3527. EBB to Walter Richard Cassels
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 92–93.
Casa Guidi.
[ca. 1 March 1855] [1]
Dear Mr Cassels
We have just received another parcel through your kindness. [2] In thanking you for it, which we do heartily, we must protest against the excess .. of paying the railroad carriage from Leghorn. If ever we should trouble you again, pray never do that again– The convenience has been great to us, & our needs are supplied for some time–
I was very sorry that illness should have prevented our seeing you when you were in Florence & good enough to remember us & call here. Another time, may we be more happy!– The severe weather of this winter had been too much for me—I never suffered so much from an Italian winter: but now I am well again, if not as strong as usual.
With our united regards & thanks to you, believe me
very faithfully yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
March 3d
Dear Mr Cassels, I am glad that through a neglect, this note did not go to the post when it was written. It gives me an opportunity of thanking you for your’s, & for saying how very, very sorry we are that you should have had so much trouble on our account. [3] As for the books they arrived in perfect safety,—& being in part the prodigal gift of my sister to my child, both he & I should be grateful to you– It is difficult to get English child-literature in Florence—& this is the Alexandrian library to us! For the rest, I scarcely wonder!– After the Im-Conception doctrine, [4] who can wonder that the A, B, C, of rational christianity or any other species of good sense “in words of two syllables,” [5] should be considered noxious to the pa-pal pow-er? By the way, dont you think that the “Story of an apple Dumpling” [6] might have been suspected to be the statistics in cypher of some secret society?– Mazzinian, of course.
Well– I end by thanking you much.
EBB.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year provided by EBB’s references to her health and the winter. The approximate date for the beginning of this letter is suggested by EBB’s internal date of 3 March.
2. The previous autumn, as in this case (see letter 3509), RB had asked Edward Chapman to send a parcel of books to Florence by way of Cassels’s firm in Manchester “to be forwarded by steamer” to Leghorn (see letter 3483).
3. Cassels had rescued the books “from the custom-house where they had been siezed by the authorities”; see the opening paragraph in letter 3533.
4. Pope Pius IX had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception a few months earlier in December 1854. He did so upon his sole authority as Pope, resisting suggestions that it should be a collegial proclamation with the bishops. This unilateral action set the precedent for the eventual affirmation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, which was officially defined and accepted by the Roman Catholic Church in 1870.
5. A phrase included in titles of some children’s books of the period. As indicated in the first paragraph of letter 3533, one of these books was Mamma’s Bible Stories, Part I of which is headed “Bible Stories, Chiefly in Words Not Exceeding Two Syllables.”
6. The Apple Dumpling, and Other Stories for Young Boys and Girls (1852) by Frances Elizabeth Barrow (née Mease, 1822–94), who wrote under the pseudonym “Aunt Fanny.” She is described as “an American author who was born in Charleston and who published twenty-five books. Her children’s books had a phenomenal success among English readers” (The Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books: 1566–1910, prepared by Judith St. John, Toronto, 1958, p. 325).
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