After she received Robert’s lock that night—mail was delivered in London up to several times a day in the mid-1800s—Elizabeth finally sent him a ring with a strand of hair and a larger lock of her hair wrapped in paper along with a letter.
Robert proclaimed his joy at receiving Elizabeth’s hair in a letter to her postmarked December 2. “I was happy, so happy before!” he wrote. “But I am happier and richer now.”
Nineteenth-century English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a portrait by Field Talfourd.
The poetess memorialized this exchange in one of her forty-four love poems published collectively a few years later as Sonnets from the Portuguese:
I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday.
Robert and Elizabeth’s love affair continued, and in September 1846 they married. Soon the Brownings moved to Italy and settled in Florence, then moved around over the years to other cities in Italy, and to London and Paris.
As for Elizabeth’s hair, the strand in the ring she had sent him before they married was destroyed when Robert had the ring resized. From the larger lock she sent him, Robert placed a small portion of it in the ring (The British Library, London), and preserved the balance with the letter in which it was sent. Robert stored Elizabeth’s love letters in a marquetry box; Elizabeth kept Robert’s in a collapsible morocco case. They took these letters to Italy with them, where they remained until Elizabeth died fifteen years later and Robert returned to England with them. (The letters and cases are owned by Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.)
The Brownings’ friend Leigh Hunt owned a lock of the hair of the great seventeenth-century poet John Milton, whose works included Comus, “Lycidas,” and Samson Agonistes. Hunt had obtained the hair from a Dr. Batty, along with locks from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the author of Gulliver’s Travels, and Samuel Johnson, who wrote one of the earliest collections of words and their meanings, the English Dictionary. Hunt had shown Milton’s hair to the poet John Keats (1795-1821), who wrote about it in a letter and also composed some verses about seeing it. In the January 1833 issue of Tail’s Edinburgh Magazine, Hunt traced the lineage of the lock—and wrote that it “must have been cut when the poet was in the vigour of life, before he wrote Paradise Lost.”
On July 13, 1856, about ten years after they were married, Robert and Elizabeth Browning received from their friend Leigh Hunt a portion of the lock of Milton’s hair that he owned. It was given in an envelope on which Hunt wrote, “A bit of a lock of the hair of Milton. To Robert & E. B. Browning from Leigh Hunt. God bless them.” (The remainder of the lock was sold at Sotheby’s on April 29, 1913, for £2.15.)
LEFT: The locks of two great poets who lived hundreds of years apart are displayed together in this silver scallop-shell reliquary that was owned by Robert Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's hair is shown here.
RIGHT: Locks of hair from John Milton.
There is no evidence that Robert Browning placed the locks of either Milton or Elizabeth, who died in Florence in June 1861, in the reliquary when he was alive. More likely, the locks were placed there after the poet died in 1889, either by his son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, or by his daughter-in-law, Fannie Browning. One or the other probably had the two inscriptions engraved that appear in the reliquary: “E. B. B. to R. B. Nov 29 1845” on one side, and “Milton’s Hair, the gift of Leigh Hunt, in a Reliquary given by K. de K. Bronson, to Robert Browning” on the other side.
Little is known about the history of the reliquary except that it was owned by Pope Pius V (this is known from a faint inscription on the rim) but it is conceivable that it was once used in a church. When new Roman Catholic churches were built, a relic of a saint—a body part such as a fingernail or bone or even the saint’s entire body—was traditionally placed in a reliquary under the altar. The reliquary could be a large chest or casket or a small container. Milton and Elizabeth Browning may not have been holy persons, per se, but preserving their hair in the reliquary was in keeping with its function as a repository for human relics. The reliquary was in the possession of Robert Weideman Barrett Browning at the time of his death in 1912 and was included in a sale of Browning pictures, autograph letters, manuscripts, and other items at Sotheby’s the following year.
The reliquary and locks of Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were later acquired in 1933 at the National Auction Gallery in New York by American collector Dallas Pratt, who was actively collecting material related to Keats and his circle. In 1971, as a gift to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of John Keats, Dr. Pratt presented the reliquary to a small museum in Italy, the country where Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived for most of their married life.
Though they lived two centuries apart and led very different lives, both John Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a number of things in common. Both married relatively late in life—Milton at the age of thirty-six, Elizabeth when she was forty. Both suffered physical handicaps; Milton was blind, and Elizabeth was an invalid, a condition resulting from a back injury. Both studied Latin and displayed literary talents in their childhood. That they share a place side by side today, tangibly and metaphorically, befits two of England’s greatest poets—Milton, known for his epics, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for her sonnets—and the works they have left for posterity.
LOCATION: Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome, Italy.
THE ELEPHANT MAN
DATE: 1890
WHAT IT IS: The skeleton of Joseph Carey Merrick, dubbed, because of his physical appearance, the Elephant Man.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The skeleton is mounted in the standing position in a glass case. Merrick was 5 feet 1 inch tall.
