Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

a lyrical drama’, is the best thing she’s written. And she has a strong vision for the volume as a whole. Like her previous books, it will start with the long piece, ‘Then, would come the Poets’ vow, & Margret, & several poems of a length almost equal to them, & some shorter ones at the end.’

As she writes these letters in her warm room, keeping one eye on the chill world outdoors, Elizabeth can take comfort from the fact that it’s no longer just family who believe in her talent. She’s joining a literary world. But by March 1838 even this busy life of the mind can’t disguise the fact that she hasn’t been out of the house for six months, and is ‘incapable of any occupation which should not rather be called an imitation of idleness’. She’s acutely aware how this gets in the way of writing, ‘For altho’ ambition is a grand angelic sin […] I have at any rate a long futurity of coughing [to] abstract me from it.’

Beyond her bedroom door, though, the household mood has been lightened in recent months by the promise of a permanent London address. Months of wrangling over the lease of this potential home at 50 Wimpole Street have left the family on tenterhooks lest ‘those lawyers […] are going to rob us of it’. By spring 1838 the move seems increasingly certain. But then bad news arrives at Gloucester Place: ‘How the waves of pleasure & mournfulness chase each other over the sand of life!’ In February, the Barretts discover that Uncle Sam is dead. The shock affects Elizabeth, as all bad news does, psychosomatically: ‘My strength flags a good deal, and the cough very little.’ Uncle Sam, the family learn, died at Kingston on 23 December 1837 while trying to get home from Spanish Town to Cinnamon Hill. The cause of death was ‘pulmonary consumption’, or TB: so though the family back in London had no idea of it, he must have guessed that he was dying.

Possibly this is why, the previous August, he had gifted Elizabeth his one-eighth share in the David Lyon, a working vessel once used as a convict ship, together with its latest annual profit. Uncle Sam is survived by no legitimate children, and his gift marks the special relationship the two had enjoyed since he, ‘Was […] Uncle brother friend & nurse when I lay in the long weary sickness at Gloucester’. When news of this generosity arrived, his ‘kindness melted our dear Ba to tears, for she had thought from his long continued silence, that she must be forgotten.’ In fact he was probably too ill for letter-writing. But she doesn’t yet seem to realise the significance of the money itself. Invested, it will produce an annual income of around £200, equivalent to a little under three years’ pay for a skilled labourer. Combined with around £4,000 inherited from Grandmama, also invested for her, it means that, unusually for a woman at this time, Elizabeth could afford to live independently.

This is not what happens next. Instead in a visceral reflex Papa summons his own Sam, the son who is his brother’s namesake, home from Jamaica. At twenty-six the former naughty schoolboy has become one of the most gregarious, outgoing members of the Barrett clan and, sent to Cinnamon Hill in 1836, he has proved an asset in the management of family affairs. He is also a young man with an appetite for life. It’s no coincidence that, among the siblings, he has a special bond with Henrietta. Third and fourth in the surviving birth order as Ba and Bro are first and second, the pair share an analogous bond of temperament and age, relishing socialising, dancing and party-going. Characteristically, when Sam does finally return to England in November 1838, almost a year after his uncle’s death, he takes in a tour of the eastern seaboard of the US, including a visit to New York, along the way. Indeed, even back in Britain he doesn’t rush home, but goes first to old friends in Sidmouth.

By the time he arrives in London, the family will be settled in at Wimpole Street, and they see their new home’s advantages and deficiencies through his eyes. Moving half a mile east from Gloucester Place means living in a yet more built-up area of London. Elizabeth has not been keen on the move, ‘on account of the gloominesses of that street & of that part of the street—whose walls look so much like Newgate’s turned inside out’. Wimpole Street, which runs parallel with Harley Street, isn’t an arterial thoroughfare like Gloucester Place. If a little quieter, it’s also less imposing: Sam is ‘in some measure disappointed at the width of the Street; to this however I am reconciled, for the house is delightful in every respect’. (He also notices the London cold after the warmth of Montego Bay: ‘My room as warm as I could wish it when in bed, but as cold as my bitterest enemy could desire when out.’) But number 50 itself is if anything grander than the old house. Though constructed of plain brick – apart from the stone-faced ground and lower floor – it’s triple-fronted, comprising a basement plus four storeys; five if you include the rooms in the mansard roof. A wide stone bridge leads to a front door with a magnificent peacock’s tail of statement fanlight.

The Barrett men arrive at Wimpole Street in mid-April 1838. Elizabeth and her sisters follow after a few days because, ‘The house was so unfinished, that we were obliged & glad to accept the charities of a kind friend & go to Crawford Street until the ghost of paint had been sufficiently exorcised.’ But once there, ‘We like the house very much indeed!’ she tells Miss Mitford. ‘The doves & my books & I have a little slip of sitting room to ourselves, —& dearest Papa in his abundant kindness surprised me in it with a