Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Trepsac is a French family name, intriguingly associated in the eighteenth-century Caribbean most strongly with the leader of the Dominican Order on Martinique: race and religion are as entangled for Treppy as for the Barrett family ‘proper’. While Nonconformism offers a form of moderate radicalism that particularly suits the Barretts’ ambiguous social position, in the 1830s social upheaval and religious revival are tangling on all sides. In Dublin, biblical literalists calling themselves Plymouth Brethren are rejecting the Anglicanism of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency; at the ‘other’ end of Revivalism the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement is founded by John Keble and John Henry Newman in 1833. Radical spirituality supplies drama to the drab lives of the labouring poor even as it denies their aspirations. This is a moment when Britain seems poised to follow its continental neighbours, and former colonies in North America, into violent social revolution. But Nonconformist Revivalism preaches individual self-determination rather than political reformation. (It objects to slavery as a check on individual rights, not as a social failure.) So its social effect is stabilising rather than radicalising; it puts a brake on the political consciousness of the working people for whom it’s the only access to ideas, education and collective participation.

  In Sidmouth Elizabeth, too, is finding that Nonconformism offers her both a new community and ideas to explore. Marsh Congregational Chapel, where she worships, was built in 1810 and boasts an active congregation. Its minister, the Revd George Hunter, a charismatic preacher and driven leader, excels at eliciting bequests for the thriving Sunday school. He’s also the perfect object for a crush, since his wife is absent, ‘removed […] by a stroke worse than death .. madness! & there is no hope of a restoration’, and he has a little daughter, Mary, who turns ten in 1836. Sure enough, he soon turns up in Elizabeth’s letters. Evidently, the fashionable congregation may donate to appeals but don’t pay a generous salary: his ‘circumstances are miserably straitened, & the only apparent opening lies [in] pupils’, as she notes later, while soliciting teaching work for him. With plenty of experience of schooling younger siblings herself, she now secures permission to tutor little Mary Hunter, who goes on to become a lifelong family favourite. Papa even gives the sisters permission to accompany Hunter when he preaches out of town.

  Once again Elizabeth has set up, right under her father’s nose, a scenario in which she serves as helper to a man who inspires her intellectually. But nothing indicates that the Revd Hunter is manipulative like Mr Boyd. Indeed, for all his charismatic intensity, surviving correspondence suggests a man more vulnerable than in control. Nervy and needy, like his wife he too will end his days in an asylum. And so Elizabeth’s friendship with him doesn’t turn into obsession but remains a conduit through which her interests and emotions can become more public and dispersed. In fact, we could say that hers is a case in which the Revd Hunter’s ministry pays off. As doctrinal debates displace classical poetics in appealing to her intellectual side, the Sidmouth poems are markedly more spiritual than those that precede and follow them. A new, devotional tone appears in her correspondence.

  This same tone brings her closer again to her father. Each is now seeking solace and meaning in a life whose main project seems to have been cut short. Resignation feels like the meanest of virtues, a piece-by-piece renunciation of any number of hopes. But it can also be a gesture, a way to bundle up everything that’s risky, unspeakable or uncertain into one big statement of abdication. In Sidmouth in 1833–34 Papa is preparing for a future as a man of reduced significance, and Elizabeth for a spinster life of indifferent health.

  She also has her first taste of failure. In May 1833 her translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound, together with some of her own poems, is issued by a proper, unsubsidised publisher, A. J. Valpy, in his Classical Library. It’s an exciting milestone, and the submission is Papa’s idea. One reason Valpy accepted the manuscript may have been a small but significant poetic triumph that Elizabeth had recently achieved. In January 1832 The Times rushed her poem on cholera into print a mere four days after receiving it. But when, the following month, she made the Aeschylus translation, it was her turn to rush, hurrying to complete the work within a fortnight in order to impress Boyd – a misjudgement all the more understandable in those emotionally chaotic last months at Hope End. Now the book is out, and the few reviews it receives are far from positive. Worst of all is The Athenaeum’s single-sentence notice: ‘Take warning by the author before us.’

