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‘One heart… Say nothing…’ EBB to George Goodin MB 15 April 1841, #805. Matilda Carter is painting her miniature. It won’t turn out well, to EBB’s amusement; EBB to Mitford 14 June 1841, #819. ‘Prison…’ EBB to Mitford 18 July 1841, #829.
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‘What claim had I…’ #829. ‘For sporting purposes…’ EBB to Mitford 28 December 1840, #783. ‘Send him by the railroad…’ EBB to Mitford mid-December 1840, #779. No station: https://www.railscot.co.uk/London_and_South_Western_Railway/ [retrieved 22 March 2019].
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‘A shawl thrown…’ EBB to Mitford 9 February 1841, #797. He is due Thursday (7 January, if letter #787 is dated correctly, but this dating is itself taken from reference to his arrival). EBB to Mitford 16 April 1841, #806; EBB to Mitford 5 August 1841, #840; EBB to Mitford late July 1841, #835; EBB to Mitford 15 July 1841, #827; #840.
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‘An occasional manner…’ EBB to Mitford 17 July 1841, #828. ‘There are fine things…’ #827.
That John Kenyon is house-hunting in Torquay she finds incomprehensible. He will eventually buy after she’s left town, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kenyon,_John_(DNB00) [retrieved 21 May 2020]. EBB to Mitford 12 November 1841, #872.
‘Delay…’ #830. ‘Patent…’ EBB to Mitford 25 August 1841, #845. ‘Loosening the chains…’ EBB to Kenyon 10 November 1841, #871.
‘The opening of the dungeon…’ EBB to Fanny Dowglass 31 March 1842, #935: ‘Ten days we spent upon the road. I suffered in the manner that was apprehended by renewed & increased spitting of blood, but not to the extent—& altho’ exhausted day after day to fainting & speechlessness I came into London perfectly alive & inclined to remain so.’
EBB also reports this spitting of blood to Miss Mitford: EBB to Mitford 13 September 1841, #851.
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‘And what was worse…’ EBB to Mitford 21 September 1841, #853. ‘He likes London…’ EBB to Mitford 23 September 1841, #854. Literary gossip: EBB to Mitford 24 September 1841, #855.
BOOK SIX
Epigraph
Spoken by the wicked Lady Waldemar in AL Bk 9, Ll. 65–66.
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Miss Mitford handles everything from domestic finance to runaway horses.
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EBB blames reading Wollstonecraft at twelve for her ‘awkwardness…’: EBB to Mitford 22 July 1842, #988. ‘Domestic love…’ EBB to RB 20 March 1845, #1870. ‘How uncivilized…’ EBB to Mitford 19 October 1841, #863.
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EBB to Boyd 12 January 1842, #898. The poems are ‘The House of Clouds’ in August and ‘Lessons from the Gorse’ in October. The essays are posthumously published together as a freestanding volume in 1863.
‘It is well…’ The Athenaeum, 4 June 1842. ‘Do not live by…’ The Athenaeum, 27 August 1842.
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‘The long life’s work…’ The Athenaeum, 27 August 1842. ‘No—…’ EBB to Mitford 30 December 1842, #1105.
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The right places: The Athenaeum, Blackwood’s, Schloss’s Bijou Almanac. Kenyon ‘was a good deal surprised, he said, that Moxon shd have answered so decidedly.’ EBB to Mitford 2 January 1843, #1110.
Wordsworth composed his poetic tribute to Haydon while climbing Helvellyn at seventy, a decade after promising to write something for the 1829 piece portraying Napoleon Bonaparte to which his portrait is a companion. ‘If I can command my thoughts I will write something about your Picture, in prose for the Muse has forsaken me.’ William Wordsworth to Haydon 23 April 1831: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw04614/Napolon-Bonaparte? https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw06661
‘You have brought me…’ EBB to B. R. Haydon 17 October 1842, #1026. ‘Invisible Friend…’ Benjamin Robert Haydon to EBB 9 January 1843, #1121. The American reprints of EBB’s Haydon sonnet appear on 26 November and 3 December 1842.
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EBB commends and quotes from Mathews’s Poems on Man in the epigraph to ‘A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress’ in Poems (1850). EBB to James Russell Lowell, 4 January 1843, #1112. Mathews publishes, and would like to be published by, Edward Moxon: ‘I mentioned, I think, in a former hasty note that […] you might, perhaps, be waited on with regard to a little volume of Poems (“Poems on Man”) with some proposition as to its re-production in London. […] I beg also to offer a copy for the acceptance of Mr. Browning, in token of the pleasure I have derived from his writings which you were good enough to send me.’ Cornelius Mathews to Edward Moxon 27 February 1844, SD1201.1.
‘Dark…’ EBB to Mitford 16 January 1844, #1505. ‘Bitter anguish…’ EBB to Mitford 9 November 1841, #870.
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Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid (London: Edward Moxon, 1844).
‘How entirely…’ Martineau to EBB 6 March 1844, #1564. ‘I dare…’ EBB to Mitford 8 November 1841, #869. ‘Fairy visions…’ #1564.
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‘Torquay dancing…’ EBB to Mitford 12 November 1841, #872. ‘Mr Haydon’s mystical…’ #869. ‘I have recognized…’ EBB to Mitford 25 November 1841, #874. ‘Did you hear of…’ EBB to Mitford 18 November 1841, #873.
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Contemporaries found that the lack of moral template, and use of archaisms, made Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ a difficult read. The Barretts are typical in being excited by the 1837 accession of eighteen-year-old Victoria and subsequent palace affairs, from the Lady Flora Hastings scandal to the Queen’s marriage to Prince Albert and the births of her nine children.
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‘I want to write…’ EBB to Mitford 30 December 1844, #1797.
Education: Anglican National Schools have appeared since 1811, their Nonconformist equivalents in the Lancasterian System since 1808. By 1831, 1.25 million children attend Sunday school. In 1833 the government voted annual sums for state education; in 1840 the Grammar Schools Act expanded the state secondary curriculum to include literature and science. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (London, Chatto & Windus: 1957). ‘On April 11th, in 1844, Mr Locke, a wollen-draper; Mr. Moulton, a dealer in second-hand tools; Mr. Morrison, a City Missionary, and Mr Starey formed the beginnings of the Ragged Schools Union.’ https://www.raggeduniversity.co.uk/2012/08/08/history-ragged-schools-2/ [retrieved 15 March 2020].
Like EBB, Dickens is developing a reputation in
