730. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 231–233.
Three Mile Cross,
Jan. 3[0], 1840. [1]
My beloved Friend,
My father and I sat to-night looking at the fire in silence and in sadness, the wind rising and sighing with its most mournful rather than its more threatening sound through the branches, from which the snow was falling silently—contradicting by sight and feeling (for the cold was intense) the evidence of another sense, as the double Roman narcissus and the white and purple hyacinths shed their delicious fragrance from the window—my father and myself sat pensively over the wood fire, until he said suddenly, “You are thinking of dear Miss Barrett; so was I. God bless her! How long is it since you have heard from her?” Every night at that time I had thought of you, my sweetest, sitting over the glowing embers, and at last I determined to write to you before I slept. I have told you of my little girl, Agnes Niven, just twelve years old. Her mother and I sometimes call her our pet lamb. She sent me this week a pair of delicate mittens, knit of the finest wool and silk, with the following stanza:
“A tuft of flax to a Grecian bride
Was ancient Hymen’s offer;
A tuft of wool is England’s pride:
What more can a pet-lamb offer?”
Are not these lines, with their combination of point and gracefulness, their Mr. Kenyon-like terseness and turn, very remarkable in a girl of that age?
I have been reading “Jack Sheppard,” [2] and have been struck by the great danger, in these times, of representing authority so constantly and fearfully in the wrong, so tyrannous, so devilish, as the author has been pleased to portray it in “Jack Sheppard;” for he does not seem so much a man, or even an incarnate fiend, as a representation of power—government or law, call it as you may—the ruling power. Of course Mr. Ainsworth had no such design, but such is the effect; and as the millions who see it represented at the minor theatres will not distinguish between now and a hundred years back, all the Chartists [3] in the land are less dangerous than this nightmare of a book, and I, Radical as I am, lament any additional temptations to outbreak, with all its train of horrors. [4] Seriously, what things these are—the Jack Sheppards, and Squeers’s, and Oliver Twists, and Michael Armstrongs [5] —all the worse for the power which, except the last, the others contain! Grievously the worse!
My friend Mr. Hughes [6] speaks well of Mr. Ainsworth. His father was a collector of these old robber stories, and used to repeat the local ballads upon Turpin, [7] &c., to his son as he sat upon his knee; and this has perhaps been at the bottom of the matter. A good antiquarian I believe him to be, but what a use to make of the picturesque old knowledge! Well, one comfort is that it will wear itself out; and then it will be cast aside like an old fashion.
Ever most faithfully yours,
M. R. M.
Address: Miss Barrett, Torquay.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 105–106 (as 3 January 1840).
1. The editors of EBB-MRM suggest that the date was misread by L’Estrange and should be Jan. 30 1840. This suggestion has merit; if L’Estrange’s dating were correct, EBB would surely have commented on Agnes Niven’s stanza in letter 727 or 729, rather than delaying comment until letter 732.
2. Jack Sheppard: A Romance (3 vols., 1839) by William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82), novelist and historian, who had achieved popularity in 1834 with Rookwood.
4. The Athenæum of 26 October 1839 (no. 626, pp. 803–805) described Jack Sheppard as “a bad book, and what is worse, it is of a class of bad books, got up for a bad public.” In view of this, and Miss Mitford’s opinion of the book, it is interesting to note that The Examiner (no. 1659, 17 November 1839, p. 732) gave an account of the trial of an 18-year-old boy for burglary, in emulation of Jack Sheppard.
5. Wackford Squeers was the penny-pinching schoolmaster in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby; Oliver Twist the foundling in Dickens’s novel of the same name; Michael Armstrong’s story was told in The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840) by Frances Trollope.
7. Dick Turpin (1706–39), a thief and highwayman, owes much of his lasting notoriety to Ainsworth, in whose Rookwood Turpin figured prominently. He was hanged on 7 April 1739.
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