SD1513. Mary Russell Mitford to Charles Boner
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 274 (in part).
Swallowfield, near Reading
Sept. 27, 1851.
You see, my dear friend, by the date, that the great tearing up by the roots has at last been effected. …
Just after I wrote to you Mrs. Browning arrived in town, and I went there for a week to meet her. A strange thing it seemed to see her walking about like other people. She and her husband are now gone to winter in Paris. I talk of meeting them there in the spring. They have a pretty little boy, but it was odd to hear the English parents and the English nurse talking to him in Italian. I suppose next year they will all talk to him in French, and when English will take its turn, God knows. In their way to England they stopped at Paris, and in the Louvre they thought they saw Alfred Tennyson: looking at the book they found his name written “A. Tennyson, Rentier.” (Is not that curious?) So then they met and offered each other their houses, he having a cottage at Twickenham, and they not having given up their apartment at the Casa Guidi. By the way, I don’t think they can return to Florence with that book, the “Casa Guidi Windows,” against them. When I was in London I heard from three quarters that Mazzini wants to have it translated as a political pamphlet. …
Text: Memoirs and Letters of Charles Boner, ed. R.M. Kettle (London, 1871), I, 213–216.
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