William Rothenstein's The Browning Readers (frontispiece) is one painter's tribute to a favorite poet. It also offers a fascinating glimpse of the “idea” of Browning at the turn of the century, a pictorial impression of the atmosphere in which his work was read and of the mood it evoked in his readers. Its original and thoughtful approach to the relationships between reader, writer, artist, and spectator sets it apart from the general run of charming but lightweight variations on the popular theme of women reading and places it, a particularly English example, among the masterpieces of the genre from Corot to Hopper. Together with Rothenstein's other Browning subjects, Porphyria and two paintings from “Parting at Morning,” The Browning Readers contributes to that alternative critical heritage of “paintings from books“ which parallels and supplements the written commentaries of reviewers and literary critics (Altick 248).

“That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” (Forster 1: 25 and Dickens 218). Charles Dickens's description of the anguish of his childhood is wreathed in paradoxes the author savors but does not acknowledge. Like his scandalous successor Oscar Wilde, Dickens luxuriates in the spectacle of his own martyrdom. His commendation “exquisitely” turns a lament into a boast, undermining the sincerity that assures us his suffering has no language. Yet despite their half-concealed pleasure at his own pain, these sentences pleased Dickens so much that, after writing them to John Forster in his secret confession of his childhood humiliation, he gave them to his abused, beloved David Copperfield and thereby to the world. David, however, subdues the pride in emotional virtuosity his creator could not suppress.

Robert Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889. On the same day Asolando: Fancies and Facts was published in London. During this centennial year I should like to look at the poet's last publication and take note of his valedictory remarks particularly as they touch on his well-known “philosophy of the imperfect,” which I believe can be better understood as a philosophy of inadequacy. To that end I shall focus on the poem “Development,” which gives a general idea of what Browning had to say not only in Asolando but in much of his earlier work as well.

Dramatic, even melodramatic, Ruskin's preferred style is often—and deliberately—given over to the passionate; in the middle of a lecture, he will stop to announce that he has found by his side a “violent little fragment of an undelivered lecture” (QA, 157) which he then delivers, subsequently pointing out his return to “cool English” (QA, 160). Such a self-conscious examination and description of his own mood and tone characterizes Ruskin's odd discursive stance, as he is at once involved and distant, choosing his drama in his written text, and then orally exposing it.

Among the reformers advocating a people's theater in the early twentieth century, there were those theorists of culture for the masses, like Romain Rolland and Anatolii Lunacharsky, who realized that to appeal to a broad audience a genuinely popular theatre must not only be uplifting and civic in spirit, but also entertaining. They recognized that such a popular theater already existed in the nineteenth century in the form of melodramatic performance: it had democratized the stage, brought the lower classes into the theatre, reduced the gap between the actor and the auditorium, and enabled the spectator to enter into the action, thereby creating a sense of communion (Bradby and McCormick 15–29). Rather than proposing a return to the sacred rituals of Greece or the religious festivals of the Middle Ages as the basis of a people's theater, they argued that melodramatic performance—purified of its commercialism and crudity—offered the model for a revolutionary new popular art.

“For the choice of subject we have nothing but condemnation. It is Mr Browning's luck” (Litzinger 331). Thus the reviewer for Chamber's Journal in 1869 summed up his reaction to the subject matter of Browning's The Ring and the Book. Indeed, this account of Browning's subject has seemed satisfactory to all but the biographically inclined of Browning's critics. Browning's subject—a grisly murder and its attendant trials—can easily enough be explained by reference to his account of discovering his historical sources in Book 1 of The Ring and the Book or by a general discussion of Browning's personal propensity for the criminal or the bizarre. I wish to argue here, however, that Browning's subject was not merely his “luck.” Rather it went to the heart of social concerns and fictional practices in England in the 1860s. I propose, not to offer an exhaustive new reading of the poem, but to show how we can see The Ring and the Book as embedded in Victorian responses to the criminal body. A focus on the body and crime can provide us with a significant new understanding of Browning's poem even as it offers us a new way to view that poem's connections to Victorian culture and to our own.

Scientific and hermeneutic studies, which held the attention of Robert Browning7's contemporaries who were sensitive to Christology, made Scripture and the “book of nature” seem even more inscrutable. A prominent theme in many Browning poems, “How very hard it is to be / A Christian” (Easter-Day, lines 1–2), pertains not only to behavior but also to the influence of spoken, written, or printed discourse on historical and canonical matters. In Karshish's epistle to Abib, Cleon's letter to Protus, and multiple analyses of a parchment concerning St. John's death, Christianity appears not just a religious and cultural phenomenon, but a changing philological and interpretive one affected by “the ineptitude of the time, / And the penman's prejudice” (Christmas-Eve 871–72). For Victorians and later readers, anxious about being on the brink of a post-Christian age and therefore inclined to idealize their ancestors' religious confidence, Browning's portraits of Christianity's first century are a chance to review inherited discursive practices. He represents Christianity's vocal and textual foundations to accentuate “hermeneutics, … how poets find authority and means to communicate in written language and how readers derive meaning from poetic texts … or an event qua text.” (Peterson 363). Browning is less troubled by “higher” or “lower” critics, attuned to the perils of logocentrism, than by nervous religious and literary disciples who understand his poetics no better than they adapt to the altered theological climate.

For browning, the central issue in The Ring and the Book is perception of the finite limits of the human capacity for recognizing truth. For the critical reader, the central issue is perhaps better expressed as Browning's awareness of his own capacity for re-creating or “repristinating” the past. Critics have labelled Browning's work as either relativistic or ironic, often using these terms as the poles of a continuum upon which the accuracy of Browning's perceptions might be measured. For example, Robert Langbaum sees relativism as the basis of the poem's associational coherence: “The organized facts are ‘one fact the more.’ The principle of organization is inseparable from the facts because without it the facts would not be knowable. To know anything we must imagine it” (15). W. David Shaw understands irony and relativism to be mutually exclusive (239). He argues that Browning structures his poem by the dialectical irony which arises out of the movement of Guido's guilt and the corresponding movement of Pompilia's innocence. I suggest that relativism and irony come together once one recognizes the close relationship between historicity and fantasy and the rather serious implications this relationship has for the kind of truth Browning suggests his poem specifies. That is, the act of artistic creativity allows the poet to express with freedom intuitive insights into the world of unlimited possibility, or infinity, and indeed, it is for an ever closer approach to the infinite that he or she strives artistically.

During the past two decades Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become most appreciated for her 1856 feminist epic Aurora Leigh, a poem in which she asserted her “highest convictions upon Life and Art.” Before publishing Aurora Leigh, however, she said that one of her most important poems was “The Dead Pan.” When she published her two-volume collection of Poems in 1844, she insisted that “The Dead Pan” be placed last for emphasis. This poem of thirty-nine stanzas, each ending with some variation of the phrase “Pan is dead,” is often overlooked today in discussions of Barrett Browning's development probably because its theme appears outdated to modern readers. Beginning with a catalogue of classical deities—such as Juno, Apollo, and Cybele—shocked by the crucifixion of Christ, the poem depicts the death of these classical gods along with their representative, Pan. In the final third of the poem they are replaced by the Christian god and his martyred son. Then the refrain “Pan is dead” changes in meaning: no longer the lament of the classical gods, the refrain becomes a joyful proclamation of the Christian poet. On a first reading, “The Dead Pan” seems simply to celebrate orthodox Christianity; it is still generally remembered as a Victorian expression of pietism or, in Douglas Bush's facetious words of 1937, a poem in which the “Greek gods are brought face to face with Christian truth and put to rout” (268).