Robert and their son Pen Browning, Isa Blagden and Robert Lytton, who would become Viceroy of India, the Trollopes, the Powers, the Storys, Kate Field and many others were present on that day at her graveside, but not Walter Savage Landor, as they had forgot to send a carriage for the old King-Lear-like poet. Robert Browning never again visited her grave side, indeed interfered with the very beautiful tomb for her Frederic Lord Leighton designed for her, Robert seeing to it that her name was not present on it, only her initials, and that the intended portrait became as unlike hers as was possible.

 

Leighton Sketch Book, Royal Academy Library

____
Greek Lyre                   Christian Harp                Hebrew Harp
Tragedy and Comedy    Cross                            Jubilee with Broken Slave Shackle

Indeed, several of the ex-patriot women of the Anglo-Florentine circle came of mixed blood, different colours and other faiths, being therefore scarcely marriageable in English society. Elizabeth herself referred to her part slave ancestry. Maurice (Moisé) Baruch, the conscientious librarian of the English Church in Florence, found his resting place in the English Cemetery, buried by the Anglican Reverend Tottenham, his tomb inscribed in English and in German, the latter in fraktura script in 1867. Thomas Adolphus Trollope noted that the Hungarian patriot Ferencz Pulszky's talented beautiful Viennese wife, Therese Walther, was Jewish. While Thomas Adolphus' friend, Isa Blagden, and his own wife, Theodosia Garrow Trollope, were part Jewish, part East Indian. Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a composite of these in the exotic and beautiful character of Miriam in The Marble Faun.

    
Robert Lytton, who had attended Elizabeth's funeral along with Isa, was the son of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, had published poetry under the name of 'Owen Meredith' and became Viceroy of India.

Elizabeth had hoped Lytton would marry Isa Blagden, for she had saved his life one summer in Bagni di Lucca, when the Brownings were also there, but Isa's mixed blood, part Jewish, part East Indian, prevented the match. They both wrote works about their romance: Lytton's Lucile, a kind of Aurora Leigh, in verse; Isa's Agnes Tremorne in prose. I am hoping someone will write a book about Isa and Lytton.   

In Florence, because of its openness, both English and Americans could be friends of each other more readily than could have been the case in either England or in America. Among Florence's residents was Hiram Powers, whose sculpture the 'Greek Slave' was the very centre of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition,

In the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Gift of William Wilson Corcoran.

whose 'America' was not accepted by Congress because he showed her trampling on slave chains,

and whose 'Last of the Tribes' is exquisite.

He was himself part Native American and Elizabeth speaks of his great flashing eyes, while the brilliant artist Sophia Peabody, married to Nathaniel Hawthorne, studied sculpture under him.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning saw his sculpture of the 'Greek Slave' in his studio in Florence and was so moved by it that she wrote this sonnet.

In the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Gift of William Wilson Corcoran.

          They say Ideal Beauty cannot enter
          The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
          An alien Image with the shackled hands,
          Called the Greek Slave: as if the sculptor meant her,
          (That passionless perfection which he lent her,
          Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill expands)
          To, so, confront men’s crimes in different lands,
          With man’s ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
          Art’s fiery finger! – and break up erelong
          The serfdom of this world! Appeal, fair stone,
          From God’s pure heights of beauty, against man’s wrong!
          Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
          East griefs but west, - and strike and shame the strong,
          By thunders of white silence, overthrown!

Elizabeth is speaking here against slavery in America, in Russia.

Buried also in our Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery, amongst servants from England, serfs from Russia, is Nadezhda, who came at 14 to Florence, a Black slave from Nubia, who was baptized in a Russian Orthodox family and who lies beneath a most beautiful Orthodox cross in white marble, her story told in Cyrillic on its base. We recall that Pushkin, who wrote of a friend as buried under the sweet myrtle of Italy at Leghorn, was himself the grandson of 'Tsar Peter's Negro'.

'Zdes' pokoitsja telo/ negritjanki Kalimy/ vo Sv. Kresenii/ Nadezdy/ privezennoj vo Florenciju iz Nubii/ v 1827 godu . . . 1851// Primi mja Gospodi/ vo Carstvie Tvoe'/Qui giacciono le spoglie mortali della nera Kalima, nel Santo/ Battesimo chiamata Nadezda (Speranza) che è stata portata a Firenze dalla Nubia nel 1827 . . 1851, Accoglila Signore nel Tuo Regno/

Mary Somerville buried her husband William here in July of 1860, being interred herself later in a magnificent tomb in Naples. Her husband's father, a Scottish clergyman and historian, wrote powerful essays against slavery. We recall that Scotland was an integral part of the slaves, sugar, rum triangle, still giving us our Dundee marmalade. Now Mary Fairfax Somerville, with no university education, merely a few months of school where she was placed in an iron contraption for her spine, discovered two planets and taught mathematics to Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who then, with Charles Babbage, invented the computer. At least that is what IBM told us back in the 1950s in Silicon Valley, where I was in college. Mary's books are exquisitely written - and were used as science textbooks by the University of Cambridge in the Victorian period. At 92, Mary regretted she would not live to see the end of the disgrace to humanity that is slavery. When I was at the UNESCO conference on computers and culture in St Petersburg two years ago we found many of us were women and/or Blacks, seizing this new information technology for our freedom.

  

The Admiral Sir Fleetwood Broughton Reyolds Pellew buried his Creole wife and heiress, the daughter of Lady Holland, Harriet Webster Pellew, here in August, 1849, having her tomb sculpted by Félicie de Fauveau, the Royalist sculptress living in exile following her imprisonment in France, in Florence. She also sculpted his tomb when he died in Marseilles, July, 1861, placing on it his father's Coat of Arms won through the victory of the Battle of Algiers against Moroccan slave traders. I tried to tell my childhood friend, Godfrey Webster, of these tombs but my letter reached him in Brazil too late. I had already told Godfrey, an Old Etonian, of his Creole ancestry. We had grown up together at Battle Abbey to which he should have been heir, had not the Trust sold it. We found Félicie de Fauveau's sculpure in photographs owned by Lord Crawford in Scotland, for she had willed them to his ancestor, the great art historian who had lived in Florence, Lord Lindsay. The tombs themselves have been vandalized.

On 28 December 1827, the ship 'Edward' had set sail from the Port of London for the Port of New Orleans. On board were Frances Trollope, 40, Cecilia Trollope, 12, Emily Trollope, 10, Henry Trollope, 14, all English, Frances Wright, 28, American, and August Hervieu, 23, French. Frances Wright, associated with Lafayette, had invited the Trollopes to Nashoba where she had a settlement for the education of Negro slaves. Auguste Hervieu, a brilliant young artist, was the children's tutor and companion. With them also were Hester Rust and William Abbott, their servants. Often Hervieu had to sell his art to feed and house them all.

Fanny and her family next voyaged up the Mississippi to Natchez and then through the forests to Nashoba in Tennessee. All this became grist to her mill in her anti-slavery novel, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or Lynch Law, 1835, 1857. It is not in print. It is now very rare. You can see it, instead of read it, through Auguste Hervieu's engravings, which I have placed in a separate file so they not crash this one.