—But you have plenty of time before you.
It’s the start of a lifelong, and life-changing, relationship. Over decades, Kenyon will introduce Elizabeth to the key confidant of her thirties, Mary Russell Mitford, who in turn gives her the adored spaniel Flush. He will encourage his mentee and Robert Browning to meet. Eventually, he will even give the Browning couple and their son financial support.
But for all its future importance, this isn’t the first friendship that Elizabeth’s Essay produces. Since June she’s been corresponding with another family friend, Sir Uvedale Price, who also lives in Herefordshire. His home at Foxley near Yazor is close to the craggy Welsh hills and less than three miles from the meandering River Wye. This is a terrain far removed from the smooth valleys of southern England, so amenable to neoclassical order and elegant, ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes; and Sir Uvedale has helped develop the strikingly anticlassical aesthetic of the Picturesque, which is now shaping national and international fashion. He published the work for which he’s best known, An Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared With The Sublime And The Beautiful; And, On The Use Of Studying Pictures, For The Purpose Of Improving Real Landscape, in 1794.
The lengthy subtitle says it all. Price argued that the Romantic categories of the Sublime and the Beautiful, until then fashionable ways to think about both natural and man-made landscapes, should be supplemented by a third: the Picturesque, or in other words what works well in a picture. In eighteenth-century France, the principle had developed that gardening was a painterly creation ‘designed by the man of genius, and adored by the man of feeling’. This idea was borrowed for British audiences by artist, travel writer and Anglican clergyman William Gilpin, an associate of Price’s, who first cited it in 1782 in his Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. Hugely successful, and followed by further volumes, this illustrated tourist guide created the Wye Tour, that first model of mass tourism, quickly popular even among the wealthy as the Napoleonic Wars made traditional Grand Tours problematic.
Sir Uvedale lives upriver from all the excitement, yet by the time his relationship with Elizabeth springs to life, those thirty-odd miles of river trip between Ross on Wye and Chepstow, featuring gorges, overhanging woods, old towns, ruined castles and the ruins of Tintern Abbey, are the epitome of Picturesque fashion. More exciting for Elizabeth, though, is that Sir Uvedale is friends with William Wordsworth, whose own Wye Tour resulted in his famous ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’. Elizabeth will admire and advocate Wordsworth throughout her life, and this poem, with its mixture of applied philosophy and picturesque description, seems clearly to have influenced her. Wordsworth writes:
Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
Half a century later Aurora Leigh echoes:
Behind the elms
And through their tops, you saw the folded hills
Striped up and down with hedges, (burly oaks
Projecting from the line to show themselves)
Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smoked
As still as when a silent mouth in frost
Breathes.
Price is an Oxford-educated socialite who has married into the Irish aristocracy. Wealthy and sophisticated, he counts as friends both prominent Whig politician and sometime Foreign Secretary Charles James Fox, and Sir George Beaumont, who has helped found the National Gallery. So he has no need to tolerate fools or to pander to lady hobbyists; and he recognises that Elizabeth is neither. Their correspondence is intensely serious and focuses on ancient Greek verse-forms, which both believe are the appropriate discipline for English verse. For all his resistance to neoclassical landscape, Price has received an excellent classical education, and he devotes pages to close reading of Elizabeth’s use of metre. She responds in kind, displaying the width and depth of her knowledge: her first letter alone recruits Abraham Cowley, Thomas Gray, Sir John Denham, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Alexander Pope. The tone of intellectually engaged argumentation is one a young man of her age and class might share with his college tutor, something Price recognises and commends: ‘This very amicable controversy, may, I think, be of use to us both; for you are well furnished with arms, & dextrous in the use of them.’
