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Letters from Robert Browning to the Rev. J. D. Williams, 1874–1889

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Extract

When, in 1884, Thomas J. Wise viewed with consternation Browning's unselective destruction of his correspondence and early writings, his eye may well have noticed the signature of the Rev. J. D. Williams. At the same time Williams, like Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald, was giving and mailing away pages and whole letters bearing Browning's autograph. As a result, only a fraction of the Williams-Browning correspondence is now extant. The letters in this collection comprise, to the best of our knowledge, the complete remains of this correspondence. Thirty-three of these letters have not been published previously, with the exception of a part of Letter 23, published in William S. Peterson's Interrogating the Oracle. Their texts have been taken from holographs in the University of Texas Miriam Lutcher Stark Library. Letter 36 is from a holograph owned by the Yale University Library, and was previously published in New Letters of Robert Browning, edited by W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker (1950). The four additional letters (9, 17, 18, and 32) were published in 1933 in Thurman L. Hood's edition of the Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise. In the absence of the holographs, these letters have been transcribed directly from that edition. Irregularities in the Hood text—for example, the unusual letterhead in Letter 17–have been incorporated into this edition for lack of corrective evidence.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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