The Brownings’ Correspondence, Volume 31

Volume 31 finds RB and his son, Pen, continuing their residence at 19 Warwick Crescent, London. In February 1864 RB’s will is drawn up by his old friend Bryan Waller Procter. It is witnessed and signed by Alfred Tennyson and Francis Turner Palgrave at the latter’s home on the 12th (see letter 5333). On 28 May RB’s Dramatis Personæ (1864) is published by Chapman and Hall to largely positive reviews. A second edition is released in late September. Earlier that month, Ticknor and Fields publishes the American edition of Dramatis Personæ in Boston. RB receives £150 for it and three of his poems that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in the May and June 1864 issues. The fourth edition of RB’s Poetical Works is published by Chapman and Hall in March of the following year, eliciting a wide-ranging and appreciative notice from Gerald Massey in The Quarterly Review of July 1865, the full text of which is reprinted in Appendix III. RB and his family spend their 1864 summer holiday in the southwest of France; first at Cambo-les-Bains (from where RB visits the famous Pas de Roland), then at Biarritz on the Atlantic coast. The following summer the Browning party returns for the third time to St. Marie, near Pornic, in Brittany. In May 1864 RB enters into a short-lived but intense friendship and correspondence with Julia Wedgwood, the intellectual and literary great-granddaughter of the English potter Josiah Wedgwood. In March 1865 Julia abruptly puts an end to their exchange of letters and the visits from RB, writing in letter 5563: “I have reason to know that my pleasure in your company has had an interpretation put upon it that I ought not to allow.” RB reluctantly accepts her decision in letter 5564.