Correspondence

5002.  RB to Frederic Chapman

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 12.

1. Chichester Road,

Upper Westbourne Terrace.

New Year’s Day, [1862] [1]

My dear Chapman,

Thank you most heartily for your munificence– Pen, who is not here, will thank you himself, I am sure: I shall leave him the delight of cutting the string & opening the parcel. [2] All happiness to you & to Mrs Chapman [3] this & all following years

Ever yours most truly

Robert Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. Year provided by reference to the return address; 1862 was the only year RB resided at 1 Chichester Road on New Year’s Day.

2. Which contained Anthony Trollope’s Tales of All Countries (1861), published by Chapman and Hall, with an inscribed date of “Jan. 1. 1862” (see Reconstruction, A2348). The parcel may have also contained William Makepeace Thackeray’s Christmas Books. Mrs. Perkins’s Ball. Our Street. Dr. Birch (1857), published by Chapman. The volume was offered for sale by Dobell in Catalogue 249 (1915), where the inscribed date is given as “June 1, 1862,” the month being a possible mistranscription of “Jan.”

3. Clara Chapman (née Woodin, 1842–66), eldest daughter of Joseph Steward Woodin (1787–1870) and his wife, Martha (née Hamilton, 1817–54). She married Chapman at the Church of St. Matthias, Richmond, Surrey, on 21 November 1861.

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