victorian poetry essay questions

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, E.B.B. (1806-1861)

Simon Avery, E.B.B. and The Woman Question

In this essay, Dr Simon Avery considers how Elizabeth Barrett Browning used poetry to explore and challenge traditional Victorian roles for women, assessing the early influences on her work and thought.

Essay: Simon Avery, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Woman Question”, The British Library. CC BY-NC 4.0

Across the course of the 19th century, the question of women’s roles and rights was fiercely and widely debated. How should women – and particularly  middle-class  women – be educated? What was their ‘proper’ place in society? Should they be allowed to work outside the home? Should they be able to vote and have a political voice? These and a range of other issues constituted what the Victorians termed ‘The Woman Question’, which was fervently analysed in discussion groups, in the press, in parliament, and in scientific and medical circles as women pushed for greater recognition and equality. Changes in social expectations and in legislation were achieved very slowly – the vote was only granted to women over 30 in 1918 and women over 21 in 1928, for example – but in the meantime the Woman Question was firmly on Britain’s social and political agendas. It was an area, too, where many women writers, including the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, made powerful and engaging contributions.

Early influences

Barrett Browning was always interested in the position of women in society, and throughout her career she wrote challengingly and combatively about the need for gender equality. In her youth she was an ardent admirer of the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose controversial book  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) emphasized the ways in which middle-class women were denied any proper education and were therefore made unfit for meaningful roles in society. It was a book which Barrett Browning believed should be read repeatedly because of its strong call for change. Certainly, she made sure that she educated herself to the highest levels through extensive reading in history, literature, the classics (particularly Greek), and a range of modern foreign languages.

Barrett Browning also believed that this educational training was crucial to her aim to be recognised as a successful poet. This was particularly so given that the dominant conservative culture of the time believed that poetry was principally the literary terrain of men. If women were to write poetry, they should write about love, nature or pious religion – that is, nothing that was perceived as too intellectually demanding. From the start, however, Barrett Browning sought not only to assert her right to be a poet, but to be a poet who dealt with key social and political issues of the day: war, nationalism, industrialisation, slavery, religious controversy, the manipulation of power, and the fight for liberty on numerous fronts. There was little conforming to conservative expectations here.

Oppression and celebration: themes in barrett browning’s poetry.

By the late 1830s, Barrett Browning was starting to explore her concern with the social roles prescribed for women much more critically through her poetry. In particular, she was increasingly interested in the power dynamics that lie at the heart of heterosexual relationships. In a series of ballads composed in the 1830s and early 1840s, for example – poems such as ‘The Romaunt of Margret’, ‘A Romance of the Ganges’, ‘The Romance of the Swan’s Nest’ and ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ – Barrett Browning repeatedly criticises women’s secondary role in society, the ways in which the institution of marriage oppresses them, and the idea that love and sexual relations are often grounded in problematic and often brutal power games. Betrayal, duplicity and loss are dominant themes in these poems, which often see the women silenced or dead at the end. Conventional society’s expectations are entrapping and potentially deadly.

By the 1840s, however, Barrett Browning was also starting to celebrate particularly strong women in her work. In ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, for example, published in  Poems  (1844), she depicts Geraldine as a woman who rejects the image of female passivity embodied in the statue of Silence in the woods on her estate. Instead, Geraldine asserts independence and agency as she initiates a cross-class relationship with the poet Bertram. Also contained in  Poems  are the two sonnets ‘To George Sand: A Desire’ and ‘To George Sand: A Recognition’. These were written for the French novelist Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin who published under the pseudonym of George Sand. A highly controversial figure who frequently dressed in traditionally masculine attire, Sand produced novels which openly questioned the systematic oppression of women, sexual hypocrisy and established religion. For Barrett Browning, Sand represented a positive model of ‘True genius, but true woman’ (‘A Recognition’, l. 1).

Aurora Leigh

Barrett Browning brought together these interests in various aspects of the Woman Question in her major poem,  Aurora Leigh , published in 1856. Her longest work, which is written as a nine-book epic, it traces Aurora’s struggles to establish herself as a professional woman poet. It is also, as Barrett Browning wrote in the Dedication, ‘the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’. In the first book of the poem, Barrett Browning returns to the issue of women’s education as Aurora’s aunt subjects her to an ‘education’ system which threats to eradicate both her enquiring mind and her individuality. She is made to read conduct books on how to be a good woman, learn lists of useless facts, and perform obtuse tasks like spinning glass and modelling flowers in wax (Book 1, ll. 399-426). It is only when Aurora discovers her father’s library, with its extensive range of ideas and knowledge, that she feels her world and mind opening up, imaged here in terms of volcanic eruption:

As the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart […] – thus, my soul […] Let go conventions and sprang up surprised (Book 1, ll. 845–52)

As the poem demonstrates, this is a far more meaningful education for Aurora – one which transcends traditional middle-class women’s education and which offers more than just a training for marriage.

