Scope and Content
The Cottage, Groombridge, Tunbridge Wells.
My dear friend
The last time I heard from you, you were troubled with gout and sciatica. I hope they are gone, and that you are able to look forward to another autumn and winter with hope and courage.
Since I wrote to you an old friend has departed, Allen, Ruskin's publisher (1). He underwent an operation from which it was supposed he was recovering. During this operation another trouble was discovered, which could not be reached, and would have caused death after nine or ten months of agony. Suddenly, and most mercifully, he sank and was at rest, spared all anticipation and prolonged suffering.
I have not been away from home this year. I ought to go, but I shrink from travelling. More than ever should I love to set eyes on the sea. Our house, in many ways, with its old garden and big trees is lovely, but I pine for the illimitable outlook. I can get a far away horizon in five minutes but that does not satisfy me and I want the Atlantic before my bedroom window. This is stupidly unreasonable. A more pressing need is some insurrectionary neighbours in this most proper, most conservative village. Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, whom I used to know well years ago, spent a day with me a few weeks back, and although I could not get up much enthusiasm for her cause (2) her own enthusiasm was delightful. She is a convict and was in Holloway prison. She sent for the governor one morning , and asked him if bugs were a part of prison discipline because, if so, she would calmly endure them. If they were not, she would like then to be removed to another apartment. Her gipsy-black hair has turned quite white, but she is as handsome at fifty as she was at twenty-five. The ancient home of the Cobden race near Midhurst still belongs to the family.
The children are all well, but Willie is much over-worked, and at times I am anxious about him. He has to travel long distances by day and night. A little while ago he was summoned to some place far away in the north. Part of the journey was by the night mail, part by official train, part by carriage and all without rest. Then there was the return the next day.
I went yesterday evening as I often do, to spend an hour with my next-door neighbour,(3) an old lady – somewhere between seventy-five and eighty – the only woman in Groombridge who reads books. She can easily learn poetry by heart even now. She repeated to me, as she knitted, three poems, one by Trench, another by Kingsley, and the third was Tennyson's Will. The last, she learnt two or three weeks ago. She is a singular survival of Toryism and Church, but very shrewd and commanding.
Best love from both of us.
Most affectionately
W. Hale White
(1) Allen, George (1832–1907), engraver and publisher.
(2) Sanderson, (Julia Sarah) Anne Cobden- (1853–1926), socialist and suffragette “More dramatically, in 1905 she joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and, following its Westminster protest in
October 1906, she was imprisoned in Holloway, gaining the women's suffrage movement a high profile with this notorious mistreatment of the daughter of him who gave you bread, one of the nicest women in
England suffering from the coarsest indignity. as George Bernard Shaw wrote to The Times (31 October 1906).
(3) Mrs Oswall probably widow of Oswell, (William) Cotton (1818–1893), explorer and hunter – 'in 1860 married Agnes Frances (d. 1908), fourth daughter of Francis Rivaz; they settled at Groombridge in Kent.'