Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  By the time Fuller got to Gibraltar she sent a note to the Brownings that the captain had died of smallpox and had been buried at sea. “You know me & my cowardice, Arabel—‘Do burn it,’ ” she implored Robert. In August 1850, as Elizabeth was recovering from her fourth and most dangerous miscarriage, she could tell, as she always could, that Robert was attempting to keep some bad news from her. For two days Robert had avoided telling her that which had horrified him. Fuller’s fears had been founded. For the Elizabeth sank at the very end of the voyage home. Margaret Fuller, her husband, and her son all drowned within sight of land.

  The manuscript of Fuller’s history of the Revolution, which would have added dimension to the Anglo-Americans’ concern for liberty and for the unity of Italy, went down with them. Elizabeth Barrett Browning became the poet of the Risorgimento; another woman, one who considered herself married to an Italian, the American thinker Margaret Fuller might have become the chronicler of those events had fate allowed.

  Jesse White, the British feminist, had come to Italy and married a politically engaged Italian. As Jesse White Mario, she toured England giving lectures on the Italian revolution, taking a view opposite that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Though she admired the poet, White continued to uphold Mazzini and had other views that Elizabeth denounced in her letters.

  The mixing of Anglo-American and Italian, Protestant and Roman Catholic, was not all a matter of Sarah Page running away with a nobleman many years her junior. For the Brownings, the concern over Wilson and Ferdinando was not the mixed marriage but the possible loss of a couple who had served their needs so well.

  Elizabeth thought Wilson might wait till England to marry and have her family present, but the couple married in the English church in Florence and planned a Catholic wedding in Paris.

  England was of special interest to Elizabeth in the spring of 1855. From it she was receiving exciting news that supported her fervent belief. She wrote to her sister Arabel with glee: “Now, listen, all unbelievers in spirits! You cant survive much longer, so make the most of your life.” Spirits who could be summoned by mediums, and whose presence could be heard in the rapping on tables, the tilting of tables, and the mysterious presence during séances of disembodied hands had its beginning, in 1848, in … upstate New York. It was America’s contribution to that revolution in religious values that occurred during the Victorian period.

  After the new biblical criticism from Germany had disproved the divine authorship of the Bible, casting doubt on previously held religious certainty, not all Victorian intellectuals ran about London in despair, wringing their hands and contorting their prose with shouts of the everlasting Nay! “God is dead” was not shouted from every rooftop. Nor did all believers in the face of science and the theory of evolution turn nostalgically to the past or return to a stubborn form of traditional orthodoxy—or become High Church or go over to Rome. From Victorian roots, hybrids flowered. For example, the works of the eighteenth-century Emanuel Swedenborg recirculated, and many in the Brownings’ circle, Powers, Page, Story, believed in the spirit world he envisioned. His work Conjugal Love, which described an afterlife not unlike life, when married couples were united as one mind, was known to the Brownings, studied early in their marriage. For some the loosening of orthodoxy expanded possibilities. It was not surprising that this optimism swelled in the United States, where mid-century congregations of five to ten thousand spiritualists could be found meeting in Boston in the music hall on a Sunday. By the spring of 1855, séances and spiritual rappings ran rampant in the well-to-do and stately homes of England. And it was an American friend of the Brownings, the discerning and pioneering collector of Italian art James Jackson Jarves, who first sent Elizabeth the good news.

  Robert Browning took a skeptical attitude on the spiritual rappings, spurred on perhaps by his wife’s immediate will to believe. Yet he, as well as his wife, considered the wealthy young Jarves “rather a cold man—& honest.” Jarves was heir to what would later be called the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company. He had traveled to and written about Hawaii before coming to Italy. There he saw American tourists attempting to grapple with Italian culture. He became a writer on art who believed he had a mission to carry thoughts about art and the artistic life back to the United States. Even before he arrived in Italy, his own marriage had turned very bitter. Still he did not believe in divorce. “We must all bear our own sin, and in some degree our neighbors’ also,” he would write. (He did not consider himself the biological father of his last child by Elizabeth Swain Jarves.) “Marriage can be made self-corrective by viewing it in its true sense, as a school in which to train the virtues for heaven. If its trials are sore, so are its years few.”

