Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald, 1876–1889 [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674732582, 9780674732575

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Learned Lady betters from %obert Tir owning to 0Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald 1876-1889

THE

CARL

H.

PFORZHEIMER

LIBRARY

Learned Lady betters %pbert

'Browning

from

to ¡JArs. Thomas

FitzGerald

1876-1889

EDITED

BY

Edward C. McAleer

H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts 1966

O Copyright 1966 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Second Printing

The publication of this volume has been aided by a grant from The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc.

Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

66-11358

Printed in the United States of America

TO

zJWabel Purefoy FitzGerald

Preface

T H I S BOOK CONSISTS OF sixty-six letters in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, for the most part heretofore unpublished, supplemented by eight letters or portions of letters previously published. They constitute one of the best of the primary sources we have for the last fourteen years of Browning's life. Written to a dear friend who was also a "learned lady," they shed light on his poetry, his social life, and his friendships; and they give as well some of his views on the nature of poetry, of art, and of religion. Letter ι of this collection is at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire. Letter 69 was purchased by the late Carl H. Pforzheimer from Meyers & Co., London, in 1946 and is now in the Pforzheimer Library. Letter 71 is owned by Mr. Richard L. Purdy of Yale University. Six letters (4, 6, 44, 46, 49, and 74) were used by Mrs. Sutherland Orr in her Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) and subsequently lost, although number 4 appeared in the J. H. Benton sale catalogue of the American Art Association, March 12, 1920, and a half sheet of number 44 is in the possession of Miss Mabel Purefoy FitzGerald. The remaining sixty-five letters are in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library. "The Property of the Rev. H. Purefoy FitzGerald Grandson of the original recipient," they were sold at Sotheby's on July 28,1913, to Joseph Hornstein, for ,£155. (By coincidence, Browning's letters to Mrs. Skirrow were sold on the same day for ^140.) At the Hornstein sale of February 25, 1918, again at Sotheby's, they were purchased by Sotheran's for _£ιοο. They were next sold at the Anderson Galleries in New York City on February 17, 1919, and vii

Preface finally purchased by Mr. Pforzheimer from Gabriel Wells on May 5, 1920. When Browning and Mrs. FitzGerald were both in London, he called on her every Sunday. When either of them was not in London, he wrote or intended to write to her every Saturday. There must be, therefore, letters not accounted for in this volume. Mrs. FitzGerald sometimes kept a letter in an appropriate book, and her granddaughter has a few of these. She left to a kinsman her fine autograph collection from various correspondents, and surely Browning must be represented in it. She also gave letters away; pinned to letter 69 is her note, "Would you like this letter as an Autograph written 3 years before his death in Decr 1889 — he wrote to me, till the last week of his life." Four of the letters in the Pforzheimer collection (38, 45, 47, and 61) are incomplete; perhaps Mrs. FitzGerald gave away the last page of each as an autograph. It is known that she destroyed parts of some letters because of allusions therein to contemporaries. There is one Browning letter to her postmarked April 12, 1875, a t Harvard University; there is another at Baylor University. I have found some Browning letters addressed to "Dear Friend" and written on a Saturday, but there is not enough internal evidence to prove that they were addressed to Mrs. FitzGerald. (One such brief note, dated July 27, 1878, is in the Mary S. Harkness collection of the New York Public Library.) W. R. Nicoli and T . J. Wise in their Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1895,1, 470-471) print four sentences from a Browning letter about his Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), concluding, "The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgement that certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book which the Concocters of Novel Schemes of Morality put forth as discoveries of their own." In the copy of Ferishtah's Fancies that Browning presented to Mrs. FitzGerald on November 20, 1884, she wrote the four sentences later quoted by Nicoli and Wise, and, in addition, the date, "Octr 19, 1884," and a further sentence: "I viii

