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ONLY ONE THING is known for certain about the appearance of Sarah Anna Browning, wife of Robert Browning and mother of Robert and Sarianna Browning: she had a notably square head. Which is to say, its uncommon squareness was noted by Alfred Domett, a young man sufficiently serious as to become briefly, in his maturity, Prime Minister of New Zealand and sometime epic poet. Mr Domett, getting on in years, conscientiously committed this observation to his journal on 30 April 1878: ‘I remembered their mother about 40 years before (say 1838), who had, I used to think, the squarest head and forehead I almost ever saw in a human being, putting me in mind, absurdly enough no doubt of a tea-chest or tea-caddy.’¹

Many people have square heads. There is little enough to be interpreted from this characteristic, though to some minds a square head may naturally imply sturdy common sense and a regular attitude to life. A good square head is commonly viewed as virtually a guarantee of correct behaviour and a restrained attitude towards vanity and frivolity. Lombroso’s forensic art of physiognomy being now just as discredited as palmistry or phrenology, we may turn with more confidence to Thomas Carlyle’s shrewd and succinct assessment of Mrs Browning as being ‘the type of a Scottish gentlewoman’.² The phrase is evocative enough for those who, like Carlyle, have enjoyed some personal experience and acquired some understanding at first hand of the culture that has bred and refined the Scottish gentlewoman over the generations. She is a woman to be reckoned with. Since we know nothing but bromides and pleasing praises of Sarah Anna’s temperament beyond what may be conjectured, particularly from Carlyle’s brief but telling phrase, we may take it that she was quieter and more phlegmatic than Jane Welsh, Carlyle’s own Scottish gentlewoman wife whose verbal flyting could generally be relied upon to rattle the teeth and teacups of visitors to Carlyle’s London house in Cheyne Walk.

Mrs Browning’s father was German. Her grandfather is said to have been a Hamburg merchant whose son William is generally agreed to have become, in a small way, a ship owner in Dundee and to have married a Scotswoman. She was born Sarah Anna Wiedemann in Scotland, in the early 1770s, and while still a girl came south with her sister Christiana to lodge with an uncle in Camberwell. Her history before marriage is not known to have been remarkable; after marriage it was not notably dramatic. There is only the amplest evidence that she was worthily devoted to her hearth, garden, husband, and children.

Mrs Browning’s head so fascinated Alfred Domett that he continued to refer to it in a domestic anecdote agreeably designed to emphasize the affection that existed between mother and son: ‘On one occasion, in the act of tossing a little roll of music from the table to the piano, he thought it had touched her head in passing her, and I remember how he ran to her to apologise and caress her, though I think she had not felt it.’³ Sarah Anna Browning’s head was at least tenderly regarded and respected by Robert, her son, who—since he has left no description of it to posterity in prose or poetry—either refrained from disobliging comment or regarded its shape as in no respect unusual.

Mrs Browning was a Dissenter; her creed was Nonconformist, a somewhat austere faith that partook of no sacraments and reprobated ritual. She—and, nine years into their marriage, her husband—adhered to the Congregational Church, the chapel in York Street, Walworth, which the Browning family attended regularly to hear the preaching of the incumbent, the Revd George Clayton, characterized in the British Weekly of 20 December 1889 as one who ‘combined the character of a saint, a dancing master, and an orthodox eighteenth-century theologian in about equal proportions’.⁴ Before professing Congregationalism, she had been brought up—said Sarianna, her daughter, to Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr—in the Church of Scotland. One of the books that is recorded as a gift from Mrs Browning to her son is an anthology of sermons, inscribed by him on the flyleaf as a treasured possession and fond remembrance of his mother. As a token of maternal concern for her son’s spiritual welfare it was perfectly appropriate, and might perhaps have been intended as a modest counterweight to the large and eclectic library of books—six thousand volumes, more or less—that her husband had collected, continued to collect, and through which her precocious son was presently and diligently reading his way.

Sarah Anna Browning doubtless had cause to attempt to concentrate young Robert’s mind more narrowly. He had begun with a rather sensational anthology, Nathaniel Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World, published in 1678, and sooner rather than later would inevitably discover dictionaries and encyclopedias, those seemingly innocent repositories of dry definitions and sober facts but which are, in truth, a maze of conceits and confusions, of broad thoroughfares and frustrating cul-de-sacs from which the imaginative mind, once entered, will find no exit and never in a lifetime penetrate to the centre.

But Mrs Browning’s head, square with religion and good intentions, was very liable to be turned by kindly feeling towards her son and poetry. Robert, in 1826, had already come across Miscellaneous Poems, a copy of Shelley’s best works, published by William Benbow of High Holborn, unblushingly pirated from Mrs Shelley’s edition of her husband’s Posthumous Poems. This volume was presented to him by a cousin, James Silverthorne, and he was eager for a more reliable, authoritative edition. Having made inquiries of the Literary Gazette as to where they might be obtained, Robert requested the poems of Shelley as a birthday present.⁵ Mrs Browning may be pictured putting on her gloves, setting her bonnet squarely on her head and proceeding to Vere Street. There, at the premises of C. & J. Ollier, booksellers, she purchased the complete works of the poet, including the Pisa edition of Adonais in a purple paper cover and Epipsychidion. None of them had exhausted their first editions save The Cenci, which had achieved a second edition.

On advice, as being in somewhat the same poetic spirit as the works of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley who had died tragically in a boating accident in Italy but three years before, Sarah Anna Browning added to her order three volumes of the poetry of the late John Keats, who had died, also tragically young, in Rome in 1821. Her arms encumbered with the books of these two neglected poets, her head quite innocent of the effect they would have, she returned home to present them to her son. There being not much call for the poetry of Shelley and Keats at this time, it had taken some effort to obtain their works. Bibliophiles, wrote Edmund Gosse in 1881 in the December issue of the Century Magazine, turn almost dazed at the thought of these prizes picked up by the unconscious lady.

The Browning family belonged, remarked G. K. Chesterton, ‘to the solid and educated middle-class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity’.⁶ Robert Browning senior, husband to Sarah Anna Wiedemann, was certainly educated, undeniably middle-class, and interested in literature not so much for its own sake—though he was more literate and widely read, it may safely be said, than many of his colleagues at the Bank of England—but more from the point of view of bibliophily and learning. There was always another book to be sought and set on a shelf. The house in Camberwell was full of them.

Literature and learning are not precisely the same thing, and Mr Browning senior, according to the testimony of Mr Domett, was accustomed to speak of his son ‘“as beyond him”’—alluding to his Paracelsuses and Sordellos; though I fancy he altered his tone on this subject very much at a later period’.⁷ Poetry safely clapped between purple paper covers is one thing, poets are quite another—and an experimental, modern poet within the confines of one’s own family is bound to be unsettling to a traditionalist, try as he may to comprehend, proud as he may be of completed and published effort. Mr Browning senior may initially have been more pleased with the fact of his son’s work being printed and bound and placed in its proper place on his bookshelves than with the perplexing contents of the books themselves.

That said, introductory notes by Reuben Browning to a small volume of sketches by Robert Browning senior refer kindly to his stepbrother’s bibliophily and store of learning—however much at random and magpie-like it may have been acquired: ‘The love of reading attracted him by sympathy to books: old books were his delight, and by his continual search after them he not only knew all the old books-stalls in London, but their contents, and if any scarce work were spoken of, he could tell forthwith where a copy of it might be had. Nay, he would even describe in what part of the shop it was placed, and the price likely to be asked for it.’⁸ So, ‘with the scent of a hound and the snap of a bull-dog’ for an old or rare book, Mr Browning acquired learning and a library.

‘Thus his own library became his treasure,’ remarked Reuben Browning. ‘His books, however, were confessedly not remarkable for costly binding, but for their rarity or for interesting remarks he had to make on most of them; and his memory was so good that not infrequently, when a conversation at his table had reference to any particular subject, has he quietly left the room and in the dark, from a thousand volumes in his library, brought two or three illustrations of the point under discussion.’ The point under discussion, however esoteric, would rarely defeat Mr Browning senior’s search for an apposite reference: ‘His wonderful store of information,’ wrote Reuben Browning, ‘might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine. It comprised not merely a thorough scholastic outline of the world, but the critical points of ancient and modern history, the lore of the Middle Ages, all political combinations of parties, their descriptions and consequences; and especially the lives of the poets and painters, concerning whom he ever had to communicate some interesting anecdote not generally known.’

A portrait of Mr Browning senior, preserved throughout their lives by his children, was ‘blue-eyed and “fresh-coloured”’ and, attested Mr Browning’s daughter Sarianna to Alfred Domett, the man himself ‘had not an unsound tooth in his head’ when he died at the age of 84. In his youth he had been a vigorous sportsman, afflicted only by sore throats and a minor liver complaint. Altogether, his general health and recuperative powers were strongly marked. Alfred Domett took these facts of paternal health and heredity seriously, on the ground that ‘they have their significance with reference to the physical constitution of their son, the poet; which goes so far as to make up what is called “genius”’.

So far as Domett was aware, no cloud shadowed the home life of the Brownings: ‘Altogether, father, mother, only son and only daughter formed a most suited, harmonious and intellectual family, as appeared to me.’ Mr Browning senior, to Domett, was not often a physically significant presence: his friend’s father, ‘of whom I did not see much, seemed in my recollection, what I should be inclined to call a dry adust [sic] undersized man; rather reserved; fond particularly of old engravings, of which I believe he had a choice collection.’ Mr Browning took pleasure not only in collecting pictures but also in making them. He was liable to sketch the heads of his colleagues and visitors to the Bank of England, a habit so much encouraged by his employers that hundreds of these whiskered heads survive to this day.

Mr Browning also wrote poetry of a traditional kind. His son in later life praised his father’s verses to Edmund Gosse, declaring ‘that his father had more true poetic genius than he has’. Gosse, taking this with scarcely too gross a pinch of salt and allowing for filial piety, kindly but rigorously comments that, ‘Of course the world at large will answer, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” and of palpable fruit in the way of published verse the elder Mr Browning has nothing to show.’ The elder Browning’s poetic taste was more or less exclusively for double or triple rhyme, and especially for the heroic couplet, which he employed with ‘force and fluency’. Gosse goes on to quote the more celebrated son describing the moral and stylistic vein of the father’s vigorous verses ‘as that of a Pope born out of due time’. Mr Browning had been a great classicist and a lover of eighteenth-century literature, the poetry of that period having achieved, in his estimation, its finest flowering in the work of Alexander Pope. Though his son’s early poetry, Pauline and Paracelsus, confounded him, Mr Browning senior forgave the otherwise impenetrable Sordello because—says William Sharp in his Life of Browning—‘it was written in rhymed couplets’.

Pope, according to the critic Mark Pattison, ‘was very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant; that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonyms, and pretty turns of language.’ Mr Browning senior’s satirical portraits of friends and colleagues are said to be very Pope-ish in expression, quick sketches reminiscent in their style of Pope’s rhetorical (often oratorical) couplets. It is further said that he was incapable of portraying anyone other than as a grotesque. The sketch of his wife is certainly none too flattering.

This domestic, middle-class idyll, quiet-flowing and given muted colour by art, poetry, music, bibliophily and decent religious observances, was touching to Alfred Domett, who recollected his serene memories of the Browning family in the tranquillity that fell upon him after leaving public office in New Zealand and returning to London to look up an old friend now celebrated as an important poet and public figure.

Mr Browning, like his wife, became a Dissenter and a Nonconformist in middle life, though it had taken Sarah Anna Browning time and energy to persuade him from the Episcopal communion. In his youth, he had held principles and expressed opinions, uncompromisingly liberal, that had all but brought him to ruin—certainly had distanced him from the prospect of maintaining at least, perhaps increasing, the family fortune that derived from estates and commercial interests in the West Indies. His father, the first Robert Browning, had been born the eldest son in 1749 to Jane Morris of Cranborne, Dorset, wife to Thomas Browning who in 1760 had become landlord of Woodyates Inn, close to the Dorset-Wiltshire border, which he had held on a 99-year lease from the Earl of Shaftesbury. Thomas and Jane Browning produced five more children, three sons (one of whom died young) and two daughters.

