Two-Way Mirror, Fiona Sampson [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

next couple of years: not only poems but ‘A Thought on Thoughts’, the virtuoso prose essay that so failed to impress Boyd.

It is also the first public outing of a theme that Elizabeth will make her own two decades from now in Aurora Leigh: the figure of the woman poet. ‘Stanzas’ is a praise-song for Landon, to frame the one that Landon wrote for the poet and writer Felicia Hemans, doubling up the homage as if to go twice as far as any other poetic tribute: that ‘exquisition’ Adonais, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ode for John Keats, for example. And as in her ode for Byron, there’s a secret brilliance to her technique. The repeated ‘dying fall’ she rhymes with is no accident. She uses the strong-weak stress pattern that, when it appears like this at the ends of lines, is called ‘feminine’. A hobbled, ‘feminine’ rhythm for an ode to female role models:

Thou bay-crowned living One that o’er the bay-crowned Dead are bowing,

And o’er the shadeless moveless brow the vital shadow throwing,

And o’er the sighless songless lips the wail and music wedding.

Meanwhile home life is changing. Early in 1835 Belle Vue is sold over the family’s heads, and the usual parental prevarication – Elizabeth calls it ‘a state of most metaphysical doubtfulness’ – leads them back to Rafarel House for six months. In December 1835 they finally move to London. The three-year stay at the Devonshire seaside has been happier than any of them could have imagined when they left Hope End. But it’s been an interlude. Now is the time to consolidate their new life: no longer landed gentry perhaps, but still wealthy international merchants. The men of the family must be in the capital. George graduates this year and has to study for the Bar. When they’re not taking turns in Jamaica, the three eldest sons – Bro, Sam and Stormie – all need to be in London with Papa to manage the family sugar business. The younger boys will be closer to educational possibilities in the city. And the daughters, of course, are seen as having entirely portable lives. In any case, for them this move is not unattractive. Sidmouth, with its ‘quadrilling and cricketing’, may have been kept at arm’s length by Papa, but it’s given them a sniff of society. London seems rich with the possibility of more.

For Elizabeth, three months short of her thirtieth birthday, the city represents literary success. She’s right in more ways than she perhaps realises. Witnessing her slow emotional and literary development can be frustrating. We have to remember how each step in this all but self-taught progress is actually a giant stride. Gradus ad Parnassum. And now, pushed and pulled by the contradictory expectations of intellect and femininity, as she stands on the brink of her thirties she needs countervailing influences from beyond restrictive family life more than ever. In crowded London, where all sorts of lives go on cheek by jowl, she’ll be unable to escape the truth that Papa’s is not the only way of doing things.

Still, domestic uncertainty doesn’t end straight away. Her father starts by leasing a house in Marylebone for four months, to test the family’s ‘capacities for living the natural term of man’s life in this smokygen and foggygen’. Cautious in every way, he has picked the district he and the family know best: where his mother lived with Treppy for nearly four decades, where Papa and Uncle Sam, later Bro and young Sam, joined them on school breaks, and where Uncle Sam returned to stay whenever Parliament was sitting during his first three years as an MP.

The Barretts move to 74 Gloucester Place on 2 December 1835. It’s a bad time of year to arrive in dirty, hectic London. The house Papa has taken is a four-storey mid-terrace with basement, faced in modest brown London brick and standing in a grid of prosperous but almost identical terraced dwellings that crisscross this low-lying west central area. No public gardens or planned vistas relieve the urban claustrophobia. Though the district includes some of the smartest houses in London, it’s a shock for Elizabeth to exchange ‘the sea shore, which I love more than ever, now that I cannot walk on it’, for ‘that long & high brick wall opposite’ and the ‘dash & din’ of a city ‘wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist, so closely that I have had scarcely a glimpse of its countenance since we came’. Besides, the house, like Fortfield Terrace, is jerry-built. Within a year a storm will blow ‘the chimney thro’ the skylight, into the entrance passage. You may imagine the crashing effect of the bricks bounding from the staircase downwards breaking the stone steps in the process—in addition to the falling in of twenty four large panes of glass, frames & all!’

Still, wealth conjures up compensations. The next summer, to make up for the lack of a country view, Elizabeth’s father imports from Jamaica for her ‘two Barbary doves […] in whose voices I seem to hear the waters & waving leaves […] so beautiful & soft & calm.’ More generally people-scape is replacing landscape. She’s entering an era of important new friendships that will replace old habits – and old ties. Although Boyd is less than two miles away in Camden, contact quickly tails off in a series of excuses; Elizabeth has ‘such a cough again! that I should hasten it to a wrong conclusion, by going out today’, or is ‘quite disabled by a very bad cold which has kept me in my bedroom all today’.

But that ‘again!’ sounds an alarm. After less than a month in the city Elizabeth has already developed a chronic cough. Smog is a serious, even life-threatening problem. Yet, despite discovering that London’s pollution does indeed pose a risk, Papa fails once again to take decisive action. The family will remain at Gloucester Place for two and a half years. And when they do move, in May 1838,