An insidious disease dealt a cruel fate to one Joseph Carey Merrick, gradually and painfully imposing upon him horrible deformities, yet not ravaging his mental and physical capacities. Joseph Merrick had to face an unkind nineteenth-century society as a grotesque creature, and while his was a despairing, lonely, pathetic life, his story is also one of courage and survival.
Merrick was born on August 5, 1862, in Leicester, England, to Joseph and Mary Merrick. When he was about twenty-one months old, tumors began to appear on his lip and right cheek—the first obvious symptoms of his disease. He developed deformities that he would later attribute to his mother having been trampled by an elephant in an animal procession while she was pregnant with him, a story that is probably untrue.
Later in his life Joseph Merrick would recall with fondness his mother, Mary, but it is not known whether he remembered her as she actually was or created in his mind an idealized version of her. He would say Mary Merrick was the most considerate and beautiful of mothers and that he loved her deeply, but a surgeon who later cared for him described Mary Merrick as “worthless and inhuman” and claimed she deserted her son at a very young age. In any case, Joseph always spoke of his mother with great pride.
Mary Merrick died when Joseph was eleven or twelve years old—“the greatest misfortune of my life,” he called her death in an autobiographical pamphlet—and his father remarried to the landlady of the dwelling where he moved his family. The landlady was terribly insensitive to her stepson’s worsening physical anomalies. She demanded that he gain employment, chastising the lad to the point where he found it less onerous to remain on the streets and endure the pangs of hunger and the harsh ridicule of strangers.
Eventually he found a more genial home life with a benevolent paternal uncle. But Merrick’s own sense of guilt over not contributing to the financial well-being of the household drove him to seek refuge in the Leicester Union Workhouse, which was run on strict utilitarian principles. The arduous work required of its inmates was difficult for Merrick, since he limped and was so misshapen.
Merrick eventually embarked on
a peripatetic life, trying to make a go of it himself before having to return to another workhouse. During this time he had an eight-inch-long outgrowth of skin on his upper lip resembling a snout (which in 1882 was cut away at the Leicester infirmary). Realizing his best bet for earning a living was to exhibit himself as a freak, he contacted a local impresario, Tom Norman. Norman found him promisingly grotesque and formed a small conglomerate to manage the attraction he dubbed the Elephant Man. With his misshapen head, enlarged limbs, craggy skin, lumps on his face and body, and lumbering walk, Merrick surely cut the animal-like image that Norman deemed promotable and profitable. Although in Merrick’s lifetime displays of human monsters were not publicly accepted in England, as they once had been, they were still a popular underground attraction, bringing in sufficient profit to provide the subject with a better living than that of the average laborer.
Joseph Carey Merrick in 1886.
In a sordid store in the East End of London in 1884, Merrick made his debut as a freak. Standing before the staring audience, he would slowly undrape the cloth covering his body. The growths on his skin emitted a vile odor, but even this did not daunt the onlookers, who were all too eager to be transfixed by shock and horror. Narration was provided by Tom Norman, who may occasionally have cracked a whip to further the idea that Merrick was half-man, half-elephant.
Frederick Treves, a surgeon from the London Hospital, was informed about the human oddity on display and dispatched his assistant to visit the shop and invite Merrick to be examined. As Treves, who had viewed many disfigured souls, later wrote in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, Merrick was “the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen.” He brought Merrick to his hospital and presented him before a group of pathologists. The Pathological Society of London (now the Pathological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine) drew membership from biologists, related scientists, and interested medical men, as well as pathologists.
Although being put on display as a freak for paying customers would seem to be a depressing affair, Merrick was actually quite content in the shop where he worked for Tom Norman, and said he never wanted to return to the Leicester Workhouse. And through his whole experience of being a freak exhibit, Joseph Merrick managed to maintain an astonishing and sublime sense of pride and self-respect. Once, for example, when a friend of Tom Norman suggested that a hat be passed to patrons to help the poor creature, Joseph looked at his boss and exclaimed, “We are not beggars, are we, Thomas?”
It wasn’t long before the police closed down the exhibition shop, and for a time Merrick became an itinerant freak, collecting audiences and quick shillings, always a step ahead of the police. Eventually it became impossible for Merrick to continue to exhibit himself in England, and he decided to leave Tom Norman and try his luck with a touring circus on the European mainland. But there too the exhibition of Merrick was in conflict with the law, and he was eventually abandoned by the circus master, who absconded with all the money Merrick had managed to accumulate, between sixty and two hundred pounds, not a small amount for the times.
This cut-out card model of a Gothic church, made by Joseph Carey Merrick, was possibly given to Merrick by Margaret (Madge) Kendal, a famous English stage actress who enjoyed an epistolary friendship with the Elephant Man; he wrote to her and she bestowed many gifts upon him, although they probably never met.
Penniless, Merrick had no choice but to return to England, but the journey was a veritable nightmare. His speech was unintelligible. The trip involved a combination of water, railway, and foot passage, which was always a slow and tedious process for Merrick, who could not walk without a staff. Unconcealed, Merrick would be set upon in the street as if he were a wild animal, so he would cover his bloated head with a large black Victorian velvet cap with a potato sack attached (London Hospital Medical College Museum, London) and drape his body with a cape. His peregrinations were marked by startled countenances, shrieks of horror, obscene utterances, and pokes and jabs. As he limped along, each pace was a strenuous exercise, each street an interminable excursion of agony.
