2890. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 235.
Casa Guidi
Tuesday– [?3 December] [1850] [1]
<***> I send the first volume of Pendennis. [2] We have one more which Robert is finishing—and you shall have Wordsworth [3] in a day or two. <***>
Publication: None traced.
Source: Copy in the hand of Margaret Raine Hunt at Cornell University.
1. Dating based on references to Pendennis and The Prelude, both of which are mentioned in letter 2893.
2. The History of Pendennis (2 vols., 1849–50) by William Makepeace Thackeray was published by Bradbury and Evans in twenty-four numbers (twenty-three parts) from November 1848 to December 1850. The first twelve numbers were issued as volume one in January 1850 (under an 1849 imprint); the last twelve, as volume two upon release of the final installment. The edition the Brownings were reading, which had been lent to them by Charles Eliot Norton (see letter 2893), was probably the one being published in Leipzig by Bernhard Tauchnitz. Issued in three volumes from April 1849 to December 1850, the second volume appeared in March 1850 (see William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions in English 1841–1955, New York, 1988, p. 62). Norton, who had left England for the continent in September, could have acquired the two volumes when he passed through Germany and Austria on his way to Florence.
3. i.e., The Prelude.
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