Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Letter : [London], to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, [1842 December 7].

BIB_ID
403330
Accession number
MA 8917.25
Creator
Boyd, Hugh Stuart, 1781-1848.
Display Date
[1842 December 7].
Credit line
Acquired from the University of Illinois, 1961.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 22.6 x 18.4 cm
Notes
Date of writing determined from the postmark and internal evidence: the letter is postmarked December 8, 1842 and Boyd gives the date of writing as "Wednesday Evening", which would have been the 7th. No place of writing is given but Boyd was known to be living in London at that time and there is a Hampstead postmark on the letter. See the published editions of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
Addressed to "Miss Barrett/ 50 Wimpole Street/ London."
Boyd was blind; the letter is in the hand of an amanuensis.
Provenance
Acquired from the University of Illinois, 1961.
Summary
Telling her that he thinks her sonnet, "On Mr. Haydon's Portrait of Mr. Wordsworth", is not as good as her other work, but "[i]t is quite good enough for such a Man. Dont be angry. If you can endure his Writings, you may surely put up with anything else"; calling her last letter "beautiful, and beautiful in different ways. The part about Byron, has the truth and spirit of Conversation"; comparing her poetry favorably to Byron's; agreeing with her on the subject of interpreting the Scriptures; commenting that he thought it was shocking of Charles Wentworth Dilke (editor of the Athenæum) to ask her, in an earlier discussion about submissions to the journal which she had recounted to Boyd, to refrain from mentioning the names of God and Christ, since the journal was primarily a secular one.