Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  While they wait and plan in the privacy of her third-floor room in Wimpole Street, the lovers’ shared world develops. Robert has known Elizabeth by her family diminutive since at least January, when she signed a couple of letters with a doodled ‘Ba’ instead of her usual ‘EBB’. But it’s not till July that she starts thinking of him as ‘Robert’ instead of a limitless ‘you’, that ‘O, tu’ he introduced at the very start of their correspondence. Now she learns about his background: parents, Robert senior and Sarah Anna, née Wiedemann, and sister Sarianna, two years his junior.

  Like the Barrett family, the Brownings are Whigs. But they’re also wholehearted abolitionists, whose lives have in no small measure been defined by their convictions. When he was twenty, Robert senior was sent to work on a St Kitts plantation belonging to his mother’s family but, to his own father’s fury, was so disgusted by the realities of slavery that he turned down the opportunity to run the estates and returned to London. ‘Elizabeth’s’ Robert only learns the full extent of his father’s sacrifice this August:

  If we are poor, it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night […] ‘conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies’, (where his mother was born, who died in his infancy,) that he relinquished every prospect,—supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage—[…] You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.

  Robert’s cousin Cyrus Mason will later claim that this wasn’t a question of principle but of an ‘artistic nature’ and ‘refined instincts’ that couldn’t cope with rough and tumble plantation life. But to defend cruelty by calling objectors weak or ineffectual is an old trick – in twenty-first-century Britain the argot will be ‘snowflakes’ – and the son has no trouble turning around such verdicts. He tells Elizabeth how his father, ‘tender-hearted to a fault’, detests violence as a result of ‘some abominable early experience’ on the plantations, at the mere mention of which he ‘shuts his eyes involuntarily and shows exactly the same marks of loathing that may be noticed while a piece of cruelty is mentioned.’

  When Robert’s grandfather ‘Rob’ Browning came to write his will in 1834, he left Robert senior and Margaret, the children of his first marriage, just token sums on the grounds that they ‘have had by their uncle Tittle and aunt Mill much greater portion than can be left to my other dear children’. It was Robert senior’s maternal grandfather, the Revd John Tittle, who owned the family plantations when he was a young man: Rob’s will implies that he benefited from them after all. But there’s no evidence corroborating what it so conveniently assumes. And even if the sacrifices Robert senior made were incomplete, perhaps this is as much as we can expect from one individual. For when he rejected the planter’s life his own father in punishment demanded he pay back the money spent raising him. That one gesture has defined his life: even the comfortable family home at New Cross in Surrey is within commuting distance of the City of London because he’s forced to work there in a bank.

  Despite being prevented from following what is in fact his artistic vocation by the need to earn a living, Robert senior has filled this family home with art and books. He will draw – particularly satirical cartoons – all his life, and he collects engravings and drawings, notably by William Hogarth and artists from the Low Countries. He especially enjoys David Teniers the Younger. He has a 6,000-volume library; treasures of his rare book collection include first editions of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, Ben Jonson’s First Folio, John Milton’s Paradise Regain’d and Poems on Several Occasions, Thomas More’s Utopia, and – demonstrating genuine intellectual eclecticism in a Nonconformist household – Eikon Basilike, the book of meditations supposedly written by Charles I during his final imprisonment.

  All this reveals a creative, wide-ranging mind that must have been at least partly formed by his schooldays at Cheshunt, where he befriended John Kenyon, later Elizabeth and Robert’s ‘dear Mr Kenyon, with whom we began’. But his son is largely home-educated, brought up on this astonishing library. Like Elizabeth, Robert has been thoroughly encouraged by both parents. His artistic mother Sarah Anna is an accomplished pianist and a creator of beautiful gardens. Her German ship-owning father met and married her mother in Dundee: this northern background powers the family’s Nonconformism, and Sarah Anna is devout. Yet, life-loving rather than austere, she’s altogether less fundamentalist than many of her fellow worshippers at York Street Chapel.

