Robert Browning

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, then a suburb south of London, the first child of Robert Browning senior, a clerk at the Bank of England, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, a devout Nonconformist of Scottish and German descent ^[1]. The household was comfortable rather than wealthy, and its most remarkable feature was the father's library. Browning senior had assembled roughly six thousand volumes, many of them rare and curious, and he encouraged his son to roam through them freely ^[2]. The boy read Greek, Latin, and a mass of out-of-the-way learning that would later surface, sometimes bewilderingly, in his verse.

Browning's formal schooling was brief. He attended a local school run by the Ready family but was largely educated at home by tutors, learning music, riding, fencing, and languages ^[1]. In 1828 he enrolled at the newly founded London University, but he withdrew after less than a year, unhappy with institutional study and confident that his father's books had given him something better ^[2]. Because his mother's religious dissent barred the family from full participation in Oxford and Cambridge, and because his parents were willing to support him, Browning settled into an unusual arrangement for an ambitious young man: he simply stayed at home and wrote.

At twelve he had already produced a volume of Byronic verse, Incondita, which his parents tried and failed to get published; Browning later destroyed it ^[2]. The decisive shock of his adolescence was the discovery of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Reading Shelley's poems around 1826 converted him, for a period, to vegetarianism and atheism, and gave him a model of the poet as visionary that he would spend years absorbing and then deliberately abandoning ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Robert Browning in the 1830s would have received a hesitant answer. His first published poem, Pauline (1833), appeared anonymously, sold not a single copy, and drew a private criticism from John Stuart Mill that stung the young author deeply: Mill detected in it a morbid degree of self-consciousness ^[3]. Browning took the lesson to heart. He resolved to stop speaking in his own voice and to project himself instead into invented characters, a decision that shaped everything he wrote afterwards.

Paracelsus (1835), a long poem about the Renaissance physician and alchemist, earned respectful reviews and opened literary London to him. He met William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and the actor manager William Macready, who encouraged him to write for the stage ^[1]. The theatrical experiment mostly failed. Strafford (1837) managed a short run, but later plays such as A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843) collapsed amid quarrels with Macready, and Browning eventually gave up the stage while keeping its central discovery: the pleasure of letting a character condemn himself out of his own mouth ^[3].

The low point came with Sordello (1840), a dense narrative poem about a thirteenth-century Italian troubadour. Contemporaries found it almost unreadable, and jokes about its obscurity followed Browning for decades; Tennyson reportedly claimed he understood only the first and last lines, and that both were untrue ^[2]. Yet the same decade produced the work on which his reputation now rests. In the pamphlet series Bells and Pomegranates (1841 to 1846) he published Pippa Passes and the collections Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), which contained My Last Duchess, Porphyria's Lover, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Home-Thoughts, from Abroad ^[3]. These perfected the dramatic monologue: a single speaker, addressing an implied listener at a charged moment, revealing more than he intends.

In January 1845 Browning wrote a fan letter to Elizabeth Barrett, then far more famous than he was, opening with the declaration that he loved her verses with all his heart. Barrett was thirty-eight, an invalid confined largely to her room in the family house at 50 Wimpole Street, and living under the rule of a father who forbade any of his children to marry ^[4]. The correspondence that followed ran to nearly six hundred letters in twenty months and turned, after their first meeting in May 1845, into a courtship conducted in secret ^[4].

On September 12, 1846, the two were married quietly at St Marylebone Parish Church, and a week later they slipped out of England for Italy, taking Elizabeth's spaniel Flush and her maid Wilson ^[1]. Her father never forgave her and returned her letters unopened. The couple settled in Florence at Casa Guidi, an apartment near the Pitti Palace, where their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed Pen, was born in 1849 ^[4].

The fifteen Florentine years were, by Browning's own account, the happiest of his life, though they were more productive for Elizabeth than for him. She published Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh; he wrote comparatively little until Men and Women appeared in 1855, a two-volume collection containing Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, A Toccata of Galuppi's, and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ^[3]. Reviewers were lukewarm, and the book sold poorly, but later critics have judged it the summit of his art. Elizabeth's health, long fragile, gave way in the summer of 1861. She died in Browning's arms at Casa Guidi on June 29, 1861, and was buried in the English Cemetery in Florence ^[4].