Upon reaching the Liverpool Street Railway Station in London, the indigent Merrick was mobbed by a crowd and was soon picked up by the police. Finding a calling card on his person, they promptly summoned the doctor whose name was printed on it. Although London Hospital, where Treves practiced, did not admit patients suffering from incurable diseases, Treves gained permission from the hospital’s House Committee to rescue Merrick from the streets and sequester him in a remote room of the hospital. A subsequent letter to the Times by the hospital chairman, Francis Henry Carr Gomm, yielded an outpouring of funds sufficient to pay Merrick’s hospital costs for years and provoked widespread attention that was to improve his life even more.
In the hospital, shielded from public humiliation and contempt, Joseph Carey Merrick at last found peace. The change was slow at first, with some volunteer workers obviously uncomfortable about caring for him. But a pivotal moment, Dr. Treves pointed out in the essay he later wrote on Merrick, was when a young woman came to Joseph’s room one morning to shake his hand. Merrick wept uncontrollably, in happiness. Word about Joseph Merrick spread, and he soon had many women visitors. He read voraciously, and he even enjoyed assembling model objects from cutout books.
Despite the hardships he faced in nineteenth-century England, Joseph Carey Merrick embraced life, and his story is one of courage and survival.
In his new residence Joseph Merrick was even able to live out some dreams. The royal and the rich paid homage, giving him great pleasure; his most esteemed visitor was the princess of Wales. His patrons made arrangements for him to clandestinely go to the theater or make visits to a country estate. Perhaps his greatest satisfaction was that, at last, people would talk to him, shake his hand, smile warmly—courtesies he had never before experienced.
In April 1890, at the age of twenty-seven, slightly more than three years after being admitted to London Hospital, Merrick went to sleep and never awakened.* Following an autopsy, an obituary in the Times stated, “Witness believed that the exact cause of death was asphyxia; the back of his head being greatly deformed, and while the patient was taking a natural sleep, the weight of his head overcame him and so suffocated him.”
Joseph Merrick’s skeleton was cleaned and articulated by the curator of the museum in which his bones were deposited, a Mr. Openshaw. These processes were time-consuming, and the skeleton could not have been ready for display until 1891.
Any ordinary human being subjected to a mere fraction of the hardship and contempt Merrick suffered would turn bitter and cynical. But Merrick embraced life and loved people. The Times obituary said, “The man had great overgrowth of the skin and bone, but he did not complain of anything,”
Of Merrick, Sir Frederick Treves wrote, “Here was a man in the heyday of youth who was so vilely deformed, that everyone he met confronted him with a look of horror and disgust. He was taken about the country to be exhibited as a monstrosity and as an object of loathing. He was shunned like a leper, housed like a wild beast and got his only view of the world from a peephole in a showman’s cart.”
When Treves first met Merrick, his deformity made him almost unable to move his mouth, and he could only babble and grunt. Treves assumed he was feebleminded—for the better, he thought: “That he could appreciate his position was unthinkable.” But this so-called human monstrosity was, in fact, intelligent, and very much aware of his position. In time, Merrick came to be regarded as an exemplary human being for his warmth, understanding, patience, inner strength, and hope.
LOCATION: London Hospital Medical College Museum, London, England. (This museum is not open to the general public.)
Footnote
*Merrick’s disease was unknown during his lifetime. It was at one time mistakenly thought to have been elephantiasis, and then later it was said to be neurofibromatosis, a not uncommon disorder of the nervous system. But there seemed to be differences in Merrick’s deformiti
es as described by medical doctors and the symptoms normally suffered by neurofibromatosis victims. In 1979 a rare disease called Proteus syndrome was identified, and by the mid-1980s some medical experts concluded that Merrick had actually suffered from this disease.
OWNEY, THE CANINE TRAVELER
DATE: 1897
WHAT IT IS: The stuffed and mounted remains of a famous late-nineteenth-century dog.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: A large, dirty-brown-and-gray mongrel terrier. It is dressed in a gray-brown cloth jacket with burgundy pipings and has approximately 150 tags around its neck and on its jacket.
Meet Owney. Owney was a dog who lived in the late nineteenth century in America. Like other dogs, Owney savored affection, good food, and a warm place to cozy up for the night. But Owney was a particularly adventurous dog—he loved traveling on trains and visiting different places—who also had a strong instinct to protect the mail. He became the beloved mascot of the Railway Mail Service of the United States.
The story of Owney begins in 1888 in Albany, New York, where one nippy fall evening a stray dog wandered into the post office to seek refuge from the cold. A cordial mutual attachment soon grew between the anonymous animal and the postal workers, who eventually gave the dog a home (in the post office, of course) and a name: Owney (after a mailman named Owen who took the dog on his rounds, or deriving from the postal workers’ repetitive query to the dog, “Who owns you?”).
Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 29