…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Katharine DeKay Bronson

Posted on April 28, 2014 by melindacreech

Katharine de Kay Bronson was a wealthy American who frequently traveled with her husband Arthur Bronson around Europe. In 1875, the couple and their daughter Edith (born 1861) decided to make Venice, Italy, their permanent home. Katharine Bronson entertained guests in her house, called Ca Alvisi, on the Grand Canal and became acquainted with a group of English-speaking artists and writers, among them Henry James and Robert Browning. Bronson was first introduced to Browning in 1880 probably by their mutual friend the American sculptor William Wetmore Story. Bronson and Browning developed a close friendship, and he and his sister Sarianna spent many holidays with Bronson in Venice and in Asolo. Browning’s Ferishtah’s Fancies, completed in 1884, is thought to be influenced in part by Bronson and Venice, and in 1889, Browning dedicated Asolando to Bronson. The dedication reads:

To whom but you, dear Friend, should I dedicate verses—some few written, all of them supervised, in the comfort of your presence, and with yet another experience of the gracious hospitality now bestowed on me since so many a year,—adding a charm even to my residences at Venice, and leaving me little regret for the surprise and delight at my visits to Asolo in bygone days?

Personal Letters from Robert Browning in the Collection of Katharine de Kay Bronson and Edith Rucelai Bronson.

This scrapbook was created by Katharine Bronson after Robert Browning’s death and contains photographs of Robert Browning as well as his letters to her.

Letter from Robert Browning to Katharine DeKay Bronson, 16 September 884

In a letter from Robert Browning to Mrs. Bronson, dated 16 September 1884, Robert Browning reminisces about the warm greeting he and his sister Sarianna received from Mrs. Bronson when they arrived in Italy for a holiday in 1883:

So it was last year, and the end of the journey was at the Venice Station when the first blessing was that of Luigi’s fat face—lighting the way a few footsteps farther to the more than Friend who had come in the rain to take us and keep us.

The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to Katharine DeKay Bronson include one manuscript and eighty-seven letters.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Hiram (1805–1873) and Elizabeth (1809–1892) Powers

Posted on April 24, 2014 by melindacreech

Hiram Powers was an American neoclassical sculptor. In 1837 he moved to Italy, settling on the Via Fornace in Florence, where he had access to good supplies of marble and to traditions of stone-cutting and bronze casting. He remained in Florence until his death. Hiram and his wife became friends with the Brownings in Florence. His most famous sculpture was The Greek Slave. It toured America and was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London. Viewing the exhibit in London, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was inspired to write her famous sonnet, “Hiram Power’s Greek Slave.”

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Elizabeth Powers. [?30 November] [1854].

In this letter Elizabeth Barrett Browning returns books that Elizabeth Powers lent to her for Pen to read. Pen’s favorite was The Pretty Village.

….He has read them himself, & had them read to him again & again, –his particular favorite being ‘The Pretty Village’.

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hiram Powers. [?20 February 1855].

In this letter Elizabeth asks for more books for Pen.

. . . My Penini has been delighted with several of the books & has read them all, & will be very glad to have others.

The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to the Powers include six Browning letters.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830–1908)

Posted on April 21, 2014 by melindacreech

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer was an American sculptor. While she was living and studying in Rome, she became associated with a group of women sculptors known as “The White Marmorean Flock.” She was also a frequent visitor at the Brownings’ home in Florence, Casa Guidi. Hosmer is remembered for her casting in bronze of the Brownings’ “Clasped Hands.”

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Harriet Goodhue Hosmer. 13 January 1856.

Writing to Hosmer from Paris on 13 January 1856, Robert Browning says how much he misses “Hatty” and gives news about their common friends, Mrs. Sartoris, Leighton, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Carlyle. Elizabeth concludes by saying: “Be magnanimous & send us a long letter of absolution. You ought, being at Rome.”

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer. “Quaint twins well-mated, will you pardon one.” Autograph Manuscript. No date.

In this poem of forty-four lines Hosmer asserts The ‘one thing needful’ to you both is Truth. It is inscribed by Hosmer on an integral page: Inscribed with the sincerest regard to Robert & Elizabeth Browning—by H.G. H. The poem was extracted from an unpublished volume of poems.

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer. Harriet Hosmer Letters and Memories, edited by Cornelia Carr. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1912.

This collection of letters, edited by Cornelia Carr, long-time friend of Harriet Hosmer and published four years after her death, contains much of the Brownings’ correspondence.

The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to Hosmer include one book, three letters, and one manuscript.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Kate Field (1838-1896)

Posted on April 14, 2014 by melindacreech

Kate Field was an American journalist, lecturer, and actress of eccentric talent. She never married, but she had a close relationship with Anthony Trollope. She became acquainted with the Brownings and other literary persons living in Florence. Field died of pneumonia in Honolulu. The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to her include four books and thirty letters.

Letter from Robert Browning to Kate Field.
[?late June 1859].

This letter conveys the box number for the opera that Browning and Field will attend that evening. Browning expresses his doubt that anyone else will come, except Isa Blagden.