This independence of thought is linked to Aurora’s commitment to being recognised as a professional poet. During the 1850s, when  Aurora Leigh  was published, the question of meaningful work for women was central to many early women’s rights movements such as the Langham Place Group. Barrett Browning’s poem locks into this contemporary debate as Aurora asserts her right to work and be independent rather than accept her cousin Romney’s half-hearted marriage proposal. As she tells Romney, poetry has the power to transform opinions and bring about social change, and is ‘“most necessary work/ As any of the economists”’ (Book 2, ll. 459–60). Moreover, this is work which she believes women can do just as well as men. The poem follows Aurora from her lowly position in a London garret where she writes to make ends meet, to her position as successful and highly-regarded poet living in Italy – making  Aurora Leigh  a case study in women’s right to work and a celebration of women’s achievements.

One other major area makes  Aurora Leigh  an important text in relation to the Woman Question: the narrative of the working-class figure Marian Earle. Marian is abused by her family and subsequently, through a series of plot turns, she is sold into a brothel. When Aurora meets her in Paris, Marian is living in a slum as a single mother. In conservative Victorian thinking, Marian is now a ‘fallen woman’, beyond the pale of society even through her baby is a result of Marian’s being raped – ‘man’s violence,/ Not man’s seduction, made me what I am’, Marian explains (Book 6, ll. 1126–7). On hearing this story, Aurora rejects conventional judgements and takes Marian with her to live in Florence. She therefore shows support for the woman that conservative society condemns and boldly asserts that Marian is morally pure rather than morally tainted.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry therefore shows her to be acutely alert to many of the key concerns of the Victorian Woman Question. Her works engage forcefully with issues of education, marriage, work, sexuality, motherhood, female solidarity and the need for gender equality. It was the power of these writings – and  Aurora Leigh  in particular – which would have such an influence on subsequent poets like Christina Rossetti, Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew as they continued to interrogate women’s position in society to the end of the century and beyond.

Written by Dr. Simon Avery ,  Reader in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Westminster. His publications include Elizabeth Barrett Browning  (2011),  Mary Coleridge: Selected Poems  (2010),  Thomas Hardy: A Reader’s Guide  (2009) and the Broadview edition of Hardy’s  The Return of the Native (2013). He is currently working on a study of modernity and place in the late-Victorian period and various projects concerning the history of Queer London.

Victorian Poetry and Poetics Copyright © 2024 by Monica Smith Hart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Victorian Poetry

Victorian Poetry

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 0 )

“Victorian poetry” is a term that does not quite coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign that began with the death of her uncle, William IV, in 1837 and lasted until her own death some 63 years later on January 22, 1901. The great poets who wrote most or all of their work while she was queen (and later, starting in 1876, empress of India) include Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and A. E. Housman. Some of the poets we think of as major 20th-century figures began writing in the Victorian Age, most significantly, perhaps, William Butler Yeats, but also Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. The measure and historical importance of the Victorian period in literary history can be marked by the fact that William Wordsworth, who had seen the French Revolution, was still writing a decade after Victoria became queen, while Yeats (who would live until the eve of the Second World War) had already published some of his most important books before she died.