  She also offers a template for Robert’s relationship with a woman six years older than himself. Elizabeth’s mother was four older than her father; her sister Henrietta is also four years older than the man she’s fallen for. But Robert’s mother is a full decade years older than his father. When they married in 1811 she was thirty-eight, the same age Elizabeth is when Robert starts writing to her, and gave birth to the poet, her first child, at just a month shy of her fortieth birthday. Her age is probably the reason Robert’s parents stopped at just two children. Perhaps it is also what makes her family view her as frail, even though she seems to suffer no underlying condition and will live to seventy-six. Nevertheless, Robert learns early on to associate femininity with fragility, and with the beauty of an older woman. To some extent he even identifies with this principle, sharing his mother’s susceptibility to migraine – something his early letters to Elizabeth harp on somewhat. Indeed in April 1845 Elizabeth feels constrained to defend him from Miss Mitford’s accusations of ‘silver forkism’, and to argue for the ‘masculinity’ of his intellect: ‘With all his darknesses, & charades of light, he is a very masculine writer & thinker, & as remote as possible from Balzac’s type of the femmelette’: in doing so supplying the very term her friend will later use to abuse him.

  Elizabeth is becoming more forceful in general. By April 1846, after more than a year of Browning idealism, she understands the British Empire as a violent aberration. The horrifying loss of life in the First Sikh War, concluded the previous month by the Battle of Sobraon, which killed 320 Brits but 10,000 Sikhs, shows her conclusively that empire subjugates rather than ‘civilizes’. She takes this insight and runs:

  Some of these days our ‘great Indian Empire’ will stand up on its own legs, & make use of our own rope to scourge us to a distance. What right has England to an Indian empire? No more than the Duke of Sutherland, to his broad estates. Wait a little, & we shall see it all arranged according to a better justice, on the small scale & the large.

  To foresee independence, and how subjugation itself will power the liberation struggle, is all the more remarkable because Elizabeth is writing two years before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels will publish their theory of revolution in The Communist Manifesto, and indeed seventy before Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism – not to mention the powerful postcolonial critique the latter will go on to unlock in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and beyond. None of this thinking has happened yet. In London in 1846 abolitionism is popular; anti-imperialism all but unknown. It will be another thirty years, and after Elizabeth’s death, before the term ‘imperialist’ gains currency – and then only narrowly, as a criticism of Disraeli’s foreign policy.

  But this isn’t the first time that Elizabeth has pointed out how subjugation works. In August 1843 she published ‘The Cry of the Children’, a response to 1842’s Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, in the mass circulation Blackwood’s Magazine:

  Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart—

  Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,

  And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?

  Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper

  Here too she pictures oppression rebounding on the oppressor – blood splashing upward – though her poem ends by releasing the tension of that insight. The child in the poem, ‘weeping in the playtime of the others, / In the country of the free’ has
been indentured, a system that enslaves children in plain sight in mines and mills like those owned by Elizabeth’s own grandfather in Newcastle. Published forty years after William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, ‘The Cry of the Children’ is less visionary but more political about the actual workings of Britain’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’. It makes explicit the links between child labour, child mortality, lack of education, hopelessness and the ‘mart’ of unchecked, laissez-faire capitalism.

  This understanding of nineteenth-century industrial practice will seem obvious to the point of cliché in the twenty-first century, but in the 1840s much of what’s going on has simply never been named. By adding to what mainstream society can find words for, ‘The Cry of the Children’ helps shift popular opinion against such practices, and in 1844 the second in a sequence of Factory Acts will further shorten children’s working hours, increase their compulsory schooling hours, and institute major safety reforms in factories.

