
Luke Batterham
Senior Valuer
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Senior Valuer
We are very grateful to Michael Meredith for identifying the recipient's near-indecipherable name as that of Reuben Browning, Robert's half-uncle who worked for the London branch of Rothschild's. Among his father's other attainments, he is said to have been an authority on the letters of Junius, which Browning himself read as a boy. This letter dates from the years of considerable family sorrow for Browning, with Elizabeth dead in 1860, his father in 1866 and Elizabeth's surviving sister Arabella the previous June. He was at the same time immersed in writing The Ring and the Book, with a three-hour stint every morning, begun in the autumn of 1864 and finished in the spring of 1868, to be published that same year.