Robert Browning and Mrs. Pattison: Some Unpublished Browning Letters

ROBERT BROWNING AND MRS. PAITISON: SOME UNPUBLISHED BROWNING LEITERS W. H. G. ARMYTAGE No ONE took greater measures of protection against the probings of posterity than Robert Browning. Unfinished poems, personal letters, anything that might betray his personal inner life, he ruthlessly destroyed. Indeed, when T. J. Wise, his bibliographer and acolyte, first met him in 1884, he was "dipping into" an old leather trunk and burning his early poems and some letters from Carlyle. From that time, till Thurman L. Hood published his edition of Browning correspondence forty-nine years later,' letters of the poet have been bobbing up in many places. More have been published since Thurman Hood's collection, each adding its quota to knowledge of his life.' One correspondent of Robert Browning who is not mentioned either by Wise or Thurman Hood was Mrs. Emily Pattison. Emilia Pattison (nee Strong) was twenty-eight years younger than Browning. She had married Mark Pattison, the well-known literary historian, in 1861, the year he became Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Pattison was then forty-eight and she twenty-one. Six years after her marriage, she became a victim of certain nervous disorders. Mrs. Pattison was an artist interested in the history of art-a subject which she had studied as a girl at South Kensington. She is generally agreed to have been the original of Dorothea in Middlemarch, which was published during 1871-2, at the time this correspondence got under way.' It was her illness that drew Browning's first letter to her. Dated December 30, 1867, it was written from the Athenaeum Club. Brown1Letters of Rohert Browning Collected by Thomas]. Wise, ed. with an introduction and notes by Thurman L. Hood (London, 1933). 2lntimat. Glimpses from Brownin~s Letter File. assembled by A. Joseph Arm· strong (Waco, Tex., 1934); Twenty-two Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browing and Robert Brownin!!. Addressed to Henrietta and Arabella M oultonBarrett (New York, 1935) j Selections fro m the Letters of Robert Browning. by W. R. Benet (London, 1935); Robert Browning and Julia W edgwood1 ed. Richard Curle (London, 1937); N ew Letters of Robert Browning, ed. W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker (New Haven, Conn., 1950) j W. H. G. Armytage, "Some New Letters of Robert Browning, 1871-1889," M odern Language Quarterly, XlI, 155-8; D earest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer (Austin, Tex., 1951). aShe later married Sir Charles Dilke (1843-1911 ), three years her junior, and was his faithful companion in the political disaster which afflicted him in 1886. She published Art in the M odern State (London, 1888) and further books on French artists and sculptors. A year after she died, Sir Charles Dilke published a memoir of her as a preface to The Book of the Spiritual Life (London, 1905) in which he mentions Browning's correspondence. The correspondence, thirty-three letters from Browning to Lady Dilkc, is now among the Ditke Papers in the manuscript room of the British Museum. The letters are catalogued as B.M. Add. MSS 43913 If. 60-71, 73, 76-81, 85-94, 98-99, and 102. 179 Vol. XXI, no. 2, Jan., 1952 180 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ing, after six years in London, had begun to take root there once more. He called to pay his respects; not being able to see her, he wrote: Dear Mrs. Pattison, It is very good of you to be at the trouble of writing. I happened to hear you were in town, and-l grieve to know-not well: I could not but be solicitous to enquire for myself. All I want to say is-that I shall certainly venture to call again-and, as certainly, feel hurt and disappointed in your kindness if you make the least scruple of declining to see me a dozen times in sllccession,-I shall understand it and try again, be sure! All my associations with the sight of you have been pleasant indeedlet me fear nothing otherwise from the year just about to come, and wish you well in every sense! Pray believe mc, Dear Mrs. Pattison, very sincerely yours, Robert Brovvning. There...