Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Biography

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell (a district now forming part of the Borough of Southwark in south London), the only son of Sarah Anna (née Wiedemann) and Robert Browning. His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year. Browning's paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies, but Browning's father was an abolitionist. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation, but, revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning's mother was a daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee in Scotland, and his Scottish wife. Browning had one sister, Sarianna. Browning's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle, who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts, was rumoured within the family to have had some Jamaican mixed race ancestry. Author Julia Markus suggests St Kitts rather than Jamaica. Evidence is inconclusive. Robert's father, a literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brother's companion in his later years, after the death of his wife in 1861. His father encouraged his children's interest in literature and the arts.

By twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. After being at one or two private schools, and showing an insuperable dislike of school life, he was educated at home by a tutor via the resources of his father's extensive library. By the age of fourteen he was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he gave up later. At the age of sixteen, he studied Greek at University College London but left after his first year. His parents' staunch evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford or Cambridge University, both then open only to members of the Church of England. He had inherited substantial musical ability through his mother, and composed arrangements of various songs. He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations, dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34, financially dependent on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems.

In March 1833, Pauline, a fragment of a confession was published anonymously by Saunders and Otley at the expense of the author, the costs of printing having been borne by an aunt, Mrs Silverthorne. It is a long poem composed in homage to Shelley and somewhat in his style. Originally Browning considered Pauline as the first of a series written by different aspects of himself, but he soon abandoned this idea. The press noticed the publication. W.J. Fox writing in the The Monthly Repository of April 1833 discerned merit in the work. Allan Cunningham praised it in the The Athenaeum. However, it sold no copies. Some years later, probably in 1850, Dante Gabriel Rossetti came across it in the Reading Room of the British Museum and wrote to Browning, then in Florence to ask if he was the author. John Stuart Mill, however, wrote that the author suffered from an "intense and morbid self-consciousness". Later Browning was rather embarrassed by the work, and only included it in his collected poems of 1868 after making substantial changes and adding a preface in which he asked for indulgence for a boyish work.

In 1834 he accompanied the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general, on a brief visit to St Petersburg and began Paracelsus, which was published in 1835. The subject of the 16th century savant and alchemist was probably suggested to him by the Comte Amédée de Ripart-Monclar, to whom it was dedicated. The publication had some commercial and critical success, being noticed by Wordsworth, Dickens, Landor, J.S. Mill and others, including Tennyson (already famous). It is a monodrama without action, dealing with the problems confronting an intellectual trying to find his role in society. It gained him access to the London literary world.

As a result of his new contacts he met Macready, who invited him to write a play. Strafford was performed five times. Browning then wrote two other plays, one of which was not performed, while the other failed, Browning having fallen out with Macready.

In 1838 he visited Italy, looking for background for Sordello, a long poem in heroic couplets, presented as the imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard spoken of by Dante in the Divine Comedy, canto 6 of Purgatory, set against a background of hate and conflict during the Guelph-Ghibelline wars. This was published in 1840 and met with widespread derision, gaining him the reputation of wanton carelessness and obscurity. Tennyson commented that he only understood the first and last lines and Carlyle claimed that his wife had read the poem through and could not tell whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.

Browning's reputation began to make a partial recovery with the publication, 1841–1846, of Bells and Pomegranates, a series of eight pamphlets, originally intended just to include his plays. Fortunately his publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to include some "dramatic lyrics", some of which had already appeared in periodicals.

In 1845, Browning met the poet Elizabeth Barrett, six years his elder, who lived as a semi-invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street, London. They began regularly corresponding and gradually a romance developed between them, leading to their marriage and journey to Italy (for Elizabeth's health) on 12 September 1846. The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's domineering father disapproved of marriage for any of his children. Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did for each of his children who married: “The Mrs. Browning of popular imagination was a sweet, innocent young woman who suffered endless cruelties at the hands of a tyrannical papa but who nonetheless had the good fortune to fall in love with a dashing and handsome poet named Robert Browning. ” At her husband's insistence, the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems included her love sonnets. The book increased her popularity and high critical regard, cementing her position as an eminent Victorian poet. Upon William Wordsworth's death in 1850, she was a serious contender to become Poet Laureate, the position eventually going to Tennyson.

From the time of their marriage and until Elizabeth's death, the Brownings lived in Italy, residing first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence at Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years Browning was fascinated by, and learned from, the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, describe Italy as his university. As Elizabeth had inherited money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was happy. However, the literary assault on Browning's work did not let up and he was critically dismissed further, by patrician writers such as Charles Kingsley, for the desertion of England for foreign lands.

Browning believed spiritualism to be the result of fraud, and proved to be one of Daniel Dunglas Home's most adamant critics. Browning and his wife Elizabeth attended a séance on 23, July 1855 in Ealing with the Rymers. During the séance a spirit face materialized which Home claimed was the son of Browning who had died in infancy. Browning seized the "materialization" and discovered it to be the bare foot of Home. To make the deception worse, Browning had never lost a son in infancy.

