Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Wimpole Street is smart, but it’s no gated community. On 13 September 1843 Crow arrives home in floods of tears from walking Flush. Trotting loose behind her in busy Mortimer Street, a few blocks from home, the little dog has been pounced on and stolen. All the maid knows is that she heard his stranger-alarm bark, and when she turned round he had vanished. Elizabeth is distraught and, while she sobs herself into a fever, the three boys still at home – Sette, Alfred and Henry – get on the case. They have ‘Missing’ notices printed up within hours, and post them up all round the neighbourhood the same day. But there’s no news, and Elizabeth passes a sleepless night.

  The next day, however, the brothers make some more worldly-wise enquiries. It quickly becomes clear that they’re dealing with organised crime. Sette meets ‘dark men in dark alleys; & [derives] a fallacious hope from the ultra blackguardism of a certain Jim Green who talked pure Alsatian [a term for thieves’ slang], & was just setting out for a dog-fight to meet “lots of dogstealers”’. Having barristers in the family is useful for tracing underworld contacts, and the correct intermediary turns out to be a gunmaker in New Bond Street. William Bishop ‘is said to be “a highly respectable man”, & keeps a petition against dogstealers in general’ – something surely helpful for thieves looking for animals to steal. Nevertheless, he puts Alfred in touch with a soi-disant cobbler named Taylor. Taylor is the leader of The Fancy, a gang who kidnap the pets of the rich and ‘who make four thousand a year by the trade’. He’s already stolen ‘Mrs Chichester’s little black dog’ from next door to the Barretts, and established the going rate for ransoming ‘feelings’ is ‘five pounds down’. He even announces to Henry that his gang have been ‘two years on the watch for Flush’.

  On the second evening of the emergency, Taylor arrives at number 50 while the family (apart, as usual, from Elizabeth) are sitting down to dinner. He claims to have ‘found’ Flush: for five pounds he will take Alfred to the dog. Unfortunately, Alfred knows Elizabeth has only two sovereigns to hand. Worse, Papa, overhearing the bargaining, storms into the hallway yelling that the family will ‘not give a farthing more than two sovereigns’, and that Taylor and the dog can go to hell. ‘Papa said, “Say nothing of this to Ba”—but the voices were loud.’ Upstairs in her little room, Elizabeth passes another sleepless night. But in the morning, once her father has left home on business, she sends the other three sovereigns to William Bishop’s. It’s enough to raise Taylor, who turns up again at Wimpole Street to demand a final half-sovereign and to agree a rendezvous with Henry that evening at the gun shop where, sure enough, Flush is waiting. Henry brings him home by cab.

  The little dog is filthy and traumatised after two and a half days without food or water, but he turns out to have suffered no long-term ill effects. Almost as good, when Papa arrives home that evening, rather than interrogating the family about what he knows perfectly well must have happened, he is delighted. For this weak, anxious man the dual problem – of his favourite daughter losing her pet, and of having backed himself into a non-negotiable position – has been solved for him. Worldly-wise Henry had even arranged to be followed by a plain-clothed officer who would arrest Taylor the moment he had Flush; though this plan was foiled when the policeman got the time wrong. All in all, it’s a joyous reunion, and when Taylor’s gang steal Flush again, a year later, in October 1844, the Barrett siblings will swing into confident action, recovering him within forty-eight hours without letting their father know – although the ransom will have risen to seven pounds.

  By then, though, the intimates of his doggy world will have changed. For in the middle of March 1844 Crow announces that she is leaving. She has married the Wimpole Street butler, William Treherne, a familiar face who’s been with the family all his life – since his father was a Hope End tenant farmer – and who’s risen from stable boy to head of the household servants. ‘Quite above all aspersion’, and ‘honest, & good in the common way,’ he’s also ‘a handsome young man, as perhaps you have observed,’ Elizabeth comments, perhaps tartly, to Miss Mitford. But servants are expected to be unmarried and Elizabeth Treherne, as she now is, wed in secret at the end of 1843. More, she was already three months pregnant on her wedding day. Now the wedding is confessed – but not the pregnancy – and Treherne leaves immediately upon this announcement to set up a bakery, which the Barretts promise to patronise, at a new home in Camden Town. Meanwhile ‘Crow’, as Elizabeth can’t stop calling her, works out a protracted leave. She’s already six months pregnant. In May, entering her eighth month, and on top of working the early hours of a bakery shift, she continues to walk the miles between Camden and Wimpole Street as part of a very gradual handover.

  Which may in part express her own ambivalence. It’s a shock to have to leave home and an absorbing, secure job just because you’ve married, especially as this was a shotgun wedding which left no time to prepare emotionally. Besides, pregnancy hormones keep the young mother-to-be emotional. She weeps copiously. Hers has been a demanding role. Elizabeth is always at home, has few other companions, and is never far from being bedbound. But nursing her successfully through a series of crises has made the two women’s relationship unusually human. It has the intensity of absolute dependency on Elizabeth’s side, while for Crow, a bright, opinionated woman, it has been an opportunity to access ideas and the books that Elizabeth lends or reads aloud to her – although this is probably less flattering than it seems, since Elizabeth also reads aloud to Flush and even tries to teach him to read.

