Robert Browning

The English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) is best known for his dramatic monologues. By vividly portraying a central character against a social background, these poems probe complex human motives in a variety of historical periods.

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, London. His father, a senior clerk in the Bank of England, provided a comfortable living for his family and passed on a love of art and literature to Robert. His mother, an excellent amateur pianist, gave him a love of music, while her strong and simple piety provided him with an enduring conviction of the existence of God. In 1828 Browning entered the University of London, but he dropped out after half a year. The Brownings were a small, close-knit family and Robert apparently preferred to remain at home, reading in his father's library of over 7,000 volumes.

Early Poems and Plays

Browning began to write verses at the age of 6. His first published work was Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession, issued anonymously in 1833. The hero of the poem is a young poet, obviously Browning himself, who bares his soul to a patient heroine. When John Stuart Mill commented that the anonymous author seemed "possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being," Browning resolved never again to reveal his thoughts directly to his readers. Henceforth, he would "only make men and women speak."

This major step in Browning's poetic development was evident in his next long poem, Paracelsus (1835), whose hero was a Renaissance alchemist. Though Browning later called the poem "a failure," it received favorable reviews and brought about important friendships with the authors William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle and with the actor William C. Macready. Encouraged by these friendships, Browning began to emerge in the London social scene. Mrs. Bridell-Fox, another friend of Browning's, described him at this time as "slim and dark, and very handsome … just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves." He seemed to her "determined to conquer fame and to achieve success."

Encouraged by Macready, Browning turned to writing drama. But his first play, Strafford (1837), closed after only five performances. During the next 10 years he wrote six other plays, none of which were successfully produced. All of Browning's plays are marred by overemphasis of character analysis and lack of dramatic action.

In 1838 Browning traveled to northern Italy to acquire firsthand knowledge of its setting and atmosphere for his next long poem. But the publication of Sordello in 1840 was a disaster which dealt Browning's growing reputation a severe blow. Critics unanimously declared the poem totally obscure and unreadable, and modern readers still find it difficult.

Development of the Dramatic Monologue

After the disappointing reception of Strafford and Sordello, Browning turned to the dramatic monologue. He experimented with and perfected this form in the long poem Pippa Passes (1841) and two collections of shorter poems, Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845).

Usually written in blank verse, the dramatic monologue is the speech of a single character in a moment of some dramatic significance. In the course of his monologue, the speaker reveals what this situation is, as well as the setting of the situation and to whom he is speaking. Of greatest interest, however, is what he reveals about his own motives and personality. Often the speaker, while trying to justify himself to his listeners, actually reveals the faults or even depravity of his character to the reader. Such poems as "My Last Duchess," "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," and "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," in which this ironic revelation is fully developed, give the reader the pleasure of discovering more about the speaker than he perceives about himself.

Marriage to Elizabeth Barrett

After reading Elizabeth Barrett's flattering reference to him in her Poems, Browning wrote to her in January 1845. At that time, Barrett was an invalid confined to her room by a nervous disorder. But the two became frequent correspondents, and on May 20, 1845, Browning made his first personal visit. With his constant urging, she gained steadily in strength, hope, and will until she agreed to a secret marriage on Sept. 12, 1846. Such secrecy was necessary because Barrett's father had forbidden all of his children "the iniquity of love affairs."

Shortly after their marriage, the Brownings left London for Italy, and they made Casa Guidi in Florence their home from 1847 until 1861. It was there that their son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, was born on March 9, 1849.

Mature Poetry

In 1855 Browning published Men and Women, a collection of 51 poems. Though the volume contained many of the dramatic monologues that are best known and loved by modern readers, it was not popular with Browning's contemporaries. But it did receive several favorable critical reviews and made Browning the idol of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

After gradually declining in health for several years, Elizabeth Browning died on June 29, 1861. Browning found that he could no longer remain in Florence because of the memories it evoked. He resolved to "go to England, and live and work and write." In 1864 he published Dramatis Personae. Though some of the dramatic monologues in the collection are complex and difficult or overlong, this was the first of Browning's works to be popular with the general reading public. His popularity increased with the publication of The Ring and the Book in 1868-1869. This long poem is based on a murder and subsequent trial in Rome in 1698. In a Florentine bookstall Browning had found an "old Yellow Book" that contained records of these events. The poem is composed of 12 dramatic monologues, in which the major characters give their interpretations of the crime. The accounts contradict each other, but eventually the truth emerges from behind the tangled web of deceit and self-justification.

The Ring and the Book was enthusiastically received by the public, and Browning became a prominent figure in London society. He was a frequent guest at dinners, concerts, and receptions. In the next 10 years Browning wrote with great energy, publishing a volume almost every year. But none of these works match the quality of Men and Women, and they are little read today.

Though in the early stages of his career Browning's poetic reputation was far less than that of his wife, by 1870 he had achieved equal status with Tennyson, the poet laureate. The energy and roughness of Browning's poetry, however, contrast sharply with the melancholy and polish of Tennyson's. Today, through his influence on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Browning seems the most modern and enduring of all the mid-Victorian poets.

