Erik Visits an (Non) American Grave, Part 1,296

This is the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Born in 1806 in County Durham, England, Elizabeth Barrett was the oldest of twelve children and a tremendously talented child. From the time she was young, people recognized her poetry as special. However, they also recognized that she had horrible health. It’s unclear what happened to her but from the time she was 15, she had horrific headaches and spinal pain. This made her a laudanum addict.

Now, the family was rich. Yep, they got rich in the way you got rich at this time–they were slavers. They had a big plantation in Jamaica where they worked slaves to death. This provided Barrett the money she needed to never have to work and to write poetry. So every time you think about these rich people and the art they produced, remember how much of it came from killing slaves, even if they were so distant from it as to probably never really thinking about it.

Barrett became something of a radical from an early age, having read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women not long after it was published. Women’s rights would be something she strongly believed in.

By the late 1830s, Barrett’s health became even worse. She contracted tuberculosis, the great killer of the 19th century. Her brothers died, one on the Jamaica plantation (now without slavery due to British emancipation but without any meaningful freedoms for the people working there) and another in a sailing accident. So tragedy and sickness were everyday parts of her life.

In the early 1840s, often bedridden and not leaving her room much, Barrett became a major figure in the British literary community. She had to fill her time some way. She started taking on child labor as a cause–somewhat ironically given her family money that she lived on. But her 1842 poem “The Cry of the Children” was a call to arms over the horrors of child labor at home. Building on this, she worked hard for the 1847 Factory Act that limited working hours in textile mills for women and children to 10 a day. She began to speak out against slavery in the United States too, which again was ironic. To be fair here, she did not support the continuation of slavery in the Caribbean, but she never really, to my knowledge anyway, really had anything more than a superficial understanding of the exploitation of post-slavery Jamaica so like many Victorians, this opposition to slavery was pretty superficial. Still, you take support where you can get it and American abolitionists considered her an ally. For example, here are the first three stanzas (the whole thing is very long) to her abolitionist poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point:”

I.
I stand on the mark beside the shore
Of the first white pilgrim’s bended knee,
Where exile turned to ancestor,
And God was thanked for liberty.
I have run through the night, my skin is as dark,
I bend my knee down on this mark . . .
I look on the sky and the sea.

II.
O pilgrim-souls, I speak to you!
I see you come out proud and slow
From the land of the spirits pale as dew. . .
And round me and round me ye go!
O pilgrims, I have gasped and run
All night long from the whips of one
Who in your names works sin and woe.

III.
And thus I thought that I would come
And kneel here where I knelt before,
And feel your souls around me hum
In undertone to the ocean’s roar;
And lift my black face, my black hand,
Here, in your names, to curse this land
Ye blessed in freedom’s evermore.

In 1844, Barrett collected her poems in the less than excitingly titled Poems, which actually ran to two volumes due to her prolific work. They were incredibly popular, a best-seller. She instantly became one of Britain’s most popular writers, up there with Tennyson and Dickens and Wordsworth. Deeply impressed with her work, the poet Robert Browning wrote to her of his admiration. She responded, they fell in love during the correspondence, and married in 1846. Some critics have stated that this saved her career, that she was in decline and increasingly unwilling to speak out on political issues too. I have no way of evaluating that claim, just noting that critics note a return to her own high standards after the marriage.

Barrett’s father disapproved, but now known as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the new couple moved to Italy. It was considered better for her health and also Italy is awesome and was home to many leading ex-pats. They would make it their home for the rest of her life. Probably a bad idea that they had children, but it was the mid-19th century and it’s unclear how much she knew how to control that, or even if she wanted to do so. Anyway, they went through four miscarriages before finally having their only child, a boy known as Pen, in 1849. She was 43 years old, which was very old at the time for a birth.

Incidentally, Browning’s father was so awful, he not only disinherited her, but he had already disinherited ALL his children who had married. Nice guy. But she didn’t really need his money with her poetry selling so well. Anyway, being in Florence, she and her husband continued publishing poetry and also became central to the vital expat life there, which included at various times Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Thackeray, George Sand, Alfred Tennyson, and many others. They traveled around a lot too–Paris, back to London, around Italy. How she managed this with her health, which again was never good, I don’t know. The opium I guess.

Her many poems had very strong religious themes. She was a central figure in the romantic writing movement, which was in the ascendant through her life. I find a lot of that writing totally unreadable today, whether it is British, American, or otherwise, but that barely matters here, as she was a critical literary figure for the last two decades of her life. Edgar Allen Poe loved her work and considered her a major influence. In fact, he dedicated The Raven to her.

Here’s her 1845 poem “How Do I Love Thee?” which is unquestionably the poem everyone knows today. I didn’t even know it was by her, so there you go. Talk about a huge influence on the world.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

By the late 1850s, Browning’s health really did begin to fade for good. She kept working though and was involved in the Italian unification movement, publishing a book of poems in 1860 titled Poems before Congress about the cause and other parts of Italian politics. But by this time, she was basically finished. She died in Florence in 1861. She was 55 years old.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried in English Cemetery, Florence, Italy. Incidentally, Robert Browning stayed in Italy after his wife’s death, but he died in Venice and is buried back in London.

If you would like this series to visit some mid 19th century American poets, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I do very much appreciate the donations that came the other day when I noted it had been a full month since anyone had contributed a cent. It keeps this series alive. I do want to assure you I did not use grave money to visit Italy! I was just in Florence and so took advantage to provide you all some tasty content. Henry Howard Brownell is in East Hartford, Connecticut and Alice Cary is in Brooklyn. Previous posts in this series are archived here.