  Perhaps this is a necessary failure. It certainly helps reset the direction of Elizabeth’s work. She’s twenty-eight; the time for classical studies, however advanced, is clearly over. If she doesn’t step up now as a poet in her own right she never will. It can only help that within the year that inveterate classicist Mr Boyd will at last have left for London. Even so, such resets take time. Outside the window beyond her writing desk, the seasons pass. ‘Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea & the shadow of the hills make it a peaceful one.’ Elizabeth finally emerges from a period almost of dormition in September 1835, with the publication in The New Monthly Magazine of ‘Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon, and Suggested by her “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans”’. It’s the first in a flurry of magazine publications over the next couple of years: not only poems but ‘A Thought on Thoughts’, the virtuoso prose essay that so failed to impress Boyd.

  It is also the first public outing of a theme that Elizabeth will make her own two decades from now in Aurora Leigh: the figure of the woman poet. ‘Stanzas’ is a praise-song for Landon, to frame the one that Landon wrote for the poet and writer Felicia Hemans, doubling up the homage as if to go twice as far as any other poetic tribute: that ‘exquisition’ Adonais, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ode for John Keats, for example. And as in her ode for Byron, there’s a secret brilliance to her technique. The repeated ‘dying fall’ she rhymes with is no accident. She uses the strong-weak stress pattern that, when it appears like this at the ends of lines, is called ‘feminine’. A hobbled, ‘feminine’ rhythm for an ode to female role models:

  Thou bay-crowned living One that o’er the bay-crowned Dead are bowing,

  And o’er the shadeless moveless brow the vital shadow throwing,

  And o’er the sighless songless lips the wail and music wedding.

  Meanwhile home life is changing. Early in 1835 Belle Vue is sold over the family’s heads, and the usual parental prevarication – Elizabeth calls it ‘a state of most metaphysical doubtfulness’ – leads them back to Rafarel House for six months. In December 1835 they finally move to London. The three-year stay at the Devonshire seaside has been happier than any of them could have imagined when they left Hope End. But it’s been an interlude. Now is the time to consolidate their new life: no longer landed gentry perhaps, but still wealthy international merchants. The men of the family must be in the capital. George graduates this year and has to study for the Bar. When they’re not taking turns in Jamaica, the three eldest sons – Bro, Sam and Stormie – all need to be in London with Papa to manage the family sugar business. The younger boys will be closer to educational possibilities in the city. And the daughters, of course, are seen as having entirely portable lives. In any case, for them this move is not unattractive. Sidmouth, with its ‘quadrilling and cricketing’, may have been kept at arm’s length by Papa, but it’s given them a sniff of society. London seems rich with the possibility of more.

  For Elizabeth, three months short of her thirtieth birthday, the city represents literary success. She’s right in more ways than she perhaps realises. Witnessing her slow emotional and literary development can be frustrating. We have to remember how each step in this all but self-taught progress is actually a giant stride. Gradus ad Parnassum. And now, pushed and pulled by the contradictory expectations of intellect and femininity, as she stands on the brink of her thirties she needs countervailing influences from beyond restrictive family life more than ever. In crowded London, where all sorts of lives go on cheek by jowl, she�
��ll be unable to escape the truth that Papa’s is not the only way of doing things.

  Still, domestic uncertainty doesn’t end straight away. Her father starts by leasing a house in Marylebone for four months, to test the family’s ‘capacities for living the natural term of man’s life in this smokygen and foggygen’. Cautious in every way, he has picked the district he and the family know best: where his mother lived with Treppy for nearly four decades, where Papa and Uncle Sam, later Bro and young Sam, joined them on school breaks, and where Uncle Sam returned to stay whenever Parliament was sitting during his first three years as an MP.

