4259. William Allingham to EBB & RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 254–257.
Lane, Ballyshannon, Ireland
Oct 23/58
My dear Mr & Mrs Browning,
I could not write from London, in the turmoil of those few days, & then I was still hoping for more to tell you of.
Carlyle I found, brown, almost ruddy, & in the best humour, after two delightful months of solitude in Scotland, & one disgustful month of travel in Germany. His experience & mine agreed upon the difficulty of sleeping out of one’s own bed. I told him there were bonfires in all the reviews for Frederick, he said of course that he cared nothing about it, but added by & by that he had passed through two generations of execration, & supposed there was a new set of men coming forward now. In fact, one & all, the critics are simply huzzaing after him, no one ventures to slip an arm in his, much less to pat his shoulder, & the scoffers have disappeared. In Galignani’s they told me the 3 Tauchnitz vols had the 2 English, but there will be 5 for the 2. [1]
Most warmly C. spoke of R. Browning. Also said he had attentively redd ‘Men & Women,’ & understood it all at last but one thing—what thing? why “that with the three lampions in it”! [2] You’ll remember perhaps how I stood to stare at the same lampions. (Surely, too, the last line might be taken for ‘let us go in’ or ‘let us not go in’?) [3]
He rides on horseback most days. He was sorry for Landor, whose courtesy when C visited him at Bath had a smack of nobleness in it, [4] & thinks him not to be noted as impure & wicked but as violently self-willed. Item, C has heard things of Mrs Yearsley [5] (is that it?) who prosecuted L, & suspects her to be a rascal.
Poor Mrs Carlyle has suffered much from pulmonary disease during the past year & looks greatly the worse. She cannot move for the winter, because their household will not bear uprooting, & must keep as warm as she can at Chelsea.
Gabriel Rossetti had face-ache & looked fagged & weak; was vacillating between London & those Oxford wall-pictures. [6] William R. regular as clockwork, & to be married, they say, to Miss Rintoul, Scotch, whose late father did the Spectator. [7] Woolner, sturdy, on the 4d a day which he says he is earning. Have you seen his Moses, David, John the Baptist, & Paul, in alto-relievo, each in a gothic panel about 2 feet high, for the pulpit of Llandaff Cathl? [8] If he is not the greatest sculptor in England, call me a Fine-Arts Commissioner.
All these were most delighted to hear from & of you. As were the slow-voiced & manly Madox Brown & young Ned Jones [9] (Morris’s chum) too romantic for his name. Morris was at Oxford, painting, jerking, swearing (the other day in London he burst out of a study of Bradshaw [10] with the question “How the ________ do you think one could go by a ________ train that takes two ________ hours and a ________ half!”). He has bought land at Greenwich to build a miraculous house on, [11] for which DGR is now painting a Press all over with mystic things from Dante– [12] Love, a young man in a mantle, on a gold ground, betwixt the Sun & Moon, &c &c[.] What could one put in such a Press? Morris has two girls stitching slowly in his place at Red Lion Square, on tapestry designed by himself, queer birds and trees on a greenish-purply ground. Pray heaven he has money-columns in his notebook.
The Hogarth Club may perhaps come to something. The materials are good: it wants a Napoleon. It seems not small enough to be friendly nor large enough to [be] important. There’s an exhibition-room to wh nobody sends things & a Friday night meeting to wh nobody cares to come. Funerals are performed in the shop through wh you pass, & there’s a man in the passage who has seen better days, & whom you may send out for beer.
Ruskin too I saw for an hour, well & happy apparently, & glad to hear of you. He had not known of your being in Paris, asked for an address, & I gave him Rue de Grenelle. [13]
Monday evening I got to London, Thursday I called at Chapman’s, & confess to a slight feeling of triumph at the Portrait’s not yet being there, [14] after the disappointment conferred on me in that matter. Let me warn you against leaving the said matter to Chapman’s sagacity. Carlyle is very vexed by the engraving of the children in Fredk, saying with entire truth that the engraver is a mere mechanic & has changed Freddy from a pretty boy of 9 into a dwarf of 15. If I were you I think I should give the choice of the engraver & the whole charge of the business into the hands of either DG Rossetti or Woolner. Don’t stand on niceties with the pachydermatous Chapman (He wont with yr portrait). If you leave it to him you’ll repent. I have talked with Wm Rossetti & he entirely agrees with me. He will be most eager to serve you. His address is 45 Upper Albany Street, N.W.
You will tell me briefly, will you not? of your journey & arrival, & whither you are going for the winter. Mrs Bodichon had some hopes that Algeria might be chosen. [15] Love to Penini.
We have calm weather here, misty mornings, orange sunsets, cold moonlights, & are thus sliding into winter.
You will tell me next year, should you come to France? but that is for next year.
Let me say for once that I love you both with all my heart.
W Allingham.
