Elizabeth Barrett

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In an artist's response to just criticism it seems proper to have a page dedicated solely to the English poet Elizabeth Barrett. Elizabeth was (and is) one of the most popular and acclaimed poets of the early 19th century.

Poets

Farmer Robert ...

... Goat Rancher Carl ...

Millionaire(s) Allen(s)

First of all, you wonder, just how the heck do poets earn their living? Well, Robert Frost farmed and gave lectures. Carl Sandburg worked as a newspaper reporter and then wrote best selling books about Abraham Lincoln before settling on a goat ranch. Allen Ginsberg - while making the transition from a "Beat" poet to "hippie" activist and then to a distinguished man of letters - gave readings and taught poetry at universities and ultimately sold his personal papers to Stanford University for a cool $1.2 million.¹

Elizabeth, though, lived at a time where women almost never worked.² True, they might take temporary jobs as teachers or nurses, but that was only for ladies who had no immediate means of support. Instead if ladies wanted money, they were expected to land a wealthy husband.

Elizabeth's dad was the #2 child of Charles Moulton and the former Elizabeth Barrett, whose own dad, also named Edward, was one of the wealthiest sugar plantation owners in Jamaica. Of course most of the actual work was carried out slaves who remained in servitude in the British Empire until 1834.³

With a plethora of Edwards and Elizabeths, the family genealogy can be rather confusing. But note that Charles was a Moulton. It was Charles's wife, Elizabeth, who was the Barrett.

Charles and Elizabeth had three kids, Sarah, Edward, and Sam. As was the custom amongst the British landed aristocracy, the progenies' middle names were the same as their moms's surname - Barrett. But of course their last name was Moulton. So Edward was Edward Barrett Moulton.

So how did the family end up being the Barretts?

Well, you see Charles, like his dad (the elder Edward), also ran a plantation and so he didn't have to work for a living. But despite his wealth, he was not respected by his fellow planters and their families. Exactly what was the beef has never been clearly articulated but he may have been a bit of a ne-er-do-well. Certainly his marriage was not a success but at that time any formal dissolution of an uppercrust matrimonial union was unheard of. So after Elizabeth got a bellyful of whatever was going on, she just up and took the kids to England. There she raised them without a father.

With a whiff of scandal in his family, Elizabeth's dad - remember his name was Edward Barrett - didn't want his legacy sullied by a feckless son-in-law. So "under Royal Licence and Authority", his daughter and her kids' name were changed to Moulton-Barrett. So Edward Barrett Moulton was now Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett.

So when Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett married Mary Grahame Clark she became Mary Grahame Clark Moulton-Barrett. Their kids were Edward Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett (that's our Elizabeth), Henrietta Moulton-Barrett, Mary Moulton-Barrett, Samuel Moulton-Barrett, Arabella Moulton-Barrett, Charles John Moulton-Barrett, George Goodin-Moulton Barrett, Henry Moulton-Barrett, Alfred Moulton-Barrett, Septimus James Moulton-Barrett and Octavius Westover Moulton-Barrett. Eventually Elizabeth said to heck with it and dropped the Moulton and became Elizabth Barrett Barrett or just Elizabeth Barrett.

Edward inherited the family plantation so the family was well-set up. But Edward ran the sugar business in absentia and spent most of his time at home with only occasional trips into London to "attend to business". The family first lived in the county of Durham up by Hartlepool (the home of Andy Capp), but ultimately they settled just north of London. As was fashionable they gave their house a name; in this case it was Hope End.⁴

The kids had arrived in two bunches. The first brood, Edward, Elizabeth, Henrietta, Sam, and Arabella, formed their own tight-knit group and the others were "the brats". All the kids had nicknames which sometimes changed over time. Elizabeth was "Ba" (for "Baby") and Edward was in succession Buff, Bro, and the Brozie. Henrietta was dubbed Addles. John - one of the brats - was Stormy or Stormie. The two youngest brothers, Septimus and Octavius, were Sette and Occy. All in all their childhoods were happy although the house was always on the verge of uproar.

Elizabeth was born in 1806 and like most Victorian rich kids she was taught by private tutors. However, in her teens Elizabeth began suffering from some illness which has been variously identified by modern scholars as anorexia nervosa, neurasthenia, tuberculosis, pertussis, encephalomyelitis, poliomyelitis; paralytic scoliosis, spinal injuries from a riding accident, hypokalemic periodic paralysis, and mental problems like anxiety and agoraphobia. Others think she just may have been "enjoying poor health" as was common among the Victorian ladies. In any case, given the universal treatment of "women's complaints" in the 19th Century, she could easily have ended up with a very real opium addiction.

Due to her illness, Elizabeth spent considerable time in her room writing poetry and keeping in touch with friends and family through correspondence. It soon became evident that poetry was her métier and her mom and dad encouraged her efforts.

Poetry was ubiquitous in the 19th Century. Everybody wrote poems. You wrote poems to you friends and they would respond in kind. Magazines and newspapers printed them. So while Elizabeth was still in her teens, she started sending in her poetry and she quickly became a new star of the London literary circles.

