Footnotes

BROWNING AND THE MAN WHO SAW SHELLEY PLAIN – a month after the poet's demise, Kingsland asks Wise: "Do you recollect one Sunday morning, Mr. B. giving us an explanation of the poem 'Memorabilia' – 'Did you once see Shelley plain'. It was to the effect that he was in ––––'s shop, when some one came in & began to talk of Shelley, saying that he once saw him; thereupon B. visibly 'started', & looked at the stranger with a blanched face – who thereupon burst out laughing. What was the name of the bookseller, do you recollect. If you remember the circumstance, you might just dot down your recollection of it, & let me have it before Saturday. I should like to mention it".

Kingsland had known Browning for some twenty years ever since, as a young man and working as a compositor, he had written a fan letter, which solicited from Browning the famous declaration that 'I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, so some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I have never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man, – not a crowd, but a few I value more' (27 November 1868, Browning Society Papers, iii, p. 344; for Kingsland's friendship with Browning, see his article 'Some Browning Memories', Contemporary Review, August 1912). The four letters to Wise, two of which make reference to Browning's recent death (on 12 December 1889), appear to deal with the revised edition of Kingsland's Robert Browning, Chief Poet of the Age, published by J.W. Jarvis in 1890 (according to our postcard, on 10 February). The first edition had appeared in 1887.

However, not all the help Kingsland received from the indefatigable Secretary of the Shelley Society was untainted. In an article on 'Browning rarities' published in 1894, he describes how it was Browning had an aversion to seeing his work in print 'before it was ready for the volume that eventually contained it', nevertheless 'there are some grounds for thinking that he did, in more than one instance, transgress his own rule, for, by the kindness of a well-known London bibliophile, we have examined some interesting little booklets in his possession that were presumably issued by the poet or his publisher', going on to make the revelation that 'It will be somewhat of a revelation, we imagine, to most lovers of the Brownings to learn that a copy of a privately printed issue of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" is in existence. Until we were afforded a sight of this tiny volume, we were quite unaware that these exquisite gems had been issued in any other form than the volume in which they were first given to the public' (London, March 1894, 'Browning Rarities', Poet Lore, May 1894, vi pp. 264-8; the first such reference cited by Carter and Pollard to this most notorious of all Wise forgeries being that by Gosse the following November, Enquiry, pp. 10-12).