2821. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 28–31.
Florence.
Decr 1– [1849] [1]
My ever loved friend, you will have wondered at this unusual silence; & so will my sisters to whom I wrote just now [2] after a pause as little in my custom. It was not the fault of my head & heart .. but of this unruly body which has been laid up again in the way of all flesh of mine. In the midst of my security & vainglory in respect to health, strength, & the walking faculty, I was taken ill in the night rather more than a month ago, & miraculously escaped a miscarriage .. if the miscarriage is really escaped, .. which I cant help still being doubtful of, in spite of the strong opinion of the learned that everything is now going on well. [3] My husband & I are “infatuated enough” (as we say) to hope, rather than to fear, that this may be the case. Pure madness .. is’nt it? We ought to groan elegiacally, or at least “make the best of it” philosophically, when we talk of a possible second baby, thirteen months after the first, .. instead of which, we are just pleased, like stupid people. Our wiser English friends will hold up their hands in compassion, I am sure! My late illness exhausted me more than my confinement did .. but I am well again now, .. only obliged to keep quiet, & give up my grand walking excursions, which poor Robert used to be so boastful of. If he is vain about anything in the world, it is about my improved health, .. & I used to say to him .. “But you need’nt talk so much to people, of how your wife walked here with you & there with you, as if a wife with a pair of feet was a miracle of nature”. Now the poor feet have fallen into their old ways again. Ah—but if God pleases, it wont be for long.
Baby has been flourishing during my adversity, & is growing in learning & fat. He wears a white hat & feather, & looks in it, as my husband says, ‘like a little cavalier’,—& is much admired for his prettiness in his daily walks on the banks of the Arno, shrieking for joy at every sight he sees. One of his great delights is to scream to frighten ‘Mama’—& as of course I am horribly frightened & hide my face immediately, he falls into fits of laughter .. you would scarcely fancy that so mere a babe could laugh so heartily. But music is his passion– I like to see his entranced look when Robert plays the piano! The first rapture passing off, he insists on sitting on the player’s knees that he may play too—but though he thumps on the notes with his tiney dimpled hands, there is evidently an uneasy sense of its not being all right—he looks up in our faces to see what we think of it, with a doubtful, uncertain air. Such a darling, to be sure! Can he ever be kept from spoiling, I wonder. Everything he wants, he is to have in a moment, .. Wilson, the nurse, his father & I conspiring. Not that he has yet cried for the moon yet! only for the great chandelier.
Did I not mention to you the singular succession of losses which had fallen on the Tulk family? [4] Now, Sophia .. who married Count Cottrell .. the late Duke of Lucca’s chamberlain .. has lost her only child, [5] fifteen months old. It has much affected us, for as she was an old friend of mine, our children had become naturally associated; our Italian nurse had called Alice the ‘promessa sposa’ [6] of our Wiedeman, until she was suddenly offended at Lucca by Alice’s refusing to kiss him, & broke off the contract. Poor little Alice was a pretty, delicate child, with glossy hair just long enough to curl, & the idol of her father & mother—. All gone, except what is in Heaven! The father was quite unmanned, & could not attend the funeral, & my husband managed the whole melancholy business, selecting the ground for the small grave in the beautiful English cemetery, & officiating as chief mourner. It is curious! Those three sisters, each had a baby at the same time—& the three buds of life are every one clipped off. [7] What electric strokes of misfortune! The whole round has been gone now! If the survivors are taken, it will be when they have nothing left to lose.
