5292. Thomas Dixon to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 305.
15 Sunderland Street. Sunderland
Nov 9. 1863
Dear Sir
I once more trouble you with a line breaking in as it were upon your privacy. I was beguiled into the purchase of a Portrait of you in Photography thinking in posessing it and the text [1] (I hoped would be in unison there with) there would be the true union the one giving one the outward form the other with its genial sympathy and love giving the inner, and the simple expression of the works of that mind. Therefore judge my surprise when I looked it over to find one of the usual cold dry anatomical dessertations [sic] of you and your works——which seemed to throw a cold shudder over ones warm heart towards you, especially after your kindness in aiding us in our Library, [2] and also from a gaze on the outward exterior. The Portrait I certainly liked, and hoped while I gazed thereon that none but a genial lover of your Work and of you could produce such a Work, and that none but a lover of you would be the one to describe the Man by the Works, which in these cases really should be, we buy such Works in Love of the Man and his Works. Therefore such letterpress as accompanies them should most certainly be by a loving hand.
Yours Respectfully
Thos Dixon [3]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Dixon refers to the November 1862 installment (Part VI) of Portraits of Men of Eminence in Literature, Science, and Art, with Biographical Memoirs, ed. Lovell Reeve, with photographs by Ernest Edwards (1837–1903). There were seven numbers in all, issued on the first of the month, from June to December. The above title was issued in book form soon after the last number. The commentary on RB appears on pp. 109–112, preceded by his photograph. All known photographs of RB taken by Edwards in 1862 are reproduced facing pp. 176, 177, and 240.
2. How RB aided the library is unknown.
3. Thomas Dixon (1831–80), cork cutter and grocer, of Sunderland, Co. Durham. He corresponded with William Bell Scott, William Michael Rossetti, and John Ruskin, among many other authors. Ruskin published a selection of his letters to Dixon as Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland (1867).
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