Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  To use Richard Barrett’s own words, it gives the contemporary reader “a sense of shame” to see sharp logic used throughout to validate slavery as a form of beneficence to the African. Still, the speech by Edward’s illegitimate first cousin offers a glimpse into the colonial mind and temperament. Moulton Barrett was a Creole, never really at home in England outside the confines of his Creole relatives and concerns. How much more alienated must he have felt as he declined not only in wealth but in prestige as the majority of British people came to despise slavery and blame it on the Creole planters. He may have found out about the possibility of his mixed blood during the later years of his marriage, or it might have been that the issue of mixed blood was not a concern to the powerful heir to Cinnamon Hill during the years of prosperity. After all, such things were common in Creole families. But as his private fortunes declined, and the source of his wealth became anathema to the British people, he grew to believe he and his family were cursed, and he tried to control his children and to extinguish the possibility of a next generation. Who knows the mental sufferings of Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett in this area of legitimate procreation? Racist fears based on family secrets would certainly explain why the news of grandchildren did nothing to mollify his extreme position. A married child was a dead child. His grandchildren didn’t exist for him.

  ROBERT BROWNING, SR. (1782–1866). An unworldly man of scholarly interests, the poet’s father was a caricaturist of notable talent. He encouraged his son’s artistic and philosophic interests, while his own father had thwarted his.

  The founder of the London Browning Society and Browning’s friend, Frederick James Furnivall, wrote in a footnote to a paper he had delivered to the society after Robert’s death, “It is possible that this colour business may have had something to do with Mr. Barrett’s unjustified aversion to his daughter’s marriage to the poet.” He wasn’t referring to Elizabeth Barrett’s “Moulton” grandfather, he was referring to Robert Browning’s “Tittle” grandmother. A few months after Browning died in 1889, Furnivall investigated family records and tombstones to find out if Browning had Jewish blood as rumored. (After all, he had an uncle named Reuben.) He found instead much circumstantial evidence that Margaret Tittle, Browning’s grandfather’s first wife, had black blood. “In colour, the poet’s father was so dark that when, as a youth, he went out to his Creole mother’s sugar-plantation in St. Kitts, the beadle of the Church ordered him to come away from the white folk among whom he was sitting, and take his place among the coloured people.” Robert’s grandfather favored the children of his second, highborn wife, and left his children by Tittle out of his will. Some of his children by the second wife, as well as certain unnamed old friends of the family, concurred on this issue of blood, according to Furnivall. This report infuriated Browning’s sister, Sarianna, and his son, Pen. They both denied vehemently that the Brownings descended from a butler, another Furnivall assertion. Yet neither said one word on the issue of mixed blood on their Creole side.

  MARGARET TITTLE (1754–1789). Oil by Wright of Derby. The poet’s paternal grandmother, a Creole, according to Frederick J. Furnivall, of mixed blood, with claims to plantations on St. Kitts. Her surviving son, the poet’s father, outraged by slavery, rejected his claim on them and on a comfortable colonial livelihood. She died at the age of thirty-five, and this portrait, taken down when her husband remarried, went to her son.

  ROBERT BROWNING (1749–1833). The poet’s paternal grandfather, an ambitious man who worked for the Bank of England for more than fifty years and rose to Principal of the Bank Stock Office. On October 13, 1778, he married Margaret Tittle, a Creole, and had three children, Robert (the poet’s father), Margaret Morris, and William, who died in infancy. After Mary Tittle died he married a well-connected Englishwoman, Jane Smith, and had nine children by her.

  Instead, they allowed Mrs. Sutherland Orr to write a Life and Letters of Robert Browning. Furnivall’s assertion “was, on the face of it, not impossible, and would be absolutely unimportant to my mind, and I think I may add, to that of Mr. Browning’s sister and son. The poet and his father were what we know them, and if negro blood had any part in their composition, it was no worse for them, and so much better for the negro.” She disputed, through family friends, assertions of Browning’s father’s dark skin, and in the Wright of Derby’s portrait of his grandmother “any indication of possible dark blood is imperceptible to the general observer, and must be of too slight and fugitive a nature to enter into the discussion.” This, too, must have been told to her, for Mrs. Orr was nearly blind. Her evidence was as circumstantial as Furnivall’s, but she did verify the “systematic unkindness under which” Browning’s father grew up under his stepmother and his father. His father wouldn’t look at his son’s first completed picture when he wanted to be an artist, and even when Browning’s father pleaded to go to “a university … at his own cost,” his father forbade it.