The American authoress Miss Fuller, with whom we had had some slight intercourse by letter, & who has been at Rome during the siege, as a devoted friend of the republicans & a meritorious attendant on the hospitals, has taken us by surprise at Florence, .. retiring from the Roman field with a husband & child above a year old!– [8] Nobody had even suspected a word of this underplot, & her American friends stood in mute astonishment before this apparition of them here. The husband is a Roman marquis .. appearing amiable & gentlemanly, & having fought well, they say, at the siege, but with no pretension to cope with his wife on any ground appertaining to the intellect. She talks, & he listens– I always wonder at that species of marriage; but people are so different in their matrimonial ideals, that it may answer sometimes. This Madme Ossoli saw George Sand in Paris .. was at one of her soirées .. & called her “a magnificent creature”. The soirée was “full of rubbish” .. in the way of its social composition, .. which George Sand likes .. Nota bene– If Madme Ossoli called it “rubbish”, it must have been really rubbish—not expressing anything conventionally so .. she being one of the out & out Reds, & scorners of grades of society. She said that she did not see Balzac. Balzac went into the world scarcely at all, frequenting the lowest cafès, .. so that it was difficult to track him out. Which information I receive doubtingly– The rumours about Balzac, with certain parties in Paris, are not likely to be too favorable nor at all reliable, I should fancy .. besides, I never entertain disparaging thoughts of my demi-gods, unless they should be forced upon me by evidence, you must know– I have not made a demi-god of Louis Napoleon, by the way .. no, and I dont mean it. I expect some better final result than he has yet proved himself to be, of the French revolution, with all its bitter & cruel consequences hitherto, .. so I cant quite agree with you—only so far .. that he has shown himself, up to this point, to be an upright man with noble impulses, & that I give him much of my sympathy & respect in the difficult position held by him– A man of genius, he does not seem to be:—and what, after all, will he manage to do at Rome? I dont take up the frantic Republican cry in Italy—I know too well the want of knowledge & the consequent want of effective faith & energy among the Italians—but there is a stain upon France in the present state of the Roman affair, & I dont shut my eyes to that either. To cast Rome helpless & bound into the hands of the priests, is dishonor to the actors .. however we consider the act: & for the sake of France even more than for the sake of Italy, I yearn to see the act cancelled. Oh—we have had the sight of Clough & Burbidge, [9] at last. Clough has more thought, Burbidge more music .. but I am disappointed in the book on the whole. What I like infinitely better, is Clough’s ‘Bothie of Topernafuosich’ a “long-vacation pastoral’[’], written in loose & more-than-need-be unmusical hexameters, but full of vigour & freshness, & with passages & indeed whole scenes of great beauty & eloquence. [10] It seems to have been written before the other poems– Try to get it, if you have not read it already. I feel certain you will like it, & think all the higher of the poet– Oh, it strikes both Robert & me as being worth twenty of the other little book, with its fragmentary, dislocated, unartistic character. Arnold’s volume has two good poems in it .. ‘The Sick King of Bokhara’ & ‘The deserted Merman’. [11] I liked them both– But none of these writers are artists whatever they may be in future days. Have you read Shirley? [12] & is it as good as Jane Eyre? We heard not long since that Mr Chorley had discovered the author .. the Currer Bell! A woman, most certainly. We hear too that three large editions of the ‘Princess’ are sold– [13] So much the happier for England & poetry!– Dearest dear Miss Mitford, mind you write to me, & dont pay me out in my own silence! You have not been ill, I hope & trust– Write & tell me every little thing of yourself—how you are, .. & whether there is still danger of your being uprooted from Three Mile Cross. I love & think of you always. Fancy Flush being taken in the light of a rival by Baby. Oh, Baby was quite jealous the other day, & struggled & kicked to get to me, because he saw Flush leaning his pretty head on my lap. There’s a great strife for priviledges between those two. May God bless you! My husband’s kind regards always—while I am
your most affectionate
EBB.
Address, on integral page: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 283–287.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. This letter is not extant.
3. But a miscarriage, EBB’s third, had evidently taken place. She explains in letter 2826 that she had experienced “a certain symptom”—that is, had hemorrhaged—“a few days” after posting the 19 October letter to her sisters (no. 2819). Nevertheless, throughout the following months EBB continued to believe (with some doubts) that she was pregnant. In letter 2836, however, she announces with certainty that she had suffered a miscarriage after all.
4. See letters 2771, note 9 and 2783, note 19.
5. Alice Cottrell, who died on 8 November 1849 and was buried two days later.
6. “Betrothed.”
7. Besides Sophia Cottrell and her daughter Alice, EBB refers to Louisa Ley and Caroline Gordon whose infant children had died in the autumn of 1848.
8. Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, born on 5 September 1848 in Rieta to the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (1821–50) and his wife Margaret (née Fuller, 1810–50). The Ossolis had arrived in Florence in late September 1849. The fact of Margaret Fuller’s marriage to Ossoli is confirmed by their son’s baptismal record, documenting that Roman Catholic authorities recognized his parents as husband and wife. Although the place of the Ossolis’ marriage remains unknown, the time was evidently the spring of 1848. See Joan von Mehren, “Margaret Fuller, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, and the Marriage Question,” Resources for American Literary Study, 30 (2006), 104–143.
9. i.e., Ambarvalia (1849).
10. Clough’s “The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich” (Oxford, 1848) is a poetic narrative about a reading party of Oxonians in the Highlands.
11. “The Sick King in Bokhara” and “The Forsaken Merman” were published in The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849), by A.; i.e., Matthew Arnold (1822–88).
12. Published in 1849 under Charlotte Brontë’s pseudonym Currer Bell.
13. The third edition of The Princess was announced in the “List of New Books” in The Athenæum of 2 February 1850. The first and second editions had appeared in 1847 and 1848.
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