Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Incredibly, in the spring of 1841 life does resume. Arabella, by now twenty-seven and full of energy, gets involved in charitable work with the local school. She organises ‘Tea & cake & a run in the grass’ for the children, just like the old days at Hope End. Henrietta, now turning thirty-two, disapproves because the clergyman involved is High Church. Still, she herself escapes the sickroom as often as she can: her own grief, for her own intimate Sam as much as for Bro, goes relatively unacknowledged, and even a walk around the block must offer some relief from constantly ministering to Elizabeth’s health and feelings. Friendship would be more restorative still. ‘Henrietta had a luncheon party here today. She goes out a good deal’, Elizabeth confides to George in April, ‘But one heart can’t judge for another.’ Indeed. She herself is not so stricken that she cannot sit for her portrait, though she enjoins her brother, ‘Say nothing of this—nor indeed of any thing else spoken by me today.’

  ‘Any thing else’ is Papa’s latest scheme to buy sight unseen an estate ‘reigning alone at the top of a mountain’, across the Herefordshire border in the Black Mountains of Wales, rather than free up assets to establish his sons in their own lives. Such a hilltop exile would be ‘the knell of […] perpetual exile’ for Elizabeth too: cut off from ‘medical advice’ and, perhaps even more importantly, literary London. Luckily the moment passes. So does a threatened worst of all worlds compromise by which she would forfeit Devonshire’s healthy air yet remain in provincial exile at Clifton on the edge of Bristol.

  Exile matters particularly because, encouraged by her literary friends, Elizabeth is starting to write again. She’s missed the deadline for contributing to Miss Mitford’s 1840 Findens’ Tableaux, but now she acquires a new author-correspondent who also provokes her to put pen to paper. Richard Hengist Horne, just three years her senior, has lived an absurdly adventurous life. Having failed to get into the East India Company, he joined the Mexican Navy in his early twenties, survived shipwreck, mutiny and on-board fire, and managed to break two ribs while swimming at Niagara Falls. Back in London, he writes all this up for magazines, then parlays it into a literary career, producing fiction, drama, history and epic verse, and editing periodicals. It’s all a far cry from Elizabeth’s seaside sickroom; yet the two develop a flourishing if mismatched friendship. It was a former Hope End governess, Mrs Orme, who put them in touch, forwarding a letter to Horne from Elizabeth; possibly she painted an alluring portrait of the invalid – or else stressed ‘the straightness of [her] prison’. But by now Elizabeth is widely published: peers like Horne are interested in what she’s doing anyway.

  In 1841 the two even try to collaborate on a verse-drama, Psyche Apocalypté, though this project loses momentum in the aftermath of Bro’s death. Nevertheless, Horne is a typically rackety literary male, and the friendship worries Miss Mitford. Responding to what may be either pure protectiveness or just a touch of jealousy, Elizabeth justifies it to her older friend in ways that strikingly prefigure how she’ll frame her relationship with Robert Browning:

  What claim had I in my solitude & sadness & helpless hopeless sickness, such as he believed it to be, upon a literary man overwhelmed with occupation & surrounded by friends & fitnesses of all sorts in London? Nevertheless from the first kind little note which he sent to me […] to ask me to allow him to help in amusing me, he has never forgotten or seemed to forget me.

  Miss Mitford is happier with – indeed she’s the instigator of – another new relationship; one of the most enduring of Elizabeth’s life, and a real turning point in her recovery. In December 1840 she offers the invalid a six-month-old spaniel from a litter sired by her own pet Flush. Elizabeth, who’s just as capable of havering self-sabotage as her father, does her characteristic one step forward and two steps back of shyness and renunciation: the puppy, bred ‘for sporting purposes’ would be ‘exposed to a martyrdom, whether in this room, or hereafter, in […] the London Streets prison’. And yet … and yet. She’s already taking advice from the local coaching inn:

  Send him by the railroad to Basingstoke, with a direction on the card .. ‘to be forwarded by the first Exeter coach’—& the coachman both there & at Exeter will be commissioned to feed him & see to his comfort generally. There is no danger […]—that is, if he is packed carefully in a hamper.