  Jeannette Marks wrote that Robert Browning’s father, when in the West Indies, “came to know something about his grandmother’s family: the St. Kitts Strachans, father and son, surgeons, through whom may have been inherited, quite as well as through the Tittles, ‘the dash’ of the tar brush of which Dr. Furnivall wrote.” Mrs. Orr never discounted the possibility of some black blood. What Creole family who had come to prosper from generations of slave trade could? Up until now it has been a possibility confined to footnotes, though such an issue must have reflected a concern in many a Victorian household. Four days after the Brownings’ marriage, on September 16, Elizabeth wrote to her husband: “You might put in the newspaper . . of Wimpole Street & Jamaica, or . . & Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica. That is right & I thought of it at first—only stopped . . seeming to wish to have as little about poor Papa as possible. Do as you think best now.”

  The next day, two days before they left England, Browning did what he (and others) have thought best since: “As you leave it to me,—the name, & ‘Wimpole St.’ will do—Jamaica,—sounds in the wrong direction, does it not? and the other place is distinctive enough.”

  If Robert Browning’s grandmother, as well as Elizabeth Barrett’s grandfather, had had African blood, one person who would have known it would be their Jamaican cousin John Kenyon (who himself had a “half-sister of color Hannah Kennion”)—that dear friend who Elizabeth passionately insisted would not want any responsibility for her union with Robert before the fact.

  One can disregard these accounts—“His peculiarities and defects are obvious,” Browning said of Furnivall, a respected scholar. One can keep all mention of Jeannette Marks’s careful genealogical research in footnotes forever. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have had, not only on her Moulton side but on her husband’s side, powerful motivation for writing a poem on her honeymoon about a black mother who suffocated her mulatto child because of his white skin. She might have even had secret reasons for fearing John Kenyon’s magnified eyes discerning courtship between the children of his two Creole classmates. Certainly she would not be the only child of planters in England who might have had secret preoccupations about the color of their skin.

  JOHN KENYON (1784–1856). One of the Barretts’ Jamaican cousins, Kenyon was a wealthy and cultivated patron of the arts and a minor poet. He encouraged RB to write to EBB and was a benevolent friend to both.

  While she wrote her poem on her honeymoon, she herself was pregnant. She wouldn’t believe it, even after she had been pregnant for five months.

  “I have been stupid beyond any stupidity of which I ever, that I know of, was thought capable, by me or others—and the consequence has been a premature illness, a miscarriage, at four o’clock last Sunday morning, and of five months date, says Dr. Cook, or nearly so.” This she wrote to Henrietta from Pisa in late March 1847. She had been perfectly well until about six or seven weeks before, when she became subject to violent night pains. She’d have a bit of brandy, Robert would rub her stomach, and the pains would disappear as suddenly as they arrived.

&
nbsp; Wilson finally told her that she suspected Elizabeth might be pregnant, and that if this were so, the pains were not a good sign, that they might signal miscarriage. Wilson also “had great fears about the influence of the morphine etc.” At this juncture Robert pleaded with her to call Dr. Cook. Why didn’t she?

  “I was frightened out of my wits by the suggestion about the morphine, and out of my wit by the entreaty about Dr. Cook.” Being implored on both sides by Robert and Wilson, she decided on a way to pacify Robert and her own apprehensions. She was sick in Pisa, well, she’d write to Mr. Jago, that should clarify matters.—Dear Mr. Jago, should she be pregnant, would the morphine have a negative effect?—The minute the letter was mailed, she realized it was ridiculous to send him a hypothetical case.

