Correspondence

4429.  William Allingham to EBB & RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 188–190.

Lane, Ballyshannon, Ireland,

[17] June 1859 [1]

My dear Mr & Mrs Browning

I hope this finds you comfortably settled in Casa Guidi:, after a good journey from Rome, by Sienna. So much of your plans I have from a pleasant letter of Miss Browning, dated Paris, May 14, which, by the by, came on the evening on which I found the first wildrose this season. If I were living in London or Paris, you should have many & many a time seen my handwriting—yet I could not in that case have made a thousandth part as much of a letter received. This reflection leaves my conscience as clean as the paper on which I have so often not written to you. That November letter from Florence [2] belongs for ever to a lonely pond surrounded by trees with some distant mountaintops peeping over.

The thought of writing sometime, & being replied to, remained one of the best things in the world—while meantime there was the self denial of not writing—having nothing to tell. And still I have next to nothing. Mrs Carlyle, who was very ill in the beginning of May, was better when I last heard of her—but that is nearly a month ago.

Of the painters, I know nothing– Gabriel Rossetti won’t write. Millais, & Hughes, a junior, these only are in the Academy. [3] Hunt’s Dispute with the Doctors [4] is unready, from some passing illness of the painter: I think he intends to rebel openly & show it by itself. This was the original PRB scheme—a room with flowers, music &c. Millais ARA is a Lost Leader [5] —but after all has most productiveness.

Is Gustave Doré a young man? [6] I am gloating over some of his book-designs.

‘Adam Bede’, the novel, is the literary success of this year—by a sound balanced pleasant Somebody, of the kind to succeed at once. [7]

But the War! England I am sorry to say is in a halty attitude—but it is a very fine thing that the Ministers are changing. [8]

L Napoleon has done everything well so far—all I have against him (& it is a serious thing) is his look: there has never been a mean-looking great man. But I have never seen him with my own eyes: Can you help me?

O what good news it would be to hear that you were coming to Paris! This reminds me to say to Mrs Browning that I am ashamed to find her apologizing for last year’s cookery [9] —ashamed for myself of course. If with no palate & nostrils of sole-leather like Wordsworth (which one might arrive at analytically from his poetry)—on the other hand I don’t (really!) live by sauce. Prometheus was doubtless the first cook & his vulture Indigestion. [10]

O do come to Paris & let me see you five or six times—& give me anything or nothing to eat! Have you ever seen in the Strand, in London, a publichouse sign—“The Angel in the Sun. Barclay Perkins & Co’s Entire”—? [11]

Nothing noticeable in Poetry (except the new edition of Aurora, which I have written for but not yet received– I put off taking my copy, for sake of the portrait) [12] unless you notice “Judith, by F Mills MRCS.L.” as an instance of the professional Muse attracted by a celebrated surgical operation. [13]

Bell & Daldy have at last consented to publish my book of selections,—in which connection pray accept my best thanks. [14] To speak of Nature’s lyric effusions—this is a surprising year for wild roses & ferns, as last year was for hawthorn blossoms. For me, I read, walk, bathe—happy on the whole, though often very lonely. You will write soon to me, I hope,—& Penini will write a line, will he not? and now pray believe me, dear Mr & Mrs Browning

ever yours affectionately

W Allingham

Address: Italy / Robert Browning Esq / Florence. / (Poste Restante).

Publication: Letters from William Allingham, ed. Helen P. Allingham (London, [?1913]), pp. 7–8.

Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection

1. Day provided by postmark.

2. Letter 4270.

3. The Royal Academy exhibition of 1859 included three works by John Everett Millais (1829–96): “The Vale of Rest,” “Spring,” and “The Love of James the First of Scotland.” There were two works by Arthur Hughes (1832–1915), a painter closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: “The King’s Orchard,” which depicts a page and a queen, accompanied by a quote from RB’s Pippa Passes (Poems, 1849): “… and songs tell how many a page / Pined for the grace of one so far above / His power of doing good to …” (II, 275–277); and an untitled piece, which, in a review of the exhibition, The Athenæum thought represented a gentleman who has just been accepted by a lady, as indicated by the accompanying quote from Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I, 638–639 (no. 1645, p. 617).

4. The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60) by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). It was exhibited at the German Gallery, London, in 1860.

5. Alluding to RB’s poem “The Lost Leader” (1845), which expresses disappointment in Wordsworth for betraying his once liberal ideals. Millais was elected an associate member of the Royal Academy (A.R.A.) in 1853 and thus relinquished his leadership of the anti-establishment Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

6. Gustave Doré (1832–83), French painter, printmaker, illustrator, and sculptor.

7. Since the publication of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, first as a serial in 1857, then as a book in 1858, there had been much speculation about the writer’s identity. “Authorship was claimed for a midland man called Joseph Liggins, who, although he himself never went into print on the subject, allowed others to do so without refuting the claim. … The business of keeping her identity secret, although important to the sensitive Marian, caused her anguish, and the persistence of the Liggins myth, combined with the rumours of literary London, led her at last to admit defeat and allow it to be known, in June 1859, that George Eliot was Marian Evans, alias Mrs Lewes” (ODNB).

8. Two days after the fall of the Conservative government on 10 June 1859 (see letter 4402, note 6), Lord Palmerston, head of the Liberal party, took office as prime minister and formed a new government that included Lord John Russell as foreign secretary.

9. See the third paragraph in letter 4270.

10. Prometheus, as punishment for offending Zeus (either by deceitful sacrifices or stealing fire to give to man), was chained to a rock, where an eagle fed upon his liver, which never diminished, though it was continually devoured.

11. Barclay, Perkins, and Co. a brewery in Park Street, Southwark, was for many years the largest in the world, with countless public houses, including the Angel & Sun at 285 Strand. John Barclay (1729–1809), of the Barclay banking family, and John Perkins (1729/30–1812), along with two other investors, acquired the brewery in 1781 from Hester Thrale, wife of the deceased owner, Henry Thrale, and friend of Samuel Johnson, who was one of the executors of her husband’s estate. At the time of the sale, Johnson is reported to have said: “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dreams of avarice” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 3rd. ed., 1799, IV, 89).

12. The Brownings had earlier instructed Edward Chapman to hold a copy of Aurora Leigh (2nd or 3rd ed., 1857) for Allingham (see letter 4004), though he evidently never collected it. He did, however, receive his copy of the fourth edition (see letter 4004, note 4).

13. Judith and Other Poems by Francis Mills, M.R.C.S.L. (Member of Royal College of Surgeons in London) was published in April 1859. The “celebrated surgical operation” is the decapitation of Holofernes by Judith in the title poem.

14. Allingham refers to his anthology Nightingale Valley (1860), which features several of the Brownings’ poems (see letter 4259, note 17).

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