3344. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 116–117.
[Rome]
Sunday p.m. [19 February 1854] [1]
Dearest Isa this note has been proposed since yesterday for Robert to take, and Mary Anne [2] arrives with yours. Sad it makes me feel to read it. Is it possible that this is the state of things really? & that no kind of good but altogether evil has been the consequence of your submission to what was called a “remedy” [3] —? I can scarcely understand how the knee-cap can be more out of place than it was. How does Dr Small [4] account for such a damning fact, if indeed it is a fact? The weakness, you will get over sooner than you suppose, I dare say .. and the irritation of the skin must pass before long. At the best, it is the worst & most disastrous case of the kind that ever impugned the use of “medical treatment,” and I do feel as if I personally had suffered a wrong in you; my poor dearest Isa. Robert would have gone to you through the rain yesterday if he had not felt extremely unwell—but today of course you will see him—and, when the weather lets me out, I shall run to you straight, be certain. Have you anything to read & be amused by?– We heard yesterday from Lytton who has had a sore throat & sprained his ankle, the two causes detaining him for three weeks on his bed & sofa. So there’s sympathy between you. He writes as if he were out of spirits. Blackwood is going to bring out a selection from his poems, he says. [5]
We asked the ‘spirits’ last night (‘we’ does’nt mean Robert & myself I need’nt tell you .. I am divorced on these questions) if there had been ‘rappings’ in your house,—& the answer was, “no—writers.” I asked why I could not write– Answer—“you are not called yet.” Penini said, “Go away naughty Spillets, and let mama play wiz me.”
Your ever most affectionate
Ba–
Publication: B-IB, pp. 49–50.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to hearing “yesterday from Lytton.” His letter (3340) bears a Rome receiving stamp of 18 February.
2. Maryann Martin, Isa’s maid.
3. See letter 3351, in which EBB describes Isa’s medical treatment in detail.
4. Thomas Gerard Small (1804–85), the senior English doctor in Rome, had been practicing medicine there since 1832. Odo Russell wrote of him: “Doctor Small is an Irishman who enjoys the reputation in Rome of being an able, though quarrelsome physician” (The Roman Question, ed. Noel Blakiston, 1962, p. 357).
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