I have a favour to ask. Bell and Daldy [16] have agreed (or nearly) to publish a volume of short poems selected by your servant, wherein I desire to include six or eight by R. B. and E. B. B. [17] Should no objection appear, will you kindly send a note to Mr. Chapman—to himself or through me—expressing your consent? [18]
Publication: Letters from William Allingham, ed. Helen P. Allingham (London, [?1913]), pp. 5–7.
Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection.
1. Allingham refers to the publishing firm Bernhard Tauchnitz, established at Leipzig in 1837 by Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz (1816–95), later (1860) Baron von Tauchnitz. In 1842 he launched his Collection of British Authors series with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828). The Baron would publish selected works of RB and EBB, as well as Aurora Leigh, in 1872. The Tauchnitz edition of Frederick the Great was issued at Leipzig in 13 volumes (1858–65). As Allingham points out, vols. 1–5 corresponded with vols. 1–2 of Chapman and Hall’s edition.
2. In “Respectability” (1855), line 23: “… down the court three lampions flare.” The OED defines lampion as “a pot or cup, often of coloured glass, containing oil or grease with a wick, used in illuminations.”
3. The last line in “Respectability” reads: “Put forward your best foot.”
4. This visit occurred in the summer of 1850 at Landor’s invitation when he heard that Carlyle would be travelling through Bath (see R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York, 1954, pp. 398 and 591).
5. Sic, for Yescombe (see letter 4214, note 4).
6. In the summer of 1857, on a tour of the newly built Oxford Union with its architect, Benjamin Woodward (1816–61), Dante Gabriel Rossetti offered to paint one of the window bays in the Debating Hall. The project soon grew to include all the window bays, and Rossetti enlisted the help of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who were later joined by John Pollen, Arthur Hughes, Val Prinsep, and others, their subjects being scenes from Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. The painters received no monetary compensation (see Rossetti, 2, 377). Some of the paintings were completed, as was the ceiling, which was designed and decorated by Morris, but several of the bays were left empty and eventually assigned to William Riviere (1806–76); see Rossetti, 2, 378. The murals by Rossetti and his collaborators were painted in distemper applied to whitewash and began fading almost immediately. They were restored in the 1930’s and again in 1986.
7. Since 1851 William Michael Rossetti had been in a relationship with Henrietta Rintoul (d. 1904, aged 79), daughter of Robert Stephen Rintoul (1787–1858), founder and first editor of The Spectator (see Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1990, p. xxiv). In 1856 they became engaged, though her father opposed the match. With his death on 22 April, it may have been assumed there was nothing to stand in the way of marriage. But such was not the case, and the engagement was broken off at the end of 1860 (see Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 1906, I, 260–261).
8. Woolner’s four figures were in 1858 cast in plaster by him, then carved in stone for the pulpit in the Llandaff Cathedral nave. Woolner’s sketches for the Moses and John figures were shown in the 1858 exhibition of the Royal Academy.
9. The painter and designer Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98) formed a lifelong friendship with William Morris in January 1853, when both were students at Exeter College, Oxford. Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), painter and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, had briefly taught painting to D.G. Rossetti in 1848.
10. One of the monthly railway guides, which were first issued in 1841 by George Bradshaw (1801–53).
11. The Red House, Upton, near Bexley, Kent, designed by Philip Webb and completed in 1860 for William Morris and his wife, Jane (née Burden, 1839–1914), who married in April 1859. Morris envisioned it as a “Palace of Art” (probably an allusion to Tennyson’s 1832 poem “The Palace of Art”), and he solicited the aid of his friend Burne-Jones in making and executing designs for walls, ceilings, and furniture (see Nicholas Salmon, “A Friendship from Heaven: Burne-Jones and William Morris,” The Journal of the William Morris Society, 13, Autumn 1998, 6).
12. “The Salutation of Beatrice” (1859), a wedding gift from Rossetti to Morris and his wife, was painted in oil on the door panels of a wooden cabinet. One panel depicts the meeting of Beatrice and Dante in Florence; the other, their meeting in heaven. On the crosspiece between the two panels, is an allegorical figure representing Dante’s love. The panels were later removed and placed in a frame; the work is now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
13. The address of RB’s father and sister.
14. A reference to the Macaire photograph (see letter 4243, note 3).
15. Barbara Leigh Bodichon (née Smith, 1827–91) had married in July 1857 Eugène Bodichon (1810–85), a French physician practicing in Algiers. After their marriage the couple “spent half of each year in Algiers … and half the year in England” (ODNB).
16. The publishing firm of George Bell (1814–90) and Frederick R. Daldy (1825–1905), who merged their separate companies in 1855.
17. Nightingale Valley, ed. Giraldus (i.e., Allingham) was published in 1860 by Bell and Daldy. It contains five poems by RB: “My Last Duchess,” “Protus,” “The Laboratory,” “Up at a Villa—Down in the City,” and “May and Death.” There were three selections from EBB: “Sonnet. From the Portuguese” (Sonnet XLIII, “How do I love thee?”), “A Man’s Requirements,” and “The Lady’s Yes.”
18. The manuscript for the postscript is missing. The source is the previously published text.
___________________
