If Ba has already encountered difficulty in imagining herself into the role of woman poet, imagining herself as black woman poet must be, for her time and class, almost unthinkable. The only precursor the forty-year-old who’ll write this letter might have heard of is Phillis Wheatley, the African-born poet who was raised as a slave in Boston, Massachusetts and created a sensation in 1773, when she moved to London and published a poetry collection, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, under the patronage of the Countess of Huntingdon. She is in a way Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s alter ego, the kind of outlier, impossibly-best-case chance Elizabeth might have had if she’d been born enslaved. Later admired for her classicism, in her own time much of Wheatley’s celebrity was based precisely on the perceived anomaly of her gifts: ‘These poems display no astonishing works of genius, but when we consider them as the productions of a young, untutored African, who wrote them after six months careful study of the English language, we cannot but express our admiration.’
The exception is often viewed as an imposter, and the Barrett family disease is imposter syndrome. Ba’s father was only briefly exposed to the hurly-burly of school. Sent to Harrow at twelve, he left abruptly within a year. In the family version that will be passed down by Robert Browning, he was humiliatingly bullied by an older pupil for whom he was supposed to fag (that is, act as servant). Such bullying is endemic, indeed structural, to famous boys’ schools of the time; condoned as a way to ‘knock the corners off’ spoiled youngsters, teach discipline, and help them internalise the potency of hierarchy.
Papa certainly has faith in hierarchy. And, a decade on from Ba’s idyllic first Herefordshire summer, he sends his own eldest two sons to Charterhouse. But he himself did not cope at school: with what, exactly? Was he, for example, flogged – like a ‘slave’, as he may have experienced it? He is said to be dark complexioned, like Ba. Was there racism in the abuse? Or, more complex, might his family have feared an element of racism? In the family version the older boy who ‘punished’ the teenager, allegedly for burning his toast, was expelled: how hard did Harrow try to soothe a pushy colonial family?
Whatever happened, both brothers were withdrawn from school and, although Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett went up to Trinity Hall Cambridge at sixteen, his corners clearly never were knocked off. By the time he got to university, he may also have had a stiffening sense of his fatherless family as dysfunctional. Unlike his brother Sam, Papa will never return to Jamaica, the place where their own father scandalously separated from or possibly even deserted them and their mother. For Ba’s paternal grandfather Charles Moulton left soon after his third son had been conceived, and later his brother Robert Moulton defrauded Papa, the eldest of these sons, of up to £30,000, asserting that Charles had given him power of attorney, and laying claim to manage Edward’s estates while he was still a minor.
Despite all this, Charles has maintained some contact. By the time Ba turns seven he is living in England. Land tax records for 1812–13 show him residing at Epsom, Surrey, in a house belonging to the Barretts. But Ba never meets this missing grandparent. The begging letter he sends her father at this period elicits a brusque rebuttal. Still, his trickster figure resurfaces periodically. In The History of Parliament, where he earns a mention when his second son, Uncle Sam, serves as MP for Richmond, Yorkshire, he has become a ‘merchant, of Hammersmith, Mdx. and New York’. In fact he seems to hail from the island of Madeira, nearly 700 kilometres off the coast of Morocco, whose population at the time of his birth comprised primarily the descendants of early Portuguese settlers, and slaves from Guinea, Algeria and the Canary Islands.
How aware of this is Ba? Many years in the future she’ll fall in love with a man whose terms of endearment for this brown-eyed, dark-haired woman include ‘the little Portuguese’, a pet name eventually to be immortalised in the title of her Sonnets from the Portuguese. But her feelings about this part of her family history are mixed. From childhood, Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett signs herself ‘EBB’, omitting the initial M because, ‘I fell into the habit […] of forgetting that I was a Moulton, altogether.’ She’ll publish her breakthrough book, Poems (1844), as ‘Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’.
If Ba’s internalised racism whispers that her ancestry constitutes a ‘taint’, there’s just the faintest hint of another ‘taint’ too; one she may not even be aware of. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, with the not-disinterested John Graham-Clarke increasingly replacing other mentors, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett rushed into early marriage. But there’s an additional whiff of haste about this wedding, which took place on 14 May 1805, a fortnight shy of his twentieth birthday, and was announced only retrospectively. When Ba was born as early as decently possible just forty-two weeks later, on 6 March 1806, her father was still a couple of months short of his own legal majority. Her first brother, Bro, followed her with remarkable speed the following June, and such reproductive assiduity reminds us just how young a father Edward is.
But there is another possibility. Mary and Edward married – in style, despite the haste – at the newly consecrated, fashionable St Nicholas’s Church, Gosforth. Given this, and the local standing of Mary’s family, it’s somewhat surprising that, when baby Ba arrives, she’s christened privately at just three days old, on 9 March 1806. No evidence survives to suggest that she’s particularly frail. Noticeably, this firstborn isn’t celebrated with a holiday on the family’s plantations, though first son Bro will be. And when he’s christened, on
