Mail Slot, 50 Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning's 1845 Love Letter to Miss Elizabeth Barrett

I was at Wellesley last week for a literature symposium and found myself powerfully drawn to the Special Collections Room of the Margaret Clapp Library. Beside the functioning doorway to this collection of rare books and manuscripts is something perfectly mundane but powerfully compelling -- the front door of 50 Wimpole Street, London W1, behind which lived the family of the curmudgeonly Edward Moulton-Barrett, and most particularly his daughter the poet Elizabeth Barrett. Through 50 Wimpole Street’s brass mail slot passed Robert Browning’s January 1845 fan letter to his “dear Miss Barrett.” Their epistolary romance blossomed through the winter and spring of 1845, progressing to their first face-to-face meeting in May 1845, and culminating in their marriage in September 1846. All of the couple’s storied correspondence and the manuscripts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, including #28 reside in the Special Collections Room.

It is not the Elizabeth Barrett/Robert Browning letters themselves nor the manuscripts of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets that draw me to the Special Collections Room. It is the brass mail slot in the Wimpole Street door that I visit whenever I am at the College. If a door symbolizes the separation of the public world from the private domain, then a mail slot symbolizes the semi-permeability of that separation. The fluttering passage of letters (“all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering”) between those two realms then symbolizes the possibility that we can transcend our private self-absorption and make genuine connection with others. No wonder that since the installation of the Wimpole Street door at Wellesley in 1937, undergraduates have slipped letters expressing their deepest hopes and longings through its mail slot!