4513. John Forster to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 21–24.
Gad’s Hill Place,
Higham by Rochester, Kent.
1st of November 1859
My dear Browning
I have been upon a holiday excursion for the last five weeks—for nearly two of which your kind & welcome letter of the 16th October has been following me about, and now only yesterday caught me here—where we have arrived on our way to Montagu Square, stopping for a short visit to Dickens. It is his country place, as perhaps you may have heard; a place he used to covet in his boyhood & has been allowed to make his own; built on the site of Shakespeare’s noble fancy of Falstaff’s great adventure. [1] We find him in excellent health & spirits, & he desires his affectionate regards to you & to Mrs Browning.
We rejoice beyond measure to have such good accounts of your dear wife’s health, which I hope has still steadily improved. If you finally resolve to winter in Rome, it will of course be best that you should go, and I shall be glad. But it would be still better news to hear that you found it not necessary. Either way it is an inexpressible comfort to know that in the charge of our excellent old friend you will still be represented by your faithful old Servant– [2] And with that I feel nothing but content & gratitude.
—He has not written to me for a long time—nor taken any notice of my last letter to him: but I must be content to think no news in that way good news—for I know well that he still personally connects me in some way with his Bath annoyances, thinking I might have done more to protect him against consequences of which I had warned him all along, which I had succeeded in averting from him once, and which nothing but his headstrong Opposition to my urgent & reiterated entreaties brought finally upon him.
—But I dont like to dwell on that. Only, in regard to this Book, [3] wherein I have done everything possible to please & help him, it is mortifying to think that all is undone by the fact of my not being able to prevail upon the publisher to permit something of the old scandal to appear in it. Why—even if I thought it right that what he wishes should be done (which I do not think right, as matters stand at present), I might as successfully attempt to move the Monument [4] as move Mr Nichol [5] to compliance.
—Why on earth the book is not yet published, by the bye, I cannot for the life of me imagine. I saw & corrected (most carefully) the last revises some time before I left London. Perhaps the death of the publisher’s brother (Prof. Nichol) [6] may have something to do with the delay. I shall enquire as soon as I return– And the very first opportunity I hear of, shall take to you the Books I formerly referred to, & to which your note now kindly recurs, and to the good Landor some of these later Volumes you mention– [7]
And meanwhile you will say to him all that [is] most kind and affectionate from me. I have never swerved from him for an instant in all our intercourse– Not even entitled myself (though I have had now & then to undergo it) to a moment’s forfeiture of his best good will. In the presence of what you now say, I remember nothing but what is admirable & noble in him. I love & honor him as I have ever done– Blessings on his new white beard, on his strong old heart! Dickens joins me in an earnest message of entire affection to him.–
Before I left town—at the end of September—I transmitted 50£ through my bankers to your Account at the Agents of Messrs Drum[m]ond in Florence, who paid the last remittance: [8] and may as well say now that you may al[wa]ys count on this ever being regularly paid, at the opening of January, April, July, and October, and lying for your use at Messrs Drummond’s Agents in Florence, as long as we are all spared.
When you can spare half an hour to an old friend, you will not forget that to no one can a few words from you give such pleasure as to me. You did not tell me anything of your Sister & father, with whom I hope all is happy & well. As to the business of Italy, I wait upon events, not extremely hopeful, but not either despondent. It turns now upon whether the Italians themselves are strong enough for the burden cast upon them. I hear from one to whom Cavour himself said it a few weeks ago (staying with him at his estate of Leri near Vercelli) [9] that Louis Napoleon had complained to him, not of revolutionizing Italy, but of not having revolutionized it enough—and he also told my friend that the muskets with which the people of the Roman state are armed were given by L.N. and not by himself—it not being his intention, when they were so given, to have left the Pope an inch of his temperal possessions!!– We live in strange times– God bless you & dear Mrs Browning. And with mine & my wife’s most kind love to you both, Ever believe me my dear old friend,
Affectionately,
John Forster
I shall send your account of the new Italian actor to Macready. [10] It interested me much. Acting is a dead art here—quite gone out, & nobody seems to remember even what it was. But the playhouses thrive all the more!! I think Macready will leave Sherborne & plant himself in Cheltenham. A good move! [11]
Address: Tuscany / Robert Browning, Esqre / Casa Guidi / Via Maggio / Florence.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Berg Collection.
1. Dickens acquired Gad’s Hill Place, a country house near Rochester, Kent, in 1856 (see letter 3731, note 7). His fascination with the house dated from his childhood: “It has always a curious interest for me, because, when I was a small boy down in these parts, I thought it the most beautiful house (I suppose because of its famous old Cedar Trees) ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if ever I grew up to be a clever man, perhaps I might own that house, or such another house” (Dickens, 8, 265–266). Gad’s Hill is the location of the robbery of Canterbury pilgrims by Falstaff and his gang (I Henry IV, II, 2).
2. i.e., Wilson, who would begin taking care of Walter Savage Landor a week later.
3. Landor’s The Hellenics (new ed., enlarged, Edinburgh, 1859) was published by James Nichol on 10 December.
4. Presumably the Sir Walter Scott monument in East Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh. Completed in 1844 and dedicated in 1846, it was at this time the largest monument in the world honoring a writer.
5. Forster may be referring to either the head of the publishing firm, James Nichol (1806–66), or the latter’s son John Davidson Nichol (b. 1834), who succeeded his father in 1866 (see The Bookseller, 31 May 1866, p. 431), and with whom both Landor and Forster communicated (see R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York, 1954, pp. 445 and 465).
6. John Pringle Nichol (1804–59), elder brother of James Nichol, was professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow. He died in Glasgow on 19 September.
7. Probably a reference to Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans (1853) and The Last Fruit Off an Old Tree (1853), both published by Moxon. In letter 4550, Landor writes: “Several months have past away since I requested of Mr F. the favor of procuring from Moxon my last two works.”
8. Duly recorded by RB in his Landor accounts (see vol. 26, p. 394).
9. Leri, twenty-five miles N.E. of Turin, was a vast family estate that Cavour modernized and made profitable.
10. Perhaps Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915), whose fame dates from 1856 when he first played the title role in Othello.
11. In a letter to Juliet Pollock, dated 9 December 1859 and written from Sherborne House, Macready states: “I shall take with me many regrets away from this old house, hallowed as it is to memory by so much of love and so much of sorrow; but the work in this place grows too exacting upon me … I hope, too, that you and other friends will find Cheltenham more accessible and less dull than Sherborne, where the house and my school and some few neighbours are the sole attractions” (Macready’s Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, ed. Frederick Pollock, 1875, II, 447). The move took place about the beginning of the new year.
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