The subject of many paintings, drawings, and photographs during the final years of her life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning never concealed her strong preference for the portrait by Field Talfourd done in Rome in 1859, which she described as her “spiritual face,” “rather a transfiguration than a literal likeness.” Robert Browning, with only slightly less enthusiasm, called it “the best in existence, perhaps.” Both Brownings distributed numerous photographic copies of it to friends and relatives; as late as 1873 Robert signalled his growing friendship with Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald by giving her a photograph of the Talfourd drawing. The portrait has been reproduced in countless books and articles about the Brownings and since 1871 has hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It is unquestionably the most famous likeness of Victorian England's most celebrated woman poet.

No other Browning monologue has so often been the object of image studies as “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” but most of them deal with possible allegorical meanings, with the archetypal symbolism of the quest, or with sources and analogues of Roland's journey and of the landscape. Considerably less attention is afforded equally significant matters: the structural relationships among the images and their characterizing and thematic functions. Whatever Browning's conscious or unconscious indebtedness to other sources, his imagistic method in “Childe Roland” is still primarily his own, a significant illustration of a technique characteristic of all the major monologues of Men and Women: the use of complex patterns of recurrent images as vehicles of poetic meaning. In this essay I wish to consider how character and meaning are related to the structural development of the imagery.

The Inn Album was published in 1875 when Browning was sixty-three years old, forty-two years after Pauline, fourteen years before he died. The year 1875 falls six years into what Kenneth Knickerbocker calls Browning's senescence (1869–89), a period during which the poet acquired wide fame yet alienated many critics. After the poems of this period were reviewed, they were largely ignored. Only recently have critics given attention to The Inn Album, and only J. M. Hitner (in 1969) has discussed Browning's revisions of the poem—but his discussion is less than satisfactory. For example, given to oversimplification, he persistently confuses changes made in the proof stage with those made in the manuscript and says that the “last version of the MS. usually agrees with the first edition” (Hitner, p. 118), which, as we shall see, is simply not true.

Controversies about the meaning and structure of “Saul” have largely ignored its mystical elements. Although there is still no general consensus on the poem's theological meaning, few critics can accept in toto the views of Roma A. King, Jr., in The Bow and the Lyre (1957) that Browning's artistic purpose is confused, his theological system vague, and thus the poetic structure a failure as a “lyrical-mystical communication….” The two most effective answers to King's criticism are by W. David Shaw in “The Analogical Argument of Browning's ‘Saul’” (1964) and Victor A. Neufeldt in “Browning's ‘Saul’ in the Context of the Age” (1974). Assuming that the poem's thought is self-consistent, intellectually respectable, and essentially didactic, they both correctly disagree with King as to the alleged offensiveness of its message. Yet, in partial agreement with King, they mistakenly, I think, find the structure of “Saul” to be flawed; they also slight its emphasis on mystical experience.

Robert Langbaum has recently offered another affirmative answer to the question whether Guido is saved in the end of his second monologue in The Ring and the Book. Langbaum reviews the previous answers which have been given to this question:

Such early critics as Henry Jones, Charles W. Hodell, and Arthur Symons saw promise of deliverance in Guido's final utterance. But in 1920, A. K. Cook, in his influential Commentary upon The Ring and the Book, saw Guido as like Iago beyond redemption, and he was followed in this view by W. C. De-Vane in his even more influential Browning Handbook. Among recent critics, Park Honan sees Guido as saved; while Richard Altick and James F. Loucks, in their book-length study of the poem, think him irredeemable because the devil incarnate. Our stand does depend on whether we see Guido as human and therefore capable of development, or whether we see him as belonging to another order of existence, as an Iago or devil figure, (p. 290)

The papers of Lt.-Col. Harry Peyton Moulton-Barrett, sold by Sotheby & Co. on 7 June 1937, do not approach in quantity the collection of his first cousin, Pen Browning, dispersed by the same auction house on 1–8 May 1913. In quality, however, the Moulton-Barrett manuscripts are as important. And, as predicted at the time, no comparable collection has since been discovered. By reprinting the catalogue of this sale, the Browning Institute makes a worthy contribution for students of the Brownings. A similar contribution was made in 1972 when the 1913 catalogue, The Browning Collections, was reissued by Mansell. Unlike the latter, it is possible to introduce the present reprint with an early history, and, for the most part, to identify the present location of the collection.