  To prevent her mistress getting worked up, Crow’s final day passes unannounced, and 25 April 1844 is full of glorious chaos anyway, as Miss Mitford at last brings Flush senior to visit Elizabeth and Flush junior. But Elizabeth is upset all the same. She picks at the secrecy surrounding Crow’s marriage, even though she must understand perfectly well that it’s essential for people in service to get arrangements in place before they’re dismissed into the world with no means of support. But if Crow ever had contemplated confiding in her, witnessing what happened when Miss Mitford’s maid and groom got into a similar scrape at the start of this year would have put her off. Elizabeth’s overreaction is the cri de coeur of someone who desperately wants those she has most to do with to love her:

  of the want of chastity,—I say nothing at all. I even can conceive of the chastest of women sacrificing her reputation to the love of one man. […] But the train of deception […] is a different matter—& the more I think of the heart, which could […] so plot on, plot on, .. the wedding ring on the finger & the lover behind the door.

  After the wedding ring is on Elizabeth Crow’s finger, her successor, a fellow northerner, is chosen. Elizabeth Wilson has arrived from Northumberland in service to Susanna Maria, a Barrett cousin by marriage who’s staying at Wimpole Street because her husband, Samuel Goodin Barrett, is in danger of arrest over another contested will. Henrietta, seeing someone ‘gentle-voiced, & of a bright & kind countenance’, responds to the emergency of Crow’s departure by poaching Wilson on her sister’s behalf. Elizabeth herself is a little less fulsome, though her reservations will prove unfounded: ‘Very willing, very anxious, .. almost too anxious! very gentle, .. almost too gentle! a little failing in the vivacity & cheerfulness I like about me. I am afraid I shall never like her as well as Crow.’

  At which juncture we must pause to accuse one of these young women – Crow? Or Wilson? – over the development of Elizabeth’s signature hairdo. In the 1840s barley curls, long vertical ringlets hanging over the ears, move from the nursery to the heads of grown women. So half of Elizabeth’s hair is massed in a chignon low down at the nape of her neck, while the rest hangs in thick, dark curls either side of her face. It’s a tumbling, girlish look, flattering to a woman in her late thirties who wishes to hide somewhat behind her coiffure. Its cheek-hugging also echoes the lacy side panels of invalid bonnets: perhaps Elizabeth finds the familiar feeling comforting. Unfortunately, though, while fashions continue to change, her hairstyle will not. By the
time she’s in her fifties it will long have ceased to be flattering, and will have come to look, if anything, like a homage to Flush.

  In 1844 however, barley curls are fashionable. And so is Elizabeth herself, as a new collection of her work enjoys literary success. Edward Moxon publishes Poems on 13 August 1844, and this time the reviews are still more numerous and enthusiastic. She receives substantial coverage in sixteen British periodicals. Moxon’s offprints are published simultaneously in New York by Henry G. Langley, who gives the book the title of its long opening poem, ‘A Drama of Exile’. The young country is sensitive enough about its relationship with Britain for The United States Magazine and Democratic Review to quote from Elizabeth’s dedication:

  ‘My love and admiration have belonged to the great American people,’ these are memorable words on the lips of Elizabeth Barrett […] America is not marble nor stone that she should be insensible to a good will so earnest and true!

  Other American reviews appear in The Atlas, The Knickerbocker, and Godey’s Lady’s Book – and in the 7 December issue of Evening Mirror, where a short piece thought to have been written by Edgar Allan Poe concludes: ‘We do not believe that there is a poetical soul embodied in this world that […] sees further out, toward the periphery permitted to angels, than Miss Barrett. Yet you would get a verdict of insanity upon her from any jury in Christendom.’ This oddly mixed message comes from the same pen as an anonymous front-page rave a couple of months earlier:

  There will doubtless be criticism by Lowell and Poe—[…] of a certain new book, just published by the Langleys. It is, (as to style merely,) Tennyson, out-Tennysoned,—the last strain and tension of peculiarity and surprise—but withal brimfull of genius […] Mrs. Barrett is worth a dozen of Tennyson, and six of Motherwell—equal perhaps in original genius to Keats and Shelley. We wish we knew more of her.

  Poe, a complex individual with a reputation for invention of all kinds, may merely be trying to stoke literary controversy. But positioning Elizabeth’s poetry is important. Something new is going on. Back in London, The Spectator makes its intelligent attempt in the month the book appears:

  Miss Barrett is of the school to which MR COVENTRY PATMORE belongs, but with a happier choice in the selection of her subjects, more of skill in the use of her materials, a healthier moral tone, and less affectation, unless in her style and the occasional choice of her meter. […] The author whom MISS BARRETT immediately resembles is TENNYSON.

