Browning: London’s Other Giant of 1812
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This day in London history time.
This day is May 7th.
And on May 7th, 1812, in Camberwell, south London, Robert Browning was born.
Now that’s a pretty
good opening gambit from the year 1812, because just three months earlier, in Portsmouth, another baby had arrived. Charles Dickens.
The nineteenth century is barely out of nappies and already it has produced its two great London voice-merchants.
And think about the world Browning is born into. Napoleon marching on Moscow. America at war with Britain. The Prime Minister assassinated in Westminster. Byron waking up famous. Luddites smashing machinery in the north. Gaslights beginning to flicker on in London streets.
History everywhere seems to be kicking doors off hinges.
And in a cottage in Camberwell, a baby who will grow up to become the great voice-collector of the Victorian age.
Dickens will become the supreme novelist of London streets, fog, debt, law courts, prisons, clerks, crossings, door-knockers, boiled beef, punch bowls, and people called Mr Snagsby.
Browning will become something stranger. London-born, London-educated,
London-returned, London-buried.
But his mind is a sort of international railway terminus. Italy, Greece, Rome, Renaissance murder trials, medieval troubadours, crooked bishops, mad dukes, dodgy painters, saints, frauds, lovers, monks, mystics, villains, and people who talk and talk and talk until, usually, they give themselves away.
That’s Browning’s great trick. He hands somebody the microphone and lets them hang themselves with it.
He’s the master of the dramatic monologue. Which is to say, one person speaking, but the whole room listening. And behind the speaker, somewhere in the shadows, Browning, smiling like a man who knows where the bodies are buried.
But let’s bring him home. Because Browning is one of ours. South London born.
Camberwell.
Peckham schooling.
Dulwich Picture Gallery nearby. A father who worked at the Bank of England and had a magnificent library. A mother who gave him music.
A family house that was not just a home, but a private university with curtains.
Young Robert Browning was one of those alarming children who seems to have been born already footnoted. He read early.
He rhymed early.
He showed off early.
He learned Latin and Greek. He adored music. He fell under the spell of Shelley, became briefly vegetarian, briefly atheist, and no doubt briefly insufferable.
You can see the scene. Camberwell parents looking at this high-voltage young poet and thinking, “Good heavens, perhaps we should have encouraged accountancy.”
He went to the new University of London, lodged near Bedford Square, disliked the lectures, disliked student life, and went home. Very Browning. He didn’t need a system. He had his father’s books, his own appetite, and a brain like a fireworks factory.
Then came the early poems. Then the difficulty.
Ah yes, Browning and difficulty. That faithful old marriage.
His poem Sordello became famous for being incomprehensible.
There’s a wonderful old line attributed to Tennyson, who said he understood only two lines of it, the first and the last, and both were lies.
That may be unfair. But it’s funny. And with Browning, funny helps.
Because the great thing about Browning is that he is not a marble bust.
He’s alive, energetic, argumentative, dandyish, clever, awkward, tender, maddening, theatrical. He’s one of those writers who does not walk into a room. He bursts in, already mid-sentence.
And then love.
The great literary love story.
Elizabeth Barrett, already famous, already admired, and shut away at 50 Wimpole Street. Robert writes to her in January 1845. One of the great opening moves in literary courtship:
“I love your verse with all my heart… and I love you too.”
Well. That is not exactly shy work.
He visits her in Wimpole Street. He falls in love. She fears her tyrannical father.
They correspond. They conspire. They marry secretly at St Marylebone Church in September 1846. Then they flee. Paris, then Italy, then Florence.
Flush the dog goes too. We must not forget Flush. No great Victorian elopement is complete without a spaniel.
And in Italy they’re happy.
Casa Guidi, Florence, the Pitti Palace, the Ponte Vecchio, politics, poetry, illness, love, their son Pen. And yet England stays in Browning’s imagination. Listen to this, from Home-Thoughts, from Abroad:
“Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there…”
It’s one of those lines everybody half-knows, even if they don’t know they know it.
And it’s not London exactly, no. It’s England. Blossom, birds, hedges, spring. But it matters because it’s Browning abroad, looking back.
The London boy in Italy, hearing English birdsong in his head.
And there’s London proper in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. A man crossing a common on a wet Christmas Eve, ducking into a dissenting chapel, chimney-stacks and roofs, the city’s weather, the city’s religion, the city’s awkward human crowding. Browning’s London is not always postcard London.
It’s often mental London.
A place where belief, doubt, class, weather, noise, and conscience all jostle together under one dripping umbrella.
Then tragedy.
Elizabeth dies in Florence in 1861, in his arms.
Browning is devastated.
And what does he do?
He comes back to London.
That is the great second act.
The widower returns. He settles at 19 Warwick Crescent, near Little Venice. He walks.
He dines out.
He becomes a clubman,
a celebrity, a social figure.
He looks after Pen. His sister Sarianna keeps house.
London, having treated him warily as a young poet, now gradually receives him as one of its great men.
And then comes the big one:
The Ring and the Book.
Twenty-one thousand lines.
A Roman murder case.
Twelve books. Multiple voices. Everybody gets their say. Everybody is unreliable. Everybody is human. It’s Browning’s masterpiece, and London finally applauds.
The man who had been mocked as obscure becomes a sage. Browning Societies spring up. Admirers want to see him. Americans want autographs.
He becomes, deliciously, a Victorian lion.
And what a lion. Dapper. Sociable.
Dining out everywhere.
“As far a dandy as a sensible man can be,” said one observer. That’s a phrase worth keeping. As far a dandy as a sensible man can be.
The perfect London compliment. Peacock, but not lunatic.
Velvet waistcoat, but sound umbrella.
Late in life he moves
to De Vere Gardens in Kensington.
There’s London again. The south London boy now a grand old man in Kensington, famous across the English-speaking world.
And yet still restless,
still writing, still arguing,
still trying to get at truth through voices.
That’s Browning’s great London lesson, really.
The city is not one voice.
It is voices. Half-Rome,
Other Half-Rome, Wimpole Street, Camberwell, clubland, chapel, drawing room, courtroom, dinner table, deathbed, pulpit, studio,
street corner. Browning understood that truth does not arrive wearing a name badge.
It has to be teased out.
Cross-examined.
Heard from several mouths.
And then, the ending.
He dies in Venice on December 12th, 1889.
His son had hoped to bury him beside Elizabeth in Florence, but that couldn’t be done. And then came the offer from Westminster Abbey.
So Robert Browning came home.
A funeral in Venice first, with gondolas on the Grand Canal. Then the body returned by train to London.
And on December 31st, 1889, the Camberwell boy was buried in Poets’ Corner.
That’s the arc.
Camberwell to Venice to Westminster Abbey.
And if you want one last Browning line, take this from Rabbi Ben Ezra:
“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be…”
It’s often used sentimentally,
on cards and plaques and wedding readings.
But Browning is tougher than that.
He means life is struggle, incompletion, effort, argument. We are not finished things. We are becoming things.
And that feels right for London too.
London is never finished.
It’s always becoming.
It speaks in many voices.
Some clear, some cracked,
some comic, some dangerous. Browning heard that.
Browning made poetry out of that.
So today, May 7th, raise a glass to Robert Browning.
London-born. Italy-haunted. Westminster-buried.
The poet who turned speech into theatre, and character into revelation.
See you tomorrow.