5385. RB to Moncure Daniel Conway
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 61–62.
19 Warwick Crescent
Upper Westbourne Terrace W
May 21. ’64.
Dear Mr Conway,
I have, I fear, not yet “learned in this particular situation to be content” [1] —to-wit, with missing your sermon tomorrow, as I much fear I shall—having a permanent call for my company on Sunday mornings just at that time. However, it may be: in case it should not, let me take the opportunity of thanking you for the fine, heroic story about the Black Sergeant [2] which I told as well as I could to some friends amid the thunder & lightning, southerners as they were but admiring all the same, last night.
My book will not be issued till Tuesday or Wednesday next: [3] I know I may depend on you for not saying anything in any English paper, [4] —as your kindness might induce you to do, who can tell?—before the other people have a chance: (see the pleasant unanimity of the white critics in Landseer’s picture of the publication of poor Sir John!) [5]
I hope your little one is well again. [6] Give my kind regards to Mrs Conway & believe me
Very truly yours ever
Robert Browning.
Publication: M.D. Conway, Autobiography: Memoirs and Experiences (Boston, 1904), I, facing p. 412 (in facsimile).
Manuscript: Columbia University.
1. Cf: Philippians 4:11.
2. William Walker (d. 1864, aged 24), “a sergeant of Company A of the Third South Carolina Colored Infantry,” was “the first black to be executed for mutiny” (Howard C. Westwood, “The Cause and Consequence of a Union Black Soldier’s Mutiny and Execution,” Civil War History, 31, September 1985, 222). Walker had led his company to strike in protest over inadequate pay (half that of white soldiers), even though he and his men had been promised the same rate of pay as white soldiers prior to enlistment. He was tried by court martial and found guilty of mutiny on 11 January 1864 with a sentence of death by firing squad. Execution took place on either 29 February or 1 March 1864 (see Westwood, p. 230n).
5. “Man Proposes, God Disposes” (1863) by Edwin Henry Landseer (1802–73) was displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1864. The painting depicts “Polar bears toying with the relics of the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin and his comrade heroes. ‘The chief features of the composition,’ writes Mr. C.W. Carey … are the two huge bears, one with his head thrown up, cracking a small human bone between his teeth, the other tearing at a portion of the Union Jack upon which rests a broken mast’” (James A. Marson, Sir Edwin Landseer R.A., 1902, p. 161). Notices of the work were largely positive, though many critics were uncomfortable with the subject. A reviewer in The Athenæum of 7 May 1864 thought Landseer’s picture “epic in its quality,” but “as to his choice of subject, we protest against it” (no. 1906, p. 650). Captain Sir John Franklin (1786–1847), R.N., led several expeditions to the arctic in search of a Northwest Passage. The expedition of 1845–47 ended tragically with the deaths of Franklin and all his crew. Details of the disaster, including the date of Franklin’s death, 11 June 1847, were not fully confirmed until 1859.
6. Emerson Conway (1861–64), first son and second child of Moncure Daniel Conway and his wife, Ellen (née Dana). He died from the measles on 4 August.
___________________
