Correspondence

5508.  RB to Edward Spender

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 191.

19. Warwick Cresc.

Dec 20. ’64

Sir, [1]

I have so little that I am able to say in reply to your application, that it will be best said at once.

I am one of Mr Landor’s Executors, and was in the most intimate relation with him for the last five years: I must continue to regard Mr Landor’s family (in England) as the proper persons to determine what information should, or should not, be given to the public. Of one thing, however, I can assure you—that both the accounts you mention, as well as every other biographical notice I have happened to see, are full of mistakes,—and no wonder to me, at least: but the business of correcting these should be entrusted to the very qualified friend [2] who, I believe, has accepted it.

I am, Sir,

Your obedient, humble servant,

Robert Browning

Edward Spender Esq.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Yale University.

1. Edward Spender (1833–78), journalist, son of John Cottle Spender (1802–65), prominent surgeon at Bath, who was “Landor’s physician from 1846 to 1853” (R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York, 1954, p. 585). An article on Landor by Edward Spender, “The Life and Opinions of Walter Savage Landor,” written with the help of Robert Eyres Landor (see Super, p. 585), appeared in The London Quarterly Review of April 1865, pp. 171–206.

2. John Forster.

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