Robert Browning in Contexts (review)

Robert Browning in Contexts, edited by John Woolford; pp. xxii + 247. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1998; London: Athlone Press, 1999, $40.00, £40.00.

Robert Browning belonged to the last generation of dissenting English Protestants who were barred because of their religious beliefs from entering Oxford and Cambridge Universities. In 1828, he attended the new London University for a few months, but quickly found the course of study then offered unsuited for a young literary man. Nonetheless, he is the first great poet the University produced. Over half of the contributors to this volume are critics and scholars of nineteenth-century literature at London University, who, along with some of their friends, are symbolically claiming Browning for their own.

As its catch-all title suggests, the collection does not form a whole, but instead accommodates the individual contributors' various critical and scholarly preoccupations. Some of the essays make valuable contributions to Browning criticism; others are slight, left-handed work; and a few should not have been included. The collection has as its frontispiece an 1856 photograph of Browning owned by Michael Meredith. The picture has appeared in print only once before and shows an alert, wary poet, whose graying beard is very full and whose hair is remarkably unkempt. This startling photograph will appeal to many Browning lovers, and will, I believe, quickly become the preferred picture of Browning for most Victorian scholars.

The best and most generous of the essays is Herbert F. Tucker's "Browning as Escape Artist: Avoidance and Intimacy." Its notes and bibliography provide a good overview of the most valuable Browning criticism of the last twenty years, and reflect the author's continuing engagement with the work of others in the field. Because Tucker holds the poet to a strict theology of syntax as, for example, in his interpretation of the "Prologue" to Asolando (1889), at times he reads Browning too much like John Ruskin did, and so does not spring over the chasms between poetic moments as Browning in his famous 1855 letter urges Ruskin to do. But Tucker is agile enough with his probing critical alpenstock in the higher reaches of Browning's poetry. He recognizes how Browning insists upon a sharp distinction between his private life and dramatized feeling throughout his poetry, explicitly so in "House" from Pacchiarotto (1876), and he convincingly shows how Browning escapes into his work.

In "Browning's Duds of Consciousness (or) No Gigadibs, No Bishop," John Maynard offers a delightful and engaging jeu d'esprit that describes many of the dramatic monologues' speakers from the imagined viewpoint of their auditors or, as he calls them, the poems' "dud consciousnesses." Striking a more serious note in "Me/Not-Me: The Narrator of 'A Death in the Desert,'" Adam Roberts elegantly marshalls his scholarship and builds up a suggestive portrait of the poem's narrator as a second-century Roman Christian, whose Greek initials make a small joke, as this reviewer once pointed out, because when transliterated they spell "me." If Roberts goes too far in substituting an eta for the poem's epsilon to arrive at a negative Greek prefix and thus his title's "not-me," he does so because he wants to show Browning artistically deconstructing the historical methods of the Higher Critics of the Bible.

Isobel Armstrong in "Caliban and Primitive Language," sketches an essay about the politics of nineteenth-century ideas concerning the origins of language as reflected in "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864), beginning with Gillian Beer's meditation in Forging the Missing Link (1993) on the connections between Browning's Caliban and Johann Gottfried Herder's "Essay on the Origin of Language" (1772), and then coming to rest unexpectedly upon the thinking about political violence and language in William Godwin's Political Justice (1793). Next, in a piece of unconscious editorial one-upmanship is John Woolford's "Self- Consciousness and Self-Expression in Caliban and Browning." Demonstrating his prowess as a textual critic, Woolford examines the Pierpont Morgan Library's manuscript draft...