Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are cracking
open a file on a figure who, on paper, is listed
as a Victorian poet. But if you actually look
at the mechanics of his mind, how he constructed
a scene, how he understood motives, and specifically
how he dealt with the criminal element of the
human soul, he feels much more like a modern
psychological thriller writer. We are talking
about... Robert Browning. It is a great comparison
because when people hear Victorian poet, the
immediate mental image is, you know, usually
stiff collars, heavy curtains and rhyming couplets
about flowers or noble knights. Very proper.
Very proper. But Browning, he was effectively
the David Fincher or the Vince Gilligan of the
19th century. He was obsessed with the darker,
grittier corners of the human psyche. He wasn't
interested in the perfect hero. Not at all. He
didn't want to write about the ideal. He wanted
to write about the broken. And I know for a lot
of people. The name Robert Browning summons up
these like traumatic flashbacks of high school
English or college lit surveys. Oh, definitely.
You know, the feeling struggling through dense,
impenetrable verses, trying to figure out what
on earth he was talking about and just wondering
why he couldn't say it plainly. Right. Just tell
me what you mean. Exactly. But the reality of
his life and his actual artistic intent is so
much. wilder and frankly more accessible than
the textbooks let on. I think the reason he feels
so distinct even today is that he wasn't content
with just writing pretty poetry. He wasn't you
know looking at a sunset and writing about how
beautiful the colors were. He was looking at
a person usually a very flawed sometimes dangerous
often sociopathic person and trying to figure
out exactly how their mind worked to justify
their actions. He's the guy who decided the poetry
could effectively be a murder mystery. Exactly.
He realized that the most interesting story isn't
the crime itself. It's the why. It's the justification
for the crime inside the criminal's head. Okay,
so to kick things off and to frame this conversation,
I want to bring in a quote from none other than
Oscar Wilde. You know you're doing something
interesting when Oscar Wilde has a hot take on
you. That's a very good sign. He usually saves
his best lines for himself. He really did. So
in The Critic is Artist, Wilde said that Browning
wasn't just a poet. He was a... creator of character
who ranked right next to Shakespeare. Which is,
I mean, that is massive praise coming from Wilde.
He did not hand out compliments lightly. Not
at all. But Wilde went further. He said, if Shakespeare
could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer
through a thousand mouths. Stammer through a
thousand mouths. I love that line. Me too. And
I want to pause on that word stammer, because
in most contexts, saying a writer stammers is
an insult. It implies they can't get the words
out. Right, that they're clumsy or inarticulate.
But in this context, though, it is the highest
form of compliment. That is the key to unlocking
Browning. How so? Wilde isn't saying Browning
was inarticulate. He's saying that Browning captured
the way people actually think and speak. I mean,
think about it. When you're lying or when you're
nervous or trying to justify something you know
is wrong. You don't speak in perfect sentences.
You don't speak in perfect flowing sonnets. You
hesitate. You backtrack. You pause. You stammer.
You spin. You try to find the angle that makes
you look good. You spin. And Browning was the
first person to really capture that spin in poetry.
He created characters who were messy, real, and
often totally unreliable narrators. So before
Browning, poetry was all about capital T truth.
For the most part, yeah. It was about beauty
or God or nature. Browning comes along and introduces
the idea that truth is subjective and depends
entirely on who is doing the talking. So our
mission for this deep dive is to unpack this
man. We want to see how a guy who is accused
of being willfully obscure. And oh, we have some
truly savage stories about that later. Oh, they
are brutal. How he became this literary sage.
We're going to look at how he invented the dramatic
monologue, which is basically a fancy term for
letting a villain talk until they incriminate
themselves. And we cannot forget the life he
lived. This isn't a story of a guy sitting in
a room alone for 80 years staring at a wall.
Not even close. This involves one of history's
great romances, a secret marriage, a midnight
escape to Italy to flee a tyrannical father.
and even a physical altercation with a famous
spiritual medium. Oh, the spiritualist beatdown
is definitely my favorite part of the research
pile. It's so good. It's rare you get a major
poet getting into a shoving match with a ghost
summoner. So we've got a lot of source material
here, biographical details, publication histories,
some very, very harsh critical reviews and anecdotes
about his life in London and Italy. So let's
rewind to the beginning. Let's go to Camberwell,
England in... 1812. 1812. It's a turbulent time
in Europe. The Napoleonic Wars are raging. The
world is shifting. But in the Browning household
in Camberwell, things were quiet. But culturally,
they were incredibly dense. Culturally dense.
