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Form and Sense in Browning's The Inn Album

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Charlotte C. Watkins
Charlotte C. Watkins
Affiliation:
Howard University
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Extract

“Modern Poetry” was the caption of Carlo Pellegrini's caricature illustrating Vanity Fair's article on Browning (“the best of our professors of modern poetry”), containing the first notice of The Inn Album, which was published on 19 November 1875. Viewed in retrospect, the caption seems particularly apt as an announcement of The Inn Album. In content, the poem was modern, contemporary to the point of topicality. The very selection of contemporary upper-middle-class life as a subject was an especially modern undertaking in the mid-seventies, within a twelve-month period that included both Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the latter of which Lewes described as, like Middlemarch, “a story of English life but of our own day, and dealing for the most part in a higher sphere of Society.” The Inn Album found its material in contemporary manners, just as Browning's poems that had preceded it in the seventies had addressed themselves, in various ways, to other aspects of contemporary life. In addition, references in The Inn Album to contemporary styles in the arts call attention to the poem as a poem and relate it, also, to modern art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 2 , Spring 1974 , pp. 65 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

NOTES

1. Vanity Fair, 20 Nov. 1875. On the date of publication of The Inn Album, see the Smith, Elder advertisements in the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, 13 and 20 Nov. 1875.

2. In a letter to Blackwood, 22 Nov. 1875 (The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, Gordon S. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954–1955], VI, 193).Google Scholar On the same day. Lewes was reading Browning's new poem. I am indebted to Professor Haight for the information, from Lewes' unpublished diaries, that on 22 and 23 Nov. Lewes read The Inn Album.

3. A Choice of Browning's Verse, selected with an Introd. by Lucie-Smith, Edward (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

4. DeVane, William C., “Browning and the Spirit of Greece,” Nineteenth Century Studies, ed. Davis, Herbert, DeVane, William C., and Bald, R. C. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1940)Google Scholar; Langbaum, Robert, “Browning and the Question of Myth,” Publications of the Modem Language Association, 81 (1966), 575–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. The Inn Album, ll. 254–57, 1203–10, 549, 986, 1445–59; The Ring and the Book, I.383; II.786; I.783–84; VII.443; VI.399; II.66–67; VI.1933–96. All references are to lines and text in The Works of Robert Browning, ed. Kenyon, F. G., Centenary Edition, 10 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1912).Google Scholar

6. Langbaum, Robert, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 111.Google Scholar

7. The background of the topical references and their significance in the poem are treated more fully in my article “Robert Browning's ‘The Inn Album’ and the Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 6 (December 1973), 11–17.

8. L. 353. Galopin was the name of the horse that won the Derby on 26 May 1875. At Hurlingham Club on 29 May 1875 (Royal Day), the game of tent-pegging was introduced in England, followed by polo matches: see 1. 333 of the poem.

9. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. McAleer, Edward C.. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1951), p. 28, n. 23.Google Scholar

10. Othello. A Tragedy in Five Acts, by William Shakespeare. The Italian Version as Performed by Signor Salvini (New York: G. F. Nesbitt, 1873), p. 130.Google Scholar

11. The Diary of Alfred Domett, ed. Horsman, E. A. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 162.Google Scholar On the relationships between the poem, in this respect, and Greville's Memoirs and Macready's Reminiscences, see DeVane, William C., A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), pp. 386–89.Google Scholar

12. Orr, , A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning, 6th ed. (London: Bell, 1892), p. 266.Google Scholar

13. On Pippa Passes, see Stevenson, Lionel, “The Relativity of Truth in Victorian Fiction,” in Victorian Essays: A Symposium, ed. Anderson, Warren D. and Clareson, Thomas (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1967), p. 78.Google Scholar

14. The Inn Album, ll. 3065–66, quoting III.iii, rather than the earlier lines in I.iii, of the Italian version, “Addio, addio, bel cigno canor!” (Wagner, Richard, Lohengrin. With Italian, German, and English Words, the latter by Oxenford, John, ed. Arthur Sullivan and J. Pittman. [London and New York: Boosey, n.d.].Google Scholar This parallel-text edition was advertised in the Publishers' Circular, 17 June 1872.)

15. See Weichlein, William J., A Comparative Study of Five Musical Settings of La Clemenza di Tito (Univ. of Michigan dissertation, 1956; University Microfilms, No. 21, 371).Google Scholar The fact that there is in the Library of Congress Music Division a (manuscript) copy of the “Amo te solo” from the opera by Jomelli suggests that the aria the girl sings in the poem may have been popular as a detached piece in the eighteen-seventies.

16. Stedman, E. C., Victorian Poets (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), p. 341.Google Scholar

17. Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Hood, Thurman L. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1933), p. 168.Google Scholar

18. Symons, , An Introduction to the Study of Browning, Rev. ed. (London: Dent, 1916), p. 6.Google Scholar