  On his way back to America, without his wife, Jarves, whose invaluable art collection would be bought in his lifetime by Yale University, planned to stop in England and attend a séance with a young psychic who had become all the rage, Daniel Dunglas Home (or “Hume” as it is pronounced and as Elizabeth spelled it). Jarves himself had not had any personal experiences with the spirits, though he tended to believe in them, given both his parents’, and particularly his mother’s, enthusiasm. Robert, respecting Jarves’s clear head at the time, told him on parting, “ ‘If you see anything, write to us, and I will receive your testimony.’ ” With that, off Jarves went to England with his friend J. R. Tilton, the American artist who lived in Rome.

  No letter came. “ ‘I told you so,’ Robert said. ‘He’s an honest man. He has seen nothing & won’t write. I knew he wouldn’t write. These things always slip through.’ ”

  Robert spoke too soon. Jarves’s letter, when it arrived, was such an explosive account of Home’s power that in Florence for weeks nothing else but the letter was “talked of, everybody snatching it from everybody, reading it, copying it, dreaming and discussing over it.”

  The description Elizabeth offered Arabel was her own “I told you so” to her more orthodox sister. She couldn’t quote the letter verbatim, as it was still going the rounds, yet: “He has seen a heavy table with a French lamp on it lifted into the air, without a finger touching it—the same table tilted up on end . . the lamp kept in its place unmoved . . contrary to all laws of gravitation—same table made so light he could lift it with a finger—same table made so heavy that all the persons present tugging at it, couldn’t stir it an inch. (This, in different private houses.)”

  Then there were the spiritual hands. Elizabeth tried to re-create his words, “ ‘As surely as I clasped your hand at parting … I clasped the hand of a spirit …’ ” They were “ ‘hands of different sizes’—‘softer & more thrilling than any woman’s’—‘conveying an inexpressible pleasure’—the ‘softest & most loving tenderness of touch.’ ” These “hands did everything you asked them to do—untied a lady’s apron-string & carried the apron across the room … struck playfully or patted tenderly the person present—took Mr. Jarves’s handkerchief & knotted it in so ingenious a manner as would be hard for a man’s craft. Then there was music—an accordion was played upon exquisitely in a full light,” played “more exquisitely than a mortal could play it. That may or may not be an exaggeration.”

  She did not want to overstate. “I must tell you that altho he felt the hands, clasped them, felt the fingers, was aware of their various size & pressure, yet he himself saw them indistinctly—a sort of floating cloud each hand was to him—but the other persons present, all of them, including Mr. Tilton our unbeliever, saw the hands of the spirits as perfectly & clearly as they saw their own. Then the house was shaken as with an earthquake . . with the perpendicular & lateral movement . . until the master of it begged for quiet—he was afraid of the consequences to the walls. The whole ended in trance & prayer on the part of the medium—magnificent in character—‘like Dr. Channing’ says Mr. Jarves who had heard him.”

  Though this would seem to have been enough spirits for one day, Mr. Jarves and Mr. Home decided to sleep together: “The demonstrations being often intere
sting on such occasions.… (You see Hume is known to Mr. Jarves’s family—he is quite a gentleman—related to the Earl of Home—& is said to be a most interesting young man . . refined, frank, affectionate, pious . . & rather like Mr. Ruskin in personal appearance.)” The sleeping arrangement proved fortunate. Sounds began immediately. “The demonstrations were so violent as to frighten Hume who crept close to me for protection,” Jarves wrote to a friend. Elizabeth reported to Arabel, “The spirits walked round the bed with distinct footsteps—drew the curtains backward & forward, lifted up the heavy fourposter bed into the air . . & did everything Mr. Jarves asked them to do except one for which there seemed to be a reason. They said they wd. try to do it, but they failed. He saw, but dimly, a full-length spirit upon the occasion.” And if that were not enough, extraordinary revelations were made to him, “not only upon his own affairs but upon matters connected with people in Florence—& two or three ladies here are in agonies because something is hinted which may refer to one of them. Well—what do you say?”

