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Robert Browning and His Son

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Gertrude Reese*
Affiliation:
University of Texas

Extract

Robert Browning's life falls into three sections. Thirty-three years form the first chapter: his birth in Camberwell on May 7, 1812; six years of schooling in Peckham; two years of study under a French tutor; a brief term at London University; two months in Russia in 1834, when he was twenty-two; three months in Italy in 1838; a second trip to Italy in 1844; a considerable quantity of poetic production that brought recognition from a few friends.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , September 1946 , pp. 784 - 803
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946

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References

1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859, ed. Leonard Huxley (London, 1929), p. 285.

2 Notes of Travel (Boston, 1870), iv, 69-70.

3 Katherine Burton, Sorrow Built a Bridge (New York, 1938), p. 67.

4 Letters of Robert Browning, collected by T. J. Wise, ed. T. L. Hood (New Haven, 1933), pp. 62-63.

5 Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, revised ed. by F. G. Kenyon (Boston, 1908), p. 247.

6 Ibid.; Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston, 1903), ii, 91.

7 Orr, op. cit., p. 247.

8 Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, 1897), i, 400-401.

9 I am indebted to Dr. A. J. Armstrong of Baylor University for permission to use forty-one unpublished letters from Jowett to Browning. Three of the letters—those of the dates April 1, 1867; December 22, 1867; October 8, 1868—and a portion of one dated March 18, 1886, are quoted below.

10 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 112.

11 Ibid., p. 109.

12 Ibid., p. 115.

13 Ibid., pp. 147-148.

14 Letters of Robert Browning to Miss Isa Blagden, arranged for publication by A. J. Armstrong (Waco, Texas, 1923), p. 109.

15 Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood, A Broken Friendship as Revealed by Their Letters, ed. Richard Curie (New York, 1937), p. 133.

16 I have been able to use these letters through the courtesy of the Rare Book Collections at the University of Texas.

17 Leiters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 326.

18 Letters of Robert Browning to Miss Isa Blagden, p. 193.

19 Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, pp. 267-268.

20 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 102.

21 Letters of Robert Browning to Miss Isa Blagden, p. 205.

22 Felix Moscheles, Fragments of an Autobiography (New York, 1899), p. 320.

23 W. H. Griffin and H. C. Minchin, The Life of Robert Browning (London, 1910), pp. 9-15.

24 “The ‘Detachment’ of Browning,” Athenaeum, January 4, 1890, p. 18.

25 Henriette Corkran, Celebrities and I (London, 1902), p. 270.

26 Ibid., pp. 270-271; Moscheles, op. cit., pp. 321-322.

27 C. E. Hallé, Notes from a Painter's Life (London, 1909), p. 121.

28 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 247.

29 Browning's Parleyings; The Autobiography of a Mind (New Haven, 1927), pp. 181-184, 209-211.

30 Lilian Whiting, The Brownings, Their Life and Art (Boston, 1911), p. 227; Moscheles, op. cit., p. 321; Corkran, op. cit., pp. 163-164.

31 C. E. Clement and L. Hutton, eds., Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (Boston, 1884), i, 105.

32 Moscheles, op. cit., p. 321.

33 Athenaeum, December 10, 1881, p. 786; April 24, 1886, p. 562; May 4, 1878, p. 577; May 31, 1879, p. 703.

34 Whiting, op. cit., p. 236; Mrs. Clara J. Bloomfield-Moore, “Robert Browning,” Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, xlv (May, 1890), 689.

35 Whiting, op. cit., p. 283.

36 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 239.

37 R. C. Lehmann, Memories of Half a Century (London, 1908), p. 124.

38 Athenaeum, December 10, 1881, p. 785; Bloomfield-Moore, op. cit., p. 689.

39 Whiting, op. cit., pp. 227-228.

40 Lehmann, op. cit., p. 122.

41 Moscheles, op. cit., p. 322.

42 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 283.

43 Moscheles, op. cit., p. 321.

44 Leiters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, pp. 265-267, 270, 271-272, 274-275.

45 Ibid., pp. 266-267.

46 Orr, op. cit., pp. 381-382.

47 James, op. cit., ii, 116.

48 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 314.

49 Ibid., p. 300; Orr, op. cit., p. 398.

50 Lilian Whiting, The Golden Road (Boston, 1918), pp. 102-103; Lilian Whiting, The Brownings, pp. 262-264.

51 Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences (New York, 1935), pp. 115-116.

52 Ibid., p. 115; New York Times, September 23, 1935, p. 17.

53 Orr, op. cit., pp. 393-394; William Lyon Phelps, “Robert Browning as Seen by His Son,” Century Magazine, lxxxv (January, 1913), p. 417.

54 Phelps, op. cit., p. 420; the Times, March 12, 1913, p. 11.

55 Luhan, op. cit., p. 117.

56 Griffin and Minchin, op. cit., p. 36.

57 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, p. 289.

58 Corkran, op. cit., p. 163.

59 Phelps, op. cit., p. 417.

60 Ibid.; Luhan, op. cit., p. 115.

61 James, op. cit., ii, 281.

62 Ibid., ii, 166, 264.

63 Luhan, op. cit., pp. 111-117.

64 Ibid., pp. 117-118.

65 Ibid., pp. 115. 117