  As a result, in spring 1845 Elizabeth is asked for a poem by the Anti-Corn Law League, which campaigns against the protectionist legal tariffs on wheat imports that, along with cartel-type arrangements between domestic landowners, keep the price of this staple so high that people are starving. Under pressure from her father and brothers Elizabeth declines, instead donating money to the cause. But she does so with regret, her excuses – ‘as a woman you will know that women are subject to various influences’ – audibly contorted by the inimical impulses of domestic probity and a passionate desire to ‘lift my voice in my poetry, as high as my heart’.

  In December 1845, however, she starts work on another political poem. ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ tells the story of an enslaved woman who is raped by her owner(s) after they’ve killed her partner. The woman murders the resulting child, whose colour betrays the rape, and is hunted down and flogged to death. Here too Elizabeth makes oppression turn itself into the engine of resistance, pitching the status quo upside down: the narrator is as revolted by her baby’s ‘white’ face as her persecutors are dismissive of ‘my black face, my black hand’. Given Elizabeth’s family background this is a revolutionary vision – which is perhaps why it takes her a year to write – and she doesn’t publish the poem while living under her father’s roof. But it demonstrates how, in giving up her belief in him, she’s free at last to give up believing in slavery. And perhaps it is easier to be publicly abolitionist than to oppose Britain’s Corn Laws since, now that the country has outlawed slavery, it can be ‘distanced’ as a purely American crime.

  ‘The Runaway Slave’ will first be published in an American abolitionist anthology, The Liberty Bell, in 1848, although Elizabeth sends it to James Russell Lowell in New England at the end of 1846. This is verse as public speech, aiming to create a moral catharsis when shared emotion leads to shared moral insight. Such an elevated view of poetry’s social role comes, like so much in Elizabeth’s work and thought, from her classical education: after all, Homeric epic celebrates public, political ethics. This places poetry excitingly at the heart of contemporary debates. But it can also be inhibiting. Morally necessary conclusions may leave little room for poetic ambiguity; the effort to be persuasive can make a poem over-rhetorical or simplistic.

  Yet the fiercely inhabited psyche of the ‘Runaway Slave’, together with the poem’s obsessional iteration of ‘black’ and ‘white’ – first as colours in the non-human natural world, but then also as racist constructions of human identity – create a genuine feeling of terror and hyper-reality:

  I look at the sky.

  The clouds are breaking on my brain;

  I am floated along, as if I should die

  Of liberty’s exquisite pain.

  In the name of the white child waiting for me

  In the death-dark.

  It works so well indeed that this is sometimes taken as evidence of Elizabeth’s anxiety about her own possible African-Caribbean heritage. After all, it’s in December 1845, while working on this poem, that she sends Robert her famous ‘blood of a slave’ letter. But the assumption is reductive. Elizabeth is turning such prevailing prejudices on their head. In her poem it is whiteness and all that it means – the abuses, the power-relations – that is disgusting.

  That the possibility of mixed heritage haunts the West Indian plantocracy is poetic justice, of course. But it is a haunting, and, just as it can’t be proved in Elizabeth’s case, it’s no more than rumour in Robert’s. Claims that his maternal grandmother Margaret Tittle was the daughter of an enslaved woman are simply untrue. Her mother Margaret Strachan was the daughter of a St Kitts surgeon, Dr George Strachan, while her father, the Revd John Tittle, was an estate manager and legal representative for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

  In fact, during 1846 Elizabeth is also secretly working on what will become a famous marker not of African-Caribbean but of her possible Portuguese heritage: the forty-four love poems that will eventually be published as Sonnets from the Portuguese. In both this sequence and, in a different way, in ‘The Runaway Slave’, it’s as if she has finally caught her breath enough to speak out, producing personal, political poetry that isn’t just concerned with art for art’s sake, but takes part in the world around her. Yet she remains uncertain about the confessional character of this verse, which she knows Robert disdains, as she’ll later tell Arabella: ‘I never showed them to Robert […] I felt shy about them altogether […] I had heard him express himself strongly against “personal” poetry & I shrank back.’

