archives.nypl.org -- Robert Browning collection of papers (original) (raw)

This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts, correspondence, and a portrait photograph. The collection includes a portrait photograph of Browning inscribed by Robert Browning, "Paris, October 1862," by an unidentified photographer. The manuscripts consist of holograph poems, notes, and miscellaneous autograph material. Included is a holograph poem by Louise De la Ramee in memory of Robert Browning, a holograph poem by Earl Edward Lytton entitled "To Robert Browning", a holograph review by James Stephens of "The Reader's Browning", and a bound sequence of sonnets on the death of the author by A. C. Swinburne. The correspondence, dating from 1836 to 1889 includes letters written by the author to Isa Blagden, his son Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, Sophia May Eckley, Una Hawthorne, Leigh Hunt, Frederick Locker-Lampson, Edward Moxon, to Sir John Simeon regarding a pension for William Allingham, to Thomas Talfourd, William Makepeace Thackeray, T. A. Trollope, and to others. Also included are letters, dating from 1859 to 1891, relating to the author between various correspodents including letters from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to W. J. Fox; from Robert W. Barrett Browning to Mrs. Sophia May Eckley and to Alexandra Leighton Orr; and from Alexandra Leighton Orr to Sir Leslie Stephen relating to John Stuart Mill's opinion of Robert Browning's "Pauline." Also present are letters to Browning from Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Forster, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and others, dating from 1840 to 1889.

The Robert Browning collection of papers are arranged in three series: