‘The nurse says…’ RB to Arabella MB and Henrietta MB 9 March 1849, #2776. ‘& I comforted myself…The first cry…’ EBB to Anna Jameson 30 April 1849, #2785. Birth announcement: #2776. ‘Her perfect goodness…’ #2779. ‘Little fellow…’ RB to Arabella MB and Henrietta MB 13 March 1849, #2778. Doesn’t breast-feed: ‘Tho’ Ba is inconvenienced a little […] seeing that she does not nourish the infant herself’. #2779.
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Looking for balie: #2778. ‘Mighty woman…’ #2779. ‘Nobody was ever…’
EBB to Mitford 10 October 1848, #2749. ‘Just because…’ EBB to Julia Martin 14 May 1849, #2791. RB’s mother was already unconscious when the news of the birth arrived.
Chapman and Hall has taken on both poets from the dilatory Moxon. ‘One heap…’ Mitford to Charles Boner, 22 February 1847, SD1310. ‘Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but […] “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told!’ ” […] “My wife,” [Carlyle] writes, “has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”’ William Sharp, Life of Robert Browning (London: Walter Scott Ltd, 1897) chapter 5, pp. 93–113.
The Eclectic Review (August 1849), pp. 203–14; The Atlas (13 January 1849), pp. 33–34; The English Review (June 1849), pp. 354–86; Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art (December 1849), pp. 378–79; The Mornng Post (9 February 1849), p. 6.
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‘So longingly…’ EBB to Henrietta MB 23–25 May 1849, #2793. ‘If your…’ EBB to Sarianna Browning 2 May 1849, #2789.
Christening: ‘Ba told me I should greatly oblige her by not only giving our child that name, but by always calling him by it.’ He has a Nonconformist’s christening ‘at the French Evangelical Protestant Church, being the chapel of the Prussian Legation at Florence’, RB to Sarianna Browning 2 July 1849, #2800. Moïse Droin, the Genevan-born progressive educationalist and pastor of the Lutheran Evangelical Church 1835–50, has published liturgical verse. That it’s actually the German Lutheran Evangelical Church we know from Claire Keller, Une passion italienne: Le général Ostermann-Tolstoï et Maria Pagliari (Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 2016) page number not given: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gyIiCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT145&lpg=PT145&dq=Moïse+Droin&source=bl&ots=MwGYKIIhgm&sig=ACfU3U2DdPPX46kKg13BJ7zt4gb7fKkpeg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwias_iTgYXjAhX0QUEAHUXJBiw4ChDoATAFegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=Moïse%20Droin&f=false [retrieved 25 June 2019].
‘Nerves were unstrung…’ EBB to Arabella MB c.23–25 June 1849, #2797.
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‘Prices… Some suggestion of it…’ #2797. ‘Flush, Baby…’ EBB to Arabella MB 4 July 1849, #2801.
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‘…Bosnian’: Edmund Gosse, Critical Kit-kats (London: William Heinemann, 1896). ‘The truth is that though they were written several years ago, I never showed them to Robert till last [year] .. I felt shy about them altogether .. even to him. I had heard him express himself strongly against “personal” poetry & I shrank back.—[…] But when Robert saw them, he was much touched & pleased—&, thinking highly of the poetry, he did not like, .. could not consent, he said, that they should be lost to my volumes: so we agreed to slip them in under some sort of veil, & after much consideration chose the “Portuguese.” Observe—the poem which precedes them, is “Catarina to Camoens”. In a loving fancy, he had always associated me with Catarina, and the poem had affected him to tears, he said, again & again.’ EBB to Arabella MB 12 January 1851, #2899.
Robert ‘is much better’: EBB to Arabella MB 31 August 1849, #2812.
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The Christian Register (28 September 1850), p. 154. The English Review (December 1850), pp. 320–32. The Morning Post (13 December 1850), p. 2. The Athenaeum (30 November 1850), pp. 1242–44. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (October 1850), p. 714.
Despite fainting, at Christmas EBB was still ‘hoping that the poor little resolute creature may not be weakened by the peril she has run—.’ EBB to Henrietta MB 22 December 1849, #2826.
‘Generally obtuse…’ EBB to Henrietta (MB) Cook 15 April 1850, #2842.
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‘I grieve…’ #2826. Arabella MB to Henrietta (MB) Cook 8 April 1850, SD1420. ‘What emotion…’ #2842.
Advocacy of EBB for laureateship: The Athenaeum vol. 1 (1850), p. 585 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.25738790&view=1up&seq=591 [retrieved 26 June 2019]. Thought to be by either literary editor Henry Chorley (Martin Garrett, A Browning Chronology (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2000), p. 83) or T. K. Hervey (Kelley et al., online Chronology). ‘It’s curious…’ EBB to Arabella MB 14–16 June 1850, #2861. EBB goes on: ‘To say nothing of my own husband’s rights! At the same time it is just possible, that the choosers may escape from the difficulty of choice by choosing a woman, & in that case, may choose me. (They wont though.)’ Louise Bogan becomes the first female annual US Laureate ninety-five years from now.
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‘Appeals…’ EBB to Mary Louisa Boyle 5 December 1850, #2891; EBB to Miss Mitford 13 December 1850, #2895.
‘A hundred ounces…’ as estimated by Dr Harding. RB to Kenyon 29 July 1850, #2869. They now don’t really need the extra room that their landlord has let them rent since spring. ‘Perfectly white & black…’ EBB to Eliza Anne Ogilvy 28 August 1850, #2875. ‘Except the blackberries…’ EBB to Sarianna Browning c.7 September 1850, #2877.
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Poems (1850): The Athenaeum notes ‘Diffuseness, ruggedness, concetti, and at times colloquialisms’.
On 13 August 1850 the Brownings had lost one of their few intellectual and genuine Florentine friendships when the American feminist Margaret Fuller d’Ossoli, her husband, an Italian count, and their infant son, around Pen’s age, drowned off the American coast.
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Venice: ‘Robert & I were sitting outside the caffè in the piazza of St Mark last night at nearly ten, taking our coffee & listening to music, & watching the soundless crowd drift backwards & forwards through that grand square’; EBB to Arabella MB 16 May 1851, #2917. They’re travelling with the Ogilvies, Casa Guidi neighbours. ‘Robert & I… An old man…’ EBB to Arabella MB 5 June 1851, #2920.
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The quick route is via Basle and Strasbourg. Tennyson’s offer: his letter delights the Brownings because
