2638. Thomas Westwood to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 14, 65–69.
7 Denmark St
Camberwell
10th Decr 1846.
My dear Mrs Browning,
It was all ill temper—it is of no use disguising it—that shut me up in brevities in that note of mine– I was a little––disappointed at your long dreary silence—you know how talkative such silences are, & what uncomfortable things they are apt to say—but I tried to believe that you were still in Italy, till, on a sudden, some indifferent person told me that you had returned to England, & with recovered health, & were married, & had gone away again—whither, he knew not—and all this without one word to a poor friend who would have rejoiced as much as any other at these changes, & the blessings that were in them. So when I wrote to congratulate you, I did it in that infinitesimal sort of fashion, holding in my natural utterance with a light rein, & not letting one half the pleasure, that I felt at heart, peep out in my greeting—there you have all my peevishness, in a frank confession—it is lucky for me that you are in the land of absolutions.
Do you know that I cannot believe you really are in Pisa. I cannot separate you from Wimpole St—my faith cleaves to the old associations—all the rest is a dream. I honour the new name, as you know, but it is hard to realize its being yours. With me the case stands thus—to day, I part with you ill, & in England—to morrow, I find you well, & at Pisa, and with this new name—for the interval was a blank to me as you are aware, & without any connecting links. So that when the news reached me first it seemed too much like magic to be true—& even now, if I send my thoughts over sea to find you, just as I fancy that they’ve reached their journey’s end—it’s not Italy after all, but Wimpole St once again.
In the mean time, I have your assurance to strengthen my faith, & that you are “well & happy” is quite sufficient to reconcile me to any sundering of old associations, or to any changes that speak out with so pleasant an utterance.
My own story, I will not deny you,—it is so very short– That I have left green quiet Enfield, you know, & I believe you know too, that in so leaving I exchanged my former vocation for a mercantile one. [1] Since then, I have been learning,—somewhat clumsily I fear,—to walk over this new ground, which is not smooth ground by any manner of means, but rather rough on the contrary & provocative of all sorts of tumblings & stumblings, which I have had enough to do to avoid. I have no aversion, however[,] to my present craft, & it has at any rate one bright face (a three-quarters one) & that is the permanence– I am at least not eaten up by those thousand & one minute anxieties that swarmed about me, like angry ants, at Enfield.
My mother and myself (there are no more of us now—I have lost my sister since you heard from me last) [2] are residing in a little house about 3 miles from Town, just on the outer verge of the city fogs, & where a cloudy sunshine hovers now & then. I look back, almost remorsefully sometimes to the old faces, & the old home, but I am happier on the whole, and—contented—& this is ‘finis’ to my personal history––almost. Flossy [3] has become a city dog too, & is sitting on the rug there, with a most wise ledger-like visage, as if he were deep in the mysteries of ‘debtor & creditor’––& a little confused withal. He is very fat—invincibly happy, &——presumes that when Flush comes back from his travels, he will be far too conceited to acknowledge an old acquaintance who has never been far from the sound of Bow-bell. [4] Is Flush with you? Tell me about him, if you should ever write to me again.
As for my writing—it goes on in driblets, just as it used to do—dropping, perhaps, a little faster than heretofore, but by no means wearing its way into the stony heart of my public. What I have written has been chiefly for the Athenæum, & one or two of the magazines. [5] I have got enough to make another book, but I have little courage to enter on the task—surely there are “small poets” enough—& then, the “shelves”—carpenters’ work, you know, is not so strong as it used to be. No—I shall leave my lyrics to evaporate in the usual way—& find comfort in others folk’s eternities[.]
Are you as Briarean [6] in your grasp of news as you used to be? Do you remember how I would send you now & then what I conceived to be a very bran-new novelty, & how you would gently intimate to me in return, that with you, it was a week old at least––the “Raven” for example– I have not much heart to touch on news, I can assure you. I have an internal consciousness that this morning’s Times is lying at your elbow, & that you are cutting open some new English book that we shall not catch sight of here till—the day after tomorrow—so that it seems like a jest to ask you whether you have seen the last number but one of the ‘Eclectic’—but as there is just a fraction of a chance of its having escaped you, I will venture to hint that it contains a review of yourself, very favourable and written in a kindly tone that it pleased me especially. [7] I see also that Mr. Marston has been lecturing in Edinburgh & that his last lecture contains an “estimate of the genius of Elizabeth Barrett, & the author of Festus.” [8] Stone by stone, my dear Mrs. Browning, you are building up your fame. For the new books, Mary Howitt promises a volume of Ballads—old ones, I trust, for she has not been just to herself of late—& Mrs Norton has a book of ballads too—child ballads. [9] Ralph Waldo Emerson advertizes “[‘]Poems’ in a few days”. Bulwer’s ‘Lucretia’ has been out some time—and is characterized by the Athenæum as “a bad book of a bad Class[”] [10] —rather too summary a judgment, & yet right in the main, I think, .. the book has some good features, & powerful passages, but it is very melodramatic in its effects, & is less artistic in its treatment, as it seems to me, than Bulwer’s books usually are. Tennyson—I hear sad, sad things of Tennyson– I fear he will keep his promise & write no more poems. Mr Horne is quite dumb—in the advertisements, and—was it you who said ‘this far & no farther’ to the ‘Bells & Pomegranates’? That eighth & last was a spiteful thing to say in running away from us–
How Mariana-like you will feel, when you have waded thus far through my platitudes. I can fancy you jingling the refrain, with a slight twist of the text into “I would that he were dead!” [11] One word more, notwithstanding– Now that you have given me so many pleasant things to think of concerning you, & have assured me that you have, now & then, just once in six months or so, a faint recollection of an old correspondent, I can content myself with those thoughts & that assurance, without being unduly selfish by asking you to write, so dreaming that you may write, I will dream that perhaps, when you come back to England—& have an idle half hour to bestow. Till then, & always—believe me, dear Mrs Browning.