But Price is seventy-nine when this correspondence starts. When he dies just over three years later, in September 1829, Elizabeth is – luckily perhaps – still too young to understand quite how rare such formative friendships are. She grieves for Sir Uvedale of course, and composes an exequy; but she isn’t devastated. She isn’t even fully convinced by his legacy, which after all surrounds her. Papa’s house at Hope End is a gigantic Picturesque folly. But Elizabeth is not at all convinced that she doesn’t prefer the ‘Sublime’ and ‘Beautiful’, comparing, ‘Herefordshire all hill & wood—undulating & broken ground!’ with ‘Worcestershire throwing out a grand unbroken extent […] to the horizon! One, prospect attracting the eye, by picturesqueness: the other the mind—by sublimity.’
Perhaps that’s partly because this ‘sublime’ vicinity has produced the third, and most intense, of her new friendships. Hugh Stuart Boyd, a forty-five-year-old soi-disant scholar living off the proceeds from his County Antrim estates, has settled in nearby Malvern. With his wife Anne and daughter Annie, five years Elizabeth’s junior, he lives first at Ruby Cottage, Malvern Wells, and then, from May 1828, at Woodland Lodge, Great Malvern. Boyd is so impressed by Elizabeth’s Essay on Mind that in February 1827 he writes to her out of the blue and without being introduced. It’s a not insignificant gesture that verges on social transgression.
The letter itself is lost, but we know something of what it contains from Elizabeth’s reply. Evidently, he’s enclosed some verses in Greek addressed to her, but also expressed interest in her ‘improvement’. Combining flattery with criticism is, did she but know it, the classic move an older man makes on a younger woman. It works so well because young women are so often in the grip of self-criticism; learning the delicate paradox of excelling at being secondary. And Elizabeth, on the cusp of twenty-one, responds. Like many women her age, she’s been practising self-flagellation, behind the stalking horse of self-improvement, for years. Besides, she’s already primed by her father to attach herself to authority, and to believe that criticism is a sign of male affection. Indeed Boyd’s letter arrives just when she’s feeling demolished by her father’s dismissal of a new poem, ‘The Development of Genius’: she simply assumes that his verdict is both authoritative and disinterested. She seizes on Boyd’s approach and fires off in response one of her epistolary pyrotechnics, full of allusions and accompanied by some Greek verses of her own.
She also starts a one-step-forward, two-steps-back dance that we’ll come to recognise:
I regret that the distance between Hope End & Malvern, & my own incapacity to walk or ride far, should present anything like an obstacle to my availing myself immediately of Mr Boyd’s very kind offer of pointing out to me personally his objections to my Essay.
For Elizabeth may be intellectually accomplished but rural seclusion – not to mention a deeper retreat, into the privacy of her own room – has turned the confident, boisterous child into a shy young woman who hates going out and about. She especially hates paying visits, which in these days of slow travel often require an overnight stay. It’s not a solitary vice. Social shyness is a sanctioned family trait. Henrietta records a day in February 1827 on which:
Mama was on the lawn superintending the dusting of the curtains, luckily she escaped before [a cold-calling family] saw her. Luncheon was ordered, I was sent for & there they sat never attempting to go till it was becoming quite dark [
…] Pray fancy Mama & me by ourselves obliged to entertain these four people.
Elizabeth even found visiting Sir Uvedale Price challenging. Though her trip to Yazor in October 1826 went well – he entrusted her with the proofs of his An Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages – their intimacy remains founded on the extraordinary mutuality of their literary confidence. So her reluctance to turn what quickly becomes an in-depth epistolary relationship with Hugh Stuart Boyd into something in real time is not surprising. Eight months in, convention will remain an alibi for shyness: ‘As a female, & a young female, I could not pay such a first visit as the one you proposed to me, without overstepping the established observances of society.’ Whether or not this is her father’s view, as she claims, in the event she manages to hold off meeting Boyd for over a year – until one day in March 1828 her carriage passes him on the road.