  Besides, she’s still hesitating over giving herself away, one way or another. All summer the lovers’ correspondence has yawed between the impossibility and the necessity of eloping. Elizabeth’s panics are in proportion to the size of this step. She’s particularly worried that John Kenyon, who understands both her and Robert well, will winkle out their secret. She hates lying to him, and all her friends: it makes her feel she’s ‘swindling’ them. But preoccupation is itself a giveaway. By early September 1846, both Mr Boyd and Treppy, who’s visiting Wimpole Street, seem to guess what’s afoot. As Treppy says, ‘Secrets indeed! You think that nobody can see & hear except yourselves, I suppose,—& there are two circumstances going on in the house, plain for any eyes to see!’

  That second ‘circumstance’ is Henrietta’s love affair with an army ensign the family call Surtees: full name, William Surtees Cook. (He’s actually a second cousin, whose mother and Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother were sisters.) Henrietta’s courtship, unlike Elizabeth’s, is an open secret not least because Surtees has seen off two other suitors since 1844 by laying siege at Wimpole Street. The siblings and their servants close ranks to protect the romance as he takes up residence in the drawing room during visiting hours, breaks down in tears, and generally outlasts his rivals’ stores of time, patience and dignity. It’s dramatic stuff, which quite possibly helps distract everyone from the equally intense affair being conducted altogether more discreetly on the third floor.

  In July 1846 Elizabeth’s maternal aunt, Jane Hedley, staying at Wimpole Street for her own daughter Arabella’s marriage, conjectures that if Henrietta and Surtees were to elope to Italy they could take Elizabeth with them. But elopement is a radical step, even for these more able-bodied lovers. Besides, Surtees lacks the money to marry. He’s hoping against hope for promotion: things have become so desperate that he has even written a novel in hopes of making money from fiction. As many an aspirant has discovered, this isn’t as easy as it looks, even if, like him, you have Elizabeth Barrett as personal editor. Johnny Cheerful is submitted to Colburn but turned down, and remains unpublished. Besides, when Surtees is promoted to captain at the end of 1845, he almost immediately retires from his regiment on half pay, cancelling out the rise.

  Still, all this adds to the general undertone of plotting with which, this summer, 50 Wimpole Street is seething; and Aunt Hedley, with her ‘beaming affectionate face’, keeps accidentally putting her foot in it. First she teases Elizabeth in front of Papa that an inve
stment document is her marriage-settlement, then she reveals to him that Robert has been visiting her niece. Meanwhile Robert himself is feeling compromised in another way. He’s desperate to tell his beloved parents everything:

  Why should not my father & mother know? What possible harm can follow from their knowing? Why should I wound them to the very soul and for ever […] For in any case they will take my feeling for their own with implicit trust.

  It would all be so much easier out of Papa’s punitive reach in cheap, sunny, southern Europe. So the summer of 1846 comes to an end with a vertiginous feeling of now or never. If the lovers really are to sail south, and Elizabeth to escape another London winter, they must do so before the weather closes in. Something has to change. And suddenly, on 9 September, it does. As if to force their hand, Papa announces, with characteristic lack of consultation, that he’s moving the entire family out to the countryside because, he says, Wimpole Street needs to be refurbished. Less than a fortnight later, on 21 September, the Barretts have relocated to the small Surrey village of Little Bookham.

  But Elizabeth isn’t with them. ‘Therefore decide!’ she challenges Robert when she gets the news. ‘It seems quite too soon & too sudden for us to set out on our Italian adventure now—.’ But her lover is tired of waiting. He understands quite well that if Elizabeth goes off to the countryside now, the window for European escape will close for another year. And maybe forever. Even if she does survive the winter cold, a relationship can only endure stasis for so long before it becomes fixed in unreality. So he takes her at her word, and decides: ‘If you do go on Monday, our marriage will be impossible for another year—the misery! You see what we have gained by waiting. We must be married directly and go to Italy—I will go for a licence today and we can be married on Saturday.’