5974. Thomas Forbes Kelsall to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 261–263.
Fareham
Novr 13. 1867.
Dear Mr Browning,
I have now the pleasure of placing before you, according to promise, some of the Beddoes mss. and of anticipating the gratification their inspection will give you. The whole of these mss. are at your service, but I was unwilling to stifle your enthusiastic regard for Beddoes [1] under too great a weight of ms. not very easy to decypher & partially obliterated. I have therefore commenced with only a portion, selected so as to present the writer in various attitudes of thought & at different times of life. The packet is too bulky for the post, & I therefore commit it to the care of the L. & Southwestern railway authorities, by whom, I trust, it will be safely delivered (to the address of this note, furnished to me by Procter), not very long after the arrival of this. The mss. sent comprise,
1. The complete copy of Deaths Jest Book mentioned in my memoirs p. cxx. as No 2. [2]
2. “The enlarged version” of the 1st Act.
3. A book containing early poems, & later fragments.
4. Two chapters from the ‘Ivory Gate,’ [3] filling 5 closely packed sheets of letter paper.
All the alterations & comments made on any of these in ink, & most of those in pencil, are by Beddoes himself—but Nos 1 & 2 have passed thro’ the hands of Procter & Bourne, [4] who both pencilled on them a few notes of praise or blame. You will find many passages omitted, in my publication [5] —being almost entirely relative to Mandrake [6] —& this personage I was anxious, from various motives, to keep as much as possible out of sight. I was publishg agst the inclination of the near relatives, & to these I knew that Mandrake & his belongings wod, as well as to the almost universal public, be most distasteful. Neither did I much admire them myself. They seem laboured & artificial—& quite unworthy of the company they are in. They have nevertheless strokes of wit here & there—especially in the omitted scene, which commences the 2d Act,—& 2 very clever lyrics ‘The New St Cecilia’ & ‘oviparous tailor’,—which were of course unpublishable to ‘ears polite’. [7] You will also find his prefatory remarks on the drama, which were excluded from my limited publication. On all these omissions & manipulations of mine I shod like very much to have your opinion & where, & how, you consider them faulty.
Such passages or phrases as I have printed not in accordance with these mss. exist in the oldest copy not now sent, & where there was a fair choice I sometimes consulted my own taste. The little book contains at one end apparently some of his earliest compositions—between Charterhouse & Oxford, & soon afterwds They have little value in themselves, but are very interesting for his sake—& they are far from commonplace. The fragments at the other end are evidently later & very superior. They breathe the tones of the Brides Trag: [8] & even of the D J B. and as such I published most of them. The book came into my possession in 1823, or a little later, & was soon forgotten by Beddoes.
I have left with the mss. a little artistic fancy sketched by one of my sons, in boyhood, who had seen Beddoes, & aimed at a grotesque likeness. [9] Hold it up before the light.
The detached mss. are fragmentary in the last degree, as B. was very stingy of paper, & generally jotted down his conceptns on the backs of letters or any scrap of vilest paper. I enclose 2 specimens, which you may permanently retain as memorials. Is not the ‘Dream-Pedlary’ [10] a charming composition? The fragment of Bourne’s letter shows his estimate of Beddoes. He rightly regrets the long suppression of the D J B. He & Procter were agst publication witht great amendmts, I was for prompt publication with such amendmts as might be readily obtained: but the majority prevailed.
You need be in no hurry to return the mss. Keep them for months, or longer.
I must ask for a few early lines after rect of the parcel, as I shall be anxious for its safety—& hereafter you will perhaps oblige me with your ideas about the unpublished portions. Can they in any way be made use of in maintenance of the writer’s fame? or shall we do wisely to let it rest on what is published?
Mr Moxon has long promised the public a ‘miniature’ Selection from Shelley’s poems, with a critical estimate, by R.B: & my bookseller has more than once enquired for it,—but in vain. Can you not cheer me with some good tidings of it? [11] May I presume to put to you another personal question, suggested partly by the last, but more by your once contemplated Oxonian lecture on Beddoes? Is a selection of his poems an attainable desideratum, under the same auspices as the promised Selection from Shelley? There is of course no copyright in the way, & your name wod win purchasers. Surely with you it wod be a labour of love—& the publication wod have a freshness not attaching to the more celebrated authors. I entreat you to entertain the idea. Of course you wod freely command all the mss. & knowledge in my possessn or power.
Believe me,
dear Mr Browning
Yours very faithfully
Thos F. Kelsall. [12]
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 19 Warwick Crescent / Upper Westbourne Terrace W / London.
Publication: Donner, pp. 96–98.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–49); see letter 1580, note 6.
2. Referring to the “Memoir” (pp. v–cxxxiv) in The Poems Posthumous and Collected of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, [ed. T.F. Kelsall] (2 vols., 1851). RB’s copy, a gift from Bryan Waller Procter, sold as lot 377 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A182).
3. “The volume of prose and poetry he [Beddoes] had prepared for publication” (Donner, p. lxxiii). In this note and some others relating to RB’s correspondence with Kelsall, we have drawn on material researched by H.W. Donner for his book The Browning Box (1935). We here record our debt to his scholarship.
4. John Gervas Hutchinson Bourne (1804–45), barrister and judge, was a friend and admirer of Beddoes. They graduated B.A. from Pembroke College, Oxford, in the same year, 1825.
5. Kelsall edited Death’s Jest-Book; or the Fool’s Tragedy (1850) and reprinted it in Poems Posthumous, II, 1–169.
6. A “grotesque comic figure [in Death’s Jest-Book] … much objected to on grounds of coarseness by Beddoes’s friends and family and much relished by subsequent readers” (see Daniel Karlin, “On Being Second-Rate: The Skeleton Art of Thomas Lovell Beddoes,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 36, No. 2, 2006, 48).
7. Alexander Pope, “An Epistle to the … Earl of Burlington” (1731), line 150. The couplet reads: “To Rest, the Cushion, and soft Dean invite, / Who never mentions Hell to Ears polite” (lines 149–150).
8. The Brides’ Tragedy (1822), a verse drama in five acts.
9. This drawing by Thomas Moultrie Kelsall (1837–68) in 1847 depicts a skeletal figure in a mortarboard cap and flowing white garment. It is reproduced as the frontispiece in Donner.
10. A lyric published in Poems Posthumous, I, 184–186. It and a song from Death’s Jest-Book are written on a leaf that sold as part of lot 230 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, L11). The other specimen, verses beginning “The lake, like her, heaves gently,” is written in the blank space of a letter from Bourne to Beddoes, dated 21 February 1833. It also sold as part of lot 230 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, L10).
12. Thomas Forbes Kelsall (1799–1872), friend and executor of Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
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