  The Barretts move to 74 Gloucester Place on 2 December 1835. It’s a bad time of year to arrive in dirty, hectic London. The house Papa has taken is a four-storey mid-terrace with basement, faced in modest brown London brick and standing in a grid of prosperous but almost identical terraced dwellings that crisscross this low-lying west central area. No public gardens or planned vistas relieve the urban claustrophobia. Though the district includes some of the smartest houses in London, it’s a shock for Elizabeth to exchange ‘the sea shore, which I love more than ever, now that I cannot walk on it’, for ‘that long & high brick wall opposite’ and the ‘dash & din’ of a city ‘wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist, so closely that I have had scarcely a glimpse of its countenance since we came’. Besides, the house, like Fortfield Terrace, is jerry-built. Within a year a storm will blow ‘the chimney thro’ the skylight, into the entrance passage. You may imagine the crashing effect of the bricks bounding from the staircase downwards breaking the stone steps in the process—in addition to the falling in of twenty four large panes of glass, frames & all!’

  Still, wealth conjures up compensations. The next summer, to make up for the lack of a country view, Elizabeth’s father imports from Jamaica for her ‘two Barbary doves […] in whose voices I seem to hear the waters & waving leaves […] so beautiful & soft & calm.’ More generally people-scape is replacing landscape. She’s entering an era of important new friendships that will replace old habits – and old ties. Although Boyd is less than two miles away in Camden, contact quickly tails off in a series of excuses; Elizabeth has ‘such a cough again! that I should hasten it to a wrong conclusion, by going out today’, or is ‘quite disabled by a very bad cold which has kept me in my bedroom all today’.

  But that ‘again!’ sounds an alarm. After less than a month in the city Elizabeth has already developed a chronic cough. Smog is a serious, even life-threatening problem. Yet, despite discovering that London’s pollution does indeed pose a risk, Papa fails once again to take decisive action. The family will remain at Gloucester Place for two and a half years. And when they do move, in May 1838, it will be to similar acommodation even closer to the centre of London. The costs to Elizabeth of these decisions will be, as future feminists would say, ‘written on the body’.

  For now though, as friends and visitors help put it on the map, Marylebone is slowly becoming home. One of the first in touch is John Kenyon. A decade after he had stumbled across his young relative’s poetic talents, he is eager to welcome her into his richly gregarious, literary life. He has turned the home he shares with his brother-in-law, just a few blocks east at 39 Devonshire Place, into a kind of writers’ salon built on personal friendship. Kenyon happened to settle near Nether Stowey in the early days of his marriage, and there befriended many first-generation Romantic writers through Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the time he introduces Elizabeth to the London literary scene in 1835, his friends include Charles and Mary Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, who often stays with him when in England, Robert Southey, whom he will accompany on a tour of France in 1838, and William Wordsworth. His circle also includes a number of American writers. Julia Ward Howe, who will later write ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, describes him as ‘a Maecenas of the period’. He also knows less famous but still established writers and intellectuals, such as the poet-dramatist and civil servant Bryan Waller Procter, theologians Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, and the lawyer, journalist and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, through whom everyone in the circle is just a handshake away from the German Romantic poets, among them Goethe, Herder and Schiller, whom Robinson met during a youthful Grand Tour.

  In short, it’s precisely the distinguished writing world of which Elizabeth dreamt when she was a girl in Herefordshire, and its doors are suddenly open to her. Her instant, characteristic response is to be overwhelmed by shyness. Luckily, Kenyon persists. He’s a generous man: one measure of his philanthropy is that his charitable donations are dispersed impersonally, by a board he appoints. And he has the gift of friendship. Crabb Robinson describes ‘the face of a Benedictine monk and the joyous talk of a good fellow [who] delights at seeing at his hospitable table every variety of literary notabilities, and therefore he has been called “a feeder of lions”.’

