3524. EBB to Anna Brownell Jameson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 83–86.
Florence
February 24 [1855] [1]
The devil, (say charitable souls) is not as bad as he is painted, [2] and even I, dearest Moña Nina, am better than I seem. In the first place .. let me make haste to say that I never received the letter you sent me to Rome with the information of your family affliction [3] —& that, if I had, it could never have remained an unnoticed letter. I am not so untender .. so unsympathizing .. not so brutal, .. let us speak out. I lost several letters in Rome .. besides a good deal of illusion. I did not like Rome, I think I confessed to you.—— In the second place when your last letter reached me .. I mean, the letter in which you told me to write to you directly .. I would have written directly, but was so very unwell that you would not have wished me even to try if, absent in the flesh, you had been present in spirit. I have had a severe attack on the chest .. the worst I ever had in Italy .. the consequence of exceptionally severe weather .. a bitter wind & frost together .. which quite broke me up with cough & fever at night. Now I am well again—only of course much weakened, & grown thin: I mean to get fat again upon cod’s liver oil, in order to appear in England with some degree of decency. You know I’m a lineal descendant of the White Cat [4] & have seven lives accordingly. Also I have a trick of falling from six-story windows upon my feet, .. in the manner of the traditions of my race. Not only I die hard, but I can hardly die. “Half of it would kill me,” said an admiring friend the other day. “What strength you must have.” A questionable advantage, except that I have also .. a Robert, & a Penini!!——
Dearest friend I dont know how to tell you of our fulness of sympathy in your late trials. From a word which reached us from England the other day, there will be, I do trust, some effectual arrangement to relieve your friends from their anxieties about you. Then, there should be an increase of the government pension by another hundred—that is certain: only the “should be” lies so far out of sight in the ideal, that nobody in his senses should calculate on its occurrence. As to Law it’s different from Right .. particularly in England perhaps—and appeals to Law are disastrous when they cannot be counted on as victorious, always & certainly. Therefore you may be wise in abstaining—you have considered sufficiently, of course. I only hope you are not trammelled in any degree by motives of delicacy which would be preposterous under the actual circumstances. It seems strange that the Jameson family should not make an effort on their own account to rid themselves of the reproach on their name, by rectifying this great wrong. [5] You meantime are as nobly laborious as ever– We have caught hold of fragments in the newspapers from your Commonplace Book, which made us wish for more—and Mr Kenyon told me of a kind mention of Robert which was very pleasant to me. [6]
How will it be? Shall you be likely to come to Italy before we set out to the north—that is, before the middle of may? or shall we cross on the road, like our letters? or shall we catch you in London, or in Paris at least. Oh—you wont miss the Exhibition in Paris– [7] That seems certain?
I know Florence Nightingale slightly. She came to see me when we were in London last—and I remember her face & her graceful manner, & the flowers she sent me afterwards. [8] I honor her from my heart—she is an earnest, noble woman, & has fulfilled her woman’s duty where many men have failed. [9]
At the same time I confess myself to be at a loss to see any new position for the sex .. or the most imperfect solution of the “woman’s question” in this step of her’s. If a movement at all, it is retrograde—a revival of old virtues! Since the siege of Troy & earlier, we have had princesses binding wounds with their hands—it’s strictly the woman’s part .. & men understand it so, as you will perceive by the general adhesion and approbation—on this late occasion of the masculine dignities. Every man is on his knees before ladies carrying lint,—calling them “angelical she’s,” .. whereas, if they stir an inch as thinkers or artists from the beaten line, (involving more good to general humanity than is involved in lint) the very same men would curse the impudence of the very same women & stop there!——
I cant understand on what ground you think you see the least gain to the “woman’s question,” so called– It’s rather the contrary, to my mind: &, any way, the women of England must give the precedence to the sœurs de la charitè, [10] who have magnificently won it in all matters of this kind– For my own part (& apart from the exceptional miseries of the war) I acknowledge to you that I do not consider the best use to which we can put a gifted & accomplished woman, is to make her a hospital-nurse. If it is .. why then, woe to us all, who are artists! The woman’s question is at an end. The man’s ‘no’es’ carry it. For the future I hope you will know your place & keep clear of Raffaelle & criticism: & I shall expect to hear of you as an organisor [sic] of the gruel-department in the hospital at Greenwich [11] … that is, if you have the luck to percer, [12] & distinguish yourself.