  Which is modern indeed of her – the narrow-gauge Basingstoke line is a primitive affair, barely eighteen months old – but also impractical, since there is as yet no station at Reading.

  Not surprisingly, when he finally arrives in Torquay at the start of 1841, Flush junior seems shaken by his journey. Additionally, a local panic about mad dogs makes it dangerous to let him out. So he starts by messing round the house. But soon:

  A shawl thrown upon a chair by my fireside, is his favorite place—& there he sits most of the day .. coming down occasionally to be patted or enjoy a round of leaps. Such a quiet, loving intelligent little dog—& so very very pretty!

  Spaniels of all breeds are highly strung. But Flush, cutely long-eared, with a white blazon on his chest and a mismatched head too dark for his ears, seems surprisingly docile. He will end up as one of the most widely travelled dogs of the nineteenth century, and by April is already becoming a domestic personality:

  He wants to lie on my bed—& most particularly objects to being shut up at night all by himself in the dark. […] & whenever a door down stairs has happened to be left unclosed, up he comes to this door in the middle of the night, shaking the handle with his two paws until Arabel, who sleeps on a sofa by my side, gets up to let him in.

  It’s a dog’s life. At the end of April Flush goes adventuring in the Torquay woods, gets lost, and is found again; in July he acquires ‘a kitten for a playmate! […] Think of his carrying this little white, snowball of a kitten, no larger than his head, carrying it about the room in his mouth—& playing with it for hours together!’ He’s become a charmer who ‘creeps up in his usual irresistible way, & lays his head down on my pillow’, and cocky with it:

  He is fond of milk—& when any is brought to me in a cup he wont let me drink a whole half without a hint that the rest belongs to him. He waits till his turn comes, till he thinks it is come—and then if I loiter, as I do sometimes pretend to do, Mr Flush tries to take possession of the cup by main force.

  Confident at home, outdoors he has ‘not, in fact, reached the point of heroism’:

  if a cat stands & stares at us, we retreat prudently—if it runs our way by accident however free of hostile intention, we cry out piteously—if a stranger tries to pat our pretty head, we shrink away.

  If Elizabeth, who feels rather the same about strangers herself, seems to be overinvolved with her new pet, that’s partly because her isolated life still lacks incident. But things are changing. Her letters are once again alert and intellectual. She’s ardently re-engaged with writing, and is reading widely. In July 1841 when not one but two mutual friends, Miss Mitford and John Kenyon, send her Robert Browning’s new poem, ‘Pippa Passes’, it behoves her to be tactful. But she can’t resist noting ‘an occasional manner,’ even though:

  There are fine things in it—& the presence of genius, never to be denied!—At the same time it is hard .. to understand—is’nt it?—Too hard?—I think so!—And the fault of Paracelsus,—the defect in harmony, is here too. After all, Browning is a true poet—[…] and if any critics have, as your critical friend wrote to you, ‘flattered him into a wilderness & left him’ they left him alone with his genius […] the genius—the genius—it is undeniable—

  All this adds up to a startling resurrection. Best of all, at long last Elizabeth is to leave Torquay. After the usual to and fro – ‘Delay—delay—delay!—[…] We cant go on at all without stopping short’ – Papa finally lets her chose where she wants to live and, desperate not to spend another winter in Devon, she decides to gamble on coming back to London – and by road. After all, the special ‘patent’ carriage her father has ordered – he will join the travellers himself at Exeter
– has a bed in it, ‘and its springs are numberless’. Dr Scully has set a deadline for safe travel before the autumn closes in and so on 1 September Elizabeth, Arabella, Crow and Flush set out for home.

