Correspondence

5896.  Frederic Chapman to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 196–197.

April 25h 1867

My dear Mr. Browning

<A Lady with whom I am acquainted, Lady Wood, [2] asks permission to take extracts from your Volumes and from Mrs. Browning’s, for a Volume of Selections that she is doing for Moxon & Co.

If you kindly agree to let her use any, I think it would be advisable that you limit her to 2 or 3 Poems from each Edition–

I also enclose another application for your consent–>

Since your last letter, I have looked to the dates on which the Selections [3] were ready–

The sheets were delivered to the binder on December 1. 1865–

The illustrations were ready on the 3d December–

The binder did not deliver the books to the trade until December 21–

He asserts that he could not get the brass blocks out of the Cutters hands until the 16th–

More than once he promised days on which the book should be ready, and which I recollect that I informed you only to be disappointed by him—he broke his promise with us two or three times—

I did everything that I possibly could to expedite the book, and I never allowed a day to pass without seeing after it.

I can assure you that I was most anxious about it but that I was helpless whilst the mechanic who cut the brass was working at it– I cannot find out exactly how many days he was engaged upon it, but I believe it was more than a month.

Yrs most truly

Fred Chapman

P.S. The Enquiries after your new work are very numerous,—I am, I assure you aware of its importance–

There is scarcely a day passes without Enquiry for it.

Publication: RB-GS, p. 326 (in part).

Manuscript: Eton College Library.

1. RB sent this letter to George Murray Smith (see letter 5897), marking it “Private” and crossing out the passage in angle brackets below.

2. Emma, Lady Wood (née Michell, 1802–79), novelist and wife of John Page Wood (1796–1866), 2nd Baronet Wood of Hatherley House. She compiled and edited Leaves from the Poets’ Laurels, published in Moxon’s Miniature Poets series in 1869. In the preface, she acknowledges RB, among others, for giving permissions. EBB is represented by “Sonnet—Flush or Faunus,” p. 39, and two poems from Sonnets from the Portuguese: “Old Letters” (sonnet XXVIII, “My letters! all dead paper, .. mute and white”), p. 123, and “The Pet Name” (sonnet XXXIII, “Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear”), p. 124. RB is represented by “Prospice,” p. 92; a passage from Paracelsus “(Description of Autumn),” I, 25–48, p, 102; “De Gustibus,” p. 103; “May and Death,” p. 120; and “Meeting at Night,” p. 134.

3. A Selection from the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1866).

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