Browning

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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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”.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.