I like that. It's a polite way of saying his
dad was a hoarder. A collector. Let's call him
a literary collector. Okay. Okay. Okay. A collector.
So Robert Browning is born to a bank clerk. His
dad works for the Bank of England, making about
150 pounds a year. Which is a decent middle class
wage for the time. They aren't starving, but
they aren't. wealthy aristocrats by any stretch.
But here's the kicker. His dad has a personal
library of six thousand books. Just pause and
think about the logistics of that. Right. Six
thousand books in a private home in the early
19th century. Books were not cheap paperbacks
you grab at the airport. They were expensive
objects. They were heavy. They took up space.
It's an obsession. It's a total obsession. To
amass 6 ,000 volumes on a bank clerk's salary
implies this man valued knowledge above all else.
And these weren't just the standard bestsellers
of the day. These were rare books, eclectic topics,
history, languages, obscure treatises on magic
and alchemy. It sounds like the Internet before
the Internet. Just a repository of random, incredible...
information. That is a great way to view it.
It was an analog database and young Robert had
a library card with no limits. And his dad wasn't
just some boring number cruncher who liked reading.
He was a man of principle. The notes mentioned
he had actually been sent to the West Indies
to work on a sugar plantation in St. Kitts. Yeah,
his family had money there. But he gave it up.
This is a crucial piece of the puzzle regarding
Browning's moral formation. Robert's father was
an abolitionist. He went to the Caribbean as
a young man expecting to take over the family
business. But he witnessed a slave revolt and
saw the brutality of the plantation system firsthand.
And he just couldn't do it. He couldn't stomach
it. He essentially walked away from a fortune
because he refused to profit from slavery. He
came back to England to work as a clerk for a
modest wage rather than be a wealthy planter.
Wow. That sets a pretty high bar for the household.
You have this father who sacrificed wealth for
principle and who values knowledge above almost
anything else. It creates an atmosphere where
integrity and intellect are the two most important
currencies. Precisely. And then you have Robert's
mother, who was a talented musician and a devout
nonconformist Christian. Robert was incredibly
close to her. Some biographers even say he was
a bit of a mama's boy well into adulthood. So
you have this boy, Robert. growing up in this
hothouse environment, and the sources say he
was essentially unschooled. Which, to modern
ears, sounds like he was uneducated or illiterate.
But in Browning's case, it's actually the opposite,
right? Exactly. He tried a couple of private
schools, but he hated them. Yeah. He had what
he called an insuperable dislike of school life.
The regimentation, the dullying, the rote learning,
it didn't work for his brain. So he just went
home. He was tutored in that library. It's like
the ultimate homeschooling experience, but on
steroids. He didn't follow a curriculum. He just
devoured those 6 ,000 books. And the result is
kind of terrifying. By age 14, he's fluent in
French, Greek, Italian, and Latin. 14. 14. But
more importantly, it creates a very specific
kind of intellect. When you go to a university,
Oxford or Cambridge, you are taught how to think
in a certain structured way. You read the canon
in a specific order. You learn to write in a
specific style. There's a path. There's a path.
Browning didn't have that. He was trained by
his own random, intense curiosity. It's like
he was building a puzzle. But he had pieces from
five different boxes. He's reading a medical
textbook from 1600, then a history of the popes,
then a book on biology, and mixing it all together
in his head. Exactly. It meant his vocabulary
was eclectic and, to many, overwhelming. He made
connections that other people wouldn't make because
they hadn't read those obscure texts that he
found on his dad's shelf. This explains so much
about why his poetry later became so difficult
for the average reader. He assumed everyone had
read the same 6 ,000 weird books he had. He was
operating on a different set of references. And
he started writing early. He wrote a whole book
of poetry at age 12, which he later destroyed
because he couldn't find a publisher. Which is
honestly very relatable content for any writer.
So true. But then, like every moody, intelligent
teenager in the 19th century, he discovered Shelley.
Perceive as Shelley, the ultimate romantic rebel.
