2159. RB to Camilla Toulmin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 285–286.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey,
January 5th, 1846.
My dear Miss Toulmin, [1]
Thank you very heartily for your praise—of which I am proud—and for your kind conveyance of it—for which I am grateful. How the class of readers who look naturally for [‘]’lady-like literature,” as you say, and in place of it find your good, energetic writing—how they relish the substitution, I cannot undertake to say—but I hope with greater equanimity than people like myself, who, having every now and then to dip into reviews—quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily—never fail to detect abundant traces of the “’prentice-hand” [2] just discarded, I make no doubt, from the cutting-out department of Wellington House [3] for bad taste and worse English—but the difference is, happily, that whereas you would infallibly warn off the coarse red paws of such fellows from touching, even—much less writing criticism about so delicate a matter as a “waist,” long or short—they, in securing such a writer as you, would do far too much honour to their vaunted columns. [4] Pray believe that I am very much gratified, and ever,
Yours faithfully,
Robert Browning.
Text: Camilla D.T. Crosland, Landmarks of a Literary Life, 1820–1892 (1893), p. 152.
1. Camilla Dufour Toulmin, afterwards Crosland (1812–95), began a career of writing and contributing to periodicals in 1838. In 1846 she published Poems, and later in life she published several novels. A believer in spiritualism, she eventually made public the results of her personal investigations in Light in the Valley: My Experiences of Spiritualism (1857). According to the DNB, it is “a credulous record, which was received with much scorn by the public.” Two years before her death, she published Landmarks of a Literary Life (1893), in which this letter from RB appeared (see note 3 below). Recalling her first acquaintance with RB at a dinner given by the Thomas Powells honouring Leigh Hunt in the early 1840’s she said he “spoke comparatively little that evening, but I was struck with the quiet dignity of his deportment, and his expression of commanding intelligence. I had not read then a line of his writings, and indeed he was new to fame. I think his ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ were on the eve of publication, or lately presented to the world. I know he sent me two or three numbers soon afterwards, though we did not meet again for some time” (p. 150).
2. Cf. Burns, “Green Grow the Rashes O” (1784), line 23.
3. William Jones’s Wellington House Classical and Commercial Academy was located in Hampstead Road.
4. This annotation by the recipient followed RB’s letter in Landmarks (p. 152): “The latter part of this letter refers to the ladies’ magazine, which I then conducted, and in which my article on ‘Poets and Poetry’ appeared. It was a periodical that devoted some columns to subject of dress, but which nevertheless had several masculine and other able contributors.” Her review of Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, for which RB is thanking her, appeared in The New Monthly Belle Assemblée, January 1846, pp. 36–37 (for the text, see pp. 367–369). Camilla Toulmin also reviewed Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy in the same periodical in June 1846.
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