3687. RB to Edward Chapman
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 20–21.
102 Rue de Grenelle, Faubourg St Germain.
Wednesday Eg [5 December 1855] [1]
My dear Chapman,
Don’t think me ungrateful for your prompt & kind note of some three weeks since– I expected to have more to write about: & even now, what can I tell you? I see Galignani’s table covered with papers, and a choice article in here & there a one about,—what you call, the Twins; [2] the “Examiner” being the best, [3] —as for the worst, there’s no saying that. The serious notices are to come,—it is to be hoped. How this style of thing helps or hinders the sale, is what you must counsel me about. Do please let me know anything you can.
Have you got your checque from Fields? [4] I have had another .. indeed, two other American letters, guaranteeing the £75 for my wife’s proof-sheets. [5] I answered Fields’ note (the enclosure in your letter) on purpose to say that you had paid me & that he must pay you—& so he has done, I trust.
Will you have the goodness to give Mrs Jameson (who will give or send this), a copy of “Men & Women”? [6] —And, finally,—you remember that notable Treatise on Bible-genealogies, [7] for which all the Publishers were tearing each other to pieces just when I left London—you never mentioned whether Longman or Murray proved the happy man: well, I send you a fairer & improved copy of the same, which the author is desirous to substitute for the one in your possession—that’s all. I write in haste—but have really said my say—& Mrs Jameson waits.
Ever yours sincerely,
Robert Browning
I ought to add—(& it may incite your good nature to a speedier reply) that I shall leave this house on or about the 15 current,—for what place, is yet uncertain.
Publication: NL, pp. 84–85.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Dated by reference to letter 3695, which RB begins: “I wrote to you more than a week ago by Mrs Jameson.”
2. Presumably, Chapman referred to Men and Women as “the Twins.”
3. Concluding his largely positive review of Men and Women in The Examiner of 1 December 1855 (pp. 756–757), John Forster wished away all of RB’s “unquestionable faults … but they shall not prevent our pronouncing the poems we have quoted or named … and many others which we have not been able to quote or name … to be as genuine poetry as any that has been written in our time.” For the full text of this review, see pp. 317–320. Writing on the same date as this letter, Robert Bulwer Lytton tells Forster: “I have just read your Review of Browning and think it Excellent! He is greatly pleased with it himself” (see SD1891).
4. RB received £60 for the American edition of Men and Women. In letter 3651 he told J.T. Fields: “Mr Chapman also desires me to beg you to make the Draft payable to him—as he will give me the amount at once.” By letter 3665, RB had received the money from Chapman.
5. For the American edition of Aurora Leigh, which would be published by C.S. Francis. Further negotiations between RB and Francis increased the agreed upon price to £100.
6. See Reconstruction, C396.
7. RB, Sr.’s work, “The Nomenclator”; see letter 3652, note 2.
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