If you were a distinct, angsty teen in the 1820s,
Shelley was your idol. He was the rock star.
And Browning goes all in. He adopts atheism and
vegetarianism just to be like Shelley. It's the
19th century equivalent of dyeing your hair black
and wearing eyeliner because you like a band.
It totally is. It was a phase. but an intense
one. It's that teenage need to define yourself
against your parents. His mother was deeply religious,
so of course he becomes an atheist. His family
eats roast beef, so he becomes a vegetarian.
He wanted to be a radical. And this phase gets
noticed. John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher,
actually read some of Browning's early work,
specifically a poem called Pauline, which was
heavily influenced by this Shelley phase. And
Mill's comment was brutal. What did the great
philosopher say? He wrote in the margins that
the author suffered from an intense and morbid
self -consciousness. Ouch. That is not what you
want John Stuart Mill saying about your diary.
Morbid self -consciousness. It's harsh, but probably
accurate. Browning was trying to figure out who
he was. He was incredibly bright, overeducated
in this unconventional way, and trying to channel
all that intensity into poetry. He was unschooled,
as we said, but he did briefly attend University
College London at 16, but left after a year.
Why didn't he go to Oxford or Cambridge? I mean,
if he was this genius, surely that was the path.
He couldn't. His parents were nonconformists,
meaning they were Protestants but not members
of the Church of England. At that time, Oxford
and Cambridge were only open to Anglicans. Ah,
right. So he's an outsider by default. He's smart
enough for Oxford, but he's locked out by the
religious rules of the time. So he's living at
home until he's 34, dependent on his parents,
refusing a real job, and just writing poetry.
It sounds like a recipe for a failure to launch.
And that's exactly what it looked like for a
long time. He had this incredible foundation,
but he had to learn how to communicate it to
the world. For a long time, he was just shouting
into the void. And that brings us perfectly to
the crash. Yeah. Because usually in these biographies,
you hear about the struggle and then the big
break. Browning had a mini break. and then a
massive face plant that nearly ended his career
before it began. That's a very fair assessment.
His first big poem, Paracelsus, came out in 1835.
It was about a 16th century alchemist. And it
actually did well. People liked it. Yeah. Dickens,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, they all saw this and thought,
okay, this kid has something. He was the new
it boy for a hot second. He was invited to the
dinners. He was meeting the literary lions. He'd
arrived. He thought he'd arrived. But then comes
1840. and the publication of Sordello. The name
alone makes Victorian literature students shudder.
Let's unpack this disaster. What was Sordello?
Well, on paper, it sounds epic. It's a long poem
set during the wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines
in medieval Italy. Okay. Complicated, but interesting.
It's about a troubadour. A poet named Sordello,
who is actually mentioned briefly in Dante's
Divine Comedy. Browning went to Italy to research
it. He wanted to write this massive historical
narrative about the role of the poet in society
and the conflict between the contemplative life
and the active life. That sounds ambitious, but
not necessarily disastrous. The problem was the
execution. It was impenetrable. It was dense.
The references were obscure. The syntax was knotted.
He assumed the reader knew as much about medieval
Italian politics as he did. Back to the 6 ,000
books problem. Exactly. He skipped transitions.
He jumped between thoughts. It was like reading
the raw output of his brain without any editing
for the reader's benefit. And the reaction wasn't
just, this is bad. It was, what is this? The
anecdotes from the sources are absolutely savage.
We have to talk about Tennyson's reaction because
it perfectly encapsulates the confusion. Alfred
Lord Tennyson, arguably the greatest poet of
the age and a friend of Browning's. A friend.
A friend. He tried to read it. He later claimed
that he only understood two lines in the entire
poem. The first line and the last line. And what
were they? The first line was, who will may hear
Sordello's story told? And the last line was,
who would has heard Sordello's story told? Simple
enough. I'm going to tell you a story and I told
you a story. Except Tennyson added, and they
were both lies. Oh, that's cool. He meant he
didn't hear the story told because he couldn't
understand a word of the middle. That is brutal.
But my favorite is Jane Walsh Carlyle. She was
the wife of Thomas Carlyle, the famous historian.