Robert the First, as he may here be styled, was to become grandfather of the poet. He was recommended by Lord Shaftesbury for employment in the Bank of England, where he served for the whole of his working life, fifty years, from August 1769, when he would have been about the age of twenty, becoming Principal of the Bank Stock Office, a post of some considerable prestige which implied wide contact with influential financiers. This first Robert Browning was no man, merely, of balance sheets and bottom-polished trousers: at about the age of forty, he vigorously assisted, as a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company, in the defence of the Bank of England during the Gordon Riots of 1780.

In 1778, he married Margaret Morris Tittle, a lady who had been born in the West Indies, reputedly a Creole (and said, by some, to have been darker than was then thought decent), by whom he sired three children—Robert, the eldest, being born on 6 July 1782 at Battersea. A second son, William, was born and died in 1784. A daughter, Margaret—who remained unmarried and lived quietly until her death in 1857 (or 1858, according to a descendant, Vivienne Browning)—was born in 1783. Nothing more is heard of Margaret, beyond a reference by Cyrus Mason, a Browning cousin, who in later life composed a memoir in which he wrote that ‘Aunt Margaret was detected mysteriously crooning prophecies over her Nephew, behind a door at the house at Camberwell.’

The picture of an eccentric prophetess lurking at keyholes and singing the fortunes of the future poet is not conjured by any other biographer of Robert Browning. Cyrus Mason is not widely regarded as a reliable chronicler of Browning family history. He begins with his own self-aggrandizing agenda and sticks to it. His reputation is rather as a somewhat embittered relation who took the view that the poet Robert Browning and his admirers had paid inadequate attention and given insufficient credit to the more remote branches of the family. The contribution of the extended family to the poet’s early education, he considered, had been cruelly overlooked and positively belittled by wilful neglect.

However, since the reference to Margaret Browning does exist, and since Margaret has otherwise vanished from biographical ken, a possible—rather than probable—explanation for this single recorded peculiarity of the poet’s aunt is that she may have been simple-minded and thus kept in what her family may have regarded (not uncommonly at the time) as a decent, discreet seclusion. The extent to which they succeeded in containing any public embarrassment may—and it is no more than supposition—account for Margaret’s virtually complete obscurity in a family history that has been otherwise largely revealed.

Margaret Morris Tittle Browning died in Camberwell in 1789, when Robert (who can be referred to as Robert the Second), her only remaining son, was seven years old. When Robert was twelve, his father remarried in April 1794. This second wife, Jane Smith, by whom he fathered nine more children, three sons, and six daughters, was but twenty-three at the time of her marriage in Chelsea to the 45-year-old Robert Browning the First. The difference of twenty-two years between husband and wife is said, specifically by Mrs Sutherland Orr, Robert Browning’s official biographer, sister of the exotic Orientalist and painter Frederic Leighton, and a friend of the poet, to have resulted in the complete ascendancy of Jane Smith Browning over her husband. Besotted by, and doting upon, his young darling, he made no objection to Jane’s relegation of a portrait (attributed to Wright of Derby) of his first wife to a garret on the basis that a man did not need two wives. One—the living—in this case proved perfectly sufficient.

The hard man of business and urban battle, the doughty Englishman of Dorset stock, the soundly respectable man who annually read the Bible and Tom Jones (both, probably, with equal religious attention), the stout and severe man who lived more or less hale—despite the affliction of gout—to the age of eighty-four, was easily subverted by a woman whose gnawing jealousy of his first family extended from the dead to the quick. Browning family tradition, says Vivienne Browning, a family historian, also attributes a jealousy to Robert the First, naturally anxious to retain the love and loyalty of his young wife against any possible threat, actual or merely perceived in his imagination. Their nine children, a substantial though not unusual number, may have been conceived and borne as much in response to jealousy, doubt, and fear as in expression of any softer feelings.

Jane Browning’s alleged ill-will towards Robert the Second, Robert the First’s son by his previous marriage to Margaret Tittle, was not appeased by the young man’s independence, financial or intellectual. He had inherited a small income from an uncle, his mother’s brother, and proposed to apply it to a university education for himself. Jane, supposedly on the ground that there were insufficient funds to send her own sons to university, opposed her stepson’s ambition. Then, too, there was some irritation that Robert the Second wished to be an artist and showed some talent for the calling. Robert the First—says Mrs Orr—turned away disgustedly when Robert the Second showed his first completed picture to his father. The household was plainly a domestic arena of seething discontents, jealous insecurities, envious stratagems, entrenched positions on every front, and sniper fire from every corner of every room.

Margaret Tittle had left property in the West Indies, and it was Robert the First’s intention that their son should proceed, at the age of nineteen, to St Kitts to manage the family estates, which were worked by slave labour. He may have been glad enough to go, to remove himself as far as possible from his father and stepmother. In the event, he lasted only a year in the West Indies before returning to London, emotionally bruised by his experience of the degrading conditions under which slaves laboured on the sugar plantations. Robert the Second’s reasonable expectation was that he might inherit perhaps not all, but at least a substantial proportion of his mother’s property, had he not ‘conceived such a hatred of the slave system’.

Mrs Sutherland Orr states: ‘One of the experiences which disgusted him with St Kitts was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding that all such educative action was prohibited.’ For a man who, from his earliest years, was wholly devoted to books, art, anything that nourished and encouraged inquiry and intellect, the spiritual repression of mind and soul as much—perhaps more than—physical repression of bodily freedom, must have seemed an act of institutionalized criminality and personal inhumanity by the properly constituted authorities. He could not morally consider himself party to, or representative of, such a system.

Certainly as a result of the apparent lily-livered liberalism of his son and his shocking, incomprehensible disregard for the propriety of profit, conjecturally also on account of a profound unease about maintaining the affection and loyalty of his young wife—there were only ten years between stepmother Jane and her stepson—Robert the First fell into a passionate and powerful rage that he sustained for many years. Robert Browning, the grandson and son of the protagonists of this quarrel, did not learn the details of the family rupture until 25 August 1846, when his mother finally confided the circumstances of nigh on half a century before.

‘If we are poor,’ wrote Robert Browning the Third the next day to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night, as we sate alone, “conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies,” (where his mother was born, who died in his infancy,) that he relinquished every prospect,—supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage—one proof of which was, that when he heard that his son was a suitor to her, my mother—he benevolently waited on her Uncle to assure him that his niece “would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged”!—those were his very words. My father on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love—but the quarrel with his father,—who married again and continued to hate him till a few years before his death,—induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested. You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.’

As soon as Robert the Second achieved his majority, he was dunned by his father for restitution in full of all the expenses that Robert the First had laid out on him, and he was stripped of any inheritance from his mother, Margaret, whose fortune, at the time of her marriage, had not been settled upon her and thus had fallen under the control of her husband. These reactions so intimidated Robert the Second that he agreed to enter the Bank of England, his father’s territory, as a clerk and to sublimate his love of books and sketching in ledgers and ink. In November 1803, four months after his twenty-first birthday, he began his long, complaisant, not necessarily unhappy servitude of fifty years as a bank clerk in Threadneedle Street.

A little over seven years later, at Camberwell on 19 February 1811, in the teeth of his father’s opposition, Robert the Second married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, whose uncle evidently disregarded Robert the First’s predictions. She was then thirty-nine, ten years older than her husband and only one year younger than his stepmother Jane. They settled at 6 Southampton Street, Camberwell, where, on 7 May 1812, Sarah Anna Browning was delivered of a son, the third in the direct Browning line to be named Robert. Twenty months later, on 7 January 1814, their second child, called Sarah Anna after her mother, but known as Sarianna by her family and friends, was born.

William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, published in 1897, refers briskly and offhandedly to a third child, Clara. Nothing is known of Clara: it is possible she may have been stillborn or died immediately after birth. Mrs Orr never mentions the birth of a third child, and not even Cyrus Mason, the family member one would expect to seize eagerly upon the suppression of any reference to a Browning, suggests that more than two children were born to the Brownings. However, William Clyde DeVane, discussing Browning’s ‘Lines to the Memory of his Parents’ in A Browning Handbook, states that ‘The “child that never knew” Mrs Browning was a stillborn child who was to have been named Clara.’ The poem containing this discreet reference was not printed until it appeared in F.G. Kenyon’s New Poems by Robert Browning, published in 1914, and in the February issue, that same year, of the Cornhill Magazine. Vivienne Browning, in My Browning Family Album, published in 1992, declares that her grandmother (Elizabeth, a daughter of Reuben Browning, son of Jane, Robert the First’s second wife) ‘included a third baby—a girl—in the family tree’, but Vivienne Browning ‘cannot now find any evidence to support this’.

It is known that Sarah Anna Browning miscarried at least once. In a letter to his son Pen, the poet Robert Browning wrote on 25 January 1888 to condole with him and his wife Fannie on her miscarriage: ‘Don’t be disappointed at this first failure of your natural hopes—it may soon be repaired. Your dearest Mother experienced the same misfortune, at much about the same time after marriage: and it happened also to my own mother, before I was born.’ Unless Sarah Anna’s miscarriage occurred in a very late stage of pregnancy, it seems improbable that a miscarried child should have been given a name and regarded, in whatever terms, as a first-born—but natural parental sentiment may have prompted the Brownings to give their first daughter, who never drew breath, miscarried or stillborn, at least the dignity and memorial of a name.

The small, close-knit family moved house in 1824, though merely from 6 Southampton Street to another house (the number is not known) in the same street, where they remained until December 1840. Bereaved of his mother at the age of seven, repressed from the age of twelve by his father and stepmother, denied further education and frustrated in his principles and ambitions in his late teens, all but disinherited for failure to make a success of business and to close a moral eye to the inhumanity of slavery, set on a high stool and loaded with ledgers in his early twenties, it is hardly surprising that Robert the Second sought a little peace and quiet for avocations that had moderated into hobbies. He settled for a happy—perhaps undemanding—marriage to a peacable, slightly older wife, and a tranquil bolt-hole in what was then, in the early nineteenth century, the semi-rural backwater of Camberwell.

His poverty, counted in monetary terms, was relative. His work in the Bank of England, never as elevated or responsible as Robert the First’s, was nevertheless adequately paid, the hours were short and overtime, particularly the lucrative night watch, was paid at a higher rate. There was little or no managerial or official concern about the amount of paper, the number of pens, or the quantity of sealing wax used by Bank officials, and these materials were naturally regarded as lucrative perquisites that substantially bumped up the regular salary. Though Mrs Orr admits this trade, she adds—somewhat severely—in a footnote: ‘I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them an almost superstitious reverence. He could never endure to see a scrap of writing-paper wasted.’

He could count on a regular salary of a little more than £300 a year, supplemented by generous rates of remuneration for extra duties and appropriate perks of office. He may have been deprived of any interest in his mother’s estate, but his small income from his mother’s brother, even after deductions from it by his father, continued to be a reliable annual resource. Over the years, Robert the Second acquired valuable specialist knowledge of pictures and books, and certainly, though he was no calculating businessman and willingly gave away many items from his collection, he occasionally—perhaps regularly—traded acquisitions and profited from serendipitous discoveries.

In the end, though it was a long time coming, Robert the First softened towards his eldest son. That he was not wholly implacable is testified by his will, made in 1819, two years before his retirement from the Bank: he left Robert the Second and Margaret ten pounds each for a ring. This may seem a paltry inheritance, but he took into account the fact that Robert and Margaret had inherited from ‘their Uncle Tittle and Aunt Mill a much greater proportion than can be left to my other dear children’. He trusted ‘they will not think I am deficient in love and regard to them’. As a token of reconciliation, the legacy to buy rings was a substantial olive branch.