Mention of Yeats and Kipling in the same sentence suggests a different way of defining the Victorian era: Kipling feels Victorian in a way that Yeats does not, and this is because Kipling’s great poetry accepted as a fact of history Britain’s Victorian-style preeminence in the world, whereas Yeats joined with the moderns to see how all that was solid melted into the air—in particular the air of World War I (1914–18), which changed everything. As a cultural phenomenon, the Victorian era might be said to have come to an end in August 1914. Indeed, at the end of the era thus defined, some of the most significant late Victorian writers, such as Alice Meynell, began leading pacifist movements against the resurgent militarism and international violence that so characterized Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Violence on the mechanized and global scale of the 20th century was one of the results of the seismic scientific and technological shifts that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century and spread throughout Europe and North America. If we put the end of the Victorian era at the beginning of World War I, we can say that it begins a little before Victoria’s accession, with the sudden and earthshaking discoveries of Victorian science. Tennyson and Browning, the two greatest Victorian poets, both took an intense interest in the revolutionary scientific discoveries of the day. The central and most revolutionary achievement of Victorian science was Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) discovery of the mechanism of evolution, the “Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” as the title page of the first edition of his book puts it. That book, generally known as On the Origin of the Species, appeared in 1859, the same year as Edward FitzGerald’s despairing celebration of the nothingness of human life in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, written partly in answer to Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. The first edition of In Memoriam had been completed 10 years earlier, so Darwin was not a shadow in Tennyson’s early world. But his gigantic shadow was, in fact, first cast by the discoveries and systematic exposition of Charles Lyell (1797–1875) in his Principles of Geology , published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833—the year that Arthur Henry Hallam (A.H.H.), Tennyson’s closest and most beloved friend, died at 22 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Lyell was one of the first to have an inkling of what has come to be called “deep time,” the shocking, almost infinite antiquity of the world—an antiquity that suggested an equally shocking future stretching uniformly ahead forever. Since it was really only in the 18th century that astronomers began to be aware of the vastness of space (no one knew that other stars were also suns until then), the scientific revolution that began with the Enlightenment and accelerated throughout the Victorian era was one that severely undercut human belief in transcendentalist idealism. The universe suddenly appeared too big to transcend, and as Tennyson put it, the muse of astronomy, Urania, rebuked the muse of elegy and tragedy, Melpomene, who replied, “A touch of shame upon her cheek; / ‘I am not worthy ev’n to speak / Of thy prevailing mysteries’” ( f , section 37, ll. 10–12).

For Tennyson, the death of Hallam was a catastrophic experience of the overwhelming of the human soul by an indifferent universe. Romantic poetry (see romanticism) had found a way to idealize human subjectivity as against the trash of mere empirical externality, but the cascading discoveries of science represented a kind of revenge on the part of the material world. In theory—romantic theory—the mind could transcend any world, no matter how great, because the world’s greatness was only relative, and the mind traffics with absolutes (see, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc ). But for the Victorians, the discovery of unimagined abysses showed that the world far outvied the mind when it came to imagination—nature’s indifferent, inhuman imagination (personified in In Memoriam ) made little of anything the human mind could offer from its own petty resources. In Memoriam and many other great Victorian poems struggled against this apprehension, but the struggle shows few of the transcendent and absolute victories to be found in the greatest romantic poets. (Browning’s essay on Shelley explicitly contrasts the objectivity of contemporary poetry—an objectivity he also ascribes to William Shakespeare—to romantic subjectivity.)

Accordingly, it might be more correct to say that the Victorian era is the era of perhaps the greatest minor poetry ever written in English. “Minor poetry” is not meant as a belittling term: The Victorians wrote in an age when for the first time, perhaps, poets were realizing that with respect to the world around it, poetry could only be minor. Tennyson, again, imagining a critic of the intense grief he displays in In Memoriam , asks: “Is this an hour / For private sorrow’s barren song, / When more and more the people throng / The chairs and thrones of civil power? / A time to quicken and to swoon, / When Science reaches forth her arms / To feel from world to world and charms / Her secret from the latest moon?” (section 21, ll. 13–20). Indeed, many still complain that Victorian literature marked the beginning of a general phenomenon of escapism which in the 20th century would become transmogrified into incessant television watching. (Victorian critics lambasted the widespread reading of novels in ways that the stern moralists of the second half of the 20th century lambasted the widespread failure to read novels instead of watching TV. These are really the same complaint.)

All of this means that Victorian literature in general and poetry in particular aimed at giving its readers pleasure. The Victorians could no longer quite believe—as Wordsworth had in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)—that such pleasure could save the soul. The Victorians were the heirs of the romantics in many ways, not least in their sense that the pleasures of literature, difficult as they sometimes were, went as deep as the depth of the human soul. But for the Victorians, the human soul did not seem quite as deep as it did for their predecessors.

All of this is generalization, of course, but it is generalization that accounts for a range of Victorian reaction, from the insistence on the absolute accuracy to which human perception can attain, to be found in Arnold, to the counter-insistence on the primacy of subjective experience over any empirical accuracy, with which the essayist and critic Walter Horatio Pater countered Arnold, and which culminated in Wildean aestheticism. It also accounts for Yeats’s folkloric anachronizing on the one hand and the striking number of conversions to Catholicism, such as Hopkins’s, on the other, offering an account of the soul fiercely capable of the same minute severity as any faithchallenging science. Further, it accounts for the triumphal shrewdness of such a champion of ­English industrial and economic achievement as Kipling.