She read the whole thing, which shows incredible
fortitude. A true hero. And her review was that
she couldn't tell whether Sordello was a book,
a city, or a man. It's funny now, but it was
devastating for Browning. This wasn't just a
bad review. It destroyed his reputation. He became
known for wanton carelessness and obscurity.
He went from being the promising young genius
to the guy who writes nonsense. It took his career
over a decade to recover from Sordello. People
literally stopped buying his books. Yeah, his
publisher told him they'd only print his next
works if he paid for the printing costs himself.
Imagine that feeling. You're the smartest guy
in the room. Literally, you have the 6 ,000 books
in your head, but you can't get the ideas out
in a way that people understand. You're transmitting
on a frequency nobody else can hear. And that
failure is crucial. It forced him to pivot. He
realized he couldn't just dump his brain onto
the page. He needed a vehicle. He needed a way
to package his complexity that engaged the reader
rather than pushing them away. He needed to find
a way to make the obscurity part of the character,
not the author. But before he found that artistic
vehicle, he found an escape route from his life
in London. A literal escape route. The Great
Escape. We are moving to Section 3. Romance and
Italy. Because while the critics were dunking
on Sordello, something else was happening. In
1845, Robert reads a collection of poems by Elizabeth
Barrett, and he decides to write her a letter.
We have to understand the power dynamic here
to really appreciate the audacity of this. Today,
we often think of them as a pair, or maybe we
even think of Robert as the more famous one because
My Last Duchess is in every anthology. Right.
But in 1845, she was the star. She was the celebrity.
Absolutely. She was six years older than him.
She was semi -invalid, largely confined to her
room in her father's house on Wimpole Street
due to a spinal injury and chronic illness. But
her poetry was incredibly popular. She was a
household name. A household name. A serious contender
for Poet Laureate later on. Robert was the difficult,
obscure guy who wrote that unreadable poem about
the Italian troubadour. So he writes her a letter.
I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss
Barrett. And then later in the same letter, I
love you too. Which is a bold move for a fan
letter. This is a very bold move. Great poems.
Also, I love you. It was incredibly bold. But
it worked. It struck a chord. It started a correspondence
that is now legendary. They wrote hundreds of
letters. They discussed poetry, philosophy, religion,
and eventually their feelings. They fell in love
through words before they really spent time together.
But there was a major obstacle. A huge one. The
villain. Every good story needs a villain. Enter
Mr. Barrett. Elizabeth's father. He was tyrannical
is the word often used. He had forbidden any
of his children from marrying. Any of them. any
of them he threatened to disinherit them if they
did he wanted to keep them especially elizabeth
under his control he treated his family almost
like property there is a lot of speculation about
why he was this way controlling possessive perhaps
afraid of losing his authority but the effect
was that wimpole street was a prison so this
wasn't just a courtship it was a conspiracy it
was they had to meet in secret robert would come
to the house while the father was away They got
married in secret in September 1846, and then
a week later, they ran. They fled to Italy, first
Pisa, then Florence. They settled in Casaguiti,
and this move changed everything for Browning.
He later said, Italy was my university. Which
is a great line, considering he barely went to
a real university. But what he meant was that
after years of learning from books in his father's
library, he was now learning from life. From
the world. From the world. He was seeing the
art, the architecture, the messy history, the
people on the street. Italy is vibrant, chaotic,
and sensory. It pulled him out of his head and
into the world. He wasn't just reading about
gulfs and ghibellines anymore. He was walking
the streets where they fought. And they were
happy, right? This wasn't a tragic, brooding
romance where they made each other miserable.
By all accounts, it was a very happy marriage.
They had a son, Robert Weidman Barrett Browning,
known as Penn. They had 15 children. years together,
but the professional dynamic remained interesting.
Elizabeth was still the breadwinner. She was
the star. She was the one receiving visitors
and praise. Robert was often dismissed by critics
back in England. Some even attacked him for deserting
England, calling him a runaway. There's such
an irony there. You have Robert, the guy writing
these dark, twisted psychological poems, living
this sunny rom -com life in Italy. Exactly. And
you have Elizabeth, who wrote these beautiful,
sweet sonnets from the Portuguese, who came from
this dark... abusive family situation. It's a
fascinating contrast. But that happiness and
that distance from the London critics gave Robert
the space to refine his new style. He started
working on the poems that would eventually make
up the collection Men and Women. This is where
he perfects it. This is where he perfects the
dramatic monologue. This is where he takes the
failure of Sordello and turns it into a new art
form. Okay, let's unpack this. This is section
four, the innovation. The dramatic monologue.
