Browning

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.

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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.

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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