5744. Alfred William Hunt to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 76–77.
21 Old Elvet
Durham
[ca. 25 April 1866] [1]
Sir
I have been so bold as to make a drawing from one of your poems “the Childe Roland to the dark tower came.” A Welsh marsh as I have often seen one, with thick mists steaming from the hillsides all round & with a certain ugly old tower standing upon a spur of rock seemed to me (I dare say quite wrongly) to be the very scene which you must have had in your mind when you were describing the ‘trap’ [2] in which Childe Roland suddenly finds himself. I have ventured to use such a scene as an illustration of my own reading of your poem at all events.
Will you excuse the liberty I am taking in writing to you and do the Old Water Colour Society the honour of accepting & making use of a ticket to the private view of their exhibition on Saturday 28 [3] .. (I think),—and perhaps at some time in some way I may hear whether you thought my drawing was at all worthy of bearing the same title as your poem.
Most respectfully yours
A.W. Hunt [4]
R. Browning Esq
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Approximate dating based on RB’s response in letter 5747.
2. From line 174 in “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’” (Men and Women, 1855): “As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den!”
3. The 1866 summer exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours opened on Saturday, 28 April, at its gallery in Pall Mall East. Hunt’s “Childe Roland” was described in The Athenæum of 19 May 1866 as “an intensely poetic picture, if we choose to take it that way; or an admirable reading of Nature, if its prosaic aspect suits us best” (no. 2012, p. 677).
4. Alfred William Hunt (1830–96), landscape painter, was born in Liverpool, the youngest child and only son of Andrew Hunt (1791–1861), also a painter, and his wife, Sarah (née Sanderson, 1792–1877).
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