This is the thing that makes Browning, Browning.
Yeah. What exactly is it and how is it different
from just talking? Or a soliloquy. The key distinction
is between a soliloquy and a dramatic monologue.
In a Shakespearean soliloquy, like Hamlet's To
Be or Not To Be, or Macbeth's Is This a Dagger,
which I see before me, the character is usually
alone. They are speaking to the audience or themselves,
and crucially, they are generally telling the
truth about their feelings. They are revealing
their inner self honestly. Right. Hamlet isn't
lying to us. He's confused. He's existential.
But he's honest with the audience. Exactly. But
in a Browning dramatic monologue, the speaker
is talking to a specific person in the scene,
a silent listener. And crucially. the speaker
is not telling the truth. Or not full truth.
Or not the whole truth. Or at least they aren't
trying to reveal their true nature. They're usually
trying to justify themselves, rationalize a crime,
impress someone, or seduce someone. But in doing
so, they inadvertently give themselves away.
I love this description from the notes. The meaning
is not what the speaker voluntarily reveals,
but what he inadvertently gives away. It's like
watching a suspect in an interrogation room who
thinks they're talking their way out of it. But
every word is digging the hole deeper. That is
the perfect analogy. And the best example, the
one everyone should read, is My Last Duchess.
Oh, it's a classic. Set the scene for us. So
the speaker is the Duke of Ferrara, an Italian
Renaissance nobleman. He's talking to an emissary
who has come to arrange his next marriage. His
next marriage. Important detail. Very important.
He takes this emissary upstairs to show him a
painting of his previous wife, his last duchess,
which is kept behind a curtain that only he is
allowed to open. That's red flag number one.
I keep my dead wife's picture behind a curtain
and I control who sees her. Exactly. It's about
control. And as he talks about the painting,
he starts complaining about her. But listen to
what he complains about. He says she was too
easily pleased. She smiled at everyone. The horror.
The horror. She treated the Duke's gift of a
900 years old name the same way she treated a
sunset or a bow of cherry as someone brought
her from the orchard. He was jealous that she
was happy. He was jealous that he couldn't control
her happiness. He wanted to be the only source
of joy in her life. He felt that her appreciating
a sunset, something free and natural, was an
insult to his expensive heritage. It's pathological
narcissism. And then he drops the hammer. He
says, I gave commands. Then all smiles stop together.
Chills. Every time. I gave commands, then all
smiles stop together. He implies he had her killed,
but he says it so casually while discussing art.
And notice the context. He is telling this to
the guy arranging his next marriage. He is effectively
giving a warning. My next wife better not be
like the last one. This is what happens if you
smile at the mailman. Pretty much. And then he
immediately moves on to discussing the dowry
and points out a statue of Neptune taming a seahorse.
The symbolism is blatant. He wants to be Neptune
taming the woman. The listener, the emissary,
and the reader are left horrified. But the Duke
thinks he's just being a sophisticated art collector.
That is the genius of it. You, the reader, have
to do the work. Browning doesn't say the Duke
is a bad man. He lets the Duke speak and you
figure it out. Precisely. It turns the reader
into a detective. You have to read between the
lines. He does it with other characters, too.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister is another
great one. It's a monk watching a fellow monk
gardening. And the speaker just hates this other
monk. He's growling, oh, my heart's abhorrence.
He hates him for such petty reasons, right? Like
how he places his knife and fork. Yes. He criticizes
the other monk, Brother Lawrence, for being too
simple, for talking about his melons, for how
he drinks his water. But as the poem goes on,
we realize the speaker is actually the sinful
one. He's projecting. Totally. He's full of lust.
He's watching women washing clothes nearby. He's
full of envy and he's full of rage. He's planning
to trip the other monk up or trick him into heresy.
He's projecting all his own dauntless onto this
innocent gardener. It's a study in hypocrisy.
And then there's Porphyria's lover. This one
is, well, it's straight up criminal minds. It's
darker than the others. It is. It starts with
a storm. A woman, Porphyria, comes in from the
rain to visit her lover. She lights the fire.
