Robyn Williams: Well I've remarked before at this time how dreadful it appears, just trying
to keep alive a couple of centuries ago. How did they manage? And have famous love affairs
at the same time? Could you actually fancy someone who was pale and lingering, stretched
out in a darkened bedroom, like a maggot in a winding sheet.
But they did. And today, Jim Leavesley, the good doctor out west, tells of the Brownings,
whose love still resonates over the ages past, despite everything. Jim.
Jim Leavesley: The Oxford Anthology of English Literature lists Elizabeth BarrettBrowning, born 200 years ago this week, under the slightly disparaging title of 'other
Victorian poets', and that she now survives only in her husband's work. You would have to be
either a particularly insensitive or a very daring writer to put that into print nowadays. What
she is perhaps most remembered for today is her famous love affair and elopement with
Robert Browning. From the medical history viewpoint, The Oxford Anthology's brief
biography not only arouses our curiosity on that score, but also with a single line which reads,
'Educated at home, Miss Barrett became an invalid (for still mysterious reasons) from 1838 to
1846.'
What could this malady be that lasted for eight years and from which she seemed to have
recovered eventually, to die in 1861?
Elizabeth Barrett was born in Durham, England, on March 6th, 1806, the eldest of twelve
children. Her father, Edward, became well-to-do from trading in slaves in Jamaica, a job for
which, later in life, he became stigmatised. But Elizabeth's childhood was happy and at the
age of six she began to write history. At twelve, after reading philosopher John Locke, she
thought her mind not only edified but exalted. That's pretty weighty stuff from someone not
yet in their teens, and I daresay would take a bit of swallowing by her contemporaries.
However, her father seemed to have gained a smug satisfaction from her precociousness for,
when she was fourteen, he had printed privately her first poem, 'The Battle of the Marathon'.
Shortly after this, Elizabeth experienced her first serious illness. She fell from her pony and
injured her back. She was in bed for a considerable time and in retrospect, and knowing her
future maladies, it may have been a disease of the vertebrae than injury which so
incapacitated her. The bed rest forced her to study at home, which is probably just as well, for
she sounds to have been a bit insufferable.
In 1833 the Bill abolishing slavery was passed and her father was ruined. The family moved
to London where they kept a low profile, receiving few visitors. Although the back was
better, Elizabeth took once more to her couch, this time with rather vague symptoms of
fatigue. She struck up a correspondence with Mary Mitford, famous author of 'Our Village',
and it is from these copious letters that details of her illness have been gleaned. In 1837 she
wrote to Miss Mitford encouraging her to do her correspondence in a recumbent position.
The fact that Mary was twenty years Elizabeth's senior did not abash our heroine. She herself
wrote reclining because, as she comments, 'I used once to suffer from feebleness of the spine,
and even now it is exceedingly fatiguing for me to sit bolt upright.'
In 1838 the family moved to Wimpole Street, London, becoming famously known as the
Barretts of Wimpole Street, the epitome of the Victorian family. Prophetically, Wimpole
Street, along with adjacent Harley Street and Devonshire Square, is now, and was then,
located at the very heart of the British medical establishment and it was at this precise
moment that her long illness began.
She wrote to Miss Mitford at the end of 1837 telling how she had caught a cold which turned
into a cough and had kept her in the house. Elizabeth added that Dr Chambers had told her
not to go out of doors for some weeks, concluding, 'I have an abhorrence of medical advice,
but my sisters are insistent.' With advice like that, I would be a little cagey myself. Anyway,
the good Dr Chambers thought there was no disease process, only excitability and irritability
of the chest, a Victorian medical solecism regrettably long since discarded. Incidentally,
Chambers was Physician Extraordinary to the Queen, a post recognising medical worth rather
than being one in which you actually applied a cold stethoscope to the royal chest.
In July, she was losing weight and the pulse began to race, 'keeping pace with the Wild
Huntsman', as she put it. They don't write case-notes like that nowadays, more's the pity. She
was put on the heart drug, Digitalis, and sent off to Torquay for a change of air. There she
began to cough up blood and her spirits drooped. Indeed she would have cried all day, she
said, if it had needed such exertion.
The medical picture became clearer. Prolonged coughing, fatigue, loss of weight, and spitting
blood point to that most common disease of the 19th century, tuberculosis. Moreover, looking
back to the spinal condition which had been put down to the fall from her pony, that may also
have been a tubercular infection, called Pott's disease, if affecting that area.
The main treatment then was prolonged, enforced and uninterrupted bed rest, together with
attention to diet and avoidance of draughts. Thus Elizabeth began her bedroom durance until
it was relieved in a most remarkable way eight years later.
She stayed in Torquay for three years. In 1840 her eldest brother and greatest friend was
drowned, and she wrote that she was suffering from congestion of the heart, and could not
sleep. I am sure she was expressing her sorrow, loneliness and dejection at life's situation in
literary rather than pathological terms. She became more closely attached to her father and
wrote a poignant dedication to him in a book of her poems.
In 1841 she returned to Wimpole Street as a bedridden invalid, being carried there in an
invalid carriage. At this time the blood in her sputum had begun to increase, an ominous sign.
The London household was presided over by Edward Barrett, who, doubtless embittered by
the death of two sons and his wife, plus the ruination of his livelihood and the social death its
nature had occasioned, had developed into an intolerant, censorious and puritanical man.
