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Robert Browning’s Domestic Gods

Kevin A. Morrison

in Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place

Chapter four rereads the interior spaces of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florentine residence, Casa Guidi. Instead of seeing it as a space that exemplifies middle-class Victorian domestic ... More

Chapter four rereads the interior spaces of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florentine residence, Casa Guidi. Instead of seeing it as a space that exemplifies middle-class Victorian domestic practise, as has been traditionally understood, this chapter posits it as a religiously inflected liberal space.Less

The Man of Letters as Defender of the Faith, 1903–4: Robert Browning; Blatchford I; The Napoleon of Notting Hill

William Oddie

in Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908

This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1903–4. Following the publication of his biography of Robert Browning in 1903, Chesterton entered, in the words of the anonymous reviewer of ... More

This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1903–4. Following the publication of his biography of Robert Browning in 1903, Chesterton entered, in the words of the anonymous reviewer of Vanity Fair, ‘a new phase of his career as a writer’; he now belonged, the reviewer pronounced, ‘to the men of letters as apart from the journalists’. It also became clear that Chesterton's own ideas about religion had moved on and that they had become both more corporate and more doctrinal than Robert Browning reflects. By the end of the 1903 this was to become strikingly apparent in his engagement in a vigorous public controversy over the integrity of the Christian religion, an episode which had probably become an increasingly inevitable outcome of his intellectual history during the previous three years.Less

THE RECORDED VOICE FROM VICTORIAN AURA TO MODERNIST ECHO

John M. Picker

in Victorian Soundscapes

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph ... More

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.Less

Robert Browning’s Experiment: Composition and Communication in The Ring and the Book

Philipp Erchinger

in Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

This chapter concentrates on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a series of twelve dramatic monologues, which has repeatedly been described as an instance of “empiricism in literature” ... More

This chapter concentrates on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a series of twelve dramatic monologues, which has repeatedly been described as an instance of “empiricism in literature” (Langbaum) and as one of “the most ambitious literary experiments in the period” (Slinn). Trying to substantiate and make good on such claims, the chapter argues that The Ring and the Book invites its readers to participate in the composition and evaluation of an experimental form that transfers the tradition of the epic into “a novel country” in order to create a mode of writing “in difficulties” and “encumbered with incongruities” (Walter Bagehot). As a result, The Ring and the Book refuses to be read as if it were an accomplished work. Rather, it has to be made to work. Presenting itself as an experimental arrangement, Browning’s multi-voiced and many-sided text demands its readers to follow the grain of a kaleidoscopic pattern in the making, the components of which lack an underlying ground or design to hold them in place. The chapter’s argument is developed by way of an engagement with the controversial Victorian reception of Browning’s long poem.Less

Robert Browning’s Bad Habit

Erica McAlpine

in The Poet's Mistake

This chapter examines a rather embarrassing error in the closing section of Robert Browning's Pippa Passes (1841), where he casually uses a slang word for female genitalia when meaning to refer to ... More

This chapter examines a rather embarrassing error in the closing section of Robert Browning's Pippa Passes (1841), where he casually uses a slang word for female genitalia when meaning to refer to part of a nun's clothing. Like Wordsworth, Browning comes by his mistake honestly, having drawn his definition for the word from his memory of it in a seventeenth-century satirical ballad. Browning's error turns out to be a case of misreading: his source poem actually uses the word correctly—but Browning misses the joke. By exploring his mistake in context, the chapter raises the question of how interpretive mistakes relate to broader questions of meaning and its duplicity, not least in poems that are dramatic. Browning's mistake in reading thus serves as a proxy for the kinds of misinterpretations to which all readers of poetry are susceptible, especially when treating mistakes like his.Less

Ezra Pound: ‘My job was to bring a dead man to life’

Matthew Reynolds

in The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue

Since at least the time of Dryden, a ‘dead’ translation has been a bad one. But during the nineteenth century, poets became interested in the expressive possibilities of a dead style: Browning is one ... More

Since at least the time of Dryden, a ‘dead’ translation has been a bad one. But during the nineteenth century, poets became interested in the expressive possibilities of a dead style: Browning is one example. Pound's recorded statements on translation generally assert the need to ‘present’ a ‘vivid personality’ or ‘bring a dead man to life’. But the idea that something from the past might become ‘present’ again is complex, and results in a poetry of translation which is as interested in deadness as in life. I trace this aspect of Pound's writing through his translations of Cavalcanti, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius. The conflict owes something to wider modernist concerns; but it is fuelled by the activity of translation.Less

Words for Translation

Matthew Reynolds

in The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue

Literary translators have always used different words for what they are doing: a translation can be an ‘Englishing’, a ‘rendering’, a ‘traduction’, a ‘gloze’, a ‘crib’, a ‘version’ or a ‘conversion;’ ... More

Literary translators have always used different words for what they are doing: a translation can be an ‘Englishing’, a ‘rendering’, a ‘traduction’, a ‘gloze’, a ‘crib’, a ‘version’ or a ‘conversion;’ to translate can be, not only to ‘paraphrase’ and ‘interpret’, but to ‘turn’, to ‘render’, or ‘reduce.’ These words signal the different moves that can be made in the process of reading‐making‐sense‐translating, the various things that ‘translation’ can be. I explore Browning's translation of Agamemnon, Nabokov's Eugene Onegin and Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus to show what different meanings can be given to the word ‘literal’. I go on to argue that this variety of process and result has not been sufficiently recognized by translation theorists, even the subtlest such as Maria Tymoczko. In fact (I argue) it is impossible to arrive at ‘a theory’ of translation.Less

Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things

Stefanie Markovits

in The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life

Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: ... More

Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of rectilinear narrative. Both tell of marriage and adultery, combining fractured narrative form with violent plots. And despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, it moves from circular forms back to square books, to Browning’s The Inn Album, a verse-novel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares.Less

Poetic Style: Jewellery and Value in Victorian Poetry

Clara Dawson

in Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation

Chapter 2 examines evaluations of poetic style from the 1830s to the 1860s and argues for the existence of a jewelled style which crosses over the genres of the album-book or anthology, the ... More

Chapter 2 examines evaluations of poetic style from the 1830s to the 1860s and argues for the existence of a jewelled style which crosses over the genres of the album-book or anthology, the single-author volume and the periodical review. The intersection of raw economic value with fashionable display and artistic craft that coalesces around the jewel overlaps with the commodification of poetry as it circulates in the literary market. Jewellery becomes an important trope in both reviews and poetry, serving as a metaphor to express and calculate the kind of value that literature could offer. As a material commodity newly subject to mechanical reproduction, jewellery offered an analogy for the material changes to literary production. The chapter analyses poetry from gift annuals which exemplify the jewelled style, followed by a reading of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile.Less

Elizabeth Barrett and the Making of Browning’s Dramatic Romances and Lyrics

Richard Cronin

in Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

Reconstructing Robert Browning’s creative methods is a difficult task because the only manuscripts that survive, almost all at Balliol, are of late poems that even now are scarcely read. All the ... More

Reconstructing Robert Browning’s creative methods is a difficult task because the only manuscripts that survive, almost all at Balliol, are of late poems that even now are scarcely read. All the same, this chapter will discuss the germination of Browning’s early poems. It will rely principally on EBB’s notes on the poems that Browning went on to publish in Bells and Pomegranates VII that were brought together in the 56 page manuscript now held at Wellesley College. In the absence of surviving manuscripts this evidence offers the best clue as to Browning’s processes of revision. By examining Browning’s responses to EBB’s suggestions and the revisions he made to his poems after their first publication in periodicals I hope to show how his interest in the relationship between the poet and the reader is carried through into his compositional practice.Less

Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality

Patrick Fessenbecker

in Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature: Literary Content as Artistic Experience

It has sometimes been asserted that a refusal of straightforward communication is definitive of literature as such, or at least definitive of poetry. Such a definition is however not neutral; it ... More

It has sometimes been asserted that a refusal of straightforward communication is definitive of literature as such, or at least definitive of poetry. Such a definition is however not neutral; it reflects instead a preference for certain poets and poetic styles over others. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues have occasionally been presented as his greatest poetic achievement, highlighting the ironic distancing supposedly central to poetics. However, a look at Augusta Webster’s contemporaneous dramatic monologues reveals that Browning’s irony does not define the genre: Webster uses the form not to create distance between the speaker and the reader but to highlight the intellectual problem she is addressing. Looking at how both poets addressed the role of morality in human life, the chapter contends Webster’s poetry demonstrates that many poetic traditions have emphasized content just as much as form.Less

Browning's Old Florentine Painters: Italian Art and Mid-Victorian Poetry

Kelvin Everest

in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics

Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, were part of his collection of poems titled Men and Women, published in 1855. These monologues focus on two real-life ... More

Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, were part of his collection of poems titled Men and Women, published in 1855. These monologues focus on two real-life Victorian painters, Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, respectively. This chapter examines some detailed features of Browning's poetry and some larger questions raised by his interest in those particular painters during the period. In particular, it considers why Browning chose those subjects and argues that his monologues are subtle and powerful character studies that offer broader meanings developed from new possibilities in the significance of Italian art, which are remarkably emergent in cultural commentary during the Victorian period. It also looks at Browning's preoccupation with Italy and things Italian, although not at all interested in its politics any more than with England's.Less

Introduction: Frames of Mind

Kevin A. Morrison

in Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place

The introduction positions the book in relation to extant scholarship on Victorian liberalism and Victorian decorative practices as well as meta-archival reflections on knowledge-creation.

‘All Great Art is Praise’: Ruskin’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’

Stephen Cheeke

in Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism

Chapter 4 reads Robert Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ in relation to the art-writing of John Ruskin and the Renaissance Victorian myth. Browning’s painter-monk gives voice to Ruskinian orthodoxies ... More

Chapter 4 reads Robert Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ in relation to the art-writing of John Ruskin and the Renaissance Victorian myth. Browning’s painter-monk gives voice to Ruskinian orthodoxies about painting’s relation to worship and praise, and Lippi’s manifesto for modern painting embodies aspects of Ruskin’s early naturalism. Lippi also presents a psychological challenge to Ruskin’s art-theory through the ambivalence underlying his motivation. For Browning, the tension between sensuality and spirituality was characteristic of the late fifteenth century, and something out of which great religious artworks emerged. In the early works of Ruskin, they stand in opposition. When Ruskin himself studies Lippi’s work more seriously in the 1870s, he takes issue with Browning’s presentation of the painter, insisting upon the moral virtue of the artist as something evident in the paintings themselves. Their disagreement belongs within a broader cultural argument about the how the Renaissance is interpreted in the nineteenth century.Less

‘Another sort of writing’? Invalidism and Poetic Labour in the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett

Marcus Waithe

in Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop

This chapter responds to Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion that correspondence might be a lesser form of literary ‘work’ than other forms of writing. The question of epistolary labour is particularly ... More

This chapter responds to Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion that correspondence might be a lesser form of literary ‘work’ than other forms of writing. The question of epistolary labour is particularly pertinent to the case of Elizabeth Barrett whose letters to her fellow poet Robert Browning are the subject of scrutiny here. In the course of this chapter, letters are analysed as a comforting, and sometimes experimental proxy for the more personally fraught medium of poetic and literary production.Less