  Elizabeth may be nervous of literary lions, but within a month of moving to London she’s already writing to Thomas Noon Talfourd to thank him for leaving a copy of his privately printed tragedy, Ion, for her at their shared publisher Valpy’s. A decade Elizabeth’s senior, Talfourd is a barrister and writer who has already published a body of literary and legal journalism. His new play will premiere at Covent Garden in May to ‘success complete. Ellen Tree and Macready were loudly applauded, and the author had every reason to be satisfied.’ Talfourd’s after-theatre party is ‘largely attended by actors, lawyers, and dramatists’, according to Crabb Robinson, who’s there along with ‘quantities of poets’ including William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor – and the young Robert Browning, a twenty-four-year-old newcomer, who had published the monodrama Paracelsus to critical acclaim the previous summer and is included in the festivities with a toast.

  Elizabeth won’t be at the first-night party, of course; but she thanks Talfourd for Ion with a letter that combines effusiveness with criticism: ‘Dare I observe that the most perceptible defect appears to me to arise from a redundancy in the language? May I observe besides that the power of concentrating thought in poetry, is a more essential one, than as it is generally estimated?’ Dare she indeed, even though as it happens she’s right? But Talfourd seems to have been more amused than offended by this precocious criticism. He keeps the letter in an album: where nearly a decade from now, and to her intense mortification, Robert Browning and Elizabeth’s brother George will stumble upon it together.

  But in the spring of 1836, the young Robert Browning is being just as clumsy as Elizabeth. The pair are tyros at the same moment, if not together. Two days after the Ion party, Robert writes to William Charles Macready, the great classical and Shakespearean tragedian who’s playing the lead, offering to write him ‘a Tragedy […] to be ready by the first of November next’ on ‘any subject […] any character of event with which you are predisposed to sympathize’. This bumptiouness pays off: a year from now, Macready will join the management of Covent Garden, becoming a powerful advocate for living writers’ work; and on 1 May 1837 Browning’s blank verse drama Strafford, with Macready in the title role, will open at the house for a successful five-night run.

  For the next few years, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning – a young man six years her junior, but whose profile is enhanced by this kind of going out and about – will move in parallel through London’s culture-making circles. When they read each other, it’s from within the same rich, elbowing world of poetic competitors; a cat’s cradle of repeated crisscross encounters. This summer, Kenyon lends Elizabeth Robert’s Paracelsus and she:

  wd wish for more harmony & rather more clearness & compression—concentration—besides: but I do think & feel that the pulse of poetry is full & warm & strong in it, […] a height & depth of thought—& sudden repressed gushings of tenderness which suggest to us a depth beyond.

  Yet they never quite meet. Elizabeth’s gender, her shyness and her tendency to suffer chest infections all mean that she doesn’t actually enter most of the rooms in which her gifted peers join the
senior poets of the day to toast, gossip or backstab each other.

  The fact that she does manage to participate so fully despite this speaks to the quality of her writing. By now, au fait with how the literary world works, she’s publishing regularly in literary magazines. These new poems, starting with her ‘Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon…’ ode, are attracting critical attention. In July 1836, The Athenaeum’s ‘Our Weekly Gossip of Literature and Art’ singles out her ballad, ‘The Romaunt of Margret’, published that month in The New Monthly Magazine: ‘We have not read such a ballad for many a day; and if its writer will only remember, that in poetry manner is a blemish to be got rid of, […] he (or she) may rank very high—what if we say, among the highest?’

  And Kenyon continues to make introductions. In May, two days after Talfourd’s premiere, he persuades her to come to dinner at Devonshire Place to meet Walter Savage Landor and William Wordsworth. Against the tide of fashion, she still admires the latter greatly:

  You might think me affected if I told you all I felt in seeing the living face. His manners are very simple; & his conversation not at all prominent—if you quite understand what I mean by that. I do myself—for I saw at the same time—Landor, the brilliant Landor! & felt the difference between great genius and eminent talent.