Preface have put them in English characters with the proper pronunciation that they may go properly into English verse but that is done only for private information." Surely one may suspect that the letter quoted was written to Mrs. FitzGerald. Even though Browning tried to write to Mrs. FitzGerald every Saturday when either of them was away from London and he could not pay his Sunday call, we cannot tell how many letters he did write. We do not always know when she was away from London, and Browning did not always live up to his resolution. Of the seventy-two dated letters in this volume, only forty-two were dated on a Saturday. While he was on the Continent in 1888, Browning deliberately did not write for over four months: ". . . she found such fault with what she called my 'scolding her,' " he wrote to Mrs. Skirrow, "that I thought a little stopping in our intercourse would have a soothing effect" (D&K, p. 363). The text of sixty-seven letters in this volume are taken from the holographs in the Pforzheimer Library and at Stowe School. The remaining seven letters are from the previously published sources. The introduction aims to acquaint the reader with Mrs. FitzGerald and her family, with the social background of the letters, and with Browning, his sister, and his son. The notes are intended to identify persons, events, and obscure quotations. This is the first edition of Browning correspondence to contain bibliographical descriptions of the physical characteristics of his letters (see appendix). These descriptions should make it possible for future editors to date, at least approximately, some of the letters Browning left undated. For permission to edit these letters, I am grateful to Mr. Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., on behalf of The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc.; to Mr. John Temple and Mr. John C. Saunders of Stowe School; to Mr. Richard L . Purdy; to Dean W. C. DeVane, Professor K . L. Knickerbocker, and the Yale University Press; and to Sir John Murray. New Y or

January 1965

Edward C. McAleer

ix

t-Acknowledgments

T H E LIBRARIES I USED MOST are the New York Society Library, the New York Public Library, the Bodleian, and the British Museum, and I thank the staffs of these libraries for their kind help. I am especially indebted to Miss M. C. Stanley-Smith of the Oxfordshire County Library, Miss Gwenda Jones and Mr. Ray Fowkes of the Buckinghamshire County Library, Mr. Jack W. Herring of the Armstrong Browning Library, Mr. J. Gewritz of the library of the Jewish Chronicle, Mr. Herbert C. Schultz of the Huntington Library, Mr. William H. McCarthy, Jr., of the Rosenbach Foundation, Mr. Jefferson T. Warren of Vizcaya in Miami, Mr. G. F. Willmot of the Yorkshire Museum, and Dr. Kenneth N. Cameron and Dr. Marcelle Thiébaux of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library. I take this opportunity to thank friends and colleagues who have helped me to track down facts and to identify quotations: Mrs. Giuliana Artom Treves, Mr. Howard Comrie, Professor Leon Edel, Mr. Lawrence Evans, Mr. Lachlan Phil Kelley, Professor Cecil Lang, Professor James McNally, Mr. Geoffrey Purefoy (great-grandson of Mrs. FitzGerald and the present owner of Shalstone Manor, Mrs. Mary Lillias Geraldine Purefoy having in recent years made over the property to her eldest son), Mr. Malcolm Quantrill, Mr. Vincent Quinn, Mr. James Toole of Lamlash, Mr. Howard Twelvetrees, Mrs. John Hall Wheelock, Professor John Wildman, and Professor Carl Woodring. Colleagues at Hunter College who have been particularly helpful are Dr. Mirella L. D'Ancona, Dr. Mariella Cavalchini, Miss Elsie M. Fugett, Professor Elio Gianturco, Professor E. Adelaide Hahn, Professor Leslie Marchand, Professor Helaine zi

Acknowledgments Newstead, and Professor Constantine Trypanis. The City University of New York allowed me a research assistant, and I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable help of Miss Beverly Goldberg. Especially do I wish to thank Miss Mabel Purefoy FitzGerald of Oxford, the last surviving grandchild of Mrs. FitzGerald. Miss FitzGerald was born in 1872; she knew Browning and, of course, her grandmother. She also knew Mrs. Sutherland Orr and recalls with great interest the visit Mrs. Orr paid to Shalstone in June of 1890 when she went through the letters she later used in writing her life of Browning. Miss FitzGerald has access to books, diaries, and papers that belonged to her grandmother, all of which she examined for any information that would shed light on these letters. I spent the summer of 1962 in Oxford working in the Bodleian and daily I called on Miss FitzGerald, who would have ready for me answers to problems I had left with her the day before. In addition to the pleasure of using the Bodleian, I had the pleasure of meeting daily with a gentlewoman who knew the writer of these letters, the recipient, and many of the people mentioned in them, and whose face would light up as she brought them to life for me. E . C. M.

xii

Contents Introduction

ι

TA