Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Autograph manuscript poem, 'A Tale of Villafranca', [1859]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Autograph manuscript poem, "A Tale of Villafranca, as told in Tuscany"

comprising 11 numbered seven-line stanzas, commencing "My little son, my Florentine", revisions or corrections to four lines, signed at the foot, text on rectos only, addressed on the final verso ("For the 'Athenaeum' from Mrs Browning"), subscribed beneath the author's signature ("To the Hon. Emily Eden | from her servant | W.H.D."), 4 pages, 8vo, [1859], remains of guards at inner margins, some creasing and light spotting

AN EARLY MANUSCRIPT TEXT OF A POEM BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. In this poem Browning expresses her anger at the Peace of Villafrance between France and Austria, which had frustrated hopes of Italian unification. She presents Napoleon III as having been thwarted in his "great Deed" by cynical forces of conservatism from across Europe.

The current lot appears to be the manuscript sent by the author to the Athenaeum, where the poem was first printed on 24 September 1859. This manuscript provides the text as first published, rather than the revised text with an additional stanza (stanza 7) that appeared in Poems Before Congress (1860). It apparently contains a small number of final textual changes, such as to the lines "And those lamented, 'From this source/ What red blood must be poured?", which is revised from "While some lamented..." She altered the line again in 1860 to read "And many murmured...".

Other manuscript copies of the poem are found in the Berg Collection and at Boston Public Library, as well as in the working manuscript of Poems Before Congress at the HRC in Austin, Texas. Barrett Browning also incorporated the additional stanza seven into several letters written in October 1859 (see IELM, BrB 876-884).

PROVENANCE:

Presented by "W.H.D.", almost certainly William Hepworth Dixon, editor of the Athenaeum, to Emily Eden (for whom see lot 187); thence by family descent