When, in 1884, Thomas J. Wise viewed with consternation Browning's unselective destruction of his correspondence and early writings, his eye may well have noticed the signature of the Rev. J. D. Williams. At the same time Williams, like Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald, was giving and mailing away pages and whole letters bearing Browning's autograph. As a result, only a fraction of the Williams-Browning correspondence is now extant. The letters in this collection comprise, to the best of our knowledge, the complete remains of this correspondence. Thirty-three of these letters have not been published previously, with the exception of a part of Letter 23, published in William S. Peterson's Interrogating the Oracle. Their texts have been taken from holographs in the University of Texas Miriam Lutcher Stark Library. Letter 36 is from a holograph owned by the Yale University Library, and was previously published in New Letters of Robert Browning, edited by W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker (1950). The four additional letters (9, 17, 18, and 32) were published in 1933 in Thurman L. Hood's edition of the Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise. In the absence of the holographs, these letters have been transcribed directly from that edition. Irregularities in the Hood text—for example, the unusual letterhead in Letter 17–have been incorporated into this edition for lack of corrective evidence.

Europe has long held a special attraction for American artists of various tastes and disciplines. One of the first to call his countrymen's attention to Europe as a source of creative impulse for the fertile American imagination was Washington Irving. When writing in 1819 that “never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery,” Irving admitted that only “Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical associations.” There, he argued, “were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly-cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom.” Although America was young, bustling, democratic, and full of promise, “Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age.” “Every mouldering stone was a chronicle,” so that, as Irving asserted, “to wander over the scenes of [Europe's] renouned achievement [was] to tread … in the footsteps of antiquity … to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose [oneself] among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.”

D. W. Griffith, the most revered and influential movie creator of his day, is now universally acknowledged as the most significant figure in the history of American film. A one-time stage actor and playwright, and before that a Kentucky farmboy and high school dropout, David Wark Griffith became a movie director in 1908. By 1915, the year he released his monumental film The Birth of a Nation, he had completely revolutionized the motion picture industry. Appropriately, it was this innovative pioneer of the cinema who first brought the work of Robert Browning to the screen. In 1909 Griffith made a version of Pippa Passes and, apparently encouraged by the favorable response it received, made a version of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1912.