She's being affectionate. And the lover, the
speaker. realizes that in this moment, she worships
him perfectly. She is his. She is his. She has
defied societal rules. She's likely from a higher
class to come see him. And he thinks, she is
mine. Fair, perfectly pure, and good. So to preserve
that moment forever, to stop her from ever leaving
or changing her mind. He wants to freeze time.
Exactly. So he strangles her. With her own hair.
With her own hair. And then, and this is the
part that really disturbs people, he opens her
eyes, unwinds the hair, and props her head up
on his shoulder. He sits there with the corpse.
And he says this chilling line. No pain felt
she. I am quite sure she felt no pain. He's rationalizing
the murder as an act of love. As a kindness.
It's the ultimate act of possession. And the
poem ends with him sitting there with the body
saying, and yet God has not said a word. Like
he's waiting for lightning to strike. And because
it hasn't, he thinks he's justified. It's deeply
disturbing. But again, it's about that psychological
deep dive. Browning isn't endorsing this violence.
He's exploring the twisted logic of a mind that
thinks killing someone is a way to keep them.
He's showing us the danger of possessiveness
taken to its absolute extreme. Why does this
matter so much? I mean, obviously there are great
creepy poems, but you mentioned earlier that
this bridged the gap to modern literature. Browning
shifted the focus of poetry. The Romantics, Shelley,
Wordsworth, Keats were often focused on the sublime.
on nature, on big abstract emotions. Browning
focused on the psychological. He influenced T
.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and even modern novelists.
The unreliable narrator. The idea of the unreliable
narrator, which is so huge in fiction today,
think of Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, or
even Lolita, owes a huge debt to Browning's dramatic
monologues. He taught writers that a character's
voice could be a puzzle to be solved, not just
a way to convey information. It's interesting
that he was so good at spotting fakes, liars,
and manipulators in his poetry because that leads
us directly to section five, the spirit. foot
incident. Oh, this is a wild story. This is where
Browning the skeptic meets the 19th century craze
for spiritualism. So in the 1850s, spiritualism,
talking to the dead, seances, mediums, table
turning was huge. It was the Marvel movie franchise
of the Victorian era. Everyone was into it. It
was a mix of parlor game and religion. And Elizabeth
Barrett Browning was a believer. She really wanted
it to be true. She found comfort in the idea
of the spirit world. Robert, on the other hand,
was a rationalist. He hated it. He thought it
was all manipulation and fraud, preying on grieving
people. Enter Daniel Dungless Holm. He was the
superstar medium of the day. He was. He was the
Uri Geller of the 1850s. He claimed he could
levitate, handle hot coals, summon spirits, play
accordions without touching them. So the Brownings
go to a seance with him. Yes. In July 1855, in
Ealing. The lights are low. The tension is high.
And things get weird. During the seance, a wreath
of clematis flowers floats off the table and
lands on Elizabeth's head. She is deeply moved.
Then a spirit face materializes above the table.
Home claims it is the spirit of Robert's son,
who died in infancy. Oh, he's playing on their
emotions, trying to hook them. He is. The tension
in the room must have been palpable. Elizabeth
is likely in tears. Robert is simmering. And
he's simmering because he knew two things. One,
he thought home was a fraud. And two, and this
is the kicker, Browning never lost a son in infancy.
Wait, really? Really. They had Penn, who was
alive and well. They hadn't lost an infant. So
home was not only faking it, he was bad at his
research, he was cold reading, and he missed
badly. So what does Robert do? Does he politely
cough and correct him? No. He lunges. he seizes
the spirit face he physically grabs the ghost
he grabs it and it turns out to be daniel douglas
holmes barefoot no yes he grabbed the guy's foot
i've got your spirit face right here pal that
is incredible so home had slipped his shoe off
under the table And was waggling his foot around
in the dark. It was a double fraud. A fake face
that was actually a foot. And a fake dead son.
Browning was furious. He essentially kicked home
out of the house. And he wrote an angry letter
to the Times calling the whole thing a cheat
and imposture. He did. But he didn't stop there.
He wrote a poem about it because that is how
poets exact revenge. Of course. He wrote Mr.