  The piece goes on astutely to ascribe to her something close to the Picturesque culture with which she grew up:

  representing things not as they really are, or as they are supposed to be, but with a peculiarity derived from the writer’s mind [her poems] excel in a species of quaint description, which is sometimes more effective than a natural style.

  Other British reviews compare Elizabeth to Milton, Keats, Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth. She’s being read against the entire English canon as well as against her peers. Yet still she remains a special case, set apart by gender. ‘We have no hesitation in saying that among the female poets of the day, MISS BARRETT stands at the head’, pronounces The Atlas. Worse, in Blackwood’s, Scottish metaphysician James Ferrier raps her over the knuckles for aspiring to the literary at all:

  If she will but wash her hands completely of Aeschylus and Milton, and all other poets, […] and come before the public in the graces of her own feminine sensibilities […] her sway over human hearts will be more irresistible than ever, and she will have nothing to fear from a comparison with the most gifted and industrious of her sex.

  Luckily, less antediluvian readers are to be found among her peers, the young poets who are giving each other a run for their money. A year ago John Kenyon let Elizabeth know that Robert Browning admired her poem ‘The Dead Pan’. When Poems appears, Browning is travelling in Italy; he left London the day before it was published. But on 10 January 1845, after he’s been home for just over a month, he reads a copy which Kenyon has sent to New Cross and writes to congratulate Elizabeth.

  The letter he sends this short, dark winter day is an intimate expression of poetic kinship. Its ‘Aha!’ of recognising someone he’s never seen through her words alone is the basis for everything that follows. The feeling may be asexual, but his language is intemperate:

  I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—[… I]nto me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew. I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought—but in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you too.

  For Elizabeth, no other kind of kinship could be more powerful. Her Preface to Poems restated how deeply personal her passion for poetry is:

  Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing […] I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry […] I have done my work […]—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being,—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain.

  Robert’s letter makes clear that he’s interested in her as a person too:

  Do you know I was once not very far from seeing .. really seeing you? Mr Kenyon said to me one morning ‘would you like to see Miss Barrett?’—then he went to announce me,—then he returned .. you were too unwell—and now it is years ago—and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels—as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, ..

  But it’s his very first words that couldn’t be better pitched to speak directly to her poetic, which is to say her emotional, self. I love your verses with all my heart: in fact he probably has her at I love. Eighteen months from now, she will tell Robert that this word ‘was a disguised angel & I should have known it by its wings though they did not fly’. For, as she says to Miss Mitford, quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Even when the object is not poetry, “I love love.”’

  Elizabeth writes back to Robert the very next day, and her response is perfectly pitched in turn to draw him in. She asks him to critique her work: a lead none of her male correspondents has ever refused. And while drawing back within the shelter of propriety she carefully chooses words that mirror his own:

  I thank you, dear Mr Browning, from the bottom of my heart. […] Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet & of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me!

  And though she havers, she finds herself, exceptionally, at least contemplating an actual meeting:

  Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure & honour of making your acquaintance?—[…] I would rather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do dormouse’s eyes: in the spring, we shall see.

  The next day is Sunday, so she has to calm her impatience for his response. The wait is worth it. ‘You make me very happy’, Robert writes, on Monday 13 January, and he goes on to ask for her poetic companionship, even guidance:

  your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you—for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time—you speak out, you, —I […] fear the pure white light, even if it is in me: but I am going to try .. so it will be no small comfort to have your company just now.

  But Elizabeth doesn’t hear the profound compliment in this. What she thinks is that she’s being offered the worthy but tedious role of mentor. That fierce childhood shyness remains just as strong as the rest of her passionate nature. Immediately she retracts her suggest of meeting:

  The fault was clearly with me & not with you.

  When I had an Italian master, years ago, he told me that there was an unpronounceable English word which absolutely express
ed me […] ‘testa lunga.’ Of course the signor meant headlong!—[…] Headlong I was at first, & headlong I continue—[…] guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary .. tearing open letters, & never untying a string,—& expecting everything to be done in a minute […]. And so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, & wrote what you read.

  In fact, hastiness has caused her to misread his second letter, not his first. Praising her poetry in terms of finding her own self present in it, Robert is finding a subtle way to keep open the possibility that he is interested in that self – even though he can’t know this, because the two have not yet met. He’s just as idealistic as Elizabeth about poetry, and every bit as likely to fall in love through it. And, while protesting that he hates letter writing, he has already told her that she’s the exception to this rule – and done so exquisitely, by quoting the epitaph to the great Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso, ‘O tu!’ – ‘Ah, you!’

  Now he waits a prideful fortnight before replying to Elizabeth’s snip. These two weeks may also reflect a young man’s self-absorption. For of course Robert does want this poet who has become a writerly touchstone to help with his own poetry; but he doesn’t seem nearly so eager to produce a detailed critique of hers. With charm and vagueness, when he does get in touch he tells her: