5161. RB to Dinah Mulock
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 180–181.
19. Warwick Crescent,
Harrow Road,
Jan: 16. ’63
My dear Miss Mulock,
I don’t wonder at your goodness and right feeling, certainly—but I feel most grateful for this exercise of them. I had been writing, a few hours before your letter came, to this person, “Stampe”, wholly a stranger to me, whose application to another friend [1] had been, with a like considerateness, placed in my hands. “The correspondence” which Stampe boasts of having “secured” must be that which, after the death of Mr Boyd, fell into the power of Mrs Smith—(Adam Clarke’s daughter!) she immediately itched to book-make, and informed my wife of her intention to enrich her performance by the introduction of these letters: the earnest expostulation of my wife and a subjoined threat of my own,—for the law for once helps us here,—stopped this plan, we supposed. She,—or I hope, her representatives—have now, it would appear, given these merely personal and most intimate communications to a stranger and a “Stampe”!
I promise him I will advertise the work, and give it a character in the “Times”, if he does not desist: I shall moreover apply for an Injunction and punish him properly: but the woman’s part in the business is the horrible thing: he gets twopence-halfpenny, or hopes to get it.
All thanks to you again: if you are ever in London, I should like much to see you.
I send something with this– [2]
Ever yours affectionately
Robert Browning.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. John Forster.
2. Presumably one of Jefferson Bingham’s copies of the 1861 Alessandri photograph of EBB (see letter 5005, note 10).
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