5419. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 85–86.
Cumberland Place
Friday. July 8th [1864] [1]
Dear friend
I want you to know how much the black cloud has passed away from me today. I was so sorry it was so black yesterday—& yet why should I be sorry? For that is just the time I needed you most. It was the thoughts of possibly having to give up such a great happiness, but now that is quite past, for I have put it out of my hands. I begged my parents to forward you a letter of mine if they have a shade of dislike to this kind of intercourse. So do you put it out of your head too dear friend, for you have not to shield me here, do not come to me shrinkingly, they do not even know what a pain it will be to me, so they will shut the door if they think it right, or even if they think it best in any point of view. I have been so much dwelling in your past. I hope you will never try to exclude sad memories from our intercourse, though they may seem to waken mine—they are most precious to me. There are pains that are only cured by pain, one cannot have one’s own dark thoughts for another’s bright thoughts, but the chambers that are consecrated to our beloved Dead are the best exit from the dark Alone where too much of our lives—too much of my life at least—is spent. Do not ever shrink from admitting me to yours, I believe you will never repent it for your own sake. I am sure it will be always a precious possession to me, a lamp lighting up that terrible Hereafter—to think of the spirit that is waiting for you.
I daresay I shall often write to you. I know you will always care for my letters, & shall not want you to write & tell me so. I shall send you my novel [2] in a day or two. I send it as you gave me your child’s writings, as what is valuable for the sake of the writer. I was looking over it, & the greater part appears to me merely tawdry, where it was done from without, the fragment that was done from within has a certain value, I think.—but part of it has been translated with such terrible irony into my own life, as you will see, that I cannot judge it. Do not disappoint me on Sunday, unless you have my letter, you know that it will be forwarded at once if there is a hesitation[.]
Ever yrs FJW
Publication: Sue Brown, “Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: The Unpublished Correspondence,” The Journal of Browning Studies, 3 (December 2012), 40–41.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. The year was pencilled on the manuscript by Miss Wedgwood, subsequent to its return to her in 1913.
2. Probably her second novel, An Old Debt (2 vols., 1858), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under a pseudonym, “Florence Dawson.” Her first novel, Framleigh Hall (3 vols., 1858) was published anonymously a few months earlier by Hurst and Blackett.
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