After attending the séance, Browning wrote in a letter to The Times that: 'the whole display of hands, spirit utterances etc., was a cheat and imposture'. Browning's son Robert in a letter to the London Times, December 5, 1902 referred to the incident "Home was detected in a vulgar fraud." Browning gave his unflattering impression of Home in the poem, "Sludge the Medium" (1864). His wife, Elizabeth was convinced that the phenomena she witnessed were genuine and their discussions about Home were a constant source of disagreement.

In Florence, probably from early in 1853, Browning worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known; in 1855, however, when these were published, they made relatively little impact.

Elizabeth died in 1861: Robert Browning returned to London the following year with Pen, by then 12 years old, and made their home in 17 Warwick Crescent, Maida Vale. It was only when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene—albeit while paying frequent visits to Italy (though never again to Florence)—that his reputation started to take off.

In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve books, essentially ten lengthy dramatic monologues narrated by the various characters in the story, showing their individual perspectives on events, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Long, even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and arguably his greatest work; it has been praised as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought for nearly forty years. The Robert Browning Society was formed in 1881 and his work was recognised as belonging within the British literary canon.

In the remaining years of his life Browning travelled extensively. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Balaustion's Adventure and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received. The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included an attack against Browning's critics, especially Alfred Austin, later to become Poet Laureate. According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, but he refused her proposal of marriage, and did not re-marry. In 1878, he revisited Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several further occasions. In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. The Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the brief, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889), published on the day of his death.

Browning died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

Browning was awarded many distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Edinburgh, a life Governor of London University, and had the offer of the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow. But he turned down anything that involved public speaking.

Poetic style

Browning is popularly known by his shorter poems, such as Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess, Rabbi Ben Ezra, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

His fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker's character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalising past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. .

The Ring and the Book is an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The work was a best-seller in its day, but a later critic, Anthony Burgess, commented "We all want to like Browning, but we find it very hard."

History of sound recording

At a dinner party on 7 April 1889, at the home of Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, an Edison cylinder phonograph recording was made on a white wax cylinder by Edison's British representative, George Gouraud. In the recording, which still exists, Browning recites part of "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" (and can be heard apologising when he forgets the words). When the recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave."

Legacy and cultural references

In his introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Browning's poems 1833–1864 Ian Jack comments that Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot "all learned from Browning's exploration of the possibilities of dramatic poetry and of colloquial idiom".

In 1914, American modern composer Charles Ives created one of his most innovative and captivating pieces ever, and named it after Browning. It is the Robert Browning Overture, a densely, darkly dramatic piece with gloomy, stark overtones strongly reminiscent of the Second Viennese School.

In 1930 the story of Browning and his wife Elizabeth was made into a play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolph Besier. The play was a success and brought popular fame to the couple in the United States. The role of Elizabeth became a signature role for the actress Katharine Cornell. It was twice adapted into film. It was also the basis of the stage musical Robert and Elizabeth, with music by Ron Grainer and book and lyrics by Ronald Millar.

In The Browning Version (Terence Rattigan's 1948 play or one of several film adaptations), a pupil makes a parting present to his teacher of an inscribed copy of Robert Browning's translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included in the final volume's appendix.

A memorial plaque on the site of his London home, Warwick Crescent, was unveiled on 11 December 1993.

Browning Close in Royston, Hertfordshire, is named after Robert Browning.

Browning Street in Berkeley, California, is located in an area known as Poets Corner and is also named after him.

Browning Street and Robert Browning School in Walworth, London, near to his birthplace in Camberwell, are named after him.

Complete list of works

• Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
• Paracelsus (1835)
• Strafford (play) (1837)
• Sordello (1840)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles (play) (1842)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
  • "Porphyria's Lover"
  • "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
  • "My Last Duchess"
  • "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
  • "Count Gismond"
  • "Johannes Agricola in Meditation"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. IV: The Return of the Druses (play) (1843)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. V: A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (play) (1843)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VI: Colombe's Birthday (play) (1844)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VII: Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)
  • "The Laboratory"
  • "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
  • "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"
  • "The Lost Leader"
  • "Home Thoughts from Abroad"
  • "Meeting at Night"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (plays) (1846)
• Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)
• Men and Women (1855)
  • "Love Among the Ruins"
  • "The Last Ride Together"
  • "A Toccata of Galuppi's"
  • "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
  • "Fra Lippo Lippi"
  • "Andrea Del Sarto"
  • "The Patriot/ An Old Story"
  • "A Grammarian's Funeral"
  • "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician"
• Dramatis Personae (1864)
  • "Caliban upon Setebos"
  • "Rabbi Ben Ezra"
• The Ring and the Book (1868–69)
• Balaustion's Adventure (1871)
• Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)
• Fifine at the Fair (1872)
• Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or, Turf and Towers (1873)
• Aristophanes' Apology (1875)
• The Inn Album (1875)
• Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper (1876)
• The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)
• La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878)
• Dramatic Idylls (1879)
• Dramatic Idylls: Second Series (1880)
• Jocoseria (1883)
• Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)
• Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)
• Asolando (1889)
  • Prospice
• The Year's at the Spring