Sludge, the medium. It's a scathing satire where
medium confesses to being a cheat. It starts
with lines like, now don't, sir. Don't expose
me. Just this once. It's Browning using his dramatic
monologue technique to dissect the mind of a
con artist who rationalizes his lies by saying,
well, the people want to be fooled. I'm just
giving them what they want. I wonder how that
went over at the dinner table with Elizabeth.
It was a sore spot. Elizabeth remained convinced
that some phenomena were genuine, despite the
home incident. She wanted to believe in the afterlife
in a tangible way. It was a constant source of
disagreement. But it highlights Browning's character.
He hated manipulation. He hated people using
emotions to control others. Which ironically
is exactly what the villains in his poems do.
Exactly. He despised it in real life, so he explored
it in his art. So Elizabeth passes away in 1861.
Robert is devastated. He takes their son, Penn,
and moves back to London. He's now a widower.
He's in his 50s. And let's be honest, his reputation
is still recovering from the Sordello disaster
years ago. He is well known, but he isn't loved
by the public yet. He needs a win. And he gets
the biggest win of his life. This is Section
6, the masterpiece, the ring in the book. This
thing is massive. A monster. It is. Published
between 1868 and 1869, it's over 20 ,000 lines
long. To give you context, that is twice as long
as Milton's Paradise Lost. It came out in four
volumes. And the premise is basically a true
crime documentary. That's a great way to put
it. Browning found an old yellow book in a flea
market in Florence. It wasn't a novel. It was
a collection of legal documents about a Roman
murder case from the 1690s. So this is a real
case. A real case. It was a mesmerizingly sordid
tale of a nobleman, Count Guido Franceschini,
who murders his wife, Pompilia, and her parents
because he thinks she cheated on him with a priest,
Caponsacci. Classic tabloid stuff. Adultery,
murder. priests, noblemen. But Browning doesn't
just tell the story from start to finish. No,
he applies his dramatic monologue technique on
an epic scale. The poem consists of 12 books.
Essentially, it tells the same story 10 different
times from different perspectives. So you get
the husband's side, the wife's side, the priest's
side. The witnesses, the lawyers, the pope. Everyone
tells the story, but the truth shifts depending
on who is speaking. The husband paints himself
as a victim of a loose woman and a gold -digging
family. The wife paints herself as a victim of
a cruel, abusive tyrant. The lawyers spin the
law to fit their arguments. It's a tour de force
of relativity. It sounds like the movie Rashomon,
but written 80 years earlier. Exactly. It forces
the reader to sift through all these biases to
find the moral center. Browning is showing us
that truth is often fragmented. You can't just
take one person's word for it. You have to synthesize
the truth from all the lies. It sounds exhausting,
but in a good way. Like you're on the jury for
a very complicated trial. And the public loved
it. They ate it up. Finally, after 40 years of
writing, Browning got the renown he craved. He
wasn't just the obscure poet anymore. He was
a sage, a philosopher poet. The Robert Browning
Society was formed while he was still alive to
study his work. Which was rare. Usually you have
to die to get a society dedicated to you. It
was almost unheard of. He finally made it. He
became a Victorian institution. But even institutions
are mortal. And that brings us to Section 7,
which I find really moving. The voice from beyond
the grave. This is a fascinating bit of history.
We are so used to recorded audio now. We're recording
this right now. People send voice notes. But
in 1889, capturing a human voice was science
fiction. The date is April 7, 1889. a dinner
party at the home of Rudolph Lehman, and a representative
of Thomas Edison is there. George Geroad. He
brings a phonograph and a white wax cylinder.
He asks Browning to speak into it. Browning is
old now. He's 77 years old. And Browning, the
great poet, decides to recite one of his most
famous fast -paced poems. How they brought the
good news from Ghent to X. He starts reciting,
I sprang to the stirrup and Joris, and he's getting
into the rhythm of the galloping horses. But
then... He forgets the words. He stumbles. He
stops. On the recording, which still exists,
you can find it online, you can hear him say,
I'm terribly sorry, but I can't remember my own
verses. And he laughs about it. He laughs and
asks others to help him. That is so human. The
man who wrote millions of words, the man with
the 6 ,000 book library in his head, blanks on
his own hit single. It's charming. But it's also
poignant. He died later that year, in December
1889 in Venice. When that recording was played
a year later on the anniversary of his death,
people said it was the first time a voice had
been heard from beyond the grave. It's one of
the oldest surviving recordings of a notable
person in the UK. It's a ghostly connection to
a man who spent his life trying to capture the
voices of others. Now let's jump to the present.
