Reference
X955/1/129
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Date free text
14th Jul 1901
Production date
From: 1901 To: 1901
Scope and Content
Lord's Well Lane, Crowborough, Tunbridge Wells
My dear friend
I am afraid that this is Swinburne at his worst, (1) and that he is referring to the election riots at Stratford where people were beaten and kicked because they dared to speak their minds about this wicked war.
Swinburne’s verse is doubly disgraceful because in the name of freedom. he applauds the tyranny which suppresses speech. What would he have said if this thing had happened in Russia! It is all too sad for words. I can hardly trust myself to write of speak about it, and I begin almost to wish myself out of a world like ours as it now is. Excepting Morley and Frederick Harrison, two agnostics, by the way, and neither of them divinities to me, there are no men of any note in politics who seriously believe that justice and morality are anything but what it is the fashion to call fads.
I hope the intense heat, which I know you do not like did not upset you. The drop of twenty degrees in twenty four hours has been also very trying.
Our two new servants have just come. I do pity you if you are going to change. I don’t wonder that you sometimes propose to yourself to take husband and wife both, but you will hardly be able to do it. There will be more than a probability of children and you wont like to turn the wife away just as she is becoming unfit for work.
Molly is very well, we both send our best, best love.
Love to Charlie
Ever affectionately
W. Hale White
(1) This must be Stratford on Avon 27 June 1901, It was published in the Saturday Review, 6 July 1901, and reprinted in A Channel Passage and other Poems. 1904.
Level of description
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