3994. Harriet Beecher Stowe to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 63.
[?Paris]
[ca. May 1857] [1]
Dear Mrs Browning
Mrs Hunt [2] by whom this may be handed to you is an English lady residing in Florence who has felt herself called to associate herself so far as possible in her position with us who carry on the great protest against Slavery in America. To her labors & zeal we owe it that there has been for two years past a German Table at the Boston Anti Slavery fair & as Florence will in future be her home, she is thinking of making an effort to raise yearly an Italian one in connection with our friends the Chapman’s & Weston’s who also will be in Italy for one or two seasons more. [3]
Knowing your extreme delicacy of health we should not of course ask of you the slightest care in this way but as Mrs Hunt feels herself much alone in Florence a word of sympathy might perhaps be a support to her & I cheerfully accede to her request to give her a line to you.
Very affectionately yours
H B Stowe
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: University of Virginia.
1. Presumably, this letter was written after Mrs. Stowe met the Brownings in April 1857 but before she returned to America in June. Her reference to the Italian table provides the year: Only the twenty-fourth (and last) National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, which began on 17 December 1857, featured an “Italian Table.”
2. C.B. Hunt. Other than her initials, we have been unable to further identify Mrs. Hunt. She collected and sent items from Stuttgart for the “German Table” in both the 1853 and 1854 National Anti-Slavery Bazaar (see Report of the Twentieth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, Boston, 1854, pp. 15–16, and The Liberator, 26 January 1855). Richard Davis Webb, Dublin printer and abolitionist, mentions her in letters to Anne Warren Weston of 28 November 1858 and 16 July 1861 (mss at Boston PL). In the 1861 letter he calls her “Miss Hunt <tho’> she prefers to be called Madame Hunt.”
3. Mrs. Stowe refers to Maria Weston Chapman (1806–85) and her children (see letter 2973, note 5), as well as her four sisters, Caroline Weston (1808–82), Anne Warren Weston (1812–90), Lucia Weston (1822–61), and Emma Forbes Weston (1825–88). Lucia, a consumptive invalid, lived in Rome from 1853 until her death. “Always a sister kept her company (usually Emma, but occasionally Caroline or Anne) to provide nursing and companionship” (Lee V. Chambers, The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2014, p. 93). The Brownings address book for this period lists a Miss Weston in Rome at Palazzo Galitzin, Via della Scrofa; see Appendix IV.
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