Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (42 page)

1838
Travels by sea to Trieste, then Venice and nearby ‘delicious Asolo’, together with other locations mentioned in Sordello.

1839
Macready rejects RB’s second play,
King Victor and King Charles
.

1840
Sordello
published (Moxon, RB’s publisher until after 1846); received with near-universal derision. Macready rejects
The Return of the Druses
, despite RB’s strenuous efforts to make it acceptable. Browning family moves from Camberwell to New Cross, Hatcham, in Surrey.

1841
Publication of
Pippa Passes
, first in series of cheap, paper-bound pamphlets with series title
Bells and Pomegranates
(RB later explained that these terms derived from a passage in the Bible and were intended to symbolize an alternation or mixture of ‘grave and gay, singing and sermonizing’). Macready reluctantly accepts
A Blot in the ’Scutcheon
for the stage.

1842
March
: Publication of
King Victor and King Charles
, no. 2 of
Bells and Pomegranates
.
   
July
: RB reviews a biography of Tasso in the
Foreign Quarterly Review
but turns the review into an essay defending the eighteenth-century poet and forger Thomas Chatterton; this ‘Essay on Chatterton’ is RB’s only formal piece of prose criticism apart from the ‘Essay on Shelley’ published ten years later.
   
November
: Publication of
Dramatic Lyrics
, no. 3 of
Bells and
Pomegranates
, RB’s first collection of shorter poems, including ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’.

1843
January
: Publication of
The Return of the Druses
, no. 4 of
Bells and Pomegranates
.
   
February
: Publication of
A Blot in the ’Scutcheon
, no. 5 of
Bells and Pomegranates
; the play is finally produced at Drury Lane but closes after three performances and ends RB’s friendship with Macready.

1844
Offers
Colombe’s Birthday
to Charles Kean, son of Edmund Kean and Macready’s leading rival, but negotiations break down and RB publishes the play as no. 6 of
Bells and Pomegranates
; he never attempts to write for the stage again (his last two plays, published in 1846, were not offered to a theatre).
   
July
: Travels by sea to Naples, and also visits Rome and Florence for the first time.
   
December
: Returns to find flattering reference to his poetry in Elizabeth Barrett’s recently published
Poems
. EB, six years older, financially independent though living under her father’s roof, and far better known as a poet, was a reclusive invalid, but RB was already an admirer of her work and their mutual friend John Kenyon encouraged him to write to her.

1845
10 January
: Writes to Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Dear Miss Barrett, I love your poems with all my heart … and I love you too.’ The correspondence develops into a courtship, with letters and meetings (beginning on 20 May) increasing in frequency and intimacy, the latter carefully kept from EB’s domineering father, Edward Moulton Barrett, who had a deep aversion to the thought of any of his children (of either sex) marrying.
   
November
: RB publishes his second collection of shorter poems,
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
, no. 7 of
Bells and Pomegranates
, including ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, ‘The Lost Leader’ and ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’.

1846
February
: Publication of
Luria
and
A Soul’s Tragedy
, two plays which together make up no. 8 of
Bells and Pomegranates
, the last in the series.
   
10 September
: EB’s father announces that the family is moving out of their London residence in Wimpole Street while it is repainted; alarmed at the thought of being separated, RB and EB decide on an immediate clandestine marriage, which takes place on 12 September at St Marylebone Church; a week later they leave for Italy, arriving at Pisa on 14 October. Mr Barrett renounces his daughter, refuses to answer her letters or acknowledge the birth of his grandson, and dies unreconciled to her in 1857.

1847
RB and EB move to Florence, eventually settling in Casa Guidi on the south bank of the Arno, their home until EB’s death except for visits to England and Paris in 1851–2, 1855–6 and 1858.

1849
Publication of RB’s
Poems
in two volumes, RB’s first collected edition, though omitting
Strafford
and
Sordello
; issued by Chapman & Hall, EB’s publishers, who continue to publish RB until 1868, except for a volume of selections issued by Moxon in 1865.
   
8 March
: Birth of the Brownings’ only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (nicknamed ‘Penini’, then ‘Pen’); ten days later RB’s mother dies.
   EB shows RB the sonnets she wrote during their courtship, eventually published as
Sonnets from the Portuguese
(title suggested by RB).

1850
Publication of EB’s collected
Poems
including
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, and of RB’s
Christmas-Eve and Easter Day
.

