How do I love thee?" Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browningin her immortal Sonnets Front the Portuguese, "Let me count the ways. . . ."

The ways apparently were not affected by the mixed bloodline of either poet. For, in Dared And Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, an absorbing 382-page saga recently released by Alfred A. Knopf, the venerable New York publishing house, author Julia Markus offers convincing evidence that the two 19th-century English poets were part-Black descendants of wealthy Jamaican plantation owners.

This evidence comes from contemporary witnesses, frank acknowledgments by Barrett, and photographs that depict both as dark-skinned. In a letter to her beloved sister Arabel in 1860, Barrett enclosed a black-and-white photograph taken in Rome of her-serf and their 11-year-old son "Pen," which shows a clear contrast between the dark-skinned mother and fair-hatred, blue-eyed child.

The evidence of mixed race in two of the greatest poets in the English language has been a cultural bombshell, sending shock waves through literary circles on two continents. Vincent Petronella, president of Boston's Browning Society, one of the country's largest, and an English professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says: "From this time onward, no biographer can ever reject this scholarship. Something was coming to light in her [Elizabeth Barrett's] father's mind. The issue of mixed blood is as good an explanation as any. Even if you don't accept if as fact, you have to bear it in mind."

According to Markus, a respected Browning scholar and award-winning novelist, there are strong indications that the adamant opposition of Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, to the marriage of any of his 11 surviving children -- was not merely the dictum of a domestic tyrant but, rather, a deliberate attempt to extinguish the family's mixed bloodline.

The most common reaction to this cultural whodunit, which starts in Colonial Jamaica and segues to England and Italy, has been a kind of shocked silence. Although the book has been hailed by The New York Times and the Boston Globe, other major newspapers and major electronic media have not reviewed it or even mentioned it.

Race apart, Markus says that Elizabeth Barrett "may have left the world a body of poetry that to some extent merged disparate cultures into a unique and increasingly radical voice."

Both Browning and Barrett, Markus and other scholars suggest, were products of the plantation system of Jamaica where, in the 18th century, the wives of the planters, Markus writes, "often lived in proximity or in the same house as their husbands' African mistresses." Edward Barrett of Cinnamon Hill was an English planter and slaveowner who owned virtually the entire northwestern part of Jamaica. He had three children. One son, Samuel, fathered four illegitimate white children. The other son, George Goodin, and his slave mistress Elissa Peters had six illegitimate children. The daughter Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Barrett's grandmother -- married Charles Moulton, the scion of a wealthy shipping family and a free-wheeling spirit who was probably of mixed ancestry. At any rate, Markus writes, "the poet herself believed she had African blood through her grandfather Charles Moulton."

After abandoning his wife and children, Moulton, a rather shadowy figure, is believed to have become a slave trader in New York. Certainly, he had a string of mistresses (and illegitimate children), including his last, Jane Clark, a Jamaican woman who bore him a son and whom the late scholar Jeannette Marks describes in her 1938 book, The Family of Barretts, as a "free woman of colon"

Robert Browning was a product of the same system, and it appears that his grandmother, like Elizabeth Barrett's grandfather, was a descendant of Africans and Europeans.

During the three years she researched her book, Markus--whose thesis on Robert Browning's poetry earned her a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature from the University of Maryland in 1976 -- pored through the voluminous Barrett-Browning correspondence in the Special Collections of the Margaret Clapp Library at Wellesley College.

There, Markus, a longtime board member of the Browning Institute in New York City, uncovered letters that had long escaped the notice or interest of other scholars. These letters, penned by Elizabeth Barrett herself, reveal the poet's anguish at her Black ancestry and her shame at her family's participation in the plantation system.

Like the Barretts, the Brownlags profited from slavery. Robert Browning's grandfather, also named Robert, married into the Tittle family of St. Kitts, who were great landowners and slaveholders.

The poet's father, Robert Browning St., was so dark, according to Furnivall, that when he visited his mother's plantations in St. Kitts, the church beadle made him sit with the "coloured people" rather than the white. After he was caught teaching a slave to write, Robert Browning Sr. was sent home to England and given a bank clerk-ship. Browning Sr. personally renounced his family's money and was later cut out of his family's will.

Like his father, the poet Robert Browning was dark-complexioned. The earliest known photograph of Browning, taken in Paris in 1856, captures his swarthy skin as well as his long, gnarled hair and curly beard. Like Elizabeth, herself the subject of many paintings and sketches, Browning would have to wait until the invention of photography in the 1850s before his true features were accurately delineated for posterity. Yet -- probably because his own father had renounced the plantation system and the wealth it brought -- Robert Browning showed little concern or shame about having Black blood.

