Reference
X955/1/34
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Scope and Content
Park Hill, Carshalton, Surrey
My dear friend
My cousin William has just left me. He came to stay with us for three or four days, and I need hardly say we greatly enjoyed his company. He has been unwell – was seized with a kind of fainting attack one Sunday night after a very trying day and sets it down it a cigarette he smoked! However, he got much better here and was quite cheerful. – a great blessing to me, suffering from the extraordinary absence of sunlight during these last few months. Never has London to my knowledge been so dismal. However, I have seen two things worth seeing: one being Mr. Jones's play at the Princesss of Hoodman Blind (1) and the other the Millais Exhibition.(2) The play is a thoroughly noble piece of work, and it is consolatory to think that such a performance is beheld by so many people. I told Mr. Jones that I thought the good done by his melodrama was greater than the harm done by all the London sermons in a year. This is very strong commendation and I fear exaggerated. Yet I don’t know – the harm done by those sermons now is not so very great. Latterly I have been brought into contact with many church people. Some friends who have taken a fancy to Molly through there daughters who were at school with her are very churchy and Tory, but they are human, very affectionate, and very sincere. A lady came to dine with us when William was with us who sacrifices a good deal of herself to better the condition of the poor in Drury Lane. She belongs to the Church of England, and a more attractive creature I do not know.
Partly this is due to the fact that ecclesiastical theories cease to affect people as much as they did in times gone by, and partly to another fact, that, after all, they are but a dress; often disappointing and suppressive, but possibly covering a warmer heart than those possessed by a more natural costume,. The heart is the thing! I have been reading lately Dickens.s Christmas Carol with such fervour that my admiration for Dickens grew almost to worship, and if there is one thing more prominent than another in that divine little book – as genuine a piece of inspiration as ever poured forth from the fountain of all inspiration – it is the utter simplicity of the characters, and circumstances which, nevertheless, are so grand as those of Paradise Lost.
Go, little girl, with the poor coarse hand.
I have my lesson, shall understand.
And so I did, I hope. At any rate I felt it at the time as deeply as anything in the Revised Version which I have gone through all now. I was not sorry altogether your husband was so scurvily treated by the Ryde burgesses at the last municipal election, and trust he has more leisure.
Molly's education now devolves on me partly. She has left school but continues French, German, music and English. The English I look after. We have begun the Bible for the young, accompanied by the corresponding chapters in the R.V. Bacon.s Advancement of Learning, Huxley.s Physiography, a manual of Astronomy, and Green.s History of England. Of course I must superintend, as I get so little time.
Best love to your husband and all the children. Mrs White sends her best love too and thanks for the sweet flowers.
1) Grosvenor Gallery
2) Hoodman Blind Victorian melodrama by Mr Wilson Barratt and Henry A. Jones ( notes from New York Times Dec. 1 1885
(3) Bacon, Francis, The advancement of learning 1868.
(4) Huxley, Thomas Henry, Physiography, 1878 10 January 1886
Level of description
item