It may be assumed that the patriarch Browning’s temper had begun to abate before he made his will, and that the Brownings had resumed some form of comfortable, if cautious, communication until the old man’s death. There is certainly some indication that Robert the First saw something of his grandchildren—the old man is said by Mrs Orr to have ‘particularly dreaded’ his lively grandson’s ‘vicinity to his afflicted foot’, little boys and gout being clearly best kept far apart. After the death of Robert the First in 1833, stepmother Jane, then in her early sixties, moved south of the river from her house in Islington to Albert Terrace, just beyond the toll bar at New Cross. In the biography of Robert Browning published in 1910 by W. Hall Griffin and H.C. Minchin, it is said that the portrait of the first Mrs Browning, Margaret Tittle, had been retrieved from the Islington garret and was hung in her son’s dining room.

The most familiar photograph of Robert the Second, taken—it looks like—in late middle age (though it is difficult to tell, since he is said to have retained a youthful appearance until late in life) shows the profile of a rather worried-looking man. A deep line creases from the nostril to just below the side of the mouth, which itself appears thin and turns down at the corner. The hair is white, neatly combed back over the forehead and bushy around the base of the ears. It is the picture of a doubtful man who looks slightly downward rather than straight ahead, as though he has no expectation of seeing, like The Lost Leader, ‘Never glad confident morning again!’. He still bled, perhaps, from the wounds inflicted upon him as a child and young man: but if he did, he suffered in silence.

As some men for the rest of their lives do not care to talk about their experiences in war, so Robert the Second could never bring himself to talk about his bitter experiences in the West Indies: ‘My father is tenderhearted to a fault,’ wrote his son to Elizabeth Barrett on 27 August 1846. The poet’s mother had confided some particulars to him three days before, but from his father he had got never a word: ‘I have never known much more of those circumstances in his youth than I told you, in consequence of his invincible repugnance to allude to the matter—and I have a fancy to account for some peculiarities in him, which connects them with some abominable early experience. Thus,—if you question him about it, he shuts his eyes involuntarily and shows exactly the same marks of loathing that may be noticed if a piece of cruelty is mentioned … and the word “blood,” even makes him change colour.’

These ‘peculiarities’ observed in his father by the youngest Browning did not go unremarked by others who, with less fancy than his son to seek an origin for them, were content to observe and to wonder at this marvellous man. Cyrus Mason, as an amateur historian of the Browning family, speaks specifically of Robert the Second’s ‘imaginative and eccentric brain’. It seems likely that he is not only confessing his own bewilderment, which becomes ever more apparent as his memoir proceeds, but a general incomprehension within the wider Browning family. Inevitably, mild eccentricities of character become magnified by family and friends otherwise at a loss to account for the somewhat detached life of a man who is for all practical, day-to-day intents and purposes a conscientious banker and responsible family man, but whose domestic and inner life, so far as it is penetrable by others, exhibits a marked degree of abstraction and commitment to matters that harder, squarer heads would not regard as immediately profitable in the conduct of everyday life—‘Robert’s incessant study of subjects perfectly useless in Banking business’, to quote Cyrus Mason. Such minor aberrations are naturally inflated in the remembrance and the retelling, particularly when it becomes evident that such a man has become, indirectly, an object of interest and attention through efforts made by admirers or detractors to trace the early influences upon his remarkable son.

Mrs Orr tells us that Robert the Second, when he in turn became a grandfather, taught his grandson elementary anatomy, impressing upon young Pen Browning ‘the names and position of the principal bones of the human body’. Cyrus Mason adds considerably to this blameless, indeed worthy, anecdote by claiming that ‘Uncle Robert became so absorbed in his anatomical studies that he conveyed objects for dissection into the Bank of England; on one occasion a dead rat was kept for so long a time in his office desk, awaiting dissection, that his fellow clerks were compelled to apply to their chief to have it removed! The study of anatomy became so seductive that on the day Uncle Robert was married, he disappeared mysteriously after the ceremony and was discovered … busily engaged dissecting a duck, oblivious of the fact that a wife and wedding guests were reduced to a state of perplexity by his unexplained absence.’

This story has the air of invention by a fabulist—Mr Browning, being a little peckish, might merely have been carving a duck—and earlier echoes of preoccupied, enthusiastic amateur morbid anatomists recur to the mind (in the annals of Scottish eccentricity, there are several instances of notable absence of mind of more or less this nature at wedding feasts); there is even a faint, ludicrous hint of Francis Bacon fatally catching a cold while stuffing a chicken with snow by the roadside in an early endeavour to discover the principles of refrigeration. The patronizing tone is one of barely-tolerant amusement, of reminiscence dressed up with a dry chuckle, of family anecdote become fanciful.

‘Uncle Robert’, in short, was held—more or less exasperatedly—to be something of a whimsical character. His seeming inclination to desert the ceremonies and commonplace observances of ‘real life’, of family life, for abstruse, even esoteric researches—all those books!—may be exaggerated, but the metamorphosis of memory into myth is generally achieved through the medium of an actuality. The pearl of fiction accretes around a grain of actuality, and in this case the attitudes and behaviour of Robert Browning, father of the poet, achieve a relevance in respect of his attitude towards the education, intellectual liberty, and the vocation of his son.

Robert the Second, frustrated in his own creative ambitions, did not discourage his son from conducting his life along lines that he himself had been denied. Cyrus Mason declares that, from the beginning, the ‘arranged destiny’ of Robert and Sarah Anna’s son was to be a poet. His life and career, says Mason, were planned from the cot. The infant Robert’s ‘swaddling clothes were wrapped around his little body with a poetic consideration’, his father rocked his cradle rhythmically, his Aunt Margaret ‘prophecied [sic] in her dark mysterious manner his brilliant future’, and women lulled him to sleep with whispered words of poetry. Whether unconsciously or by design, Mason here introduces the fairy-story image of the good or bad fairy godmothers conferring gifts more or less useful.

Allowing for the Brothers Grimm or Perrault quality of these images conjured by Mason, and his patent intention in writing his memoir to arrogate a substantial proportion of the credit for the infant Robert’s development to a wider family circle of Brownings, there is a nub of truth in his assertion. There is some dispute as to how far it may be credited, of course. Mrs Orr merely states that the infant Robert showed a precocious aptitude for poetry: ‘It has often been told how he extemporised verse aloud while walking round and round the dining room table supporting himself by his hands, when he was still so small that his head was scarcely above it.’ Some children naturally sing, some dance, some draw little pictures and some declaim nonsense verse or nursery rhymes: Robert Browning invented his own childish verses. Doting family relations would naturally exclaim over his prospects as a great poet and genially encourage the conceit.

That he was raised from birth as—or specifically to become—a poet is improbable: more unlikely still is the assertion that he was raised ‘poetically’ by parents whose inclinations in the normal run of things were kindly and indulgent in terms of stimulating their son’s natural and lively intelligence, but not inherently fanciful: they were respectably pious, middle-class, somewhat matter-of-fact citizens of no more and no less distinction than others of their time, place, and type. They were distinctive enough to those who loved them or had cause to consider them, but they were not—in the usual meaning of the word—distinguished.

They were what G.K. Chesterton calls ‘simply a typical Camberwell family’ after he sensibly dismisses as largely irrelevant to immediate Browning biography all red herrings such as the alleged pied-noir origins of Margaret Tittle (which may have been true), a supposed Jewish strain in the Browning family (now discounted, but which would have been a matter of extreme interest to the poet), and the suggestion, from the fact that Browning and his father used a ring-seal with a coat of arms, of an aristocratic origin dating from the Middle Ages for the family name, if not for the family itself.

Nevertheless, in thrall to the romance of pedigree and the benefits that may be derived from a selective use of genealogy, Cyrus Mason’s memoir is motivated not only by a gnawing ambition to associate himself and his kinsfolk more closely with the poet Browning and to aggrandize himself by the connection, but also, vitally, to give the lie to the ‘monstrous fabrication’ by F.J. Furnivall, a devoted admirer and scholar of the poet Browning, that the Brownings descended from the servant class, very likely from a footman, later butler, to the Bankes family at Corfe Castle before becoming innkeepers. Cyrus Mason claims to trace the Browning lineage back unto the remotest generations—at least into the fourteenth century—to disprove any stigma of low birth. He even manages to infer, from some eighteenth-century holograph family documents, the high cost of binding some family books, the good quality of the ink used, and, from the evidence of ‘fine bold writing’, a prosperous, educated, literary ancestry. These elaborate researches were of the greatest possible interest to Cyrus Mason: they consumed his time, consoled his soul, confirmed his pride, and confounded cavilling critics.

Cyrus Mason was satisfied with his work, and it is to his modest credit that he has amply satisfied everyone else, most of whom are now content to acknowledge this monument to genealogical archaeology and pass more quickly than is entirely respectful to more immediate matters. We consult Mason’s book much as visitors to an exhibition browse speedily through the well-researched but earnest expository notes at the entrance and hurry inside to get to the interesting main exhibit. ‘For the great central and solid fact,’ declared G. K. Chesterton, ‘which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class.’ Allowing, naturally, for his mother’s Scottish-German parentage and his grandmother’s Creole connection, Robert Browning was certainly brought up as a middle-class Englishman.

Chesterton’s argument, scything decisively through the tangled undergrowth of genealogy and the rank weeds of heterogeneous heredity, becomes a spirited, romantic peroration, grandly swelling as he praises Robert Browning’s genius to the heights, then dropping bathetically back as he regularly nails it to the ground by constantly reminding us that Browning was ‘an Englishman of the middle class’; until, finally, he sweeps to his breathtaking and irresistible conclusion that Browning ‘piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.’

Robert Browning’s mother was no bluestocking: she was not herself literary, nor was she inclined to draw or paint in water-colours. Her husband did enough book collecting and sketching already. Though she had a considerable taste for music and is said to have been an accomplished pianist (Beethoven’s sonatas, Avison’s marches, and Gaelic laments are cited as belonging to her repertoire), she was very likely no more than ordinarily competent on a piano, though her technique was evidently infused with fine romantic feeling. Sarah Anna Browning tended her flower garden (Cyrus Mason remarks upon ‘the garden, Aunt Robert’s roses, that wicket gate the Robert Browning family used by favor, opening for them a ready way to wander in the then beautiful meadows to reach the Dulwich woods, the College and gallery’) and otherwise occupied herself, day by day, with domestic matters relating to her largely self-contained, self-sufficient family. Other biographers beg to differ when Mrs Orr tells us that Mrs Browning ‘had nothing of the artist about her’. In contrast to her husband, she produced nothing artistic or creative, but partisans speak warmly of her tender interest in music and romantic poetry. She possessed at least an artistic sensibility.

Mrs Orr remarks, cursorily but not disparagingly: ‘Little need be said about the poet’s mother’, the implication—quite wrong—being that there was little to be said. Her son’s devotion to Sarah Anna was very marked: habitually, when he sat beside her, Robert would like to put his arm around her waist. When she died in early 1849, he beatified her by describing her as ‘a divine woman’. Most biographers and others interested in the poet Browning make a point of the empathetic feeling that developed between mother and son: when Sarah Anna Browning was laid low with headaches, her son dreadfully suffered sympathetic pains. ‘The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother,’ says Mrs Orr, and adds, however ‘it might sound grotesque’, that ‘only a delicate woman could have been the mother of Robert Browning’.

She was certainly religious, and none doubted that her place in heaven had long been marked and secured by her narrow piety, commonsense good nature, and her stoical suffering of physical ailments. Sarah Anna Browning endured debilitating, painful headaches, severe as migraines (which indeed they may have been). In contrast to her vigorously hale husband, she is portrayed by Mrs Orr as ‘a delicate woman, very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia which was perhaps a symptom of this condition’.

Robert, her son, was not so delicate in health or attitude. He established an early reputation not only for mental precocity but vocal and physically boisterous expression of it. In modern times, his vigour and fearlessness, his restlessness and temper, might worry some as verging on hyperactivity. ‘He clamoured for occupation as soon as he could speak,’ says Mrs Orr and, though admitting that ‘his energies were of course destructive till they had found their proper outlet’, she discovers no inherent vice in the child: ‘we do not hear of his having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so’. A taste for lively spectacle rather than wilful incendiarism is adduced as the motive for Robert’s ‘putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother’s into the fire’ and excusing himself with the words, ‘a pretty blaze, mamma’ (rendered as ‘a pitty baze’ by Mrs Orr, prefiguring the lisping baby-talk that so rejoiced the ears of the poet and his wife when their own son, Pen, first began to speak).