  They arrive in Wimpole Street on the afternoon of 11 September 1841. It is ‘the loosening of chains whose iron entered into the soul’, a chance for Elizabeth to break with everything that has happened to her in Torquay: bereavement, depression, and three years of isolation and illness. ‘It was the opening of the dungeon to the captive! I looked at the chimney pots & at the smoke-issuing of this London .. all I cd see from my bed .. with the sort of exaltation & half-incredulity with which you have looked at the Alps!’ The patient is probably almost as frail as when she left London but, though still spitting a little blood, she seems to have shaken off her cough. As after the Gloucester interlude, at least some of her weakness must simply be the result of being kept virtually bedbound.

  Only Flush has a bad beginning. He dislikes the Barrett men:

  and, what was rather worse, he thought it necessary (being a moralist & a traveller) to express his disapprobation most loudly & tumultuously—starting up, whether by night or day, everytime he heard a footstep, throwing himself upon my shoulder & barking like a pack of hounds […] I was in despair—not so much for myself as for Papa who is not perhaps very particularly fond of dogs & most particularly, of silence.

  Luckily, he calms down before Papa can ban him and decides that, like his mistress, ‘He likes London, he says, very much indeed.’ And Elizabeth settles in to the delicious task of catching up with London literary gossip. Less than a fortnight after her arrival she’s already up to speed, and is filling in Miss Mitford on the breakdown of Robert Southey the Poet Laureate’s marriage. As 1841 ends, Elizabeth is retrieving the central part of herself.

  [Tain]

  The tain of a mirror is the obstruction – traditionally a silvering – that stops the glass giving you a clear view through to the other side, and instead throws you back your own reflection. We could say that the obstruction in a two-way hospital mirror is the secrecy in which the people on one side of the glass – the staff – keep themselves in order not to be seen by the people on the other side.

  The staff on the dark side of the two-way mirror can’t see their own selves at all. For them, unlike for the people they’re studying, there is no reflection, only observation. When I worked in mental healthcare units I particularly disliked using these mirrors. If a gaze must be met in order for us to encounter another person, I used to wonder, how on earth can we get to know them while we’re hiding behind blacked-out glass?

  From the staff side of the glass I could see the people I’d just been working with, in the room I’d just left, as clearly as if they were on stage. Yet they weren’t acting. Actors direct their actions towards us as we sit in the darkness beyond the fourth wall of the footlights; the two-way mirror claimed paradoxically to prevent this happening. Actors consent to our sitting there in the dark; the two-way mirror did not feel consensual. On the contrary, it seemed to break the carefully worked-out group contract in which everyone was involved in an equal level of self-disclosure and what went on inside the group room stayed inside the group room. I felt I was failing the group, that I was a cheat, a voyeur, because they couldn’t see me watching them.

  What made it worse was that I was getting the people in the room to write poetry, that intimate gesture of self-disclosure and trust. The power of the lyric tradition comes from the way it explodes the distinction between the poet and her reader, the poem and its auditor, often using the first person singular as a kind of collective pronoun; a shared viewpoint. I says the poem, stepping forward to speak on behalf of us all.

  That’s a huge risk for the poet to take, because who is to speak for everyone? In the mid-nineteenth century Elizabeth Barrett Browning took this risk by writing and publishing as a woman. She exposed herself to misunderstanding, criticism and ridicule. In the day room, group members were taking a risk by writing as the repeatedly marginalised individuals many of them were; exposing themselves and their writing to being thought of as symptomatic cases, not poets.

  What could possibly make up for this? In writing about Elizabeth I feel as though I’m at her service, just as I used to feel I was at the service of my hospital writers. I used to picture myself as a tabula rasa, the blank page for them to write on. Of course, that wasn’t true. I was bringing all sorts of things into the group room with me: I just couldn’t see myself when I was in there. The odd paradox I had slowly to learn was that, far from being self-indulgent, self-examination made me more useful to the group members. Which is true of biography, too. However hard we think about Elizabeth, we only know what we can know about her. I may be at my subject’s service, but she herself is not here.

