3208. William Allingham to EBB & RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 19, 110–111.
Ballyshannon, Ireland, [1]
6 June 1853
Dear Mr Browning & Mrs Browning,
As I am sitting in the shop of Mr McGlashan the publisher in Dublin, [2] I am told that Mr Lever’s son [3] starts tonight for Florence, & the opportunity of speaking a word to you tempts me successfully—the more easily that I have heard nothing of you since I heard your living voices last year. The only person likely to tell me anything was Mr Landor, & he wrote lately wishing I could give him news.
Is there a hope of your visiting England this year?—and Ireland too?—which has been put in repair for the Exhibition season. [4]
I have written 4 or 5 Irish would-be-Popular Songs (in English) [5] —little else.
Mr McGlashan’s packet is gaping for my note, which would attain its object, of recalling my name in yr memory for an instant, if you merely glanced at one line of it, where I set in view, in front of countless kind thoughts, the phrase of
ever sincerely & gratefully yours
William Allingham
I remember well yr little boy’s face & curls, & Italian English—(not a feat of memory either).
I am glad to hear this moment from the publisher that Mrs Browning’s Poems are “Out of Print” & will of course be shortly again “In the Press” [6] —quite the opposite to being on the shelf.
Having no wife or family, I am regardless of expense—in postages I mean, & such matters.
Publication: Letters from William Allingham, ed. Helen P. Allingham (London, [?1913]), p. 2.
Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection.
1. Allingham has crossed through the publisher’s printed address, “50. Upper Sackville Street, Dublin,” and written his own.
2. James McGlashan (1800?–58), Scottish-born publisher, had worked for William Blackwood & Sons in Edinburgh before relocating to Dublin about 1830. He became a partner in the publishing firm of William Curry, Jun., and Company, taking it over in 1846 under his own name. He edited The Dublin University Magazine from 1838 to 1842 and may have formed a friendship with Charles Lever at that time when it began serializing the latter’s novels. Because of ill health and poor finances, McGlashan sold his business in 1855 and returned to Scotland (see Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, ed Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, 2009, p. 388).
3. Charles Lever (1837–63), son of the novelist, had been attending school in Ireland but did not continue. According to his father, “The Messrs. Sandell, the engineers to whom the Tuscan and some other of the Italian railroads have been conceded, have made me an offer to take him as a pupil and make him a C.E.” (Lionel Stevenson, Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever, 1939, p. 198).
4. Allingham refers to the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1853, held in Dublin from 12 May to 31 October of that year. The opening, presided over by the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, was attended by the Lord Mayor of London, the mayors of Manchester and Liverpool, as well as numerous members of the nobility (see The Daily News, 14 May 1853, p. 5). Queen Victoria and Prince Albert travelled to Dublin at the end of August to visit the exhibition.
5. Perhaps one of the compositions sub-titled “To an Irish Tune” in Day and Night Songs (1854).
6. EBB’s third edition of Poems (1853) may have been “in the Press,” but it was not released until 12 October, and, as far as we have been able to determine, Chapman and Hall refrained from advertising the work until shortly before publication.
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