To quiet the boy, Sarah Anna Browning’s best resource was to sit him on her knees, holding him in a firm grip, and to engage his attention with stories—‘doubtless Bible stories’, says Mrs Orr, as a tribute not only to Mrs Browning’s natural piety, her vocation as a Sunday School teacher, and her subscription to the London Missionary Society but also, no doubt, to the improving effect of religion in general, Nonconformism in particular, and its associated morality. If, as Cyrus Mason suggests, Robert was raised to be a poet, quiet introspection was not a notable characteristic of his infancy—though music (he liked to listen to his mother play the piano and would beg her to keep up the performance) and religion (Sarah Anna Browning could curb her son’s arrogance until quite late in his life by pointing out the very real peril and lively retribution awaiting those who failed in Christian charity) could soothe the savage child and bind them together, mother and son, in a delicate balance of love and apprehension. Maternal indulgence, too, was a reliable ploy: Robert could be induced to swallow unpleasant medicine so long as he was given a toad which Mrs Browning, holding a parasol over her head, obligingly searched for in her strawberry bed—a memory of childhood that never faded in her son’s recollection.

A recollection of his mother’s garden very likely informs the idyllic first section—‘The Flower’s Name’—of the poem ‘Garden-Fancies’, a revised version of which was included in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, published in 1845:

Here’s the garden she walked across,

Arm in my arm, such a short while since:

Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss

Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!

She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,

As back with that murmur the wicket swung;

For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,

To feed and forget it the leaves among.⁹

As she walks with little Robert through her garden, talking to him, Sarah Anna Browning’s gown brushes against a bush or hedge of box. She stops, hushes her words, and points out ‘a moth on the milk-white phlox’. Here roses, there rock plants, elsewhere a particular flower with a ‘soft meandering Spanish name’ that inspires an ambition in the boy to learn Spanish ‘Only for that slow sweet name’s sake’. Above all, the roses ‘ranged in valiant row’ where Sarah Anna always pauses—

… for she lingers

There like sunshine over the ground

And ever I see her soft white fingers

Searching after the bud she found.¹⁰

There are any number of anecdotes that attest to a happy childhood and none that imply any serious cause for parental or official reprobation—saving only the exasperation of the Revd George Clayton who, in the course of a church service, had cause to admonish ‘for restlessness and inattention Master Robert Browning’. The boy had been reduced by impatience to gnawing on a pew.

The question of Robert the Third’s education was settled when his head became filled with so much random information that it increased what Mrs Orr describes as his ‘turbulent activity’ and it was thought desirable that he should be off-loaded for an hour or two every day into the care of a ‘lady of reduced fortunes’ who kept a dame school or local kindergarten. There, Robert’s precociousness so dispirited the mothers of the other children in the school, who reckoned that Robert was getting all the poor lady’s attention to the disadvantage of their own dullard sons, that they complained and demanded his removal. Thereafter, until the age of eight or nine, Robert enjoyed the advantages of a home education. His mother mostly took care of his moral, musical, and religious education, his father fired up his imagination with his own squirrelled store of learning and his inspired, fanciful methods of imparting it.

Robert the Second, thoroughly versed in the Greek poets, is conjured irresistibly in his son’s poetic memory: the poem ‘Development’, first published in Asolando, probably dates from 1888 or 1889, and is often quoted to illustrate Browning’s first encounter with Homer in 1817 or thereabouts.

My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.

When I was five years old, I asked him once

‘What do you read about?’

‘The siege of Troy.’

‘What is a siege and what is Troy?’

Whereat

He piled up chairs and tables for a town,

Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat

—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)

By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close

Under the footstool, being cowardly,

But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—

Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought

By taking Troy to get possession of

—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,

(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance

And put to flight Hector—our page boy’s self.

Adds Browning,

This taught me who was who and what was what:

So far I rightly understood the case

At five years old:

And when, after two or three years, the game of Troy’s siege had become familiar,

My Father came upon our make-believe.

‘How would you like to read yourself the tale

Properly told, of which I gave you first

Merely such notion as a boy could bear?’

whereupon, at about the age of eight, Robert the Third opened Pope’s translation of The Iliad and

So I ran through Pope,

Enjoyed the tale, what history so true?

Attacked my Primer, duly drudged,

Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—

The very thing itself, the actual words,

in Greek by the age of twelve. Thereafter, for a lifetime, there was no end to Homer and Greek and the worm casts of scholarship, the dream-destroying detritus of peckers through dust and texts, winnowers of grain from chaff, who tumbled the towers of Ilium more surely to rock and sand than the hot force of vir et armis, desiccating the blood of heroes and giving the lie at Hell’s Gate to Hector’s love for his wife.

‘Development’ raises questions as to whether Robert the Second was to blame for encouraging his son’s learning through play and—strictly speaking—falsehood rather than, in Gradgrind fashion, sticking strictly to the facts:

That is—he might have put into my hand

The ‘Ethics’? In translation, if you please,

Exact, no pretty lying that improves

To suit the modern taste: no more—no less—

The ‘Ethics’.

In no mistrustful mind of dry-as-dust nonagenarian scholarship, unburdened by the Ethics, bubbling with guiltless, childlike nine-year-old innocence of any distinction between accredited reality and mythological falsehood, between truth-to-fact and truth-to-fiction, Robert was sent to school.

Browning’s biographers can become thoroughly intoxicated in the well-stocked cellar of fine vintage learning that their subject laid down from his earliest years and drew upon in draughts for the rest of his working life as a poet. He read everything and ‘could forget nothing’—except, as he claimed later, ‘names and the date of the Battle of Waterloo’. The boy’s virtual self-education at home rather than his formal schooling informed a lifetime’s poetry and play-writing. School was the least of it—a pretty perfunctory performance lasting only some five or six years. Robert boarded, from Mondays to Fridays, with the Misses Ready, who with their brother, the Revd Thomas Ready, kept an elementary school for boys at number 77 Queen’s Road, Peckham.¹¹ It was reputedly the best school in the neighbourhood, highly regarded both in respect of pedagogy and piety. Mr Ready instructed the older boys while the younger boys, up to the age of ten, were physically and spiritually improved by the two Ready sisters, who sang the hymns of Isaac Watts as they oiled and brushed out the hair and brushed up the moral fibre of their charges. Robert attended the Ready school until he was fourteen.

His distress at leaving his mother was more than he thought he could bear. And what was it for, this dolorous separation? He later remarked to Alfred Domett,¹² whose two elder brothers had been at the Ready school, that ‘they taught him nothing there, and that he was “bullied by the big boys”’. John Domett recalled to his brother Alfred for his memoir, ‘young Browning, in a pinafore of brown holland such as small boys used to wear in those days, for he was always neat in his dress—and how they used to pit him against much older boys in a “chaffing” match to amuse themselves with the “little bright-eyed fellow’s” readiness and acuteness at retort and repartee’. Robert distinguished himself not only by a smart mouth but also by occasional sharp practice: when the master’s attention was diverted, he would close the Revd Ready’s lexicon, obliging him to open it again to look for the word he’d been referring to. He also learned how to suck up to Mr Ready, composing verses that earned him some privileges and would have warmed the heart of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Great bosh they were,’ Robert said, quoting two concluding lines:

We boys are privates in our Regiment’s ranks—

’Tis to our Captain that we all owe thanks!

and followed this piece of blatant toadying by reciting from memory to Alfred Domett, while they were walking by a greenhouse discernible behind the walls of the school playground, a disrespectful epigram he had also made:

Within these walls and near that house of glass,

Did I, three (?) years of hapless childhood pass—

D—d undiluted misery it was!

He got his revenge, though, by taking off the Misses Ready in full Watts voice, ‘illustrating with voice and gesture’ the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would sweep down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines:

‘Lord, ’tis a pleasant thing to stand

In gardens planted by Thy hand

…

Fools never raise their thoughts so high

Like brutes they live, like BRUTES they die.’

Mrs Orr, uncorseting a little in citing this anecdote, obligingly admits that Robert ‘even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things’. She quickly snaps back, though, Mrs Orr, remarking that Robert’s satirical swipe—even if it demonstrated some falling away from ‘the intense piety of his earlier childhood’—evidenced merely a momentary triumph of his sense of humour over religious instincts that did not need strengthening. His humour took a sharper, drier tone when, in 1833, some years after leaving the school, he heard of a serious-minded sermon delivered by the Revd Thomas Ready and commented:

A heavy sermon—sure the error’s great

For not a word Tom utters has its weight.¹³

The quality of the education at the Ready school was probably perfectly adequate for its times and most of its pupils. If it threatened to stultify the brilliance of Robert Browning, and if his contempt for it has condemned it in the estimation of posterity, the fault can hardly be heaped on the heads of the diligent Readys. Robert himself, quickly taking his own measure of the school in contrast to the pleasure of his father’s exciting, fantastic excursions into the education of his son, seems not to have bothered to make close friends with any of his slower-witted contemporaries, though he did dragoon some of his classmates into acting difficult plays, mostly way above their heads, some of which he wrote specially for them. He conspicuously failed to win a school prize (though, according to Mrs Orr, ‘these rewards were showered in such profusion that the only difficulty was to avoid them’) and took a somewhat de haut en bas attitude towards the school in general.

His satirical impulse was not entirely lacking in some grandiose, theatrical sense of his own superiority, to judge by Sarianna Browning’s later description to Mrs Orr of an occasion when her brother solemnly ‘ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own composition’. Such a performance was very likely not unknown at home.

It is hardly surprising that Robert was bullied at school, nor that he sometimes played up, nor that he learned virtually nothing that he later considered useful. If one of the purposes of such a school was to ‘knock the nonsense’ out of a boy, iron him out and apply his mind to the Ethics—as it were—there was a lot of knocking out to be done, since the boy Robert was immediately filled up again and creased with the learnedly fantastic ‘nonsense’ he got at home. ‘If we test the matter,’ wrote Chesterton, ‘by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, over-educated.’¹⁴

Robert’s scorn for the Ready school (despite acknowledging, on the later word of Sarianna in 1903, that ‘the boys were most liberally and kindly treated’), though perhaps fair enough in terms of his own needs, which the world and its books—far less an elementary school in Peckham and its primers—were not enough to satisfy, was conceived from what Chesterton acutely perceives as his elementary ignorance in one vital respect: Robert was ignorant of the degree to which the knowledge he already possessed—‘knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadors, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages’—was exceptional. He had no idea that he himself was exceptional, that the world in general neither knew nor cared about what he knew and, according to its own lights, got along without it very well. He never was wearied by knowledge and never was troubled by the effort taken to acquire it: learning was pleasure and increase, it never was a dispiriting chore or a burden to his brain. ‘His father’s house,’ commented Sarianna Browning to Mrs Orr, ‘was literally crammed with books; and it was in this way that Robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.’ ‘His sagacious destiny,’ remarked Chesterton, ‘while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.’

The books Robert read ‘omnivorously, though certainly not without guidance’ before and during his schooldays are known mostly on the authority of Mrs Orr, who gives a part-catalogue of them. In addition to Quarles’ Emblems in a seventeenth-century edition which Robert himself annotated, there may be counted ‘the first edition of Robinson Crusoe; the first edition of Milton’s works, bought for him by his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the introduction of printing; the original pamphlet Killing no Murder (1559) [sic], which Carlyle borrowed for his Life of Cromwell; an equally early copy of Bernard de Mandeville’s Bees; very ancient Bibles … Among more modern publications, Walpole’s Letters were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the Letters of Junius and all the works of Voltaire.’ Later, when Robert had sufficient mastery of ancient languages, Latin poets and Greek dramatists (including Smart’s translation of Horace, donated by his step-uncle Reuben) crowded his mind together with Elizabethan poets and playwrights, scraps from the cloudily romantic Ossian (by James Macpherson, another poet who had difficulty separating fact from fiction),¹⁵ Wordsworth and Coleridge (representatives of the English Romantics) and—to crown the glittering heap—the inimitable (though that stopped no one, including Robert Browning, from trying) poetry of Byron.

