Correspondence

5168.  RB to Dinah Mulock

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 194.

19. Warwick Crescent,

Harrow Road, W.

Jan: 27. ’63.

Dear Miss Mulock,

I have no more of the things you please to care about: I wish I had, since you ask for one. Here is Casa Guidi, however. [1] <Yes, I’ll send an old, condemned & suppressed portrait.> [2]

Thro’ your goodness to me, I have stopped that wretched proceeding. The letters are to be returned to me, and there is to be no more book-making: which is the better for all parties. The people say they did not know they were doing wrong, and are sorry. Had you not written, worse would have happened.

Ever yours affectionately

Robert Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. i.e., a photograph of Mignaty’s painting of the drawing room at Casa Guidi.

2. The passage in angle brackets is interpolated above the line. Assuming RB sent a photograph of EBB in letter 5161, Miss Mulock may have asked for one of RB. The “suppressed portrait” could be a photograph, “which has undeniably a certain ‘grin,’” that EBB mentions in letter 4855.

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