One of the most melancholy events in modern literary history was the dispersal of the books, manuscripts, and other artifacts owned by Pen Browning at the Sotheby sale of 1–8 May 1913. Not only did that event mark the ultimate frustration of Pen's dream of keeping together, for sentiment's sake, the bits and pieces of his parents' lives that he had been collecting through the years, but the sale also had a seriously detrimental effect upon subsequent Browning scholarship. Whereas Tennyson scholars, for example, can today examine that poet's entire personal library and a large collection of his family papers in the Tennyson Research Centre at Lincoln, the corresponding materials for the Brownings are scattered all over the world.