Kate Field. Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings. Taken from Life. Boston: Loring, [ca. 1868].

This booklet recounts the readings of Charles Dickens. Field likens her descriptions to a photograph. She describes the purpose of her book:

Their publication is induced by the hope of clinching the recollection of Mr. Dicken’s readings in the minds of many; and . . . giving to those who have not had the good fortune to hear them, some faint outline of a rare pleasure, the like of which will ne’er come to us again.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Elizabeth Clementine Kinney (1810–1889)

Posted on April 11, 2014 by melindacreech

Elizabeth Clementine Kinney was an American writer, contributing frequently to periodicals such as Blackwood’s, The Daily Telegraph, and Knickerbockers. During a fourteen year stay in Europe she developed a close friendship with Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to Kinney include two books, five letters, and two manuscripts.

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Elizabeth Clementine Kinney. [ca. September 1854].

In this very interesting letter, Elizabeth Barrett Browning discusses the plans of Harriet Hosmer, Elizabeth Kinney, and herself related to dressing up as men in order to gain access to a monastery not far from the Porta Roma of Florence in order to view some Donnatello paintings. Their elaborate plan, however, was never realized.

Ellizabeth Clementine Kinney.
“Stay!—come not here with unannointed eyes.”
Autograph Manuscript. Undated.

This sonnet is addressed to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and signed with Elizabeth Clementine Kinney’s iinitials. The poem is written on the end-pages of Casa Guidi Windows, London: Chapman and Hall, 1851.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Edward Oliver Wolcott (1848–1905)

Posted on April 7, 2014 by melindacreech

Edward Oliver Wolcott was a prominent politician during the 1890s, serving as senator from Colorado from 1879 until 1882. His biographer, Thomas Fulton Dawson, observed that Wolcott had an overwhelming personality and “whatever he did, good or bad, he did on an unusual scale.” The last year of his life he traveled in Italy, hoping that a change of climate would aid his failing health, but he died in Monaco in 1905.

Letter from Robert Browning to Edward Oliver Wolcott.
28 February 1887.

In this letter Browning thanks Wolcott for a “generous and beautiful gift” delivered to him by Joseph Charles Parkinson, journalist, civil servant, and social reformer. The gift, according to a letter from Wolcott to Browning on 13 January 1887, was a set of photographs of the Rocky Mountains and the Taos Indians.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Susan Howard

Posted on April 3, 2014 by melindacreech

The Armstrong Browning Library owns a small album of manuscripts, letters, and printed items that contains memorials to Annie Howard, daughter of Susan and John Tasker Howard. Annie died unexpectedly in Milan on 6 June 6 1860. The Howards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Brownings had shared acquaintances in Italy during that period. The tributes in the album were written by three well-known nineteenth-century figures—the anti-slavery preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, his novelist sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and poet Elizabeth Barret Browning. The album contains two letters from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Annie’s mother Susan and a copy of Barrett Browning’s “De Profundis,” written twenty years earlier following the drowning death of her dear brother, Edward. Stowe contributed a poem commemorating Annie to the album and a copy of Henry Ward Beecher’s funeral sermon was also included in the memorial album.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. “To the Memory of Annie, who died at Milan June 6. 1860.” In the Annie Howard Memorial Album. Autograph Manuscript. [1860].

The two letters from Elizabeth Barrett Browning are beautiful expressions of condolences on the death of Annie.

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Susan Howard. 14 August [1860].

Excerpts from the letter:

Villa Alberti, Siena— August 14—

My dear Mrs Howard

I receive your letter, read it, hold it in my hands, with a sympathy deeply moved. . . . Hearing of such things makes us silent before God. What must it be to experience them?—I have suffered myself very heavy afflictions, but the affliction of the mother I have not suffered, & I shut my eyes to the image of it—.

Only, where Christ brings His cross He brings his presence—& where He is, none are desolate—& there is no room for despair. At the darkest you have felt a Hand through the Dark—closer perhaps, & tenderer, than any touch dreamt of at noon. As He knows His own, so He knows how to comfort them—using sometimes the very grief itself, & straining it to the sweetness of a peace unattainable to those ignorant of any grief—

. . . we write in most affectionate sympathy with you .. & your husband, .. may I add, while I sign this letter as your true friend

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Susan Howard. 12 March [1861].

Elizabeth, who had just lost her sister, Henrietta, expresses her sympathy for Susan Howard in these excerpts from the letter:

Rome. 126. Via Felice

March 12.

My dear Mrs Howard, your letter came to me when I was in bitter need of comfort myself—What are we to say to others while our own heart faints? I had been in great anxiety for months, —& then at last came news from England, —& there was no more to fear. . . .

Before then, the pain you expressed & a sermon of Mr Beecher’s had reminded me of an old forgotten m-s. of mine (De Profundis) “written in my earlier manner” (say the critics) & referring to a great grief, —and I sent it for printing in the Independent- That was for you, & not for me—yet by the time it was printed & came out here, some of it sailed me also thro’ a new trial. How the threads cross! —

. . . Dear Mrs Howard—when the young go away with hands full of unblown roses, who should lament that they did not stay to sit under leafless trees? —Why yearn for them to live to lose daughters?-Let us consider, of all our holy Dead, that the lessons they learn now are not learnt with pangs but easily, while they sit under the eyes of Him who loves them more than we ever could. . . .