What these poets almost all share is a sense of poetry as giving pleasure. Once the burden is taken off literary pleasure as the royal road to transcendence, pleasure can be regarded as an end in itself, and the Victorians could write the kind of poetry that gave a purer pleasure than the strongly individualized poetic self-assertions to be found in the romantics. (John Keats is a partial exception and a high influence on the Victorians, especially on Tennyson.) If one thinks of the kind of poetry that we remember without remembering or caring who wrote it, then this is the kind of poetry that the Victorians wrote. This can be seen as much in the vogue for highly sophisticated dramatic monologues— as with Browning and Tennyson, who were inventing characters, not speaking for themselves—as in the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. It is no accident that Francis Turner Palgrave’s great and wildly successful anthology Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics was a product of the Victorian age and ended with a few contemporary poems (Palgrave thanked Tennyson in his introduction), and that almost all its selections, from whatever age, sound Victorian.

The character of Palgrave’s collection culled from various poets can be found in the kinds of collections that individual Victorian poets put together, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Similarly, among Tennyson’s most popular works were songs from the longer narrative works, such as the songs from The Princess: A Medley, which themselves are contextless, songs sung by characters, not spoken by them. FitzGerald pointed out that the Rubáiyát was an anthology (published alphabetically in Persian), which he gave the form of an eclogue (pastoral poem)—so that even when placed into a consecutive form, it is the stanzas that had priority, not the story they told. Even Tennyson described In Memoriam as a collection of lyrics, not as a consecutive work (though it is that, too, of course). Swinburne was another impresario of the evocative (partly through his study of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience ), and Yeats consistently described his poems as songs.

Idiosyncratic and unpredictable as so many of the Victorians were, they nevertheless wrote poems that people remember as poems rather than as the expressions of poets. They wrote poems that gave people pleasure as poems, and such pleasure is the most archaic and deeply rooted experience of poetry that any of us ever has. Thus, Melpomene, the muse of tragedy shamed by Urania’s rebuke in In Memoriam states that as an earthly muse, she owns “but a little art / To lull with song an aching heart, / And render human love his dues,” so that in the end her role is to intensify human experience, minor as it is compared to the transcendence where science and religion come together in the grandeur and immensity of the universe. She, on the other hand, ministering to purely human and earthly experience, has “darken’d sanctities with song” (section 37, l. 24).

None of this should suggest that Victorian poetry is cloying. Its intensity of grief and its apprehensions of despair rival those of any other poetic tradition or period. In fact, some of that intensity derives from a paradoxical acknowledgement of its uselessness. The idea that the human soul is minor, just as the poetry that soul expresses is minor, is a grim one—consonant with the Victorian insights of that greatest of analytic pessimists, Sigmund Freud. The Pre-Raphaelite poetry can have the last word here: The absolutely minor pleasures of decorative beauty—scorned as unworthy of poetry by too many grander aspirants—became for them the devastatingly precise detail which undercuts any notion of transcendence. (They are the forebears of such modern great poets as Elizabeth Bishop.) All there is, in the end, is the world of detail, without the saving importance that might turn loss into gain, as it did for the romantics, that might make pleasure any more than decorative. It is the success of Victorian poetry that it preserves the importance of the decorative, gives us something to hang onto on earth when there is nothing that poetry can communicate that will bring us into heaven.

Bibliography Browning, Robert. Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Reeves and Turner. 1888. Hough, Graham Goulden. The Last Romantics. London: Duckworth, 1949. Houghton, Walter Edwards. Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830– 1870. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957. Trilling, Lionel, and Harold Bloom. Victorian Prose and Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Ricks, Christopher, ed. The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Share this:

Categories: Literature

Tags: A. E. Housman , Alfred , Algernon Charles Swinburne , Christina Rossetti , Criticism of Victorian Poetry , Dante Gabriel Rossetti , Gerard Manley Hopkins , Literary Criticism , Lord Tennyson , Matthew Arnold , Notes of Victorian Poetry , Poetry , Robert Browning , study guide of Victorian Poetry , Themes of Victorian Poetry , Victorian Literature , Victorian Poetry , Victorian Poetry analysis , Victorian Poets

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Numismatics
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Social History
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music and Religion
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Meta-Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Society
• Law and Politics
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Legal System - Costs and Funding
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Restitution
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Games
• Computer Security
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business Strategy
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Social Issues in Business and Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Systems
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Research Methodology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Social Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Sustainability
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• Ethnic Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Qualitative Political Methodology
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Disability Studies
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry

Matthew Bevis is a University Lecturer and Fellow in English at Keble College, Oxford. His publications include Tennyson: Lives of Victorian Literary Figures (2003), The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (2007), Some Versions of Empson, ed. (2007), Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (2012), and Lessons in Byron (2013). He is currently co-editing a collection of essays on Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry and writing a book entitled Wordsworth’s Laughter.

• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This Handbook is the largest and most comprehensive collection of essays on Victorian poetry and poetics yet published. It provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements ('Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'). The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, and the final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
• Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

University of Houston Libraries

Victorian literature research guide.

• Victorian Literature
• Background Information
• Literary Criticism
• Primary Sources
• Need More Help?

In this guide

In this guide, you will find information on resources to help you with your papers and assignments, including how to find:

• background information (or reference sources),
• literary criticism, and
• primary sources.

You will also find information on MLA style, as well as details about how a librarian can help you in the research process.

If you have any questions along the way, please contact me ! 

• Next: Background Information >>

English Librarian

• Last Updated: Jan 12, 2024 10:29 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uh.edu/VictorianLiterature

Robert Browning: Poems

By robert browning, robert browning: poems about the victorian age.

Robert Browning is naturally considered a Victorian poet, considering that he wrote during the time period of Victorian England. And yet Browning's work is simultaneously a revolt against some of the most well-defined aspects of that time, and a reflection of its characteristics.

Victorian England, named after Queen Victoria who was crowned in 1837, is marked by several social qualities: repressed sexuality, strict morality, an expansion of English imperialism, a focus on human inventiveness, and nascent doubt over man's place in the universe. With the world changing so quickly over the roughly 70 year-period, artists, scholars and scientists created and wrote from a place of unrest. Where perhaps most of them came down strong on one side of the period's many questions, Browning embraced the uncertainty of his time as a facet of human nature and psychology, and his poetry reflects not strong opinions but rather our tendency to waver between opposing views.

Perhaps the most well-known aspect of Victorian England was its 'prudish' attitudes on sex. Operating under the belief that women were not to be consumed with sexual lust, laws and social strictures forced men and women into entirely separate spheres. The hope was that secure, happy families could be created and by default a moral society. Browning's work takes great issue with such repression. Though he is by not means a libertine, he reflects in many poems the cost of such repression as an equally vicious reaction. Poems like " Porphyria's Lover " or " Evelyn Hope " show the grotesque side of such assumptions. Further, the class element of this Victorian idea (that women should prepare a nice home for a man's success) is shown to be equally vicious in poems like "My Last Duchess" and "The Laboratory."

Though Browning was not explicitly a political poet, his work does reflect doubts in the supremacy of England as Victorianism saw it. Consider poems like " Caliban upon Setebos ," which proffer the thesis that we are all of us flawed creatures who know nothing of anyone save ourselves. The argument implicitly counters the Social Darwinist ideas that justified England's extreme imperialism.

Browning's time also saw great advances in human knowledge, but ones that came at the cost of a long-held Christian faith in the divinity of man. The Industrial Revolution opened up man's ability to exploit nature for his own gain, while new opportunities for education created new readers and thinkers, and new scientific discoveries - primarily Darwin's theory of evolution - led many to doubt that man was in fact a reflection of a supreme deity. While these advancements certainly improved quality of life, they also brought with them an age of doubt. Many writers embraced such a worldview and sought to express new ideas in the possibilities, but Browning explored both sides, questioning the value of a life without faith while also celebrating the possibilities of a man less tied to God. Poems like "Caliban upon Setebos" or " Rabbi Ben Ezra " confront these questions directly, but many others - like " Andrea del Sarto " - reflect a sophisticated concept of human psychology, one that suggests we are limited to our perceptions and entirely conditioned by the circumstances of our lives. These days not a radical idea, in Victorian England it was far more groundbreaking to suggest that there is nothing about us that is a priori divine and perfect, but instead that we each of us develop our own moral sense, and moreover have the ability to rationalize our moral sense as acceptable. Browning's love of drama was fed by such a worldview, since he was able to empathize with the perspectives of characters who otherwise preach attitudes we might find abhorrent. Browning was much enamored of the complications and potentials of human beings, and found great conflict in the way these elements tried to fit in with a bigger world.