These works are not the end of it—hardly even the beginning. Wanley’s aforementioned Wonders of the Little World: or, A General History of Man in Six Books forever gripped Robert Browning’s imagination, its title-page advertising the contents as showing ‘by many thousands of examples … what MAN hath been from the First Ages of the World to these Times in respect of his Body, Senses, Passions, Affections, His Virtues and Perfections, his Vices and Defects.’ Nathaniel Wanley, Vicar of Trinity Parish in the City of Coventry published his Wonders in 1678, in an age when reports of wonder-working strained credulity less than they might now. The book furnished Robert’s poetry with morbid material for the rest of his life. He came across Wanley’s Little World of Wonders pretty much as Robert Louis Stevenson came across Pollock’s toy theatre and characters, ‘penny plain and tuppence coloured’.

The Emblems of Francis Quarles, first published in 1635, was relatively wholesome by comparison, though as a work of intense piety and severely high moral tone, it naturally directed the attention of readers (‘dunghill worldlings’) to the dreadful consequences of any lapse from the exemplary conduct of early and medieval Christian saints. The text was decorated with little woodcuts of devils with pitchforks, the Devil himself driving the chariot of the world and attending idle pursuits such as a game of bowls. Mythology and folklore were mixed with biblical allusions, the whole rich in an extensive, imaginative vocabulary. We have more qualms today about exposing young minds to the grim, the ghastly, the grotesque and the gothic, even the fairy tales of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm in the unexpurgated version, though children will generally seek out and sup on horrors for themselves. Robert Browning’s early exposure to morbid literature and its fine, matter-of-fact and matter-of-fiction examples of casual and institutionalized cruelties, injustices, and fantastical phenomena was balanced by early immersion in more authoritative works, among them—notably—the fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle, published in 1822, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, The Art of Painting in All its Branches by Gérard de Lairesse, and Principles of Harmony by John Relfe.

Mrs Browning contributed a worthy work of 1677 by Elisha Coles, A Practical Discourse of Effectual Calling and of Perseverance (the only book in the house, according to Betty Miller, to bear her signature)¹⁶ and Cruden’s Concordance to the Holy Scriptures. Mrs Miller comments that these two works of religious dedication testify not only to Mrs Browning’s ingrained piety but point up ‘something of the divided atmosphere in which Robert Browning was brought up. On the one hand he was given the freedom of a liberal and erudite library; on the other, he found himself, like Hazlitt, who counted it a misfortune, “bred up among dissenters who look with too jaundiced an eye at others, and set too high a value on their own particular pretensions. From being proscribed themselves, they learn to proscribe others; and come in the end to reduce all integrity of principle and soundness of opinion within the pale of their own little communion”.’

This may be generally true, and not only of Dissenters; but it is too harsh when applied to the Brownings in particular. In this sense, as characterized by Hazlitt, it is difficult to believe that Robert the Second adhered quite as limpet-like as his wife to the rock of Nonconformism or that her son Robert’s self-confessed passionate attachment in childhood to religion would not wane in the light of opinions other than those sincerely expressed by Congregationalists and other Nonconformists who were drilled into dutiful observance and stilled into attention by the ‘stiffening and starching’ style of the Revd George Clayton and the hectoring manner of Joseph Irons, minister of the Grove Chapel, Camberwell. Alfred Domett was reminded, in conversation with Dr Irons (‘the clever but apparently bigoted High Churchman’), ‘how we used to go sometimes up Camberwell Grove of a Sunday evening, to try how far off we could hear his father (Mr Irons, an Independent Minister or Ranter) bawling out his sermon, well enough to distinguish the words; and how on one occasion, taking a friend with him, they stood outside at a little distance and clearly heard, “I am sorry to say it, beloved brethren, but it is an undoubted fact that Roman Catholicism and midnight assassin are synonymous terms!”.’¹⁷

The religion of the Brownings, the Congregationalism of the nineteenth century, was a moderate Calvinism, shading later to liberal Evangelicalism, that derived from the first Independents of the Elizabethan age. These spring-pure Puritans, persecuted in England, disclaimed any duty to the hierarchy of the Church over their duty to God and conscience. They sailed, some of them, into exile to found pilgrim colonies in New England, and others later came to power in the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The long history of Protestant dissent had been vividly, violently marked by persecution, fanaticism, exile, torture, death, and the blood of their martyrs persisted as a lively tang in the nostrils of zealous Nonconformists.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, dissenters from the established Church of England still suffered some remnants of political and social disability—legal penalties for attending their chapels were not abolished until 1812; they were subject to political disenfranchisement until 1832 and—fatefully for Robert Browning as the son of a Dissenter and not himself a communicant of the Anglican church—the ancient universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, until 1854 were open only to members of the Established Church of England. These were serious matters that inclined Nonconformists, most of whom belonged—in East Anglia, the South Midlands, the West country and South Wales—to the respectable working classes, to support the Liberal Party led later in the century by William Gladstone.

Nevertheless, there was a difference in practice between the proscriptive Puritanism bawled from the pulpit and the less rigid, more charitable observance of its dogma in the busy social life and generous-minded charitable organization of the Congregationalists who were as strong in the Lord as they were in the practical virtues of education, evangelism, care of the sick, fundraising bazaars, music, and self-improvement. Robert Browning was born in a period between the early, bleak, and joyless fervour of the seventeenth-century Puritans and the moral hypocrisy of the late Victorians, whose conformity to social conventions characterized virtually every deviation from the norms of Evangelical fundamentalism as either morally reprehensible or criminal, and probably both. In 1812, Mrs Grundy (who had been invented in 1800 by the playwright Thomas Morton as a character in Speed the Plough) was still a laughing-stock and had not then become the all-powerful, repressive deity of respectable late Victorian middle-class society. The domestic tone of the Browning household was nicely moderated between the mother’s religious principles and the father’s cultural enlightenment. In any case, there is no liberty like an enquiring mind that recognizes no limits, and the young Browning’s mind was made aware of no obstacles, beyond the blockheads of school who temporarily impeded his progress, to the accumulation of knowledge.

The violent, at least turbulent, and colourful life of Browning’s mind was tempered—though, more likely, all the more stimulated—by vigorous physical activity: he learned to ride and was taught dancing, boxing, and fencing,¹⁸ and he walked about the surrounding countryside. It was two miles, a ‘green half-hour’s walk over the fields’¹⁹ and stiles, past hedges and picturesque cottages, from Camberwell to Dulwich where, in 1814, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, attached to Dulwich College, had been opened. In that year, the two-year-old Robert was making his first picture of ‘a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant juice—paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my brushes’.²⁰

London, as Griffin and Minchin take pains to describe, was by no means well furnished with public art galleries. Neither the National Gallery nor Trafalgar Square then existed. Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Sir John Soane, had been specially commissioned for the exhibition of some 350 European paintings—Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and English. Children under the age of fourteen were, according to regulations, denied entry, but somehow young Robert Browning was allowed to enter with his father, who, said Dante Gabriel Rossetti later in Paris, ‘had a real genius for drawing—but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors’. This was not quite fair: Mr Browning also had a distinct relish for Hogarth grotesques. But it was true that, according to his son, Mr Browning would ‘turn from the Sistine altarpiece’ in favour of the Dutch artists Brouwer, Ostade, and the Teniers (father and son), who were amply represented at Dulwich.

The Dutch School did not detain the interest of young Robert, whose love of Dulwich was suffused, as he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett on 3 March 1846, with ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music lesson group, all the Poussins with the “Armida” and “Jupiter’s nursing”—and—no end to “ands”—I have sate before one, some one of those pictures I had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ….’ Enthusiasm for favourites did not mean an uncritical eye for failures. Familiarity bred contempt for works ‘execrable as sign-paintings even’. For a ‘whole collection, including “a divine painting by Murillo,” and Titian’s Daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the Louvre)’ he would ‘have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing’.

In his letter of 27 February 1846 to Elizabeth Barrett, Robert had asked the pertinent question, ‘Are there worse poets in their way than painters?’ There is a subtle difference in the ‘melancholy business’; a poet at least possesses resources capable of being adapted to other things: ‘the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of our life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and comes out after a dozen years with “Titian’s Daughter” and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!’

The point of this rushing reflection is only partly to do with art: it also makes a none-too-subtle reference to Robert Browning’s seizing the moment, ‘the short minute of our life, our one chance’, with his beloved Miss Barrett, as he finishes with the line:

I have tried—my trial is made too!

But this is in the future. The boy Robert had only just begun, on first acquaintance with the Dulwich pictures, to try his hand at poetry, good, bad, or indifferent, excepting some early extemporized lines of occasional verse for domestic or school consumption. The critic—tutored by the work of de Lairesse—was being formed, but the artist was still mostly whistling, ruddy by the hawthorn hedges, on the way to Dulwich. It was difficult to know which way to turn, which vocation to pursue: painting and drawing, for which young Robert had a facility, inspired by his father and the works of de Lairesse; music, which he dearly loved, inspired by his mother, Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression, and two distinguished tutors—Relfe, who taught theory, and Abel, who was proficient in technique; poetry, for which he not only had an aptitude but also a taste fuelled in several languages (Greek, Latin, French, some Spanish, some Italian, German later, even a smattering of Hebrew in addition to English) by the great exemplars—Horace, Homer, Pope, Byron—of the art of happy expression.

In the event, at the age of twelve, in the very year, 1824, of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, Robert the Third produced a collection of short poems entitled Incondita. The title, comments Mrs Orr, ‘conveyed a certain idea of deprecation’; Griffin and Minchin suggest an ‘allusion to the fact that “in the beginning” even the earth itself was “without form”’. The title may have been modest, but the principal stylistic influence—Byronic—was not, and at least one of the poems, ‘The Dance of Death’, was, on the authority of Mrs Orr, who was told of it, ‘a direct imitation of Coleridge’s “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter”’ (1798). A letter of 11 March 1843 from Robert the Second to a Mr Thomas Powell, quoted by Mrs Orr, testified that his son had been composing verses since ‘quite a child’ and referred to a great quantity of ‘juvenile performances’, some of which ‘extemporaneous productions’ Robert the Second enclosed.

The sample sheet of verses, taken at the time and for some while after at face value, was subsequently identified to Mrs Orr by Sarianna Browning as ‘her father’s own impromptu epigrams’. The attempt to pass off the father’s effusions as the work of the son is baffling, and Mrs Orr kindly directs us to suppose that ‘The substitution may from the first have been accidental.’ The letter is, however, valuable for its affirmation that Robert the Third was remarkably precocious in poetry and the credible information—borne out by his habitual practice in later life—that he deliberately destroyed all instances of his first efforts ‘that ever came in his way’.

Sarianna being too young at the time—no more than ten years old—never saw the poetry of Incondita, but it impressed Mr and Mrs Browning to the extent that they tried, unsuccessfully, to get the manuscript published. Disappointment in this enterprise may have been one reason that led Robert to destroy the manuscript, but it had already got beyond him into the world: Mrs Browning had shown the poems to an acquaintance, Miss Eliza Flower, who had copied them for the attention of a friend, the Revd William Johnson Fox, ‘the well-known Unitarian minister’. Robert, with an adult eye for reputation, retrieved this copy after the death of Mr Fox and, additionally, a fragment of verse contained in a letter from Miss Sarah Flower. He destroyed both.

Mrs Orr, though regretting the loss of ‘these first fruits of Mr Browning’s genius’, supposes that ‘there can have been little in them to prefigure its later forms. Their faults seem to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little wealth of thought’, an echo of Mr Fox’s opinion. Fox admitted later to Robert that ‘he had feared these tendencies as his future snare’. Two poems, said to have survived from Incondita’s brief and limited exposure, are ‘The First-Born of Egypt’, in blank verse, and ‘The Dance of Death’, in tetrameters. They are certainly gorgeous, richly allusive, spare no wrenching emotion or sensational effect, and ascend to dramatic climax. A distinct gust from the graveyard scents the relentless progress of grisly calamities that would give suffering Job more than usual pause for thought.

Nevertheless, the Byronic, perhaps less so the Coleridgean, influences were not merely juvenile infatuations. In a letter of 22 August 1846 to Miss Barrett, Robert commented that ‘I always maintained my first feeling for Byron in many respects … the interest in places he had visited, in relics of him. I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion … they seem to “have their reward” and want nobody’s love or faith.’ (The reference to Finchley as a place of ultimate pilgrimage is attributable to the fact that two days previously Miss Barrett had driven out as far as that fascinating faubourg.)

The death of Byron was as climactic in its effect as either of the surviving poems of Incondita, which take the fold of death as their theme. It may have been the stimulus that prompted the twelve-year-old Browning’s manuscript. The fallout was great on other poets, other idealists, who subsided into plain prose and practical politics—it was the death, too, at least in England, of any idea of romantic revolution. Alfred Tennyson, we are told, memorialized the event by carving the words ‘Byron is dead’ on a rock near Somersby. He was fifteen. Thomas Carlyle, approaching thirty, felt as though he had lost a brother. It is not too much to say that the death of Byron had as profound an effect in England and Europe in 1824 as the death of President John F. Kennedy had for America and the world in 1963. It was like an eclipse of the sun that stills even bird song, or the silence after a thunderclap. There were few who were unaffected. ‘The news of his death came upon my heart like a mass of lead,’ wrote Carlyle to his wife Jane.

Equally tremendous was the year 1832: Goethe died, and so did Sir Walter Scott. Robert maintained a high regard for Scott the polymathic author, often quoting from him and occasionally reflecting Scott’s work in his own poetry. The death of Keats in 1821 had been quickly followed by that of Shelley in 1822. Wordsworth was to die in 1850, and Heinrich Heine in 1856. These losses amounted, in the case of poetry, to the death of European Romanticism. ‘Though it is by no means clear what Romanticism stood for,’ the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out in a chapter on ‘The Arts’ in The Age of Revolution, ‘it is quite evident what it was against: the middle.’ Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, supposes that, had one ‘spoken in England to someone who had been influenced by, say, Coleridge, or above all by Byron’, one would have found that ‘the values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying’. This attitude, says Berlin, was relatively new. ‘What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.’

The middle, then, famously distrustful of extremes, did not apparently stand much chance, squeezed between the reactionary, traditional elements of the old order and the revolutionary, idealistic instincts of the avant-garde. Yet society has an irresistible tendency to compromise, to assimilate and settle into social stability—albeit radically altered, both right and left—when shaken by destructive events and stirred by disturbing philosophies. Nowhere is this more marked than in the mobile middle class, the eternally buoyant bourgeoisie, which confidently came into its own following the French and Industrial Revolutions.

This middle class was perceived by pre-Revolutionary enthusiasts as equipped with reason, sentiment, natural feeling, and purpose in contrast to the sterility, decrepitude, reactionary instincts, and corrupt clericalism of pre-Revolutionary society. The artificiality of the Court was in theory to be replaced by the spontaneity of the people—whereupon, of course, by the inevitable evolutionary law of society, the new society in practice naturally stiffened into a bureaucratic, bourgeois respectability, in its own time and triumphant style stifling fine romantic feeling with its own brand of philistinism. Revolutions, like romantic poets, die young. Byron astutely recognized that an early death would save him from a respectable old age.

G. K. Chesterton points to what is now known as the ‘percolation theory’ or the ‘trickle down effect’ that supposedly occurs when society is in some way shaken out from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Robert Browning, says Chesterton, was ‘born in the afterglow of the great Revolution’—the French Revolution of 1789, that is—the point of this observation being that the Jacobin dream of emancipation had begun ‘in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society’. By the time of Robert’s boyhood, ‘a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings … A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth … On all sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys.’

With this famous portmanteau phrase, Chesterton sweeps together such marvellous boys as John Ruskin ‘solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts’, Charles Dickens toiling in a blacking factory, Thomas Carlyle ‘lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire’, and John Keats, who ‘had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon’. Add to these Robert Browning, the son of a Bank of England clerk in Camberwell. These men, born to fame but not to wealth, were the inheritors of a new world that gave them a liberty that, in Robert Browning’s case, ‘exalted poetry above all earthly things’ and which he served ‘with single-hearted intensity’. Browning stands, observed Chesterton, ‘among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else’.

The matter of poetry as Robert’s sole vocation was mostly decided by the revelation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the atheistical poet. The effect was tremendous. It was like coming across a hitherto unknown brother who had thought everything, experienced everything, accomplished everything that Robert Browning, fourteen years old, living in Camberwell, had as yet only dimly felt and begun to put, somewhat derivatively of admired models, into words. Robert had read the cynical, atheistical Voltaire without obvious moral corruption; he had read of the world’s virtues and vices, irregularities and injustices, in the words of Wanley, Shakespeare, Milton, and in other works of dramatic historical fiction, without becoming contemptuous of virtue; he had read the sensational Byron without becoming mad or bad; he had read the waspish Horace Walpole without becoming overwhelmingly mannered. But the cumulative effect was bound, in some degree, to be unsettling. Shelley—who had, like young Robert, read Voltaire and encyclopedias, and who had consorted with Byron—ratcheted up the adolescent tension one notch too far.

Shelley’s musical verse hit every note. With exquisite Shelleyan technique, all the airs that had been vapouring in Robert’s head were given compositional form—delicate, forceful; and as the concert performance proceeded, Shelley’s genius, his creative spirit, played out the great work of the ideal world in which infamy was erased, God rebelled against Satan, and in which—as Chesterton remarks—‘every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy’. All things in heaven and on earth proclaimed the triumph of liberty. ‘O World, O Life, O Time,’ Robert in later life apostrophized with deliberate irony on the flyleaf of Shelley’s Miscellaneous Poems given to him by his cousin Jim Silverthorne, a book he vigorously annotated in his first enthusiasm and then thought better of in his maturity when he tried, on 2 June 1878, to erase ‘the foolish markings and still more foolish scribblings’ that ‘show the impression made on a boy by this first specimen of Shelley’s poetry’. What he could not vehemently blot out or rub at or scratch away or scribble over, he hacked at with a knife or finally—all these obliterating resources being inadequate—cut out with scissors. It seems an excessive reaction, some fifty years later, but the first enthusiasm had evidently come to seem itself embarrassingly excessive. Not only did Robert not wish to remember it, he was determined to efface it from memory—his own or posterity’s—absolutely, though without actually, as was his usual resort, burning the book to ashes. He could burn his own poetry, perhaps, but not another’s.

‘Between the year 1826, when Browning became acquainted with the work of Shelley, and 1832, when Pauline was written,’ says Betty Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait, ‘there took place in the life of the poet a crisis so radical that everything that followed upon it, including his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett, was qualified in one way or another by the effects of that initial experience.’ This sums up the biographical consensus that began with Mrs Orr’s pronouncement that Robert held Shelley greatest in the poetic art because ‘in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration’.

The souls of Keats and Shelley were identified in Robert’s mind with two nightingales which sang harmoniously together on a night in May—perhaps his birthday, the 7th of May in 1826—one in a laburnum (‘heavy with its weight of gold’, as William Sharp says Browning told a friend) in the Brownings’ garden, the other in a large copper beech on adjoining ground. ‘Their utterance,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say.’ The image was no doubt prompted in Robert’s mind by Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. At any rate, whether or not these birds were the transmigrated souls of Keats and Shelley, as Robert reverently convinced himself, they ‘had settled in a Camberwell garden’, says Chesterton less reverently, ‘in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them’.

The major impact on the tender sensibilities of young Robert Browning was made by Shelley’s Queen Mab, which later achieved a reputation, when issued in a new edition by the publisher Edward Moxon, for being that most horrid—indeed, criminal—thing, a blasphemous libel. ‘The Shelley whom Browning first loved,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was the Shelley of Queen Mab, the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how.’ In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, Robert wrote of having lived for two years on bread and potatoes—a regime that, if strictly adhered to, would have tested the faith and asceticism even of the Desert Fathers.

Queen Mab is a lecture in poetic form to Ianthe, a disembodied spirit, on the sorry state of the temporal universe. Mab is a bluestocking fairy queen who takes intense issue with the various shortcomings of contemporary politics, conventional religion, and cankerous commerce, all of which are judged to be more or less hopelessly misguided when not actually corrupt. Queen Mab’s denunciation convinces less by rational argument than by the irresistible force of her—Shelley’s—convictions. She barely stops for breath (only now and then pauses for footnotes), fired by ideas and ideals that combine termagant intensity with tender sentiment, fiercely heretical in her inability to accept a creating Deity but spiritually softer in her recognition that there could be ‘a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe’ which might or might not, according to religious belief, be identified with the supreme maker, sometimes called God.

In an aside, dealing with the matter in a footnote, Shelley argued abstinence from meat as a means whereby man might at a stroke eliminate the brutal pleasures of the chase and restore an agricultural paradise, improve himself physically and morally, and probably live forever in health and virtue. The spiritual and the corporeal were virtually synonymous. Shelley recommended himself and the pure system of his ideas to youth whose moral enthusiasm for truth and virtue was yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. Queen Mab was pouring out a song which, if not of innocence, at least was addressing innocents. The force of Shelley’s expression rather more than the systematic reason of his argument is still powerfully appealing to idealists, and most of his vehement agitprop (as it might be called today) speaks to succeeding generations even unto our own times—so much so that the utterances of Queen Mab sound not unlike the conventional wisdom of modern environmentalists, new-agers, and bourgeois bohemians. It is difficult for us now to appreciate the thrilling horror with which Shelley’s words were received by his unnerved contemporaries who read not only blasphemy—bad enough—but revolution between, as much as upon, every irreverent line.

Vegetarianism worried Robert’s mother; atheism worried the Revd George Clayton. Robert stuck to his beliefs for a while, but forgave himself his youthful excesses, characterizing them later in his life as ‘Crude convictions of boyhood, conveyed in imperfect and unapt forms of speech,—for such things all boys have been pardoned. They are growing pains, accompanied by temporary distortion of soul also.’²¹ He regretted the anxiety caused to his mother, whose strong-minded inclination that her son should not compromise his physical health was resisted by Robert’s insistence that meat-eating was a symptom of spiritual disease and argued, presumably, ‘what should it profit a man if he feed his body but starve his soul’. Besides, the new diet was also a symptom of liberty, a badge of freedom, a symbol of release from dependence.

Atheism served much the same purpose. That his speculative beliefs were sincerely held and admitted of no counter-persuasion from those who expressed concern for his physical and spiritual welfare was perhaps secondary to their practical effect. Robert Browning had got out into the world, and he would deal with it on his own terms. He might still be living within the narrow propriety of his parents’ house, which increasingly rubbed at his heels and elbows, but he was his own man. Sarianna, his sympathetic sister, admitted to Mrs Orr that ‘The fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them.’²²

Robert had left the Ready school at the age of fourteen, and for two years thereafter he was educated privately at home, in the mornings by a tutor competent in the general syllabus; in the afternoons by a number of instructors in music, technical science, languages (French particularly), singing, dancing, exercise (riding, boxing, fencing), and probably art.²³ In the evenings, if his father did not entertainingly contribute to the educational process, Robert worked at his own pleasure, voraciously reading, assiduously writing, sometimes composing music. None of his musical compositions have survived the incinerating fire he so loved to feed. Robert ‘wrote music for songs which he himself sang’, states Mrs Orr, citing three: Donne’s ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, Hood’s ‘I will not have the mad Clytie’, and ‘The mountain sheep are sweeter’ by Peacock. These settings were characterized to Mrs Orr, by those who knew of them, as ‘very spirited’.²⁴

Robert also acquired a social life, associating with three Silverthorne cousins—James, John and George, the sons of Christiana Wiedemann, Sarah Anna Browning’s sister, who had married Silverthorne, a prosperous local brewer. All three were musically gifted and sometimes described as ‘wild youths’.²⁵ The Silverthornes lived in Portland Place, Peckham. James came to be Robert’s particular friend, and his name is written in the register of Marylebone Church as one of the two witnesses at the wedding in 1846 of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. James, who succeeded to the family brewery, died in 1852. To mark his passing, Robert wrote the poem ‘May and Death’ which lovingly commemorates the friendship between himself and James (called Charles in the poem).

In addition to association with cousins, Robert acquired improving acquaintance with, notably, Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould (later to become Sir Joseph Arnould of the High Court bench of Bombay, but meanwhile something of a youthful radical and an admirer of Carlyle). Both were clever, ambitious young men of his own age, sons of established Camberwell families. He had, too, independent adventures. Stories are told—and credited by some—of his ramblings, following the tracks of gypsy caravans far across country. William Sharp, in his biography of Browning (1897), seems to think that Robert kept company with ‘any tramps, gypsies or other wayfarers’, though Mrs Orr in her more authoritative (less lyrical and very much less airily romantic) biography, published in 1891, quashes any suggestion that he caught them up or was detained in parleyings with them: ‘I do not know how the idea can have arisen that he willingly sought his experience in the society of “gipsies and tramps”.’

Both Sharp and Mrs Orr knew Robert Browning personally, and it must be admitted that the latter can lay claim to longer, more intimate and more extensive acquaintance with the poet. There is no doubting it from the tone of her book that Mrs Orr strives for a scrupulous fidelity to the facts—some of which, if deplorable, are omitted—but some caution is required when dealing with her inclination to polish the poet to his brightest lustre and to put the best and brightest face on failure. She can sometimes, in her emphases and suppressions, be inspired to what we now recognize as spin. However, Sharp invites comparison with Browning’s poem ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ and a song which Robert heard on a Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, with the refrain, ‘Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!’ that rang in his head until it found appropriate poetic expression years later. Chesterton sufficiently credits or relishes Sharp’s literary association as to repeat it in his own biography. It seems likely that, whatever romantic fascination Robert may have had with the itinerant life of gypsies, they represented his then feelings of freedom as a desirable thing rather than as an actuality in his life or as an alternative to it. He had neither any incentive to run away with the ‘raggle-taggle gypsies-o!’, nor any inclination to inquire too closely into the reality of lives less privileged, in conventional terms, than his own.

There is talk, too, of Robert’s taste for country fairs. This is elaborated by Griffin and Minchin, who charmingly describe how, ‘For three days each summer the Walworth Road from Camberwell Gate to the village green—a goodly mile—was aglow after sunset with candles beneath coloured shades on the roadside stalls: on the Green itself, besides the inevitable boats and swings and merry-go-rounds, there was the canvas-covered avenue with its gingerbread booths, there was music and dancing, and best of all, there was the ever-popular Richardson’s Theatre—appreciated, it is said, by the poet in his younger days. Peckham also had its fair, which was held just opposite Mr Ready’s school; and Greenwich, noisiest and most boisterous of fairs, was close at hand.’²⁶ Again, with an implied note of reproof, Mrs Orr dampens any speculative fervour about Robert’s bohemian instincts by insisting that ‘a few hours spent at a fair would at all times have exhausted his capacity for enduring it. In the most undisciplined acts of his early youth, were always present curious delicacies and reserves.’

She is keen to return Robert to his books and his work, away from any suggestion of irreverent or—spare the mark—inappropriate interests and activities: ‘There was always latent in him the real goodness of heart which would not allow him to trifle consciously with other lives.’ Fifine might go to the fair, but Robert should stay home and satisfy himself with the habit of work as his safeguard and keep tight control of an imagination that, rather than mastering him, would serve him. This seems a little censorious, not to say apprehensive that Robert might have had yearnings that, if not severely restrained, would have led him into even more ‘undisciplined acts’. We must close our eyes in holy dread at the very thought and be thankful that nothing unworthy soiled the blameless page he worked upon, far less sufficiently overcame his ‘curious delicacies and reserves’ to distract him from it.

Better to think of Robert no longer incited by his early adherence to Byron—that libertine and sceptic who roamed at large as much in the world as in his meditations—but at sundown, on the brow of the Camberwell hill (now known as Camberwell Grove), among the spreading elms, suffused with the spiritual light of Shelley and looking down, deliriously, on the darkling mass of London sprawled at his feet, lit by the new gas lamps. For the time being, Robert remained safely distant from the snares and entanglements of the beautiful but seductive city: so many lives to refrain from toying with, so much noisy, messy—maybe vicious—life to assault curious delicacies and reserves should he dare to descend to put them to the test. Byronism, as Chesterton remarks, ‘was not so much a pessimism about civilized things as an optimism about savage things’. But now Robert was Byronic only in the dandyism of his dress. It was Shelley who suited his soul. And so, turning, Robert would go home to bed, sleeping in a bedroom that adjoined his mother’s, the door always open between them, and to give her a kiss—every night, even in the worst of their disputes—before retiring. He never willingly spent a night away from home.²⁷

Robert’s fascination with and attachment to the natural as contrasted with the artificial world was innate. It took inspiration from his mother’s intense sympathy with flora and fauna, if we are to credit W. J. Stillman, in his Autobiography of a Journalist (quoted by Griffin and Minchin), who states that Mrs Browning had that ‘extraordinary power over animals of which we hear sometimes, but of which I have never known a case so perfect as hers. She would lure the butterflies in the garden to her, and domestic animals obeyed her as if they reasoned.’ The Browning household at times approximated to a menagerie: Griffin and Minchin speak respectfully of Browning’s learning early to ride his pony, playing with dogs, keeping pets and birds including a monkey, a magpie, and—improbably—an eagle. The collection of toads, frogs, efts, and other ‘portable creatures’ that is said to have filled his pockets gives some additional substance to the story already quoted that Mrs Browning induced Robert to take medicine by finding a toad for him in the garden. He could whistle up a lizard in Italy, chuck a toad under its chin in Hatcham, and later kept a pet owl in London as well as geese that would follow him around and submit to being embraced by the middle-aged poet.²⁸

William Sharp describes Browning’s occasional long walks into the country: ‘One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree … and there give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space on his recumbent body.’ Sharp, in this pastoral mode, quotes Browning himself as having said that ‘his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois’.²⁹ His faculty of absorption and repose, in this imagery, would have done credit to a St Francis. His love for his mother’s flowers—particularly the roses and lilies that later he would gather to send to Elizabeth Barrett—was perhaps one contributory factor in his brief vegetarianism.

In a letter of 24 July 1838 to Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, he makes a significant confession: ‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I every now and then,—in an impatience at being able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent—bite them to bits.’ This devouring quality of Browning’s desire for sensation, to the extent of attempting to consume it literally in the form of vegetable matter, is remarkable. It is as though Browning’s passion to possess the world could only be achieved by eating it, by incorporating it within himself. In Pauline, he recognized some of this when he identified

a principle of restlessness

Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.

and he declared that,

I have lived all life

When it is most alive.

How apposite, then, to come upon the charmingly-named Flower sisters, Eliza and Sarah. It was to Eliza that Mrs Browning had confided the text of Incondita and it was Eliza, so taken with it, who had copied it for Mr William Johnson Fox, a friend of her father, Benjamin Flower, ‘known’, says Mrs Orr, ‘as editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer’. Robert, encouraged by her enthusiasm for his poems, began writing to Eliza Flower at the age of twelve or thirteen.³⁰ She was nine years his senior. These letters, which she kept for her lifetime, were eventually and effortfully retrieved and destroyed—all but a few scraps—by Robert. It seems likely, even without the confirmation of the correspondence, that Eliza was his first, immature love, though the boyish, romantic attachment died out ‘for want of root’. Sentimental love, if that was what it amounted to, subsided into a lasting respect and affection for ‘a very remarkable person’ who, with her sister, was responsible for a number of popular hymns such as ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’, written by Sarah Flower Adams and set to music by Eliza. These were composed for Mr Fox’s chapel where Eliza ‘assumed the entire management of the choral part of the service’.³¹ Eliza, though Robert denied it, seems to have been the major identifiable inspiration for his second excursion into verse: the long confessional poem entitled Pauline.

Mrs Orr conventionally regrets that the headstrong Robert Browning was not sent to a public school where his energies might have been efficiently directed; but Griffin and Minchin take the more sensible view that a pre-Arnoldian public school education, if only and unrepresentatively to judge by the boy’s experience of the Ready school, would have been been ‘hardly encouraging … Nor were public schools in good odour.’ The reforms inspired by Dr Arnold of Rugby were a thing of the future.

Meantime, Robert’s father in 1825 had subscribed £100 to the foundation of the new London University, an investment that brought no dividends but procured one particular advantage: since Mr Browning was one of the original ‘proprietors’, he was entitled to a free education for a nominee. Robert, his son, could be admitted to London University as a student. In contrast to Oxford, Cambridge, and the other ancient universities, which required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles as a necessary prerequisite to admission, London University was nonsectarian, the education was less costly than at other academic institutions, and it was possible to combine the university education with private home study.

Robert was earnestly recommended by his father, describing himself as ‘a parent anxious for the welfare of an only Son’ who deemed admission to the University ‘essential to his future happiness’. Furthermore, Mr Browning testified to Robert’s impeccable moral character (‘I never knew him from his earliest infancy, guilty of the slightest deviation from Truth’) and to his ‘unwearied application for the last 6 years, to the Greek, Latin & French languages’. Mrs Orr draws a discreet veil over the upshot, confining herself to the information that ‘In his eighteenth year he attended, for a term or two, a Greek class at the London University’—he registered for the opening session, 1829–30—and that ‘It was at about the time of his short attendance at University College that the choice of poetry as his future profession was formally made.’ The phrase ‘short attendance’ implies some length of time more than a week, which was the period Robert survived lodging away from home and his mother with a Mr Hughes in Bedford Square, and perhaps a little longer than the few months he endured the pedestrian German, Greek, and Latin classes for which he registered before quitting the college entirely. He was seventeen years old, an age at which, as Mrs Orr frankly acknowledges, he was naturally ‘not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other’.

‘The always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness,’ she reports. ‘He behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders’ minds.’ This is judiciously put. A little less indulgent is the bald admission that Robert ‘set the judgements of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was not.’ School and college simply wearied him: the pedantic routine was stifling. It was not that he lacked aptitude for study, more that he lacked inclination to confine it to the well-worn track. Which is not to say Robert was unpopular: William Sharp quotes a letter from The Times of 14 December 1889, in which a friend loyally testified that ‘I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long, and I well remember the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students.’

Poetry was the thing—a foregone conclusion, at least according to Robert. Some attempts seem to have been made to promote the professions of barrister (chosen by his friends Domett and Arnould), clergyman (though Robert had given up regular church attendance), banker (employment in the Bank of England and Rothschild’s bank being the family business), even desperately—it is said—painter or actor. For a short while, when he was sixteen years old, Robert attended medical lectures given by the celebrated physician Dr Blundell at Guy’s Hospital. These are said to have aroused in him ‘considerable interest in the sciences connected with medicine’,³² but perhaps more from a fascination with the morbid, since ‘no knowledge of either disease or its treatment ever seems to have penetrated into his life’. At any rate, there seems to have been no positive belief that Robert might be suited to the medical profession. The tentative suggestions of anxious parents—the adamantine refusal of a strong-willed son—sulks and silences: it is a familiar-enough scenario, distressing to Mrs Browning, worrying to Mr Browning, a matter of some well-concealed anxiety, no doubt, to Robert Browning himself, who made a conspicuous effort to prepare himself for the profession of poet by reading Johnson’s Dictionary from cover to cover.

Robert had become accustomed to the standards of early nineteenth-century suburban middle-class comfort, but he had been educated as a mid-to-late eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in the breadth of his acquired learning but equally in the departments of upper-class sporting activities such as riding, boxing, and fencing, the social graces of singing, dancing, music, and art, and the civilized values of a man of fine feeling in dress and deportment. The acquisition of these benefits was one thing—they required no financial outlay on his own part; to maintain them would be quite another. Refined tastes are generally expensive to indulge as a permanent style of life.