Any account of Robert Browning achievements begins with the dramatic monologue, the form he did not invent but made his own. Poems such as My Last Duchess, in which a Renaissance duke calmly discloses that he had his previous wife disposed of, showed how a poem could operate like a courtroom without a judge, leaving readers to convict the speaker on his own evidence ^[3]. This technique of ironic self-revelation influenced Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and much of twentieth-century poetry, which absorbed Browning's lesson that a poem's speaker need not be its author ^[5].

After Elizabeth's death Browning returned to London with Pen and gradually re-entered literary society. Dramatis Personae (1864), which included Caliban upon Setebos and Rabbi Ben Ezra with its famous opening invitation to grow old along with the speaker, was the first of his books to reach a second edition and marked the turn in his public fortunes ^[1].

His largest work followed. Browning had bought, from a Florence market stall in 1860, a square old yellow book containing documents from a 1698 Roman murder trial: Count Guido Franceschini's killing of his young wife Pompilia and her parents ^[6]. From this material he built The Ring and the Book (1868 to 1869), a poem of more than twenty thousand lines in which ten successive speakers, including the murderer, the dying wife, the lawyers, and the aged Pope, retell the same events from their own angles ^[6]. The design turned the dramatic monologue into an architecture of competing testimony, and contemporaries received it as a masterpiece; the Athenaeum called it the supreme poetical achievement of the age ^[6]. It made Browning, at last, a celebrity, discussed in the same breath as Tennyson.

Fame changed Browning's daily life more than his habits of work. Through the 1870s he became a fixture of London dinner tables, a talkative, sociable presence so outwardly conventional that Henry James built a story, The Private Life, around the puzzle of how such a worldly diner-out could also be the author of such strange poems ^[5]. He declined offers to stand for the rectorship of Scottish universities, refused all invitations to explain his own work, and kept publishing at a pace that outstripped his readers: Balaustion's Adventure (1871), Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), and The Inn Album (1875) among them ^[1].

His private life had one notable turbulence. In 1869 he apparently proposed to the wealthy widow Louisa, Lady Ashburton, an episode that ended badly and that he came to regret; he never remarried, and he continued to mark the anniversaries of his life with Elizabeth ^[2]. He spent long summers abroad, in France and later in the Italian Alps and Venice, often with his devoted sister Sarianna, who kept house for him after their father died in 1866 ^[1].

Recognition accumulated in his final decade. The Browning Society was founded in London in 1881 to study and promote his work while he was still alive, an honor almost without precedent for a living English poet, and branches soon appeared across Britain and the United States ^[5]. Oxford had already given him an honorary degree and a fellowship at Balliol College, where his friend Benjamin Jowett was Master ^[1]. On December 12, 1889, the day his final collection Asolando was published in London, Browning died of bronchitis at his son's home, the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal in Venice ^[7]. Burial beside Elizabeth in Florence proved impossible because the English Cemetery there had closed, so he was interred in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on December 31, 1889 ^[7].

Browning's posthumous standing has shifted more than that of any other major Victorian. The generation that founded Browning societies prized him as a philosophical optimist, mining Rabbi Ben Ezra and Pippa Passes for consoling doctrine. The modernists who followed discarded the sage and kept the technician: Ezra Pound named Sordello a touchstone, and the impersonal, many-voiced method of The Waste Land owes a clear debt to Browning's habit of speaking through masks ^[5]. Academic criticism since the mid twentieth century has treated the dramatic monologues as founding documents in the poetry of psychology, unreliable narration, and moral irony ^[3].

A short list of Robert Browning facts suggests how widely his work has traveled. The Pied Piper of Hamelin became a children's classic detached from its author's name. The phrase from Pippa Passes, that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, circulates far beyond poetry, usually stripped of the irony of its context. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came supplied Stephen King with the frame for his Dark Tower novels, and the courtship of the Brownings inspired the long-running play and film The Barretts of Wimpole Street ^[5].

Any Robert Browning biography must reckon with a double reputation: the most difficult of the great Victorians and one of the most humanly curious. He wrote about painters, musicians, murderers, charlatans, saints, and lovers with the same forensic sympathy, convinced that a life is best understood from inside a particular head at a particular moment. That conviction, more than any single poem, is what modern literature took from him. His manuscripts, letters, and relics are preserved in major collections, above all the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Texas, which holds the world's largest archive devoted to the two poets ^[8].