In 1845, Browning began a secret courtship with Elizabeth Barrett, already an internationally known poet, that would produce 574 letters in 20 months as weld as Sonnets From the Portuguese, possibly the world's best-loved volume of love poetry. A year latch in 1846, the two poets secretly married in London and fled to Italy. And in 1849, after two miscarriages, Elizabeth finally gave birth to their only child. to her father's first grandchild, and to her grandfather's first legitimate great-grandson -- Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen."

So great was Elizabeth's concern about her lineage that throughout her life she made reference to her dark skin and full lips. In an 1845 letter to the English historical painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, Elizabeth described herself as "little and black."

Perhaps, too, Elizabeth was haunted by the fact that she, like her family, profited from the "peculiar institution" of slavery. It was, alter all, the 8,000-pound inheritance from her grandmother and her Uncle Samuel that allowed Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning to flee to Italy and to live, in comfort, during their 15-year marriage.

Dared And Done will long be debated by scholars. Nonetheless, Markus is confident that her theories will stand the test of time.

Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, ironically, lived long enough to know that his mission to extinguish his family's mixed bloodline failed. Not only did his daughter Elizabeth marry and bear a grandchild, but both his daughter Henrietta and son Octavius married and bore children. Four months before his father's death in April 1857, another son, Charles, known as "Stormie," had the first of two illegitimate daughters by a woman of color.

"Had his father any hopes of avoiding legitimate heirs of mixed blood," writes Markus in Dared Anti Done, "they were posthumously undone." For in 1863, Stormie -- the namesake of grandfather Charles Moulton -- whose Black blood Elizabeth decried -- married his mulatto children's governess, Anne Margaret Young, whom Jeannette Marks describes in her book as "well educated," of "good class," and, most ironic of all, "a brown woman."

It has been relatively easy to place Moulton Barrett, the .poet's father, on the furthest side of the Victorian view of the patriarch as the voice of God in the family. Yet a man who had sired twelve children of a desirable wife, and then refused permission for these adult children, male or female, to pursue romantic attachment and marriage was obviously an enigma in his own time.

Why didn't Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett want his children to marry? One reason given has been that he desired to keep his children at home and under his control. This was certainly true. Another has been that he had an unease about his children's sexuality. A father who insists on his daughters' purity is not an unfamiliar type. One who insists that his sons not marry is a unique type.

The absolute consequence of not allowing your children to marry is having no legitimate grandchildren, no legal heirs. Eleven children reached adulthood. Had each had half' the number of children Iris or her parents bore, there'd be the possibility of sixty-six grandchildren. It seems that what Edward did not want to do was to carry on the Moulton Barrett line. What we have by the time the children were adults is the singularly peculiar Fact that a Victorian father and the surviving heir of Edward of Cinnamon Hill not only wished his daughters to be spinsters, hut wished all of his sons to remain bachelors. He did not want them to have, in terms of his grandfather's will, legitimate heirs "out of their own bodies."

Why? Moulton Barrett might very well have either learned after his children were born or become increasingly concerned with the possibility that he had mixed blood. Certainly, during the long years of the contested will, Edward was brought in daily reminders of the mixed blood in the Barrett line, the underside of the system that brought him wealth. Yet it was file lineage of his father, Charles Moulton, that affected his own.

Jeanette Marks concluded that although there was some possibility of African blood in Robert Browning's line, there was no official documentation that Charles Moulton, Edward's father, Elizabeth's grandfather, had black blood. She tells us that Elizabeth's inclusion among the writers who have such blood, in What the Negro Thinks (1929) by Robert Russa Morton, for example, was erroneous. Then she quotes a section from the love letters, one that has been there to read since the end of the nineteenth century. Where is the scholar or historian or biographer who has not read these words -- including this writer Jeannette Marks quotes them in order to overlook them once more, but what they say is quite clear. In the passage, Elizabeth Barrett tells her future husband what he must know. tie must know what's in a name. She called herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, often signed her letters EBB. The oldest legitimate grandchild of Charles Moulton did not use "Moulton."

The poet herself believed she had African blood through her grandfather Charles Moulton. And she linked that fact to being "cursed from generation to generation," a sentiment of her father's. Rather than being her grandfather's theoretical heir, she would prefer "to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave!"

Jeannette Marks described the Creoles of mixed blood as often particularly attractive, unusually intelligent, and of a high nervous susceptibility. The irregularity of Elizabeth Barrett's features, seen clearly in verbal and photographic pictures, is notable -- what she herself called her lack of nose, her overgenerous mouth. One can consider the effect of the face, dominated by those deep, searching eyes, as quite exotic. There was nothing in her features to mitigate her own belief in her African blood. One doesn't see in portraits the dark complexion she and others often described, a complexion she had in common with her father. "I am 'little and black,"' she told Haydon. Anne Thackeray wrote, "She is very small, she is brown. . ." Thomas Chase described bet "dark complexioned face" compared to Robert's "rather dark complexion." She was not proud of this lineage "of the blood of the slave." She was much too close to its ramifications, both in moral and in family matters. Yet in the high pitch of her creative intelligence and her nervous susceptibilities, she may have left the world a body of poetry that to some extent merged disparate cultures into a unique and increasingly radical voice.

The founder of the London Browning Society and Browning's friend, Frederick James Furnivall, wrote in a footnote to a paper he had delivered to the society after Robert's death, "It is possible that this colour business may have had something to do with Mr. Barrett's unjustified aversion to his daughter's marriage to the poet. He wasn't referring to Elizabeth Barrett's "Moulton" grandfather, he was referring to Robert Browning's "Tittle" grandmother. "A few months after Browning died in 1889, Furnivall investigated family records and tombstones to find out if Browning had Jewish blood as rumored. He found instead much circumstantial evidence that Margaret Tittle, Browning's grandfathers' first wife, had black blood. "In colour, the poet's father was so dark that when, as a youth, he went out to his Creole mother's sugar-plantation in St. Kitts, the beadle of the Church ordered him to come away from the white folk among whom he was sitting, and take his place among the coloured people." Robert's grandfather favored the children of his second, highborn wife, and left his children by Tittle out of his will. Some of his children by the second wife, as well as certain unnamed old friends of the family, concurred on tiffs issue of blood, according to Furnivall. This report infuriated Browning's sister, Sarianna, and his son, Pen. They both denied vehemently that the Brownings descended from a butler, another Furnivall assertion. Yet neither said one word on the issue of mixed blood on their Creole side.

If Robert Browning's grandmother, as well as Elizabeth Barrett's grandfather, had had African blood, one person who would have known it would be their Jamaican cousin John Kenyon (who himself had a "half-sister of color Hannah Kennion") -- that dear friend who Elizabeth passionately insisted would not want any responsibility for her union with Robert Browning before the fact.

One can disregard these accounts -- "His peculiarities and defects are obvious," Browning said of Furnivall, a respected scholar. One can keep all mention of Jeannette Marks' careful genealogical research in footnotes forever, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have had, not only on her Moulton side but on her husband's side, powerful motivation for writing a poem on her honeymoon about a black mother who suffocated her mulatto child because of his white skin. She might have even had secret reasons for fearing John Kenyon's magnified eyes discerning courtships between the children of his two Creole classmates. Certainly she would not be the only child of planters in England who might have had secret preoccupations about the color of their skin.

While she wrote her poem on her honeymoon, she herself was pregnant. She wouldn't believe it, even after she had been pregnant for five months.

"I have been stupid beyond any stupidity of which I ever, that I know of, was thought capable, by me or others -- and the consequence has been a premature illness, a miscarriage, at four o'clock last Sunday morning, anti of five months date, says Dr. Cook, or nearly so." This she wrote to Henrietta from Pisa in late March 1847.

At the time of this unacknowledged pregnancy she wrote to Mary Mitford, "In the way of writing I have not done much yet . . . just finished my rough sketch of an antislavery ballad and sent it off to America, where nobody will print it, I am certain, because I could not help making it bitter."

Racial concerns, patriarchal rejection, family secrets, may have played a part in what she called her "stupidity," and what she described as an incredible, headlong denial of a pregnancy that ran five months. Her whole life, her whole world, had been turned upside down in the last six months.

Now not only had she married against her father's wishes, but she was immediately pregnant with the legitimate grandchild that was never meant to be.

For that first pregnancy, that concrete flesh-and-blood betrayal of her father's wishes, for that child who might be born with skin as dark as, or darker than, her own and Robert's, she was not prepared.

PHOTO: In exclusive EBONY interview, author Julia Markus tells writer Monique Barns that she hopes young Black and White scholars will investigate the Jamaican records.

PHOTO: This is simply to introduce Penini [her son] & me," Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in 1860. "I don't please myself, being vain (after) the manner of women, & not being pleased to look either blck or old . . ."

PHOTO: RobertBrowning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were both dark-skinned, according to contemporary reports. Both poets were products of the Jamaican plantation system.
Copyright of Ebony is the property of Johnson Publishing Company and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.
Back to the top
Robert Browning Magazine/Journal Articles
The Browning Main Page

||| Poetry | Edgar Allan Poe | Home | Young American Poets | Emily Dickinson Page | The Browning Main Page | Poetry Links | Anonymous Poetry | Children's Poetry | How to talk about a Poem | How to talk about a short story | Links | Joke | JavaScripts | Home | Send comments about this page to erin@cswnet.com ||| Sign and View Guestbook |||