  Robert said, “We can’t any of us sit down & conclude that the man whom we saw the other day, cold & sensible . . & skeptical about Mr. Kirkup’s pet medium Regina . . has gone suddenly mad.” He said, “Upon the whole, I can’t make up my mind to believe it is a delusion.” He would hold his judgment until “he sees with his eyes.” But in the meantime, “if it’s spiritual, I’m inclined to think it devilish,” which to his wife “is the most cruel conclusion I ever heard. I protest against such conclusion.” For her part, “I don’t believe in the least degree more since I read his letter, simply because I believed entirely, previous to reading it.” She and Robert and their friend Isa Blagden would go to a séance while they were in London over the summer—and the pious Arabel must go, too. “Won’t you? Only we won’t sleep with Mr. Hume, we have agreed, unless you should particularly desire it.”

  In June, before Elizabeth reached England, she wrote to Arabel from Paris that her sister had been very wrong not to go to a séance with Home in London when she had the opportunity. “I want to impress upon you the fact, that a spirit out of the body doesn’t pretend to more infallibility than a spirit in the body. What you go to receive is the proof of access from the spiritual world, not to receive instruction in doctrine.” When Elizabeth arrived in London, “Certainly you shall see Hume. I will have it so.” Did she forget that Arabel was a Barrett, too? Both sisters held to their convictions.

  But would the Brownings ever get out of Paris? The trip from Florence had been filled with problems. They had left on the outbreak of cholera and Elizabeth had been afraid. On ship, Pen had fun, but Robert again was sick. In Marseilles her brother Alfred was in the hotel, and had booked a room near their own. “Robert accused me of a want of sisterly affection because I insisted on washing my face and breakfasting before I sent for him—but if I hadn’t, I certainly should have dropped down in a fit at the first word of greeting. So we breakfasted—& then we sent Penini in alone with a slip of paper.”

  Uncle Alfred was in high spirits and might have been doubly pleased to be greeted by his sister’s pixielike child. The fifth Barrett son (aka Daisy) at the age of thirty-five was on his way to France to visit and marry the woman he loved, his cousin Elizabeth “Lizzie” Barrett, thirteen years his junior.

  Though he came from a big, close, letter-writing family, he apparently did not know that Ba had already heard of his matrimonial plans from Arabel. He didn’t confide in her; instead he talked of the country house he had rented in France on a six-month lease, “furnished with plate and linen” and costing only twenty pounds. He was in the happiest of moods, delighting in the “liberty of the French government.” Another republican in the making, it would appear.

  Alfred’s closed mouth and his sister’s breakfast before greeting him might have stemmed from an unspoken difference. Ba was not a champion of his plans: “depend upon it, Arabel, he comes here to meet & marry Lizzie—that’s certain. I am very, very sorry.”

  Why? The next seven and a half lines of the letter are crossed out. We are in the realm of family secrets. Alfred certainly had been in close quarters with his young cousin. When he was in his early twenties, Lizzie lived as part of the family at 50 Wimpole Street. Ba drew “A Portrait” of Lizzie Barrett at the age of ten, collected in her Poems of 1844. She quoted Ben Jonson: “Our name’s Elizabeth.” The poem painted a physical and psychological portrait that might make us a bit uneasy today, when we know so much of the intricate family reasons of why a beautiful young child might seem overwise, unchildlike, and compliant.

  GEORGINA ELIZABETH “LIZZIE” BARRETT, 1843, by Alfred Barrett Moulton Barrett. Lizzie was ten years old and living at 50 Wimpole Street when her twenty-three-year-old cousin Alfred did this watercolor. Her mother was mentally ill and could not take care of her, so as a child she lived with the Barretts of Wimpole Street.

  ALFRED BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT (1820–1904), pencil and watercolor by his brother Octavius, June 1845. The tenth child of Edward Barrett and Mary Moulton Barrett, “Daisy” was disinherited when he married his cousin Lizzie, thirteen years his junior.

  Oval cheeks encolored faintly,

  Which a trail of golden hair

  Keeps from fading off to air:

  And a forehead fair and saintly,

  Which two blue eyes undershine,

  Like meek prayers before a shrine.