In his late teens and early twenties, Robert cut a noticeable figure: his appearance was dapper and dandified, verging in some respects on the Byronic, particularly in the manner of his hair, which he wore romantically long, falling over his shoulders and carefully curled. He was of middle height, neither tall nor short, slim, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, brightly grey-eyed, charming in his urbane, self-confident manner. Robert presented himself to society as ‘full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what’s more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.’ He was a model of punctilious politeness, good-looking, light-footed and—remarked Mrs ‘Tottie’ Bridell-Fox, daughter of William Johnson Fox, of his appearance in 1835 to 1836—‘just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things: quite “the glass of fashion and the mould of form”.’³³ He grew, when able to do so, crisp whiskers from cheekbone to chin.

In the absence of an assured annual unearned income, Robert made up his mind to a calculated economy in his private needs: writing to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, he would later comment, ‘My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated … So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care’—though that was then, without any responsibility other than to his own material maintenance. The Brownings were not poor, but neither were they rich—they were generous not only in keeping Robert at home but equally in the confidence they displayed in allowing him to devote himself to writing poetry. They might, of course, have been merely marking time, hoping that something would turn up, catch Robert’s attention, fire his imagination and provide him with a good living. But on the best interpretation, his parents were large-minded and great-hearted in their confidence that this was the right thing to do for their son in particular and for the larger matter of literature in general. There was not much prospect of any financial return on their expenditure: it could hardly have been regarded as an investment except in the most optimistic view, poetry then, as now, being a paying proposition only in the most exceptional cases—Lord Byron being one in his own times; Sir Walter Scott, who also benefited from his activity as a novelist, being another.

But no doubt Mr Browning would have looked back on his own career and felt again the sigh of responsibility, of inevitability, with which he had given up his own artistic ambitions for routine employment as a banker. Robert ‘appealed to his father’, says Edmund Gosse, ‘whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training foreign to that aim’. And, says Gosse, ‘so great was the confidence of the father in the genius of the son’ that Mr Browning acquiesced—though perhaps by no means as promptly as Robert Browning later convinced himself and Gosse to have been the case. But acquiesce he did. Whatever Mr Browning might have felt he owed his son, perhaps he felt he owed himself another chance, albeit at second-hand. It was an indulgence, no doubt, but Mr Browning was not a man to invite difficulties or disputes. It was also a matter of simple fact: Robert remained rooted at home.

William Sharp makes the point that the young Robert Browning is sometimes credited with ‘the singular courage to decline to be rich’, but that Browning himself ‘was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as “singular courage”’. He had, says Sharp, ‘nothing of this bourgeois spirit’. Money, for money’s sake, was not a consideration—as his letter of 13 September 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett later testified. He would prefer ‘a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment’. He could, ‘if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship’, though by 1845 that youthful insouciance was changing in the light of love and its prospective attendant domestic expenses and obligations. Nevertheless, for the time being, in 1830, he ‘need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow’. Or how the roses might blow in his mother’s garden.

In Robert Browning: A Portrait, Betty Miller reviews the Brownings’ financial situation, pointing remorselessly to the comparatively humble origins of Robert’s mother as the daughter of a ‘mariner in Dundee’ rather than aggrandizing her as the daughter of a more substantial ship owner, and playing down the status and salary of the Bank of England clerkship enjoyed by Robert’s father. She also instances some contemporary critics who perceived Robert’s lack of apparent professional middle-class occupation as disgraceful. The prevailing attitude of respect for what is now identified as the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was as incorrigible then as now: poverty was generally considered to be morally reprehensible and fecklessness was regarded as a moral failing. The ‘deserving poor’ (a fairly select minority of the hapless and the disadvantaged) received pretty rough charity, grudging at best and rarely without an attached weight of sanctimony.

An accredited gentleman with an adequate fortune might blamelessly lead a life of leisure and pleasure, but the Brownings pretended to no giddy gentility. They were of the middle class, and the men of the middle class contributed their work to the perceived profit (moral and pecuniary) of society and to their own interests (much the same). Faults in character evidenced by apparent idleness were probably vicious and not easily glossed over by any high-tone, high-flown talk of devotion to poetry or art as a substitute for masculine resolve or absolution from a moral and material responsibility to earn a decent living. There is in this a suggestion that a poet must be, if not effeminate, at least effete—in contrast to the virtuous character of the common man committed to his daily labour who takes his ‘true honourable place in society, etc. etc.’, as Robert himself remarked. He was not wholly indifferent to conventional social values and expectations.

His position as a family dependent, nevertheless, did not unduly worry Robert: he acknowledged his father’s generosity and airily supposed that, with a little effort, he might make ‘a few hundred pounds which would soon cover my simple expenses’; and furthermore he felt, too, ‘whenever I make up my mind to that, I can be rich enough and to spare—because,’ he wrote later to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘along with what you have thought genius in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognises as such; and I have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that I was a little magnanimous in never intending to use it.’ Robert could do it if he had to, but for the time being he didn’t see, or perhaps acknowledge, the necessity—he continued never to know ‘what it was to have to do a certain thing to-day and not to-morrow’, though that did not imply any inclination to do nothing. As Edmund Gosse reported from a conversation with Robert in his later life, ‘freedom led to a super-abundance of production since on looking back he could see that he had often, in his unfettered leisure, been afraid to do nothing’. For the time being, however, Robert settled back into the familiar routines of family life and his proper application to poetry. He gave up vegetarianism as damaging to his health and atheism as damaging to his soul. The prodigal had returned, though in this case he could barely be said ever to have been away.

In January 1833, Robert completed a poetic work entitled Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession. It had been written as the first item in a projected grander master plan conceived at Richmond on the afternoon shading to evening of 22 October 1832 when he had seen Edmund Kean, once a great actor, by then in decline and disrepair but still powerfully impressive even when debilitated by drink and tuberculosis, play Shakespeare’s Richard III. The poem, consisting of 1,031 lines, took Robert three months to write. He was twenty years old. Chesterton’s dry comment is that ‘It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.’ Robert himself, in a note inserted in 1838 at the beginning of his own copy, remarks that, ‘The following Poem was written in pursuance of a foolish plan which occupied me mightily for a time, and which had for its object the enabling me to assume and realize I know not how many different characters;—meanwhile the world was never to guess that “Brown, Smith, Jones & Robinson” (as the spelling books have it) the respective authors of this poem, the other novel, such an opera, such a speech, etc., etc., were no other than one and the same individual. The present abortion was the first work of the Poet of the batch, who would have been more legitimately myself than most of the others; but I surrounded himself with all manner of (to my then notion) poetical accessories, and had planned quite a delightful life for him. Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in this fool’s paradise of mine,—R.B.’

If Christiana, Aunt Silverthorne, had not kindly and unpromptedly paid £30 for its publication (£26 and 5 shillings for setting, printing and binding, £3 and 15 shillings for advertising), Pauline might have experienced the fate of Incondita—burned by its author to ashes. As it was, Sarianna had secretly copied, in pencil, particularly choice passages during Robert’s composition of the poem.³⁴ She knew already the irresistible attraction for her brother of a fire in an open grate. She, indeed, was the only other person in the household who knew that Robert had begun writing the work at all. But then, five months later, there it was, published by Saunders and Otley, born and bound and in the hands of booksellers in March 1833. The author remained anonymous. Readers might suppose it to be the work of Brown, Smith, Jones, even Robinson, if they pleased: Robert Browning perhaps wisely elected for privacy over fame, though possibly only, batedly, preferring to anticipate the moment of astonishing revelation.

The book fell, not by chance, into the hands of reviewers. The Revd William Johnson Fox had read Incondita, and had reacted with a response that, if it stopped somewhat short of fulsome praise, had not been discouraging. Fox had acquired, in the interim, the Monthly Repository which, under his ownership and editorship, had achieved a reputation as an influential Unitarian publication. Its original emphasis had been theological, but Fox was eager not only to politicize its content but equally to give it a reputation for literary and dramatic criticism. Space could be found to notice improving literature: ten pages had recently been devoted in January 1830 to a review of the Poems of Tennyson by the 24-year-old John Stuart Mill (editor of Jeremy Bentham’s Treatise upon Evidence and founder of the Utilitarian Society, activities that had unsettled him to the point of madness until the poetry of Wordsworth restored to him the will to live). On receipt of a positive reply to the letter reintroducing himself—though he seems only to have been aware, to judge by his letter, that Fox contributed reviews to the Westminster Review—Robert had twelve copies of Pauline sent to Mr Fox, together with a copy of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen which, afterwards wishing to retrieve, he later used as an excuse to call personally on Fox.

Fox’s review was delightful. It admitted Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession to be ‘evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch’. Nevertheless, ‘In recognising a poet,’ wrote Fox, ‘we cannot stand upon trifles, nor fret ourselves about such matters. Time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero’s crown; but he first gave a glorious leap and shouted Eureka!’ Fox’s own leap was of faith that he had discovered a true poet. Of the work of genius before him, he had no doubt: he recommended the whole composition as being ‘of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another.’ There was ‘truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius.’ Tennyson had passed the Fox test of genius, and now so did Browning. Both had raised the hair on the back of his neck. Mrs Orr begs to differ in respect of Fox’s acceptance of the ‘confessional and introspective quality of the poem as an expression of the highest emotional life—of the essence, therefore, of religion’. But she gives her full approbation to the ‘encouraging kindness’ of the one critic who alone, discerning enough to cry Eureka!, discovered Robert Browning in his first obscurity.

Allan Cunningham in the Athenaeum noticed Pauline with some graceful compliments—‘fine things abound … no difficulty in finding passages to vindicate our praise … To one who sings so naturally, poetry must be as easy as music is to a bird.’ This was gratifying stuff, gilding the Fox lily which scented the air Robert Browning breathed and which he acknowledged as ‘the most timely piece of kindness in the way of literary help that ever befell me’.³⁵ Fox had, however, given a copy of Pauline to John Stuart Mill who, besides being Fox’s friend and assistant on the Monthly Repository, contributed reviews and articles to the Examiner and to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, where, in August 1830, in an omnibus review of some dozen books, Mill briefly dismissed the poem as ‘a piece of pure bewilderment’.

This might not have been so bad as a glancing cuff at an author’s head by a reviewer too pressed for time to have read the poem properly and too squeezed for space to give it more than a line. But Mill, either then or later, had taken trouble to read Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession very thoroughly, and more than once. At the end of his copy, on the fly-leaf, he made a long note presumably for his own reference. What he wrote was this:

With considerable poetic powers, the writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. I should think it a sincere confession, though of a most unlovable state, if the ‘Pauline’ were not evidently a mere phantom. All about her is full of inconsistency—he neither loves her nor fancies he loves her, yet insists upon talking love to her. If she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly. All his aspirings and yearnings and regret point to other things, never to her; then he pays her off toward the end by a piece of flummery, amounting to the modest request that she will love him and live with him and give herself up to him without his loving her moyennant quoi he will think her and call her everything that is handsome, and he promises her that she shall find it mighty pleasant. Then he leaves off by saying he knows he will have changed his mind by to-morrow, and despite ‘these intents which seem so fair,’ but that having been thus visited once no doubt he will be again—and is therefore in ‘perfect joy’, bad luck to him! as the Irish say. A cento of most beautiful passages might be made from this poem, and the psychological history of himself is powerful and truthful—truth-like certainly, all but the last stage. That, he evidently has not yet got into. The self-seeking and self-worshipping state is well described—beyond that, I should think the writer has made, as yet, only the next step, viz. into despising his own state. I even question whether part even of that self-disdain is not assumed. He is evidently dissatisfied, and feels part of the badness of his state; he does not write as if it were purged out of him. If he once could muster a hearty hatred of his selfishness it would go; as it is, he feels only the lack of good, not the positive evil. He feels not remorse, but only disappointment; a mind in that state can only be regenerated by some new passion, and I know not what to wish for him but that he may meet with a real Pauline. Meanwhile he should not attempt to show how a person may be recovered from this morbid state, for he is hardly convalescent, and ‘what should we speak of but that which we know?’