1851
Publication of EB’s
Casa Guidi Windows
, a reflection of her (and RB’s) support for the Italian movement for unity and independence, the ‘Risorgimento’. RB’s father becomes embroiled in a breach-of-promise suit.

1852
RB’s father is forced to leave England to avoid paying damages and settles with Sarianna in Paris. RB writes introduction to a volume of Shelley’s letters (all but two of which turn out to be forged); now known as the ‘Essay on Shelley’, RB’s second and last formal piece of prose criticism.

1855
Publication of
Men and Women
, consisting of fifty-one poems including ‘Love Among the Ruins’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ and the dedication to EB, ‘One Word More’. RB had counted on the volume restoring his reputation; the disappointing reviews (and sales) plunge him into a deep depression.

1856
Publication of EB’s
Aurora Leigh
, a critical (and commercial) success. A legacy from John Kenyon gives the Brownings financial security.

1857
Death of EB’s father.

1860
Publication of EB’s
Poems before Congress
.

1861
29 June
: EB dies at Casa Guidi. A month later RB leaves Florence with Pen; he settles in London, with holidays in Scotland, France, Switzerland and, in later years, Italy again, though never Florence.

1862
Publication of EB’s
Last Poems
, selected and edited by RB.

1863
Publication of
Selections from the Poetical Works
, chosen by RB’s friends John Forster and B. W. Procter, and of
Poetical Works
(3 vols.), including
Strafford
and
Sordello
. Further volumes of selections are published in 1865 (Moxon), 1872 and 1880 (Smith, Elder).

1864
Publication of
Dramatis Personae
, including ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, ‘A Death in the Desert’, ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ and ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’. For the first time in RB’s career, a second edition is called for. Starts work on
The Ring and the Book
.

1866
Death of RB’s father in Paris; Sarianna moves to London and lives with RB.

1867
Awarded honorary MA by Oxford University and honorary fellowship by Balliol. The Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, is a friend, and RB wants Pen to enter Balliol, but Pen fails the examination and eventually matriculates at Christ Church (1869); from 1874 he studies painting and sculpture and pursues a minor artistic career until his father’s death.

1868
Publication of
Poetical Works
(6 vols., Smith, Elder, RB’s publishers for the remainder of his career).

1868–9
November-February
: Publication of
The Ring and the Book
in four instalments, each volume containing three books of the poem; RB at last achieves critical acclaim and a measure of commercial success.

1869
A friendship with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, leads to her proposing that they marry; RB refuses (‘my heart [is] buried at Florence’), after which Lady Ashburton lets it be known that
she
refused
him
, the version accepted by RB’s biographers until the mid 1980s.

1871
Publication of
Balaustion’s Adventure
, a narrative poem incorporating a ‘transcript’ (RB’s preferred term for ‘translation’) of Euripides’
Alcestis;
reaches several editions. Publication of
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society
, a long dramatic monologue spoken by the Prince, a thinly disguised portrait of the recently abdicated Emperor Napoleon III.

1872
Publication of
Fifine at the Fair
, a long dramatic monologue spoken by Don Juan; RB calls it his ‘most metaphysical and boldest’ poem since
Sordello
. Second edition of
The Ring and the Book
published.

1873
Publication of
Red Cotton Night-Cap Country
, a narrative poem based on a recent sensational court-case in Normandy.

1875
Publication of
Aristophanes’ Apology
, a long dramatic monologue spoken by the heroine of
Balaustion’s Adventure
but containing lengthy interpolations by Aristophanes and incorporating another ‘transcript’ of Euripides, this time the
Heracles
. Publication of
The Inn Album
, a narrative poem set in England with a melodramatic plot.

1876
Publication of
Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper: with Other Poems
, a collection of shorter poems; the title poem is a satire on RB’s critics.

1877
Publication of
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus
, with a preface in which RB defends the extreme literalness of his translation.

1878
Publication in one volume of
La Saisiaz
and
The Two Poets of Croisic
, the first a philosophical elegy in memory of RB’s friend Annie Egerton Smith, who had died suddenly while on holiday in the Alps with RB and Sarianna, the second a comic poem about the literary pretensions of two figures from a village in Brittany.

1879
Publication of
Dramatic Idyls
, a collection of shorter poems including ‘Martin Relph’, ‘Ivàn Ivànovitch’ (founded on a legend about a woman who threw her own children to the wolves pursuing her sleigh, which RB had heard in Russia forty-five years before) and ‘Ned Bratts’.