Correspondence

5995.  RB to George Murray Smith

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 280.

East India Army Agency,

45, Pall Mall, London S.W.

[25 December 1867] [1]

My dear Mr Smith,

Here at last is the First Volume, carefully done: I shall not be so long with the others which you shall have in a few days. As I have put in the omitted passages in Strafford, [2] and otherwise improved the book, it may be as well to let me have Proofs,—though I daresay it is an unnecessary precaution.

Wishing you a merry Christmas, I am,

Ever truly yours

Robert Browning.

Please let the Printers return “Pauline” [3] —(you will find the Title & a word of preface inside it).

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Eton College Library.

1. Dating based on RB’s reference to volume one of Poetical Works (6 vols., 1868); to its preface, which is dated London, 25 December 1867; and his wishing Smith “a merry Christmas.”

2. According to the editors of the Oxford edition of RB’s works, for Poetical Works (1863), he had “altered about two-thirds of the lines in the play. He added twenty lines … but he cut out over a hundred lines. … Evidently Browning came to feel he had been too ruthless here, for eighteen lines of the last scene were restored … in 1868” (see The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, Vol. 2, ed. Ian Jack and Margaret Smith, Oxford, 1984, p. 21).

3. This copy of the first edition was extensively corrected by RB for Poetical Works (1868). It was later presented to Frederick Locker (see Reconstruction, E346).

___________________