Although all of his children were over twenty, none was allowed dinner guests without
consent, nor married without prolonged and tedious explanation, and criticism of the
domestic regime was not tolerated. Despite this, some of Elizabeth's best poetry dates from
this period. The art world seems to be full of composers or writers hacking their lungs out in
garrets while producing masterpieces of transcendental beauty. It was thus with Elizabeth
Barrett, although her chintzy bedroom with attendant maid fell somewhat short of an
impoverished attic.
In 1844, she wrote an appreciation of the works of Robert Browning in a literary journal. He
replied, skittishly expressed his love and a lively correspondence ensued. They did not meet.
Mr. Barrett would never have approved, good heavens, no! Then, via a trusted intermediary,
a bringing together was arranged. The day after Browning openly and intemperately wrote of
his love. He was thirty-three, she, thirty-nine; he, handsome, talented and active; she, pallid,
reclusive and house-bound. Mr Barrett knew of the visits but thought it was to do with one
writer visiting another and never suspected the real reason.
After two months Elizabeth ventured out of the house for the first time in years. Wintering in
Italy with her brother and sister was mooted, but Edward Barrett would have none of it. The
following year an even bolder plan was furtively suggested, not involving family this time,
just Robert and Elizabeth together as man and wife.
So plans were drawn for Wilson, Elizabeth's maid, Flush, her dog, and the two lovers to go to
Pisa. On September 11, 1846, after being virtually house-bound with a debilitating disease for
eight years, Elizabeth slipped out and she and Robert were married at St Marylebone Parish
Church. She hurried back home nurturing her guilty secret, eventually fleeing a week later.
Sister Henrietta broke it to her father, who, on hearing the news and becoming incandescent
with rage, is supposed to have thrown Henrietta downstairs and ordered the destruction of
Flush, who had been left behind. He never referred to Elizabeth again.
After the flight to Pisa, and later Florence, Elizabeth's health was transformed. She fell
pregnant almost at once, but miscarried. She had two further miscarriages losing almost three
litres of blood with one. This left her very anaemic, which, together with her active chest
lesion, produced a remarkable pallor and lethargy. Later, rather surprisingly, she did have one
successful pregnancy, a son.
The chest trouble flared. It was back to bed, and in 1860 a long abscess developed. Each day
her husband carried her to the sitting room but she slowly worsened and died in his arms in
June, 1861.
By far the most likely diagnosis is pulmonary tuberculosis. Possibly it could have been
bronchiectasis, a long-term bacterial, non-tubercular infection of the lung. If she had lung
cancer, I am sure her life would have been much shorter.
But there is more to it than that. When Browning appeared it was quickly apparent that she
was not as ill as she would have the world believe, or indeed she herself believed. She
improved dramatically after elopement, thriving on an outdoor, vigorous lifestyle, plus the
unfamiliarity of a husband's tender and loving attention. She had four pregnancies when over
forty, at least one involving much blood loss.
It would seem that the appearance of Robert Browning coincided with the onset of a
quiescent phase of her illness. She was still confined to her room by her doctors and father,
partly, I suppose, because that was the contemporary thinking of the medical establishment,
partly because her physicians were too timid to cross Edward Barrett. Robert Browning was
unconcerned by the medical niceties of bed-rest, hand-patting and steamed chicken. He
arrived serendipitously and, like a young Lochinvar, carried Elizabeth off to enjoy a few brief
years of romantic happiness. He transformed her from a bedfast recluse into a normal
member of society. I hate to spoil a story, especially of the happy-ever-after variety, but I
think with the TB being dormant at the time, he had incredible luck.
But hold, I have not quite finished, having left the most titillating bit, at least from the clinical
point of view, to the end. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a morphine addict. Early in her
illness doctors had prescribed the drug laudanum, probably to subdue the cough and allay
apprehension. It was a common enough therapy then and pretty effective. The snag was, as
we all know, tuberculosis is a long-term illness and she became addicted to the drug. Indeed,
when first considering flight, she wrote to her suitor, 'My greatest personal expense lately has
been morphine. Still the money flows out like a stream.' At least she did not have to spend
much on clothes at that time.
She was in fairly distinguished company, for Florence Nightingale is known to have taken
laudanum and lived to be over ninety. The 19thy century's most famous morphine addict of
the artistic world was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who took the drug for the last 32 years of his
life.
Under Robert Browning's encouragement the dose was reduced, in fact stopped during her
single successful pregnancy, only to be resumed. Only a few were privy to her secret.
With time the passion of those early carefree, madcap days faded, and this, coupled with the
arguments over the infantile way she dressed their son and her dabbling with spiritualism,
caused disenchantment within the marriage. Even so, Elizabeth's early death gave Robert
much grief.
The Oxford Anthology likens Miss Barrett playing Andromeda to Browning's Perseus. That
allegory perhaps is not so fanciful, for Andromeda is supposed to have been chained to a rock
to assuage the rapacity of a sea monster. Perseus, returning from beheading Medusa, saw her,
fell in love and was promised her hand in marriage if he could kill the monster. I will leave
you to decide whether the sea monster represents the slowly devouring disease, or the
tyrannical father. At least Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have not been turned into
heavenly constellations as their mythological counterparts were. Not yet, anyway.
Robyn Williams: Jim Leavesley, who should also be recorded in the heavens; I think a
Leavesley galaxy is in order. Dr Jim lives in Margaret River.
And we stay in the West next week when Michael White from Perth talks about the Fruits of
War.
I'm Robyn Williams.