Section 8. Pop culture and modern legacy. Because
Browning isn't just dusty history. He pops up
in some very weird places in our modern media
diet. He really does. Let's start with Stephen
King. If you are a fan of the Dark Tower series,
which is this massive, sprawling fantasy epic
that ties all of King's books together, you have
to know that the entire thing is inspired by
Browning's poem, Child Roll Into the Dark Tower
Came. Which itself is a very weird nightmare
logic poem. It is. It's about a knight traversing
a wasteland to reach a mysterious tower. It's
surreal, apocalyptic, filled with grotesque imagery.
And King just ran with that. He took that imagery,
the bleak landscape, the tower as a focal point
of destiny, and built a multi -book universe
around it. The vibe of the Dark Tower is pure
browning. And then there's anime. Neon Genesis
Evangelion. If you know, you know. The slogan
for NRV, the secret organization in the show,
is gods in his heaven all's right with the world.
Which is a line from Browning's Pippa Passes.
It is, although people often misuse that quote
to mean everything is great. In the poem, it's
spoken by an innocent girl, Pippa, and the irony
is that she walks past scenes of terrible crime
and corruption while singing it. So is ironic.
Deeply ironic. And in the anime, it takes on
a similarly ironic, almost sinister tone. It's
about how the world appears orderly from above,
but is chaos on the ground. And we can't forget
the romance, the Barretts of Wimpole Street.
The play and the film solidified the Robert and
Elizabeth story as the ultimate literary love
story. It made them celebrities in the 20th century
in a way that perhaps overshadowed the poetry
for a while. People knew the love story before
they knew the verses. And A .S. Byatt's possession.
A brilliant novel. The Victorian poet in that
book, Randolph Henry Ashe, is loosely based on
Browning. It captures that scholarly, passionate,
slightly rough -around -the -edges quality he
had. It shows how his presence still looms. over
literary scholarship. So bring it all together
for us. Why does he endure? Why do we still care
about a guy who wrote difficult poems 150 years
ago? I think Harold Bloom put it best. He said,
Browning unfolds a multi -personed literary and
human self. Basically, Browning challenges you.
He doesn't hand you the answer. He forces you
to engage, to judge, to think critically. You're
an active participant. You're active, not passive.
When you read a Browning monologue, you have
to figure out who is lying, who is crazy, and
where the truth hides. That is a very modern
experience. We live in a world of information
overload and unreliable narrators. Browning was
the first one to really gamify that in poetry.
He makes you do the work, so the aha. Moment
feels earned. Exactly. He respects the reader's
intelligence. He assumes you are smart enough
to figure it out. So to recap, we went from the
boy in the library of 6 ,000 books to the morbidly
self -conscious teenager to the misunderstood
failure of Sordello, then the romantic hero stealing
Elizabeth away to Italy, and finally the master
of psychology who taught us that everyone's the
hero of their own story, even the murderers.
A man who believed, as he wrote in Andrea del
Sarto, that a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
or what's a heaven for? He always reached for
more complexity, more truth, more depth. And
here is a final provocative thought for you to
chew on. Browning was a master of masks. He spoke
through hundreds of characters, dukes, murderers,
bishops, mediums, to avoid speaking directly
as himself. He found truth through fiction. In
our modern world, we are obsessed with speaking
our truth and curating our personas on social
media. We think we are being authentic, but we
are often performing. That's a great point. We
are all rating our own dramatic monologues on
Instagram or LinkedIn. We are presenting a version
of ourselves. So, is Browning's method admitting
that you are wearing a mask and revealing the
truth through a character actually more honest
than our modern obsession with being real? Maybe
fiction is the only way to tell the whole truth.
That is something to think about. Perhaps the
mask allows us to say things the face never could.
If you want to dip your toe into Browning's world,
don't be intimidated. Go read My Last Duchess.
It's short, it's creepy, and it's a masterclass.
Read it and play detective. Ask yourself, what
is this guy not telling me? You won't regret
it. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive into
the mind of Robert Browning. We'll see you next
time.