5686. Thomas Woolner to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 40–41.
29 Welbeck St. W.
Jan 9 ’66
My dear Browning
Of course you are sorry to see that it has got about; but the affair is valuable as showing the extraordinary force of a poet[’]s imagination.–
Marylebone.—An eccentric man named Robert Browning was charged with disorderly conduct.
The officer said he saw him on the previous night surrounded by a number of people. He was on his knees howling like a dog, and scratching at the ground with his hands. He asked him to get up and go away. He refused to do so, when he was asked what he meant by such conduct, and his reply was that he was making the underground railway to Hammersmith, and had got to get it finished by morning. He was then locked up. [1]
“Times” Jan: 8. 1866
It seemed to me that it ought to be stuck under that likeness of your’s I sent some time back at the request of A.T[ennyson].—but of course you are best judge as to whether you like the connection—
What a thing it is, you see, to have friends who look after your interests—you might have forgot and missed this characteristic freak altogether!
Yours ever
Thos Woolner
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 19 Warwick Crescent / Upper Westbourne Terrace.
Publication: E.V. Lucas, “Robert Browning: A Castigation and A Sculptor’s Jest,” Methuen’s Annual (London, 1914), p. 50.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. This and the previous paragraph are transcribed from a cutting from The Times, 8 January 1866 (p. 11), that Woolner has pasted in the text of the letter. In SD2811, Sarianna mentions that Punch turned the story into “some fun” about RB. In an explanation of the mad Robert Browning’s actions, the Punch writer suggested that “he has perhaps read Mr. Browning’s poems, and, not having quite understood all of them, may have taken the opportunity, when he was apprehended for inexplicable conduct, to express his sense of their occasional obscurity by calling himself Browning” (20 January 1866, p. 4).
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