5339. Thomas Woolner to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 21.

29 Welbeck St.

Feb: 23 [1864] [1]

Dear Mr Browning

Tennyson dines here at ½ past on Friday and if you are disengaged I thought you might like to come and meet him if that hour is not too early for you– Will you kindly let me know if you can come?– He leaves on Saturday I believe–

Most truly your’s

Thos: Woolner

Palgrave, the traveller, [2] will be here also. [3]

Publication: None traced.

Source: Transcript in editors’ file.

1. Year provided by RB’s response of the following day; see letter 5342.

2. William Gifford Palgrave (1826–88), travel writer and diplomat, was the younger brother of Francis Turner Palgrave. He had recently returned from Arabia, which he had crossed (disguised as a Syrian traveller) from northwest to southeast, “the first westerner” to do so (ODNB), and which he described in his Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (2 vols., 1865).

3. William Bell Scott, dropping in at Woolner’s on Friday, the 26th, “came upon a large party over their wine after dinner. Tennyson, Holman Hunt, the two Palgraves, Fairbairn, Spedding, and a lot more” (William E. Fredeman, “The Letters of Pictor Ignotus: William Bell Scott’s Correspondence with Alice Boyd, 1859–1884,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 58, September 1975, 86).

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