  Book Six: How to be dutiful

  ‘Male poets are preferable, straining less

  And telling more.’ – LADY WALDEMAR

  When Elizabeth shuts the door to her ‘little slip of sitting room’, she shuts out much of the imperfect world. Those she loves and depends on come in and out, of course: Crow, Flush, Papa, her brothers and sisters. But the battle of wills over who can stay with her is finished. No more wheedling and bribing: no more ponies or riding habits. Above all nobody to be responsible for, as she feels she was responsible for Bro’s presence, and death, in Torquay. At thirty-six Elizabeth has absolutely no longing for a household of her own, like the one Mary Russell Mitford struggles to maintain.

  Her unexpected recovery from the near-fatal illness which followed those catastrophic losses at Torquay has left her grateful for much less than her child self would have settled for. Actual domestic comfort and care replace dreams of Balkan adventure; settled family life frees her to write. And so she has every reason to be complicit in Papa’s increasingly apparent desire to keep his children close. Her surviving brothers are busy working – Charles away in Jamaica, George as a barrister – travelling (in Henry’s case), or studying: Sette to become a barrister, Occy an architect. Her sisters have a home to run. Only Elizabeth, set aside by illness, is uniquely free to do as she wishes. It turns out that ‘the duties belonging to my femineity’ don’t even include sewing. ‘You can scarcely imagine, my awkwardness when I pretent to work! Such pricking of fingers, & knotting of thread, & sowing backwards in certain evolutions, instead of forwards!’

  The busy household beyond her door blurs to a consoling thrum she’s known since childhood. ‘Domestic love only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass’, as she later puts it. Besides, through the imagined worlds of poetry Elizabeth not only escapes but feels she transcends the slight dullness of daily life. It’s small wonder her recent work has tended to revisit that ‘sacred song with a devotional ecstacy’ which The Athenaeum noted of The Seraphim. The way this poetry turns repeatedly from the often burdensome embodied self to an uplift of spiritual feeling can seem awkward and dated to the twenty-first-century reader; for the women who’s doing it, it is an act of will, a lift-off from life.

  At the same time she can’t deny the highly material facts of living in Wimpole Street, at the heart of one of London’s smartest residential districts. The capital surrounds her with its rattle and hum. Writing friends surround her too. Suddenly easily accessible, she no longer needs to cook up projects like the ill-fated Psyche Apocalypté in order to keep in touch. They can visit. If ill-health prevents her from visiting in return – well, that’s a useful fig leaf for the twin obstacles of Papa’s protectiveness and her own shyness. And the writing world seems to scent out this new proximity, as if simply being in London makes her altogether more real. Predictably, Mary Russell Mitford is among the first to visit, just six weeks after Elizabeth’s return, staying in Wimpole Street for two nights at the end of October 1841. The two enjoy a good catch-up – though disappointingly without Flush senior, who wasn’t allowed on the train: ‘How uncivilized the world is still!’

  Miss Mitford’s friendship and
support, including annual commissions for Findens’ Tableaux, has almost exclusively sustained Elizabeth’s writing through her Torquay exile. But now, as that writing continues to develop, Elizabeth begins to spread her wings by almost imperceptible degrees beyond this loving mentorship. By autumn 1841 the success of The Seraphim is established fact and, three years on from its appearance, Elizabeth is beginning to receive substantial commissions. The Athenaeum has published a couple of her poems and now its energetic and literary-minded editor Charles Wentworth Dilke agrees her pitch for a feature on Greek Christian poets, ‘(only begging me to keep away from theology —) & suggesting a subsequent reviewal of English poetical literature, from Chaucer down to our times’, as she tells Mr Boyd, who remains willy-nilly her go-to for things classical. The resulting long essay is published in three parts in February and March 1842, and it is followed between June and August by a five-part survey of English verse, which Elizabeth titles ‘The Book of the Poets’.

  The ‘Book’ is, she realises, a crack at canon forming, and in an influential publication too. So she takes it seriously. The ideal anthology she pictures excludes more drama, but includes more religious poetry, than its predecessors. She manages to slip in a vignette of ‘Robert’ (today usually held to be ‘William’) Langland, mediaeval author of Piers Plowman, as a Malvern poet, which allows her to claim her own home ground at Hope End as the birthplace of English poetry: