Browning

Her physical condition had markedly improved: she no longer rode or walked great distances or played boisterously with the younger children as she had done before her first illness, but she did stroll around the house and the gardens of Hope End and tutored her younger brothers in Latin. For the best part of the day, however, she closeted herself in her room, writing and reading in bed until late in the morning and preferring not to join the rest of the family when visitors were entertained. Now that her physical frailty had become established, accepted by custom and usage, she no longer had to emphasize her mysteriously non-specific weakness by regular consultations with doctors: coughings and a susceptibility to colds were enough to provoke sympathy and promote a collective agreement within her family that Elizabeth should be protected from anything that might worsen her delicate state of health. For intellectual stimulation, she corresponded lengthily with neighbours, older gentlemen such as Sir Uvedale Price (author, in 1794, of An Essay on the Picturesque, which introduced a new aesthetic category), Sir James Commeline (a local vicar and classical scholar), and especially with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, translator, and poet who lived at nearby Malvern Wells. She fell half in love with Mr Boyd, who was sadly afflicted with blindness, the only man outside her family that she consented to see and to make the effort to visit. But Mr Boyd, a gentleman of some moderate private means, happened to be married already and the father of children.

Mary Barrett, exhausted by the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, distressed by the death of her mother, Grandmother Graham-Clarke, and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, died at the age of forty-seven in October 1828. Elizabeth was twenty-two years old. As the oldest daughter, she might have been expected to take over the running of the Hope End household, but no such duty was imposed upon her. Instead, Aunt Bummy, Arabella Graham-Clark, an unmarried sister of Mary Barrett, came to live with the Barretts. She was forty-three years old, the same age as her brother-in-law, and capably took over the management of the household, so relieving Elizabeth of any domestic obligations. The death of his wife deeply affected Edward Barrett, who turned to religion for spiritual comfort.

On his trips to London he had fallen under the influence of the powerfully charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving who, by 1825, had started to go seriously off his theological head—and not quietly. Irving’s big moment of revelation arrived when, sensationally, he predicted the imminent second coming of Christ. From 1828, he began teaching Christ’s oneness with humanity in all its attributes and thus, heretically, to assert to his followers the sinfulness of Christ’s nature. Edward Barrett’s mind became infused with the Irvingite belief that salvation lay in purity, that translation to the next world, preferment in the afterlife, could be achieved only by remaining uncorrupted by this wretched and sinful world. Irving preached zealously to large crowds that flocked to hear his dramatic denunciations of the errors of turpitudinous humanity. His authority, he claimed, derived directly from God, whose mouthpiece he had become. As an instrument of the divine, Irving was regularly inspired to invoke the wrathful retribution of the Almighty upon the godless and the guilty.

Bereft of her mother, Elizabeth adhered emotionally to her father. They had always been close, though never dependent on one another. Edward Barrett’s feelings towards his eldest daughter were sympathetic towards her physical fragility and psychological sensitivity. His general conduct as a good paterfamilias was not exceptional: he could be severe when necessary in his principles of good Christian conduct, and strict, though not abusive, about correcting any backsliding among the young Barretts, though he tended to be more indulgent towards Elizabeth than towards the rest of his children. But now Elizabeth became clinging, resentful of his business trips to London, anxious even when he was out of her sight at home. She wept pitifully when he went away and wept for joy when he returned safely. It is now generally accepted that, in the first years after his wife’s death, Edward Barrett did not become abnormally possessive of Elizabeth: quite the reverse, in fact. If anything, it was Elizabeth who felt, however irrationally, abandoned and insecure to the extent that she became virtually reclusive and sought comfort to an unusual degree in the powerful protective presence and reassuring company of her father.

Mr Barrett, in turn, looked to his family for solace in his grief and loneliness. He was liable to fall into rages, justifiably or not, but he could generally put on a good-humoured face. If he was sometimes a beast, he was at least—like Dr Arnold of Rugby—a just beast. In whatever temper, thunderous or sunny, it was perfectly evident that he greatly missed his wife. As he turned inward upon himself and his children, so he excluded friends and barely tolerated the intrusions by various remote members of the Barrett and Graham-Clarke families. Like Elizabeth, he conceived a horror of visitors and refused to make visits to other houses. His children amply and affectionately returned his love for them, and so for a while their mutual need for security coincided. For the most part, harmony reigned throughout Hope End. Then, in 1830, just two years after the death of his wife, Edward Barrett’s mother died. His shock was unspeakable. He had no words to describe the immensity of his loss. For that matter, the entire Barrett family was shocked to the extent that they were all shackled even more securely together in the isolated house and in their passionate, almost exclusive involvement with one another.

Edward Barrett was experiencing other difficulties, beyond the deeply wounding, irreparable losses in his private life. Some long-standing business and financial worries, caused by sustained mismanagement of his interests in the West Indies and a damaging lawsuit, were brought to a head by a slave rebellion in 1832 on the Jamaican plantations managed by his brother Sam. Additionally, the imminent prospect of the complete abolition of slavery (which eventuated in 1833) implied higher production costs and an inevitable tumult in the price of sugar. The monetary losses would be severe. Hope End, a significant drain on his resources (it was heavily mortgaged and creditors were pressing), would have to be sold. He kept much of the land, but the loss of the house was bad enough. It represented, even worse, a loss of his fundamental security in the world after the deaths of his wife and mother, and a serious loss of face—humiliating evidence of failure. If such precious things could so easily slip from his grasp, what might he lose next? In fact, Edward Barrett was far from ruined: the prospect before him was not that he would be a poor man, but he would no longer be a rich man.

The Barretts left Hope End on 23 August 1832. Mr Barrett had taken a large, comfortable house by the sea at Sidmouth in Devon, and the family settled more or less cheerfully, at least without protest, into their new lives. Elizabeth slept soundly, her appetite increased, and her cough was less troublesome: perhaps the sea air had something to do with the revival of her health, and probably, too, the stimulation of a new, more open and extroverted environment after the backwater of Hope End was beneficial. It was as though a heavy burden of gloom had been lifted from the Barretts. The whole family, buzzing around the beach and enjoying a more active social life, felt better and looked healthier. They received local visitors and returned their calls—all except Elizabeth, who refused to visit or be visited by anyone and mostly stuck to her books.

Bro, Stormie, and George, the older brothers, were by now judged by their father to be adult enough to prepare themselves for employment in the world. Bro, twenty-five years old, travelled to Jamaica to help his Uncle Sam, while Stormie and George, aged sixteen and nineteen respectively, left to attend Glasgow University. Elizabeth experienced her familiar feeling that, as soon as any of the family disappeared from her sight, she might never see them again, lose them altogether; but she put up a brave front, appeared compliant of inevitable changes in family life, and applied herself even more diligently to her proper business of reading and writing until the family situation should, with any luck, return to normal.

The three Barrett brothers returned to Sidmouth in 1835. At the end of the year Mr Barrett announced that, for the sake of his sons, the family would move immediately to London. George, who intended to become a barrister, would enter the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court; Bro (who had acquired first-hand experience of the West Indian estates) and Stormie (who stammered so badly that he could not take his viva voce examination and thus had failed to take his degree) would join the family business; and the younger boys would be properly educated. Elizabeth, who had found little intellectual stimulation in Sidmouth—not that she had made much effort to seek it out—was better pleased than not at the prospect of a literary life in London. For two years the Barretts lived at 74 Gloucester Place before moving permanently, in 1838, to 50 Wimpole Street.

London winters were cold, daylight turned a depressing grey, and dense, chilling fog hung like a malevolent yellow miasma about the streets, clutching at the throat and lungs. Elizabeth’s health deteriorated. In contrast to the open situation of Sidmouth, the reflective light of the sea and the green of the surrounding Devonshire countryside, she felt immured, ‘stuck to the fender’, almost literally bricked in. There was hardly a leaf or a blade of grass to be seen except if she drove out to Hampstead Heath, which hardly qualified as real country. As for acquiring stimulating literary and intellectual acquaintance, her sole resource and only constant visitor was her portly, red-faced, fifty-two-year-old cousin, John Kenyon whose advantage, in addition to a kindly and sociable nature, was that his house in Devonshire Place was a notable focus for literary men and women. He contrived, with some difficulty, to introduce Elizabeth to Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, and—more successfully—Mary Russell Mitford, chatty and opinionated and well-connected with literary persons, who became one of her few close friends and a regular recipient, until her death many years later, of Elizabeth’s most personally confiding and wittily conversational letters.

As the result of a cold contracted in the winter of 1837–8, Elizabeth began to cough again. She continued to feel unwell into the spring. When she consulted the eminent Dr Chambers, he recommended even more rest, to the point that she was rendered virtually immobile, moving only from sofa to bed and back again, hardly stirring from her room, which was closely sealed from the least possibility of a draught. Despite all precautions, she caught another cold, and Chambers gravely diagnosed an affection of the lungs. In August 1838, he advised a change of climate. Elizabeth should winter somewhere warm, and Mr Barrett was persuaded, with some difficulty, that she should go to Torquay with her maid, Elizabeth Crow. During the three years of her convalescence at Torquay, usually attended by one or other of her brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was fairly constantly unhappy. She didn’t like Torquay, she worried about the expense of it all, the climate was not particularly mild, and her health did not noticeably improve. At times, it took decided and distressing turns for the worse. She became increasingly reliant on laudanum to help her sleep. She wanted to be well for her father’s sake, and strenuously put her mind to feeling better, but she was convinced she was dying.

Many explanations have been given for Elizabeth’s chronic ill health: Betty Miller suggests that it derived from sibling rivalry, from jealousy of Bro. As a boy—it seemed to his elder sister—he was given the advantage by being sent to school to be properly, formally educated while she was obliged more or less to instruct herself. It is certainly true that Elizabeth was intellectually much cleverer than Bro. Mrs Miller’s theory implies that Elizabeth was malingering: perceiving herself as largely powerless, she put on suffering and incapacity as a means to obtain control of her life and so avoid the domestic and social duties of a woman of her class (she never liked sewing, for example), perhaps even deliberately to restrict the possibility of being obliged to marry. Illness attracted and focused the attention of her parents, and the household was at least partly run on the basis of her requirements. She imposed what she called a ‘rigid rein’ upon herself in order not to be ‘hurled with Phaeton far from everything human … everything reasonable!’130 In her own estimation, by imposing the restraint of immobility upon herself, she saved herself from acting upon the ‘violent inclination’ that remained in her ‘inmost heart’. Elizabeth at least partly acknowledged that her ill health might be a desirable condition.

The modern consensus is that Elizabeth was truly ill. There seems little doubt now that she contracted a form of tuberculosis in her mid-teens and, as Daniel Karlin comments, ‘Tuberculosis is an impressionable disease. Elizabeth Barrett’s health fluctuated according to variations in climate and state of mind; she had periods of remission followed by crises, and the crises generally corresponded with times when she was under nervous strain. In these circumstances, there is little point in drawing distinctions between “physical” and “psychological” illness.’131 This fits very well with Margaret Forster’s view that ‘It is impossible to over-emphasise how tension of any kind—pleasurable excitement just as much as unpleasant—had an immediate physical effect on Elizabeth. She was, as she described herself, “intensely nervous”.’132

In February 1840, the Barretts learned that Sam had died in Jamaica at the age of twenty-eight. The loss of a brother struck Elizabeth down instantly. She became delirious, fainting into unconsciousness when she was not in an opium-induced sleep, and could be comforted only by her father, who came down to Torquay to stay with her for several weeks. He rallied her with pious exhortations. He urged Christian submission to God’s will and invoked devotional feeling for His grace. She gave pious thanks for Sam’s life and everything she had loved in him—his amiability, his goodness, his wit, his delight in dandyish dress—but it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by his loss. She made the effort, however, to such an extent that Mr Barrett was gratified by his beloved daughter’s beauty of character as revealed in her staunch belief that love never dies, that Sam was but in another room, in another, better world, not dead to those who loved him. What she did not yet (if she ever did) know was that Sam had died—or so it was reported by missionaries who had worked to save his soul—of evil influences: the tropical climate, in part, but more perniciously of having resorted to native women and other carnal pleasures that had broken his health and imperilled his soul.

At about this time, Arabel and Bro had discovered romance. Bro’s affair seems to have been the more serious of the two, or perhaps it was merely more advanced than Arabel’s. Bro was thirty-three years old, an age at which his father had been married for eleven years and had sired eight children. Bro was refused paternal permission to marry. Mr Barrett set his face against any argument: he would hear no plea in favour of his son’s proposed nuptials. This was not unexpected. First of all, the fact was that Bro had no money of his own and stood in no position to marry without financial support from his father. Secondly, there exists the possibility that Mr Barrett had reasonable objections to the proposed bride, though we know no grounds on which they might have been well founded. Thirdly, it was well known among the Barretts that Mr Barrett had adopted the Irvingite principle, bolstered by his own reading of the Bible, that a father exercised absolute authority over his children. It was his first duty to lead them from the paths of corruption, to save them from sin, to preserve their purity. He might grieve for Sam, but—and we may assume he knew the disgraceful details of the wage Sam had earned from sin—the circumstances leading to his son’s spiritual ruin and consequent death would have surely confirmed his moral beliefs. For Mr Barrett to permit Bro to marry a woman who did not meet the exacting standards of the most rigorous morality would be to risk losing another son to perdition.

To an extent, from love, rather than from fear, the Barrett children were somewhat awed by the implications of their father’s attitude: no suitor other than a saint would be worthy of any of them, and a saint would hardly be the most likely material from which a spouse might be made. They might privately, among themselves, poke affectionate fun at their father’s protective concern for their spiritual salvation; but it was one thing to feel proud that they were special in his eyes, quite another when his interdict, as final as a ruling of the Last Judgement, frustrated their genuine emotions and commonplace desires. In a letter of 12 December 1845 to Robert Browning, Elizabeth summed up a situation that had unexpectedly arisen to affect her personally and to which she had once referred in jest to Arabel:

‘If a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, & a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, in the other’ …

‘Why even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ‘it would not do.’ And she was right, & we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—& one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying.

The rectitudinous Mr Barrett was not in principle opposed to the institution of marriage—he was himself a living testament to its virtues, beauties and benefits; but he was absolutely opposed to any occasion for sin, and, in that respect, an inappropriate attachment could not be countenanced. Where he suspected sin he generally discovered it. When one looks for devils, it is not difficult to find them. His religious principles had not descended upon him suddenly. There had been no voice in a thunderclap or vision in a lightning flash. He had experienced no moment of sudden revelation. They had waxed gradually within him, secreted like amber that, on exposure to the moral dilemmas of life, had hardened and trapped the insects of his intolerance. Irvingism had taken deep root, nourished by Edward Barrett’s naturally devout Protestantism and his cautious, conservative Liberal politics. It was partly this slow evolution of his character into something grim and forbidding that inhibited the Barrett children from recognizing the process of transformation until it was too late to do anything to modify it. And so, by and large, it had become accepted as an element influencing their own lives.

The Barretts might admit that their father had their own good at heart, but that concept of the absolute good was utterly inflexible and did not yield to the more elastic idea of good as conceived by weaker characters. Edward Barrett’s love was as oppressive as his ire. G. K Chesterton puts it precisely: ‘He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability … The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.’133 In his deep anxiety about loss, to prevent any further harm to the Barrett family, he perversely suffocated the children by his insistence on the family’s self-sufficiency, by his efforts to exclude any external threat to their well-being, and by his belief that they should be all in all to one another and be kept together.

Elizabeth, though strong-willed as a child, perfectly capable of throwing books and other objects around a room when she fell into a pet at being thwarted in her desires, did not as a mature woman challenge her father’s authority directly in the matter of marriage. Instead, she secretly attempted to make over her own money to Bro so that he could marry as he pleased. She was foiled in this underhand strategy. Mr Barrett had no legal right to stop any of his children marrying, but his personal wishes and his threats to disinherit any of them who defied those wishes were intimidating enough. He would cut any of them off without a shilling and cast them out of his life—regretfully, no doubt, but unhesitatingly.

For one thing, Elizabeth was afraid of her father’s anger and would not confront it directly. She could not in general bear, as she wrote to her brother George after her own marriage, ‘agitating opposition from those I tenderly loved—& to act openly in defiance of Papa’s will, would have been more impossible for me than to use the right which I believe to be mine, of taking a step so strictly personal on my own responsibility.’ For another thing, she retreated into her perceived weakness less as a self-professed invalid and more as a helpless woman. To Robert Browning, who had lost his temper over Mr Barrett’s apparent tyranny, she wrote on 12 June 1846: ‘You said once that women were as strong as men, … unless in the concurrence of physical force. Which is a mistake. I would rather be kicked with a foot, … (I, for one woman! …) than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words … being a woman, & a very weak one (in more senses than the bodily), they would act on me as a dagger would … I could not help dropping, dying before them—I say it that you may understand.’ So much for the invigorating spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism. There was a third factor, however: Elizabeth, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, had been inculcated with a strong sense of family, and the Barretts were not only profoundly loyal to one another, they loved one another deeply. The children’s loyalty and love for their father was no less real and no less committed than among themselves.

Bro, who had come to Torquay to be with Elizabeth, went sailing with three friends at midday on 11 July 1840. The sea was calm and the weather was fine, except for a brief squall that blew up suddenly in the afternoon. By nightfall, the boat had not returned. It never did. The Barretts explored every strategy they could devise to convince themselves that Bro could be alive. Every possible eventuality was examined and analysed until, at last and reluctantly, they gave up hope after three days. Bro’s body was not discovered until three weeks later when it was washed ashore, with the corpses of one of his friends and the boatman, in Babbacombe Bay on 4 August. They were buried in a local churchyard two days later. Elizabeth despaired: she had quarrelled with Bro on the morning of the 11th. Her last words to her beloved brother had not been friendly. She convinced herself, too, that her illness had been the primary—the only—reason for Bro being in Torquay at all. He had stayed with her at her request, and she felt responsible for having kept him with her. It was her fault that he had been there, she reasoned, and so it was her fault that he had died. The blame was hers. Her guilt was fathomless.

For the three weeks between Bro’s disappearance and his funeral, Elizabeth was scarcely conscious. Her mind, when not blank, was tormented—delirious visions of ‘long dark spectral trains’ and ‘staring infantine faces’ filled it; dreams were ‘nothing but broken hideous shadows and ghastly lights to mark them’, driving her, she said later, almost to ‘madness, absolute hopeless madness’. For three months, she did nothing. Her father stayed with her, every bit as despairing and suffering as his daughter in their mutual loss. He returned to London in December. Elizabeth had finally felt strong enough to write a letter to Miss Mitford in October. Mary Mitford offered very practical comfort: understanding her friend’s grief, empathizing sincerely with her loss, she tactfully offered Elizabeth a puppy from her own golden cocker spaniel’s recent litter. It was a generous offer—such a dog was a very valuable gift—and Elizabeth at first refused. But she was persuaded to accept.