She doesn’t stop. She’s on a rushed errand to prevent friends from setting out to visit her mother, who is ill with the rheumatoid arthritis that within months will kill her. But, in a sign of things to come, Boyd is so petulantly affronted by this that he threatens to leave Malvern. It’s an odd reaction, one that should sound warning bells to any parent. In practice, perhaps because Mamma is so unwell, it does the opposite. The public nature of the encounter, combined with Boyd’s expression of social displeasure, bounces Elizabeth and Papa into arranging for her to visit him without delay. Just four days later, Bro drives Elizabeth, Henrietta and Arabella over the hills to Boyd’s home in Malvern Wells. Unfortunately, misjudging the steep descent from the Wyche pass, the siblings don’t set the drag chain (a kind of brake). The downhill momentum of the heavy carriage makes the pony panic, gallop, and overturn them. The result is a second awkward encounter with the Boyds in the road. This time Elizabeth introduces herself, only to be ‘awed […] by Mr Boyd’s silence—At last he said “I cannot help thinking that I was the cause—I was the cause.”’
Odder still, one might think. As are the ‘uncopiable compliments’ which follow in his next letter. Yet still no one intervenes. At this key moment in Elizabeth’s otherwise exceptionally sheltered young life she is left as utterly exposed as if she were already an orphan. John Kenyon’s affection is familial, protective and proud. Sir Uvedale’s respect for the young woman is exceptional given her age and gender; but it’s the generosity of a man near the end of a long, successful life, for whom the phenomenally able daughter of old friends is pure bonus. He’s the intellectual mentor Elizabeth has lacked, and wants nothing in return but the odd burst of brainy sparring.
Hugh Stuart Boyd is a very different. A restless soul who carts his womenfolk from place to place, he has never worked. The official tragedy of his life is that fifteen years ago he began to lose his sight and has become completely blind. Despite being now unable to read or write, he sees himself as both a scholar of Greek, and a poet. Plucky indeed – even Miltonian – which is certainly how those around him view it. But the degrees of separation that blindness can create have not so much opened up imaginative mental space as reinforced a native dogmatism. Boyd is locked in an obsession with a particular method of Greek scansion that – luckily or perhaps unluckily for Elizabeth – happens to be the same one Sir Uvedale advocates. Yet the unintentionally comic dead hand of his verse makes clear how very little he understands about poetry. In a verse about walkers killed by lightning, for example:
Awhile they sailed on pleasure’s golden tide—
A storm arose; the lightning came: they died—
If upon them Heaven’s dart unsparing flew,
Think that the next dread shaft may light on you.
Elizabeth, usually so quick to joke about bad verse, is courteous in response, praising Boyd’s ‘smoothness of versification’. But there’s no getting around it. This is a lesser talent. Boyd is no Sir Uvedale. Yet, far from developing a reciprocity, he expects to criticise Elizabeth – and to receive only praise from her. Perhaps he finds reciprocity difficult in general. Or he doesn’t like joining in: even though he seems to have enjoyed studying under a personal tutor, he left Oxford without a degree. Elizabeth has been raised in sympathy with independent-mindedness; but her father’s solitariness differs from this. Unlike Papa, Boyd has never tried to put down roots; he hasn’t created a home of his own, and his only child was born six years into what is perhaps not a terribly successful marriage.
In February 1827, when Boyd writes his first fishing letter to Elizabeth, Anne Lowry Boyd has less than ten years left to live. Her husband, by contrast, still has plenty of twinkle; Elizabeth describes him as ‘rather young looking than otherwise’. He is ‘moderately tall, and slightly formed. His features are good […] His voice is very harmonious and gentle and low.’ It soon transpires that her new friend needs an amanuensis to help with his correspondence and to read aloud in both English and ancient Greek, and he seems to find that young women fulfil this role particularly well. As Aunt Bummy will comment tartly, ‘Really all the young ladies in the neighbourhood seem to me to be in the habit of going to see that poor man.’
To be fair to Boyd, he’s no Humbert Humbert. The many young women he invites into his home are not chronologically children. Yet, as he must be aware, socially imposed innocence has kept them naïve and vulnerable to manipulation. And, while they may initially be drawn in by a feminine sense of ‘doing good works’, the bitchiness with which they compete for Boyd’s favour makes it clear where the power lies. ‘Eliza told me that Miss Steers walks out with Mr Boyd whenever she can. So […] he is not afraid of disgracing her by his “slovenly appearance”!!’, Elizabeth bursts out petulantly, before recording with shock – and envy? – that Boyd has advised Eliza to read Henry Fielding’s risqué, picaresque novel Tom Jones.