Yours in affectionate sympathy
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Photograph of a painting of Annie S. Howard,

daughter of Susan and John Tasker Howard.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)

Posted on March 31, 2014 by melindacreech

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and writer, most well-known for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a depiction of the lives of African Americans under slavery. She met Elizabeth Barrett Browning during a trip to England in 1856. In 1859-60 she traveled to Italy and became acquainted with the Brownings socially.

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to
Harriet Beecher Stowe. [?24 March 1860].

In this letter Elizabeth Barrett Browning assures Stowe that she is not ill with “typhus,” but would like to reschedule their meeting until Monday.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
London: J. Cassell, 1852.

Stowe’s anti-slavery novel sold 300,000 copies in its first year of publication in 1852. In a letter to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, dated 15 March [1853], Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes of Stowe and her novel:

No woman ever had such a success, such a fame! No man ever had, in a single book. For my part I rejoice greatly in it. It is an individual glory full of healthy influence & benediction to the world.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands [2 vols.]. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company; New York: J.C. Derby, 1854.

Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands was an account of Stowe’s travels in Europe in 1853 written for an American audience. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a letter to Sarianna Browning on [18 September 1854], says she plans to read Stowe’s book:

[A]nd in the meantime Robert read aloud snatches caught out of the heart of it, to Isa Bladgen, Hatty Hosmer & me.

The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to Harriet Beecher Stowe include more than a dozen books and one letter.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

Posted on March 26, 2014 by melindacreech

John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet, associated with the Fireside poets, and a fervent abolitionist. In a letter to Lucy Larcom (1855), he described reading Robert Browning’s Men and Women as “taking a bath among electric eels.”

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to John Greenleaf Whittier. [20 October 1856].

This letter acknowledges Whittier’s gift to the Brownings of his book The Panorama and Other Poems (1856) and contains a “kind and gratifying word of sympathy” from him. In the letter the Brownings express their gratitude that Whittier has numbered them with his friends.

The letter is mounted in an Autograph Book which had belonged to Elizabeth Whittier Pickard, niece of John Greenleaf Whittier. The album also contains letters, notes, and autographs by Julia Ward Howe, Edward Everett, John Greenleaf Whittier, Phoebe Cary, U.S. Grant, Alice Cary, Emily Faithfull, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bayard Taylor, A. Bronson Alcott, Henry W. Longfellow, Daniel Webster, Celia Thaxter, William Cullen Bryant, Edward Everett, William Lloyd Garrison, Joaquin Miller, P.T. Barnum, Edward E. Hale, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George and Louis MacDonald, and many others.

The holdings of the Armstrong Browning Library related to John Greenleaf Whittier include over eighty books, fourteen letters, and an album owned by Whittier’s niece.

…from America: The Brownings’ American Correspondents–James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

Posted on March 24, 2014 by melindacreech

James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor and diplomat associated with the Fireside Poets. The Fireside Poets, whose popularity rivaled English poets, used conventional meter, making the poems suitable for family reading by the fireside. Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning corresponded, sharing volumes of poetry and an interest in anti-slavery issues. Later when Lowell visited in England and Europe, letters were exchanged with Robert Browning about their social engagements.

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
to James Russell Lowell.
17 December 1846.

The manuscript of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” was originally enclosed with this letter. The manuscript and letter have become separated; and, although the letter is at the ABL, the manuscript of the poem is in the Camellia Collection in London. In the letter Elizabeth Barrett Browning asks Lowell to make allowances for me in remembering that I am only three month’s married, & in the sudden glare of light & happiness, here in Italy, after my long years of imprisonment in sickness & depression, without so much as the hope of this liberty.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Italy—1859—by Lowell.”
Autograph Manuscript. Undated.

This is a fair copy in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s hand of six verses written by James Russell Lowell, published under the title “Villa Franca.”

Letter from James Russell Lowell to Robert Browning.
5 December 1883.

Lowell, living in London at this time, forwards a letter to Browning that has been mistakenly delivered to his address. He says, I am sorry to say that I opened it without looking at the address. I read no further than ‘My dear Mr. Browning’ & am dying to know the rest. He then asks Browning about the weather in Venice and expresses a desire for Browning to return soon.

James Russell Lowell. “I asked of Echo: ‘what’s a good advisor?’” Autograph Manuscript. No date.

This poem, written on the back of an envelope, has never been published.

The Armstrong Browning Library’s holdings related to James Russell Lowell include over seventy books, sixteen letters, one Elizabeth Barrett Browning manuscript of Lowell’s poems, and one previously unpublished poem by Lowell. The ABL also has three Robert Browning titles that belonged to Lowell.—Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper, with Other Poems, The Ring and the Book, and Sordello.

Armstrong Browning Library & Museum

A blog that explores the work of Robert & Elizabeth Browning and 19th-century Victorian literature and culture

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