Very faithfully yours
T. Westwood.
It will sadden you to hear that poor Mrs Hood is dead. [12] She died last Friday of an illness brought on, her physicians say by the trial she has undergone– I saw her a few weeks since, when she appeared quite well– The children are both young—Fanny Hood is only fifteen—but so old, so old in heart! so unchildlike. She has taken the management of everything—& has evidently nerved herself up the firm endurance of her affliction. Did I tell you, that she is considered to have even more than her father’s poetical genius– Her friends are exerting themselves to get the pension which was settled on Mrs Hood transferred to the children—& I do not anticipate any difficulty in this. They intend to memorialize the government, & second the memorial with private letters to such parties, Lord John Russell, Maucaulay, & others, who, as men of letters, may be induced to move in the matter.
Again, good bye–
Address, on integral page: Mrs Robert Browning / Collegio di Ferdinando / Pisa / Italia / viâ France.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Eton College Library, Michael Meredith Collection.
1. It was about this time that Westwood became employed with an Anglo-Belgian railway. He eventually left England for Brussels, where he became director (see letter 1881, note 5).
2. Frances Sarah Sugden (née Westwood, 1806–45) died 14 November 1845 in Camberwell. She married Robert Massey Sugden (1801–64), a school master, on 28 May 1828, at St. Martins in the Fields. Westwood’s mother, Mary Westwood, moved with her son to Brussels, where he died on 13 March 1888, aged 72.
3. In a letter to Alwyne Compton, dated 9 April 1870, Westwood explained that “Mrs. Browning and myself were both possessors of Mitford dogs (hers, Flush—mine Floss) and between these two many tender messages were continually exchanged” (A Literary Friendship, 1914, p. 20).
4. Cf. the last couplet of the well-known verses that are meant to imitate the bells of the old churches of London. It is said that every true Cockney is born within hearing distance of the legendary bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside.
5. Several of Westwood’s poems appeared in The Athenæum in 1846, including: “The Burden of the Bell” (5 September, no. 984, p. 908); “Earth” (17 October, no. 990, p. 1068); “The Maiden’s Secret” (7 November, no. 993, p. 1141); and “A Song of Wassail” (5 December, no. 997, p. 1244). Three others had been published in the September, October, and November issues of Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine. They were “Love Her Still” (vol. 4, no. 21, pp. 266–267); “The Poet’s Flower-Gathering” (vol. 4, no. 22, pp. 300–305); and “A Vision of Old Fames” (vol. 4, no. 23, pp. 413–416).
6. i.e., far-reaching, from the hundred-handed monster of Greek Mythology, Briareus.
7. A review of EBB’s Poems (1844) appeared in The Eclectic Review for November 1846; for the complete text, see pp. 375–380.
8. The DNB states that “after his marriage [1840] Marston lived entirely in London, except for … short lecturing tours in Scotland and Lancashire”; however, we have been unable to trace further details of his lectures.
9. Aunt Carry’s Ballads for Children (1847).
10. Lucretia: or the Children of Night by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was reviewed in The Athenæum for 5 December 1846, which called the novel “a bad book of a bad school” (no. 997, p. 1240). The marked file of The Athenæum, now at City University (London), identifies H.F. Chorley as the author of this review. Emerson’s Poems was published in Boston in 1847.
11. Cf. Tennyson, “Mariana” (1830), line 12 (“I would that I were dead”); this line recurs at the end of each of the first six stanzas.
12. Jane Hood (née Reynolds, 1795–1846) died on 4 December. She and Thomas Hood had married in 1825, and had two children. Their daughter Frances (“Fanny”) Freeling Hood (afterwards Broderip, 1830–78) was the author of a number of children’s books, many of which were illustrated by her brother Thomas (1835–74), known as Tom Hood. In addition to Tom Hood’s talents as an artist, he was also a novelist and a poet. His Rules of Rhyme, a Guide to English Versification (1869) was reissued twice. Together, but principally the work of his sister, they issued the Memorials of Thomas Hood in 1860. A footnote on the penultimate page answers the query about the pension: “… we must not pass unnoticed the generous subscripton entered into shortly after our father’s death for the support of his widow and orphan children. Nor would it seem gracious to omit mention that in 1847, after our mother’s death, the pension, originally granted to her by Sir Robert Peel, was revived in our favour by the kindness of Lord John Russell, as soon as it was suggested to him by some considerate friends. For both these instances of the generosity and kindly feeling we have had extended to us for our father’s sake, we return our earnest thanks” (II, 278).
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