Although she sounds like a teenager, Elizabeth is by now in her early twenties, and not without admirers of her own. In 1829 she receives a Valentine ode under the pseudonym of Italian dramatist Alfieri, which hints heavily that its author knew her as a child:
Immortal B—t! […]
Tis thine to call ‘the days of childhood’ back,
And, with thy sounds of magic minstrelsy,
Recal the memory of past times to me.
[…]
Years have rolled on—oh, there are memories
Of blasted hopes—and mine is one of these.
The period 1829–30 also sees her involved in an extensive correspondence with classicist and lexicographer Edmund Henry Barker. Yet she remains a desperately inexperienced young woman, and by 1831 her emotions and desires have been kettled inside family life for years. She’s twenty-five: an age at which her own mother was the married mistress of Coxhoe Hall, and had given birth to Elizabeth herself. In this fugue state of inauthenticity and repression, greatly exacerbated by raw but unspoken bereavement when Mamma dies unexpectedly in late 1828, it’s no surprise that the young woman should fall in love by way of ‘exalted’ literary passions that helpfully conceal her own feelings. After all, if she asks herself why ‘Mr Boyd’ matters to her so much, she has only to reach for her own Preface to the Battle of Marathon: ‘Poetry is the parent of liberty, and of all the fine arts.’ The Achilles heel of young poets, their idealistic passion for writing, creates ready fodder for the literary casting couch.
The relationship is manipulative from the outset. Elizabeth’s very first entry in a diary she keeps for eleven months from June 1831 records, ‘I suspect that [Mr Boyd’s] regard for me is dependant on his literary estimation of me, & not great enough, for me to afford the loss of any part of it.’ Love capriciously withheld, or simply not requited, can be addictive, forcing the lover to understand that what affection is bestowed by the beloved is conditional, and to scrutinise their own behaviour for ways to ‘earn’ more. Nothing else makes sense of the incompatible ‘truths’ that the beloved claims to return their love, yet doesn’t show it. When this is sustained for years by the alibi that consummation is impossible because the beloved is married – and,
as so often the case with older men and younger women, Boyd is – the unspoken contract becomes increasingly abject, creating an association between love and suffering.
‘Why shd. I wish so much to be with a person, who certainly does not wish so much to be with me. Why shd. I take pleasure in lacerating myself, & kissing the rod?’ By now Elizabeth’s every encounter with Boyd is barbed with anxious comparisons. In November, ‘He does not like Miss Bordman as much as he used to do. He says that he does not like her much’, but in December he names Harriet Mushet, a ‘rival Queen’. At this game’s perverse arrival point, pleasure vanishes even for the instigator, as tearfulness replaces wide-eyed eagerness and, in the cliché, ‘She’s just no fun anymore’. But, missing infusions of admiration, even the manipulator may come to believe in his own affection. ‘He put his hat before his face, & talked […] “of course he felt gratified and obliged by the sentiments I expressed.” “Gratified & obliged!”—Well!’
There is simply no excuse for this. Fanning the flames is no way to handle a crush:
Mr Boyd attacked me & made Miss Steers attack me on the subject of science standing higher in the scale of intellect than poetry. […] And when she was gone, Mr Boyd said—‘I hope you did not think that I wished Miss Steers to stay for my own sake. I was quite disinterested about it—’.
But at twenty-five Elizabeth is caught in a perpetual adolescence of obedience: she doesn’t yet recognise the flawed human three-dimensionality of older men. ‘How I ought to love him!—ought!—how I do!—’ she frets, about her father. And she obeys Boyd too, as he puts her through her paces, even though by now she realises her feelings for him are adulterous:
How could I write a diary without throwing upon paper […] the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head?—& then how could I bear to look on them after they were written? Adam made fig leaves necessary for the mind, as well as for the body.
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