. & to prepare the prose papers printed in the Athenæum (which will be rewriting them, or worse!) & to make additions & complete a volume of prose miscellanies for the American publisher who undertook my poems & calls for those. And I feel now heavy & stupid with past idleness. How I shall complete these engagements & answer heaps of unanswered letters, I cannot tell—& if I were to promise to do your ballad, my bond would be worth nothing at all.– You see!– And then I have been thinking that I should do you no good by promising & keeping even,—that your Reading people want you & not me,—& that any story you chose to give them, would sell as quickly & well as if Alfred Tennyson put a Locksley Hall to the end of it! Your name would do the whole—now consider that it would. And if you take another view, tell me & let me look round again & make a struggle,—since I would not for the world disappoint you in the matter of a straw—so think & tell me.
But did I not tell you that my discovery of ‘L’Israelite[’] was null & void, & that the book meant ‘Clothilde’ under another name. [5] You remember Clothilde & her Jew?– I have been loitering over ‘Le monde comme il est’ [6] & think your thoughts of it. Good things, excellent things, admirable things are in it, but in itself one cannot call it a success. Yet it is far before ‘Ethel’, that other romance by the same writer—& people who keep common-place books may transcribe pages upon pages, of noble thoughts from it. Dont you consider the first part the strongest part? It seems to me to fade & drop off towards the end. The weakness of will in Edmond [7] makes me sick & impatient, & when at last he blows out his brains, I cant help feeling that they just deserved it for serving him no better. By the way, did you ever read a work of George Sand’s, called Horace.? [8] Tell me.
Good Flush to be well! I am so glad! But you .. falling down, without a frost to justify such a thing! Are you better .. well, .. & inclined to walk now? I do trust you are. I send you a flock of oysters .. those slow carriers of love to you, in the place of pigeons.
Today I had a letter from Mrs Jameson .. very kind .. to ask how I was & how accessible I was. She has not been in Italy, Mr Kenyon told me,—only in Germany & Switzerland—but I shall hear more. [9] The ‘Daily News’ you see announced—& the rumour names Mr Horne as engaged on it. His romances on the other hand, only thunder in advertisement—nobody sees the rim of the cloud even, over the hill. [10]
Now I have something to ask– Do you know Mr Russell your member, mighty in railroads? [11] —& if you know him, see him, & speak to him, would you object to ask him some day to give the weight of a word in behalf of my brother Alfred who is anxious to get employment on the great western railroad? I mean in the way of clerkships, & the like—& I do not mean, ever dearest Miss Mitford, that you should take trouble or suffer yourself to be annoyed to the extent of a fly’s buzzing in the matter. Only if .. you understand all the ‘ifs’. Alfred wants occupation, & young men rush to the railroads for occupation from every side. Mr Russell is chairman, he says—but I merely speak as I am bid, & without in the least expecting that you can do anything– I promised Alfred to ask you, & keep my word so.
I hear that somebody in America (Edgar Poe) has been dedicating a book to me & abusing me in the preface. [12] Is’nt that pure justice—& an original way of administering it? Mrs Butler has again decided on not returning there. Mr Kenyon dined in company with her the other day at Mr Procter’s—& she was in great force & eloquence.
Oh—& I heard some picturesque details of the Adela Villier’s romance [13] .. call it a bad romance of the circulating library!—& how after having sufficiently reconoitred the ‘objet charmant’ [14] out of the window, she wrote him a letter ending “your affectionate anonymous” .. that being the commencement of acquaintance & correspondence!– Moreover he, just a week before the catastrophe at Gretna Green, had offered his adorations to another woman, which were refused! A small capital of sentiment to set up with, on both sides .. do you not think? When Lord Jersey told Mr Ibbetson senior that he would not give a farthing to his daughter, the commoner looked sternly at the Lordship & said .. that “considering all the circumstances, he must take leave to observe that the burden did not rest wholly with the Jersey family”. —Of course the “circumstances considered,” included the peculiarly strong ‘premier pas’ [15] of “affectionate anonymous.”
Fie on my gossip & scandal!– I, who have none worse (in general) than about Flushes! By the way, let me have your chronicle of the looking glass. My Flush used to bark & howl & whine & moan at the sight of his own reflection—but now he is a philosopher & looks with complacency at his ears.
Your ever affecte
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 147–150.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to a letter from Mrs. Jameson, to which 2121 was a response.
2. Presumably George Burden Bubier (1823–69). He was born in Reading where his father had been a pastor from 1819 to 1830. Ordained a Congregational minister in 1844, Bubier’s first pastoral position (1846) was in Brixton. He was quoted as having said “if there was anything he conscientiously endeavoured to do in his sermons, it was to draw out the truth that was in the text, and never to import into it anything of his own” (The Congregational Year Book, 1870). He later became a Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Spring Hill College in Birmingham. Neither EBB’s letter to him nor his letter to her has survived.
3. A Bazaar and Exhibition was held on 5 January 1846 on behalf of the Reading Literary, Scientific, and Mechanics’ Institution. An advertisement in the Reading Mercury on 27 December 1845 listed Miss Mitford as a “patroness.”
4. As far as we know, this is the first time EBB discusses her intention to write what was to be “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” It eventually appeared in 1848 in The Liberty Bell, a Boston publication sponsored by Maria Weston Chapman. EBB goes on to explain a scheme she had mentioned earlier to her brother George and later to RB; see letters 2019 and 2073.
5. EBB did in letter 2105, see note 3.
6. Published in 1835 by Astolphe Louis Léonard, Marquis de Custine (1790–1857), whose La Russie en 1839 EBB had mentioned in letter 1761. His “other romance,” Ethel, had been published in 1839.
7. Edmond d’Offlize, a protaganist in Custine’s Le monde comme il est.
8. A novel in three volumes published in 1842.
9. Kenyon was mistaken; Mrs. Jameson had visited Italy during her trip to the continent the previous summer. Shortly after her return, she wrote to Catharine Sedgwick and said that she went “to Prague and Vienna, thence to Trieste and across the Adriatic to Venice. Did you visit Venice? I forget. In the world there is nothing like it. It seems to me that we can find a similitude for everything else, but Venice is like nothing else—Venice the beautiful, the wonderful! I had seen it before, but it was as new to me as if unbeheld” (Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, 1878, by her niece, Gerardine Macpherson, p. 213).
10. Horne’s Ballad Romances had been advertised as early as 1 November in The Examiner. The Athenæum for 27 December (no. 948) announced that it was “to be published next Monday [29 December].” Horne had applied for and been accepted to fill a position on Dickens’s The Daily News. He was assigned to Dublin as the Irish correspondent, but due to illness was unable to leave for Ireland before the end of January.
11. Charles Russell (1786–1856), M.P. for Reading 1830–37 and 1841–47, was chairman of the Great Western Railway Co., 1842–55.
14. “Charming object.”
15. “First step.”
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