5160. RB to George Stampe
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 179–180.
19. Warwick Crescent
Upper Westbourne Terrace
Jan: 16. ’63
Sir,
Since writing to you yesterday on the subject of your request to Mr Forster, I receive, by the honesty of a friend, [1] another application in which you state that you “have secured the whole of my wife’s correspondence with her old friend Hugh Stuart Boyd[.]”
I suppose this to have been by the allowance of the person into whose hands the correspondence fell at Mr Boyd’s death [2] —that lady having expressed her eagerness to biographize, and profit by the said correspondence—an eagerness which was checked for a time by an urgent remonstrance from my wife, enforced by a threat of my own to take legal measures should such remonstrance be disregarded.
It seems however that you have somehow “secured” this series of intimate communication to “an old friend” and are about to print them as if there were neither decency nor integrity in the world. By what right do you pretend to publish matters purely personal to my wife? What business have you with the affairs of my family, and how have I lost my right to be consulted in what concerns me entirely?
If you have acted hitherto in ignorance, which I will continue to hope, you are at least explicitly instructed now, that any attempt at “Biography,” like your projected one, is absurdly impossible to a stranger; that, as such an attempt would have caused indescribable pain to the subject of it, so it now causes indignation and disgust to the numerous members of her family,—not to speak of myself, whose feelings go apparently for nothing in your account; and, finally, that the printing documents of which the copy-right belongs to me is illegal and, fortunately, punishable.
I shall expect from your better consideration an immediate promise to desist from your proceedings:—if I deceive myself—depend upon it I will at once advertise respecting the character of your publication, in the Daily Papers,—apply for the requisite Injunction, and do my best to deter by your example all future “securers” of private correspondence belonging to me.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient, humble servant
Robert Browning
Mr <George Stampe.>
Publication: None traced.
Source: Transcript, in the hand of Charlotte Mulligan, at the British Library.
1. As indicated in letter 5161, Dinah Mulock (afterwards Craik, 1826–87); see letter 2909, note 3.
2. The person being Mary Ann Smith (1797–1862); see letter 2739, note 22.
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