Oh—the Crimea. How dismal, how full of despair & horror! The results will however be good, if we are induced to come down from the English pedestal in Europe, of incessant self-glorification, & learn that our close, stifling, corrupt system gives no air nor scope for healthy & effective organization anywhere. We are oligarchic in all things, from our parliament to our army. Individual interests are admitted as obstacles to the general prosperity. This plague runs through all things with us– It accounts for the fact that, according to the last marriage statistics, thirty per cent of the male population signed with the mark only. It accounts for the fact, that London is at once the largest & ugliest city in Europe– For the rest, if we cannot fight righteous & necessary battles, we must leave our place as a nation, & be satisfied with making pins.
Write to me—but dont pay your letters, dear, dear friend—& I will tell you why. Through some slip somewhere we have had to pay your two last letters just the same– So dont try it any more. Do you think we grudge postage from you? Tell me if it is true that Harriet Martineau is very ill. [13] What do you hear of her?
May God bless you. With Robert’s true love.
Your ever affct Ba.
Madme Braun sent you last winter a paper on Overbeck which was printed in the Athenæum, for Robert saw it there. [14] But the Athenæum should pay her, & does’nt. Will you speak for her? It would be kind. Also I know she would like to contribute a series of papers of the same class—descriptive of the ateliers at Rome. Do be good & Mõna Nina like for my sake, in this thing.
Address: Angleterre viâ France. / Mrs Jameson / Ealing / London.
Publication: LEBB, II, 187–190 (in part).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. Cf. the proverbial expression, “the devil is not so black as he is painted.”
3. Doubtless, the letter carried news of the death of Mrs. Jameson’s mother, Johanna Murphy (née Bird), which occurred in London on 26 March 1854.
4. EBB refers to “La Chatte blanche,” a fairy tale by Marie Catherine, Comtesse d’Aulnoy (1650?–1705) in Contes nouvelles ou les Fées à la mode (1698). The white cat of the title is transformed into a beautiful princess when a young prince, upon her urging it, cuts off her head and tail. “A cat has nine lives” is the familiar expression, and EBB uses it when mentioning her health in letters 3534 and 3548. In Italy and most of southern Europe, however, cats are said to have seven lives.
5. Mrs. Jameson’s husband, Robert Sympson Jameson (1798–1854), had died on 1 August the previous year. He left no provision for his wife in his will. The Rev. George Maynard and his wife Emma, who had been taking care of Mr. Jameson, were the principal beneficiaries. At the time of the Jamesons’ final separation in 1837, an annuity of £300 had been settled on Mrs. Jameson. But as G.H. Needler points out, Mr. Jameson “later persuaded her to waive her claim to this allowance in order that he might have the money to invest in property that, as he gave her to believe, would be valuable to her. … This very property—five acres of valuable land in a residential section of Toronto” was bequeathed to the Maynards (Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Goethe, 1939, p. xxi). Regarding the will, Mrs. Jameson wrote to Mme. von Goethe: “I never had the idea of contesting the will of my husband or allowing his memory and my own domestic misery to be dragged into a court of justice, but there was a debt due to me as the settlement had not been regularly paid. Even this honour I shall not have. … The will, in which no mention is made of Mr. Jameson’s brother and sister, was written a few hours before his death and his hand held and guided while he wrote. During the two or three last years habits of drinking had rendered him almost incapable” (p. 197). Mrs. Jameson had been awarded a government pension of £100 in 1851. A subscription raised by her friends in April 1855 added another £100 to her income (see letter 3550, note 10).
6. In A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (1854), Mrs. Jameson describes RB’s Paracelsus as “a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth” (p. 81).
7. The Exposition Universelle des produits de l’Agriculture, de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts was held from 15 May to 15 November 1855. It attracted nearly 21,000 exhibitors and was attended by more than five million people.
9. The previous autumn Florence Nightingale had been commissioned by the government to direct a staff of nurses in the English military hospital at Scutari, Turkey.
10. “Sisters of charity” (more formally known as Les Filles de la Charité), an order of nuns founded by St. Vincent de Paul in 1633, “bound only by yearly vows, and wholly given up to works of charity—chiefly nursing in hospitals and in the homes of the poor, and primary education in poor schools” (EB). Their distinctive white cornette with its wide wings was replaced by a more practical head covering in 1964. The mother house is located in the Rue de Bac, Paris.
11. The Naval Hospital at Greenwich, designed by Christopher Wren. Construction began in 1692 and continued well into the eighteenth century. The hospital closed in 1869 “after many accusations of cruelty and corruption”; four years later the Royal Naval College relocated there from Portsmouth (The London Encyclopædia, ed. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, 1983, pp. 678–679).
12. “Become known.”
13. According to the ODNB, “in 1855 Harriet Martineau had been once more stricken with illness, caused, she believed, by heart disease—a not inaccurate, but insufficient, diagnosis.”
14. The article appeared in the 3 June 1854 issue of The Athenæum; see letter 3314, note 2.
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