5885. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 187.
[London]
March 29. ’67
Dearest Isa,
You will have got my letter by this time: I have forwarded the Cheque & letter to Wilson,—that is, to her Sister at East Retford. [1] I have no sort of patience with the Sister who allows, if she does not encourage Wilson in the notion of going to Florence,—just to get rid of her. The Sister is to blame in the highest degree for advising Wilson to set up for herself as a lodging-keeper [2] —as if there were any chance of her doing that in England which she could not do in Florence, with fifty fold the advantage. I have told this to the Sister in the plainest words I could use—written words—and, of course, affronted her,—to judge by the way she last wrote to me,—on the occasion of Wilson’s wanting to return to Florence—where she will infallibly go mad. The Sister could very well have taken her as assistant or partner in her millinery-business– But the behaviour of them all, (except poor Ferdinando, who has had to painfully expiate his old faults) is too exasperatingly imbecile. I sent your letter as the best corroboration of my few words. You know, I would have taken both Wilson & Ferdinando into my service, tho’ intimately convinced I should be nearly ruined by one or the other of their incapablenesses—but fortunately for me, they, or she, would not come. She hesitated at first between taking a cigar-shop and a pastry cook shop! Imagine the imbecility of her brother [3] & sister in putting such nonsense into her head, or allowing it to stay there for a moment! Somebody else was to buy or make the articles and she—retail them with a profit! I write in great haste: I have not yet got your book, [4] but found the Procters reading it, last Sunday, and “liking it much” they said. Ever affy yours,
RB.
Publication: DI, pp. 260–261.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Probably Jane Wilson (1814–83), who, with Ann Ursula Wilson (1825–89), ran a dressmaking shop in East Retford, Nottinghamshire.
2. Apparently, in late June 1866, Wilson, Ferdinando, and Pylades travelled to England, and she opened a lodging house in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, which failed.
3. One of two brothers: James William Wilson (b. 1810), eldest sibling, or Edward Wilson (1820–98).
4. Nora and Archibald Lee (1867).
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