He did not Sit Five Minutes: The Conversion of Gigadibs

ROBERT G. LAIRD 'He did not Sit Five Minutes': The Conversion of Gigadibs Ever since its first publication in Men and Women in 1855, 'Bishop Blougram's Apology' has been recognized as one of Browning's most intricate and ambitious shorter poems. Because of the extreme subtlety of the poem, however, critics have spent their time discussing its philosophical and rhetorical difficulties, and this emphasis has meant that many basic questions about the poem still remain unanswered. To this day no fully satisfactory solutions to the following four problems have been offered: is there a historical model for Gigadibs; when was the poem written; where is the poem set and what is the importance of this setting; and why did Browning write the poem when he did. By presenting in this paper substantial new information in an attempt to answer these problems, I hope to correct some generally accepted misinterpretations of the poem. In considering possible sources for the two characters in the poem, there seems little reason to doubt Browning's own statement that Cardinal Wiseman was the model for the Bishop. At the same time, there is also little evidence to show that Blougram is intended as a caricature or specific satire of the Cardinal.1 It is true that some contemporary readers did identify Blougram with Wiseman but, as Rupert E. Palmer, Jr concludes in his well-argued essay 'The Uses of Character in "Bishop Blougram's Apology",' since we have 'no dependable evidence of even the poet's intention with regard to the character of Blougram, we can define that character only by reference to what Blougram says in the poem.'2 Roma King, Jr, then, in The Bow and the Lyre, is probably correct when he maintains that the poem is 'no more an accurate picture of Cardinal Wiseman ... than "The Lost Leader" is of Wordsworth,'3 and while Wiseman was no doubt the basic model for Blougram, the finished portrait is finally as fictional as that of the other Bishop, the one whom we overhear ordering his tomb. While the greatest difficulty with the identification of Blougram and Wiseman is simply that it is usually taken too far, DeVane's suggestion that Francis Mahony ('Father Prout') was the model for Gigadibs seems not only incorrect but misleading when one ultimately tries to determine Browning's attitude toward his young sceptical joumalist.4 It is easy to demonstrate some of the many inconsistencies which exist if one accepts UTQ, Volume XLV, Number 4, Summer 1976 296 ROBERT G. LAIRD Mahony as the prototype of Gigadibs. First, while Mahony was, in his Father Prout role, a writer for Fraser's Magazine, Gigadibs writes 'statedly' for Blackwood's (l. 945).5 Second, Mahony wrote nothing identifiable concerning Hamlet (1. 946L nor anything that might have been remotely mistaken for the 'true Dickens' (1. 950). Finally, Mahony spent his entire life in England and the Continent, coming no closer to Australia than did Browning himself.6 More recently, Ian Jack has theorized that Browning's old friend Alfred Domett suggested the character of Gigadibs.7 While one cannot disagree with Professor Jack's statement that Browning would have remembered Domett's earlier departure for New Zealand when he came to write the poem, the rest of the evidence is highly tenuous.8 Rather than trying to prove, however, that Domett is not the model for Gigadibs (although he is a better possibility than Mahony), it is easier and more worthwhile to show that there is an even more obvious candidate than the prototype of Waring. And there is someone, a lifelong friend of both the Brownings, who fulfils almost every requirement for such a model: Richard Henry (Hengist) Home, best known today for his Orion, 'the farthing epic,' and the collection of critical portraits of contemporary authors entitledANew Spirit of the Age. The story of Home's long and chequered career has been told by Cyril Pearl in his Always Morning,9 and more recently by Mrs Ann Blainey in The Farthing Poet.10 Home was born in 1802, travelled in the Caribbean and in North America during the 1820S, made a rather flashy appearance in the world...