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The Criminal Body in Victorian Britain: The Case of The Ring and the Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Mary Ellis Gibson
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Extract

“For the choice of subject we have nothing but condemnation. It is Mr Browning's luck” (Litzinger 331). Thus the reviewer for Chamber's Journal in 1869 summed up his reaction to the subject matter of Browning's The Ring and the Book. Indeed, this account of Browning's subject has seemed satisfactory to all but the biographically inclined of Browning's critics. Browning's subject—a grisly murder and its attendant trials—can easily enough be explained by reference to his account of discovering his historical sources in Book 1 of The Ring and the Book or by a general discussion of Browning's personal propensity for the criminal or the bizarre. I wish to argue here, however, that Browning's subject was not merely his “luck.” Rather it went to the heart of social concerns and fictional practices in England in the 1860s. I propose, not to offer an exhaustive new reading of the poem, but to show how we can see The Ring and the Book as embedded in Victorian responses to the criminal body. A focus on the body and crime can provide us with a significant new understanding of Browning's poem even as it offers us a new way to view that poem's connections to Victorian culture and to our own.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 18 , Spring 1990 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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