5976. RB to George Murray Smith
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 264–265.
[London]
Thursday. [?14] [November 1867] [1]
Dear Mr Smith,
I cannot forbear sending the enclosed letter received late last night. [2] You will see how right I was in doubting the authorship and absolute sincerity of the first somewhat jaunty note written on the 9th [3] It is inconceivable how, having the things to say said here, the writer should begin by saying that all he sees to remark on, is my apparent discontinuing a call now & then. I don’t at all say that had this letter come first it would have affected my determination: it would not: but what an illustration it is of the sorry carelessness & inconsequentiality I complain of. It is also extraordinary that a sale of my “good-will” should have been made last year—under the circumstances: seeing that from the time of the printing the Selections, [4] at the end of the year before last, began a feeling of disapprobation which I was at no pains to hide. Don’t trouble yourself to answer this—and return the letter only with the other books: [5] all this, of course, in strict confidence.
Yours ever fly
Robert Browning.
I have made the proper answer, painful as I found it to make.
Publication: RB-GS, pp. 328–329.
Manuscript: Eton College Library.
1. Conjectural date suggested by RB’s reference to Frederic Chapman’s letter of 9 November 1867, a Saturday (see letter 5971).
2. Neither this letter from Chapman, nor RB’s response, mentioned below, has surfaced.
4. A Selection from the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning was published by Chapman and Hall on 9 December 1865, which RB evidently thought was “late in the year.” See letter 5778, for Chapman’s explanations regarding that and the lateness of the second edition.
5. Perhaps copies of RB’s works, particularly Poetical Works (1865), which he discusses in letter 5973.
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