Robert Browning Biography

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.

 

Early years

 

Browning was born in Camberwell, a suburb of London, England, the only son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father, a man of fine intellect and character, 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 St 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. Revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother was a daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee. He had one sister, Sarianna. It is rumoured that Browning's grandmother, Margaret Tittle, was a Jamaican of mixed race who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts. 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. 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 to 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 mother’s staunch evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford University 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 dependant on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems.  Browning travelled widely, joining a British diplomatic mission to Russia in 1834, later journeying to Italy 1838 and 1844.

 

Middle years

 

Browning's career began with the publication of the anonymous poem Pauline. The piece, which disappeared without notice, would embarrass him for the rest of his life. The long poem Paracelsus, about the renowned doctor and alchemist, had no general popularity; nevertheless, it gained the notice of Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth, and other men of letters, and gave him a reputation as a poet of distinguished promise on the London scene. Browning came to befriend Charles Dickens, John Forster, Harriet Martineau and Carlyle, as well as William Charles Macready who encouraged Browning to write the play Strafford, performed in 1837 by Macready and Helen Faucit.It was no great success but Browning was encouraged enough to try again, going on to write eight plays in all, including Pippa Passes (1841) and A Soul's Tragedy (1846). A troubled production of A Blot on the 'Scutcheon (1843) was followed by the publication of the experimental and politically radical long poem Sordello (1840), which both met with widespread derision. Tennyson commented that he only understood the first and last lines and Carlyle noted that his wife has read the poem through and had not been about to tell is if Sordello was a man and city or a book.[3] His reputation would not rise again for 25 years. 
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 elopement 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.

1882 caricature from Punch Magazine reading: "The Ring and Bookmaker from Red Cotton Nightcap country"
From the time of their marriage, the Brownings lived in Italy until Elizabeth's death, 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. [3] 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. Browning bought a home in Asolo, in the Veneto outside Venice.[5] 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.]In Florence, 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 little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene—albeit while paying frequent visits in Italy—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 poems 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.

 

Last years and death

 

In the remaining years of his life Browning travelled extensively. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received. [6] The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included an attack against Browning's critics, especially the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin. According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several 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 short, 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.
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 eventually adapted twice into film.

 

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"
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 (1868-9)
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)
ProspiceComplete 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"
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 (1868-9)
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