  But never mind; she wasn’t pregnant. Wilson had been sick at the end of January, and Elizabeth had rushed to her in the middle of the night. Hadn’t Robert scolded her for going to her maid “without any stockings. ‘I wanted to kill him . . I played with his life.’ ” Now she was willing to concede the point to Robert. Perhaps she had caught cold on that occasion. That must be it. “I unconsciously caught cold by going out into the passage, I might be affected so and so and so.”

  By then Robert was beseeching her to see Dr. Cook, but she would not do it. In the second letter she ever wrote to Robert, a little over two years before, she told him that ever since she was a child she had been stubborn; testa lunga was her Italian master’s word for it. She did not misrepresent herself. No one could convince her that she was pregnant.

  The night pains went away, but about three weeks into March she felt sick enough to submit to seeing Dr. Cook. On Friday he looked around, saw the fire was too high, her pulse too irritable, saw she was doing everything wrong for a pregnant woman. He told her to lie down, prescribed cold tea; he’d be back on Sunday. “Though his opinion went with the majority, the minority of one remained obstinate.” Elizabeth still did not believe, but she did what she was told and felt better on Saturday. On the day of the miscarriage itself, “I was perfectly convinced, would have died for it at the stake, that I had just caught cold! Most stupid, stupid!”

  That evening, in the third week of March, she began to have pains, and they “came on, every five minutes” for more than twenty-four hours. “Oh, not so very violent, I have had worse pain I assure you.” Worse pain than a labor of more than twenty-four hours and a miscarriage of a five-month fetus. Only during this labor did Elizabeth come to her senses: “When my eyes were open to the truth, I was as little frightened or agitated as at this moment, and bore it all so well (I mean with so much bodily vigour) as to surprise Wilson . . and Dr. Cook too indeed.”

  Robert took her suffering worse than she. As soon as he was allowed back in her room after it was over, “he threw himself down on the bed in a passion of tears, sobbing like a child . . he who has not the eyes of a ready-weeper. He had better scolded me well, I say, for bringing all this agitation on him—for Dr. Cook pronounces that if he had been called in six weeks ago, everything would have gone as right as possible.” So her willfulness had led to this punishment, the termination of a five-month pregnancy. But she was getting well, and waited a week to inform her sisters, so that she could write the letter in her own hand, in order to reassure them as to the state of her health. It was a long letter, but she would have written even more if Robert hadn’t insisted that she not overtax herself. “And just at present my mood inclines to be a more obedient wife than I have been.”

  Her postscript, however, indicated the return of the testa lunga. “The morphine did no harm at all.” And the fetus, one assumes, was white.

  At the time of this unacknowledged pregnancy she wrote to Mary Mitford, “In the way of writing I have not done much yet . . just finished my rough sketch of an antislavery ballad & sent it off to America, where nobody will print it, I am certain, because I could not help making it bitter.” Racial concerns, patriarchal rejection, family secrets, may have played a part in what she called her “stupidity,” and what she described as an incredible, headlong denial of a pregnancy that ran five months. Her whole life, her whole world, had been turned upside down in the last six months. Now not only had she married against her father’s wishes, but she was immediately pregnant with the legitimate grandchild that was never meant to be. For that first pregnancy, that concrete flesh-and-blood betrayal of her father’s wishes, for that child who might be born with skin as dark as, or darker than, her own and Robert’s, she was not prepared.

  PISA POSTSCRIPT

  IF ON THEIR honeymoon the Brownings lived as if the world did not exist, it was Elizabeth who saw that the circle must be widened. If Robert had vowed never to be where she could not go, they must live in places where there would be plenty for him to do in her vicinity. She, too, and perhaps more than he, needed a wider circle. She loved her husband dearly, there was no doubt about that. But her circumstances were different. He chose her out of a world of women, and out of a world he had experienced. He was ready to “settle down.”

  In choosing him, she also chose not to live as a “blind poet,” but to see rivers and mountains, experience the world. Given her peculiar situation, this man was her great love and her escape route. It was now time for both of them to move on. The months in Pisa, the inexhaustible relying on their love alone, the honeymoon, was over.

