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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush
"He & I are inseparable companions,and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion." -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
On a bitter afternoon in January 1841, a coach stopped outside a small house in the British seaside town of Torquay, bleak and deserted in the off-season. The coachman lifted out a wicker basket, and a young Cocker Spaniel peeked through the thick blankets. The six- month-old puppy sniffed the sea for the first time and wagged his tail excitedly. His dark eyes shone as he pushed his way through the layers of covering, eager to track the enticing scents in the air. The puppy's determined efforts to free himself from the basket made the man laugh, whereupon the little dog leaped into his arms and began licking his face. The coachman ruffled the dog's sleek head, muttering, "Miss Mitford is going to miss you, but here we are, and mind your manners." With the puppy tucked under his arm, the coachman rang the bell. Waiting for the door to open, he shivered in the wind and thought of the green lanes and meadows of home. He wondered how this little spaniel, bred to hunt rabbits and quail, would fare as a companion to a sickly recluse. The puppy's name was Flush, and he was being delivered to the poet Elizabeth Barrett. That afternoon marked the beginning of one of the most celebrated human-dog relationships in literature.
When Flush arrived in Elizabeth's life, she was thirty-five and bedridden. As a girl, however, she had been healthy and active. Born in 1806, she was the eldest of twelve children who grew up on an estate called Hope End, consisting of 475 isolated acres on the border between England and Wales. There Mr. Barrett built a Turkish- style house, fondly remembered by Elizabeth as "crowded with minarets & domes, & crowned with metal spires & crescents." Mrs. Barrett, who was from a large, closely knit family, filled their home with visiting relatives. The Barrett children and their cousins rode horses, climbed haystacks, and played hide-and-seek in the underground passage between the house and the gardens. Elizabeth was usually the leader and often a risk-taker. Neighbors remembered her, with a "pale spiritual face and a profusion of dark curls," driving her pony carriage at breakneck speed through the steep Herefordshire lanes.
In adolescence, Elizabeth began to suffer symptoms of ill health, primarily backaches, shortness of breath, and lack of appetite. Because the Barretts' first daughter, Mary, had died when she was only three and a half, Mr. and Mrs. Barrett took Elizabeth's complaints seriously and consulted numerous doctors, to no avail. Finally, they brought her to the Spa Hotel in Gloucester, where a specialist examined her and decided to treat her as if she had a spinal disease, even though he was unsure of the diagnosis. He recommended that she remain there for months of rest in a spine crib, a hammock strung four feet above the ground. He also prescribed daily doses of laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) for the fifteen- year-old, a common medication at that time.
Looking at Elizabeth's illness from a contemporary perspective, it seems to have had several causes: a form of scoliosis, a condition in which the spine curves abnormally; tuberculosis; and perhaps an eating disorder. No clear diagnosis emerges from the surviving medical records. In nineteenth-century England, middle-class girls were considered fragile once they started to menstruate, but Elizabeth's younger sisters Arabel and Henrietta, who had also complained of illnesses when they...