The Victorian period followed directly what is known as the "Romantic period," during which poets explored the concepts of individuality as a key to transcendence. Browning, as a great admirer of the movement's best writers – Shelley and Coleridge amongst them - certainly never went full-fledged into Romanticism, but did recognize the power of hope and beauty that comes from self-knowledge and self-exploration. As such, he did not entirely accept that these doubts led to pessimism, though he did empathize with such pessimism, as seen in "Caliban upon Setebos."

All in all, Browning was a man of his time, both in the way he reflected the new Victorian learning and questioned some its assumptions on morality and behavior.

Robert Browning: Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Robert Browning: Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Comment on Robert Browning's philosophy of love as expressed in his"The Last Ride Together".

Browning's poem emphasizes the idea that the love one has shared on earth will be shared after "The Last Ride" together. These are lovers who are moving beyond what they have had on earth. He blesses her name in "pride and...

In Browning's "My Last Duchess" what is a euphemism?

"I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together"

My Last Duchess

The Duke shows us a portait of his late wife.

Study Guide for Robert Browning: Poems

Robert Browning: Poems study guide contains a biography of poet Robert Browning, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of his major poems.

• About Robert Browning: Poems
• Robert Browning: Poems Summary
• My Last Duchess Video
• Character List

Essays for Robert Browning: Poems

Robert Browning: Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of poems by Robert Browning.

• Shelter From the Storm
• Hatred in Robert Browning's Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
• The Insanity of Blindness: The Narrators in Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
• Where Are the Women?
• Robert Browning and the Representation of Desire

E-Text of Robert Browning: Poems

Robert Browning: Poems e-text contains the full texts of select poems by Robert Browning.

• Chronological List of Browning's Works
• Introduction: Life Of Browning
• Introduction: Browning As Poet
• Introduction: Appreciations
• Introduction: Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Robert Browning: Poems

• Introduction

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

Study questions, activities, and resources: elizabeth barrett browning, study questions and activities, sonnets from the portuguese.

1.  Determine the rhyme scheme for each of these sonnets. To what type do the Sonnets from the Portuguese belong—the English or the Petrarchan form?

2.  Log on to the Wikisource page for all 43 sonnets. Do any of the sonnets break from the standard rhyme scheme used in sonnets 21, 22, 32, and 43 above?

3.  In terms of form, especially rhyme scheme, which English sonneteer does Barrett Browning most resemble: Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare? For Sidney, see Astrophil and Stella , Sonnets 31, 52, 74, http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/stella.html . For Spenser, see any of the sonnets in Amoretti , http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/amoretti.html#1 . For Shakespeare, see http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/sonnets/sonnet_view.php?Sonnet=1

4.  Barrett Browning knew the poetry of John Donne very well. Do any of the above sonnets resemble Donne’s “sonnets” in terms of style or imagery? 5.  In a short essay, compare and contrast one sonnet by Browning and one by either Shakespeare, Sidney, or Spenser.

Cry of the Children

Professor Florence Boos maintains an extensive site on Victorian literature, with helpful questions on many Victorian authors. The index to her study guides is well worth downloading. It can be found at the bottom of her page devoted to E.B. Browning’s “Cry of the Children” and “The Runaway Slave”  below:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~boosf/questions/ebbrunawayweb.htm

1.  In particular, are there ways in which the rhythms reinforce the theme of noisy, dirty, and unpleasant factory conditions? 2.  What metaphors or recurrent themes does the author use to make her points (nature; death; youth and age; whirring of machinery)? 3.  In what ways is the children’s viewpoint different from that of adults? What is their view of death, and how does this reinforce the poem’s themes? How do they respond to the death of little Alice? 4.  What view of religion does the author seem to espouse? Who is responsible for the fact that the children are unable to conceive of a beneficent divine being?

Activities/Further Essay Topics

1.  Compare the document from the Victorian Web about child labour with “Cry of the Children”; then discuss which is the more likely to make the reader take action against the abuses:

• “Testimony Gathered by Ashley’s Mines Commission.” The Victorian Web. Laura Del Col, West Virginia University. http://www.victorianweb.org/history/ashley.html

2.  Compare Barrett Browning’s description of child labour with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience , particularly in the poems “Holy Thursday” and “Chimney Sweeper.” Compare the children’s attitude toward religion in both authors’ works. Compare the last line of “The Chimney Sweeper” with the last stanza of  “The Cry of the Children.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chimney_Sweeper

Figure 1: Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Project Gutenberg ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning_2.jpg ) is in the Public Domain

• British Literature: Victorians and Moderns. Authored by : James Sexton. Located at : https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature . Project : BCcampus Open Textbook Project. License : CC BY: Attribution