Browning died at his son's home in Venice on Dec. 12, 1889. In the "Epilogue" to his last collection of lyrics Browning described himself as "One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,/ Never doubted clouds would break." He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Further Reading

The standard biography of Browning is W. Hall Griffin and Harry C. Minchin, The Life of Robert Browning (1910; 3d rev. ed. 1938). Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891; revised by Frederic G. Kenyon, 1908), contains important additional information. An interesting modern psychological study is Betty B. Miller, Robert Browning: A Portrait (1952). William DeVane, A Browning Handbook (1935; 2d ed. 1955), is a useful source of information about Browning's poetry. Three of the best critical studies of his work are Roma A. King, The Bow and the Lyre: The Art of Robert Browning (1957); Robert W. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957); and Park Honan, Browning's Characters: A Study in Poetic Techniques (1961). Recommended for general historical background are George M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After, 1782-1919 (1922; new ed. 1962); G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936; 2d ed. 1953); and David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914 (1950).

Additional Sources

Maynard, John, Browning's youth, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Thomas, Donald Serrell, Robert Browning, a life within life, New York: Viking Press, 1983, 1982.

Mason, Cyrus, The poet Robert Browning and his kinsfolk, Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, Markham Press Fund, 1983.

Irvine, William, The book, the ring, & the poet; a biography of Robert Browni, New York, McGraw-Hill 1974.

Ryals, Clyde de L., The life of Robert Browning: a critical biography, Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993. □

Browning, Robert (1812–89), received his education mainly in his father's large and eclectic library. The contrasting influences of his boyhood were those of his reading (particularly of Shelley, Byron, and Keats) and of his mother's strong Nonconformist piety. His first published poem, Pauline (1833), attracted little notice. Browning travelled to Russia in 1834 and made his first trip to Italy in 1838. Paracelsus (1835) was a critical success and Browning formed several important friendships, notably with J. Forster and Macready, who persuaded him to write for the stage. In 1837 his play Strafford was produced at Covent Garden. He next published Sordello (1840), whose hostile reception eclipsed his reputation for over twenty years, and Bells and Pomegranates (1841–6). He began corresponding with Elizabeth Barrett (see Browning, E. B.) in Jan. 1845, after reading and admiring her 1844 Poems. He met her first in 1845; their relationship had to be kept a secret from her father, and they finally married and eloped to Italy in Sept. 1846. They lived mainly in Italy until Elizabeth's death in 1861. They had one child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (‘Pen’, 1849–1913). In 1850 Browning published Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and in 1855 the masterpiece of his middle period, Men and Women, which, together with Dramatis Personae (1864), began to revive his reputation; the revival was completed by the triumph of The Ring and the Book (1868–9). Meanwhile he had returned to England. He was awarded an honorary fellowship by Balliol College, Oxford, whose master Jowett was a close friend. The Browning Society was founded in 1881. Browning's publications after The Ring and the Book were: Balaustion's Adventure (1871), Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Aristophanes' Apology (1875), The Inn Album (1875), Pacchiarotto…with Other Poems (1876), The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877), La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878), Dramatic Idyls (1879), Dramatic Idyls, Second Series (1880), Jocoseria (1883), Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887) and Asolando (1889). Browning issued collections of his work in 1849, 1863, 1868, and 1888–9. The most recent collected edition (1981) contains his fugitive pieces, of which the most notable are the fine unfinished poem known as ‘Aeschylus' Soliloquy’, the sonnet ‘Helen's Tower’, ‘Gerousios Oinos’, the sonnet ‘Why I am a Liberal’, and the sonnet ‘To Edward FitzGerald’ (a savage attack after Browning read a disparaging reference to his wife in one of Fitzgerald's posthumously published letters). Browning's only prose works of importance are two ‘essays’ on Chatterton (1842) and Shelley (1852). His correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett has been published, along with other separate volumes of letters. Browning died in Venice and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Browning, Robert (1812–89). Born in Camberwell, son of a clerk in the Bank of England, Browning read widely as a boy in his father's library. Much of his early work was historically based. Paracelsus (1835) was a verse drama about the 16th‐cent. physician. Strafford (1837) was a lifeless poetic drama; King Victor and King Charles was on the unpromising subject of a dynastic dispute in 18th‐cent. Piedmont and was never performed; A Blot on the 'Scutcheon (1843) ran for three nights and convinced Browning to abandon the theatre. Dramatic Lyrics (1842) included ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister’, and ‘The Pied Piper’: Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) added ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘The Lost Leader’, and ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’. In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, already an established poet, and they lived mainly in Italy until her death in 1861. His greatest success, The Ring and the Book (1868–9), took a melodramatic murder story from late 17th‐cent. Italy and presented it from different viewpoints.

Browning, Robert (1812–89), English poet, three of whose plays in verse were produced in the theatre: Strafford (1837), with Macready, for whom it was written, in the leading role, at Covent Garden; A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon (1843) at Drury Lane; and Colombe's Birthday (1853) at the Haymarket. Helen Faucit appeared in all of them. None of them was particularly successful, and they serve only to mark the great gap between poetry and the stage in the 19th century. Browning's other plays were written to be read and belong to literature rather than to the theatre, though the dramatic poem Pippa Passes has been performed occasionally.