Chapter XXI: Letter XX: To Madox Brown, Hampstead

I am unable to say anything to the purpose about Brown’s “Hogarthian Sonnets.”

The joke about “the nigger” was a sort of offshoot from Carlyle’s _Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question_, a pronouncement which vastly amused my brother and several others in our set.

[Chatham Place, London.
24 September 1853.]

My dear Brown,

I shall be most glad to accept your invite for Sunday, to
Finchley viâ Hampstead, and shall try at once for William, who I
am sure will have equal pleasure if not pre-engaged--but these
men of society!

The Hogarthian sonnets have great excellencies, especially the
last; but they also present a few obscurities to which Browning
alone might perhaps serve as a sort of introductory horn-book.
Speaking of horn reminds me that like Desdemona I am “half
asleep,” and must to bed. By the by, that play tends to show how
the nigger, without due coercion, takes merely to beating his
wife, and perhaps ends by choking her as an outlet for his waste
energies.

I shall come on Sunday to Hampstead with or without William, at
about three or half-past, and will bring the sonnets with me, and
then go fully into them with you.

Meanwhile and ever
I am your D. G. R.