  Face and figure of a child,—

  Though too calm, you think, and tender,

  For the childhood you would lend her.

  Yet child-simple, undefiled,

  Frank, obedient, waiting still

  On the turnings of your will.

  What was this compliant child doing living in the Barrett household? Her father’s military and Jamaican interests kept him abroad, and her mother, Mary Turner Barrett, was unstable and unable to care for her daughter from the earliest years. There were whispers of insanity and alcoholism.

  In Paris in the summer of 1855 it might have been Mary Turner Barrett who showed up to visit the Brownings—her daughter’s sister- and brother-in-law—“smelling intolerably of spirits—both mentally & bodily. The tone of her conversation made me ashamed of her relationship to me—Don’t repeat this to anyone.” Better yet, Arabel crossed her name out, too.

  Lizzie’s father, Captain George Goodin Barrett, was the youngest of the four illegitimate children born to two earlier Barrett cousins—one being Samuel Barrett, the favorite son of Edward of Cinnamon Hill. Samuel’s illegitimate children by his cousin Elizabeth Barrett Waite Williams were generously provided for until maturity in his father’s will. The youngest son, Captain George Goodin Barrett—Googie—was welcome in his cousin’s house on Wimpole Street. Ba complained in her letters to Robert of his doing Jamaican business downstairs while Lizzie was upstairs with her.

  The marriage between Daisy and Lizzie did take place, at the embassy in Paris shortly after his sister predicted it. In August, from London, she wrote to dearest Alfred, “I little thought when we parted at Marseilles, that you would bring me another sister before we should meet again. May God bless you & her, dear Alfred, & make you happy to the utmost of your hopes.”

  Daisy informed his father before he married. As he told Sette, “I have written to the Governor, not according to my wishes, but out of regard to hers [Lizzie’s]. She insisted upon my shewing respect to him who is nominally ‘My father’ & so I wrote in such a strain, I thought best suited to allay the dreadful injury I was about to inflict. I regretted having to make such a parade, but what I regretted still more was the consequent annoyance it would create among you all. He has I suppose been outrageous—& his society necessarily disagreeable.”

  Sette, too, hoped his brother would wait, at least until some of his debts were paid off. But by August 2, the day after his marriage, Daisy wrote to Henrietta that “the dread deed has been done. I am a married man—.” And he told the sister he was closest to, “You must know my dearest Henrietta that I have loved Lizzie
for years—for a long, long time we have been engaged.” Lizzie and Daisy had begun taking walks with Henrietta and Surtees just before the Brownings met, in 1844—Lizzie was eleven and Daisy was twenty-four.

  There was so much interbreeding in this marriage of double cousins, so much concern about the mother’s insanity, so many memories not only of 50 Wimpole Street but of Jamaica and of illegitimacy and mixed racial birth and of contested wills that this particular marriage might have struck an even more bitter chord to Moulton Barrett, who could not seem to escape the curse of generations. He cut his son out of his will in a codicil.

  After the marriage Elizabeth would fret about Alfred’s foreign assignments, which left his young wife alone for too long a time. Lizzie Barrett was young, pretty, frivolous, in need of interesting experiences. “I fear much that it is merely outside prettiness with her—only she is so very, very pretty, that one would fain give the outward credit for the inward.” In her sister-in-law’s view Lizzie was not one to be kept for too long on the vine. What happened to the serious child to whom she had read and who’d had dreams of her own? Whatever Elizabeth’s doubts about Lizzie’s stability and Alfred’s debts, meeting her brother, while they were both at Marseilles and right before his marriage, at the exact moment when she was heading toward England and hoping for some reconciliation with her father was quite inopportune. Would her father mistake her opinions on this issue, would he think she had encouraged this match? This time there were justifications for reservations that went beyond her father’s irrationality and his cruel and primitive way of cutting pain away—and his children with it. Ba took a pause before seeing Alfred in Marseilles, and her brother didn’t breathe a word of his intentions. She was “very, very sorry” about the marriage, and whoever excised the reasons she gave Arabel for it was discreet.