4981. RB to Charles Henry Pearson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 248.
1. Chichester Road,
Upper Westbourne Terrace.
Tuesday Mg [22 October 1861] [1]
My dear Sir,
Thank you heartily for your kindness: I shall be very glad to have the advantage of meeting Mr Daniel [2] as you propose at your house on Wednesday at eight o’clock. p.m.
Yours obligedly & faithfully
Robert Browning.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Bodleian Library.
1. Date provided by reference to letter 4980.
2. Henry Olive Daniel (1836–1919), printer and fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, was a classical lecturer at King’s College, London, from 1859 until his fellowship in 1863. In a contribution to memoirs of Pearson, Daniel wrote: “He [Pearson] told me one day that Robert Browning was coming that evening to his rooms, and was desirous of information as to the best course to take for the education of his boy. Would I, as having lately left the University, come and give him the benefit of my experience? I, of course, went. It was not long after Browning’s great loss, to which in the course of the evening he made more than one pathetic reference. I recollect, too, the natural keenness of his interest in his son, and the charm of an evening passed in listening to the conversation of the poet and his host, mainly turning on their common knowledge of foreign parts, and of course, in the first place, of Florence. I remember to have been particularly struck by the manly cheerfulness with which Browning joined in topics which must have been full of solemn and fresh regrets” (Charles Henry Pearson, Fellow of Oriel and Education Minister in Victoria: Memorials by Himself, His Wife, and His Friends, ed. William Stebbing, 1900, p. 171).
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