  “He loves me too much . . so much that I feel humiliated, as someone crushed with gifts,” she wrote to her sister Arabel from Pisa. Less than four weeks after the miscarriage, “Robert’s goodness and tenderness are past speaking of, even if you could answer me. He reads to me, talks and jests to make me laugh, tells me stories, improvises verses in all sorts of languages … sings songs, explains the difference between Mendelssohn and Spohr by playing on the table, and when he has thoroughly amused me accepts it as a triumph. Of course I am spoilt to the utmost—who could escape?”

  Before the miscarriage, Elizabeth thought Robert had written to her sisters of an erroneous travel plan, and she scolded him for it. When she found out it had been she who had erred, she told him, “Whenever I blame you, I find myself in fault afterward.”

  To this humble apology she expected a pretty reply, something to the effect of “My darling, when you find fault with yourself, you are most in fault of all.”

  Instead, Robert paused for a moment, and then answered very quietly, “It is a satisfaction, at any rate, that you should admit it.”

  Robert Browning was not looking for wifely obedience. He couldn’t tolerate that any more than he could tolerate Victorian papas with ironclad rules and thunderclaps to enforce them.

  One day, over some small point relating to Flush, he said, “ ‘I do wish, Ba, you wouldn’t do so and so.’ To which I answered:

  “ ‘Well, I won’t do it any more,’ was ever a more unexceptionable answer? Yes, and it was meekly delivered too. But he didn’t like it at all, nevertheless, and cried out quite quickly:—

  “ ‘Don’t say such words to me, Ba.’

  “ ‘Why what ought I say then?’

  “ ‘Say that you will do as you please as long as you please to do it.’ ”

  The earliest known photograph of Robert Browning, Paris, 1856.

  Portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Michele Gordigiani, in 1858.

  THE MARRIAGE OF

  TRUE MINDS

  HERS

  AUNT NINA might have been a seasoned traveler, but when it came to Florence, Browning advised Elizabeth’s sisters not to take her advice. For she had described the city as British to the teeth and bursting at the seams with balls and hoopla, and this had contributed to the Brownings’ overlong stay in Pisa. Fulfilling their half-year lease, they now planned only a short stop at Florence on their way to Rome. One might say Anna Jameson had given them the gift of discovering their home for themselves. And providence led them to where Tuscany itself, after a three-hundred-year slumber, was going to ignite.

  Though the couple excelled at local co
lor, their initiation into foreign life was not complete. In Pisa, if it had not been for a friendly English woman, they would not have realized how they were being cheated day by day. They had the blessing of the devoted and gentle Elizabeth Wilson, who was more than a lady’s maid; Robert wrote home that she was their friend. A friend of the Brownings would not be adept at haggling. So timid was she that her mistress marveled at her strength in leaving Wimpole Street with them and heading on, valiantly, to help them in their (and her) new life. She was certainly not one to rush to the marketplace and scream out in shocked horror at the price of chestnuts and grapes, especially if one were able to buy a store of them for a penny. One Mrs. Taylor, who opened Elizabeth and Robert’s eyes to their millionaire status among the Pisans, went with Wilson to the market to show her how to shop. There were three customs of the country: bargain, bargain, bargain.

  The treat of Florence was double. For not only were the poets immediately attracted, but they could compare it to Pisa. It was cheaper, it was far more beautiful, and it was full of life. If Robert had vowed to go nowhere without Elizabeth, here was a place of interest to roam within walking-miles of her chair. Not that Elizabeth didn’t go outside and walk. Her general health, which she noted as always good, had not been undermined by her lungs, and she made many trips, walking, riding mules, and climbing stairs.

  The couple had first stayed at rooms in the Casa Guidi. This four-story palazzo was across the way from the Pitti Palace. It was on the “other side” of the Arno. One could reach it by going over the Ponte Vecchio, the venerable bridge on which Dante first saw his Beatrice. After another miscarriage, this time in the pregnancy’s second month, which made traveling to Rome for the winter too dangerous, they had to look for a new apartment. They tried to bargain for another lease on their apartment in the Casa Guidi. Unfortunately, they took the padrone’s poker face seriously and moved on; their straight-line British integrity once more made them deficient in the nuances of Italian life.