By the time she was twenty Elizabeth had published her first book An Essay on Mind with Other Poems. This was followed six years later by Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, The Seraphim and Other Poems in 1838, and by Poems in 1844. So by the mid-1840's Elizabeth was one of the most famous poets in the country and her books had even been reviewed favorably in the former colonies by a poet and critic named Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar
In the Colonies

But although Elizabeth became famous, the family fortunes had been sliding into decline not solely because of the abolition of slavery. The sugar plantations had been poorly managed and had been generating decreasingly less revenue. Elizabeth's mom had died in 1828 and the family, after moving around and living in rented houses along the coast, finally settled in a suburban townhouse just south of London's Regent's Park.

Elizabeth had long held abolitionist sentiments (as evinced in her poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point") and was happy to be living in a household that was no longer financed by slavery. Besides, her uncle and grandfather had left her an adequate inheritance which let her live independently of her father's now much reduced income.

With his finances strapped, Elizabeth's dad began getting irritable and also started showing an autocratic bent. He decided - most unusually for a Victorian patriarch - that his daughters should never marry.⁵ Elizabeth had no problems with marriage in principle but she was rather critical of the way the husbands tended to play the part of the head of the household.

In 1840 and in hopes of improving her health, Elizabeth and her brother Edward went on an extended vacation on the coast of Devon. But while Edward was out sailing there was an accident - the boat may have capsized - and Edward was drowned. Elizabeth had a complete nervous breakdown and back at the family home she spent even more of her time in her room.

But as before she kept in touch by correspondence. In 1845 she received a letter from a young gentleman named Robert Browning. He, too, wrote poetry and he expressed admiration for her talent.

But it wasn't just her talent he admired, and he went so far as to express affection for her personally. During the next year, the couple continued to exchange letters, and naturally they would slip in the occasional verse. Elizabeth's poems to Robert were later collected - with Robert's approval - in her most famous collection, Sonnets from the Portuguese.

The Sonnets from the Portuguese has the honor of having phrases being incorporated into the English idiom as have many of Shakespeare's mots. In particular, her Sonnet #43 starts off:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

... and the first line has been used as titles for books, films, and songs. It's even been used in television shows, for crying out loud!

Naturally the Sonnets from the Portuguese is listed as Romantic literature. However, in Elizabeth's heyday the "Romantic" designation had a broader meaning than today where it brings up pictures of paperback novels with covers of buxom young women in long flowing dresses and handsome young swains in leather knee-breeches and laced-up jerkins. Instead the years from 1800 to 1850 is designated as an actual epoch called The Romantic Period. During this time Romanticism flourished as a bonafide philosophy.

Romanticism rose in part as a reaction to the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th Century. Like all historical eras, it's hard to pinpoint the beginning and end of the Enlightenment. But a broad definition would cover the time after Descartes began writing how he thought therefore he was and then extended to the later years of Immanuel Kant. So the decades from 1640 to 1800 are as good as any.

The Enlightenment thinkers - chaps like Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edward Gibbon, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and of course, Isaac Newton - believed in the importance of the scientific method as advocated by Galileo and Johannes Kepler. Their chief philosophy was that truth came only from experimental evidence when used with logical and rational reasoning.

But Romanticism held that truth was possible from intuition and emotion. It is a little strange that the Romantics claimed their philosophy was one of truth but the word itself is derived from the French romaunt which means a work of fiction told in verse. In fact during the Romantic Period the word "romance" became to mean simply a fictional story as we can see when Horace Greeley - the "Go-West-Young-Man" editor of the New York Daily Tribune - labeled Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" as a romance.

But "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is certainly not what today's affectionate companions would read together while cozying up on a sofa by a nice open hearth. The story is about a man - Ernest Valdemar - who is dying of tuberculosis. But one of his friends - the narrator of the story who we know only as "P." - is interested is hypnosis. So Ernest agrees to let his friend hypnotize him just before he dies so they can see what happens.

Of course, since this is an Edgar Allan Poe story we know that even after death Ernest remains in a hypnotic trance and can converse with people around him. He is held in the trance for seven months. But when the hypnotist finally releases him we read that Valdemar's "whole frame at once - within the space of a single minute, or even less - shrunk - crumbled - absolutely rotted away". Then on the bed "before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome - of detestable putrescence."

Not really that romantic.

As this was the era when people did believe emotion and intuition could lead to truth, a lot of readers took "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" to be a true story. It was even published in England as a pamphlet titled Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis (with Edgar cited as the author). At first Edgar was rather coy about the story since if people thought it was true it would be great publicity. But he finally wrote that is was fiction. Elizabeth, we should point out, immediately recognized that it was simply a story and wrote Edgar praising how he could make it seem so realistic.

Back in England and although Robert was six years Elizabeth's junior, they managed to meet - daringly - in Elizabeth's own rooms. In only a year after they began their correspondence, they were married.

There was, though, one wee bit of a problem. Elizabeth knew her dad would be against her nuptials. So she and Robert kept the marriage secret.

Naturally when Edward did find out he was most displeased and vowed his daughter would never get tuppence from him. However, Elizabeth was 40 years old and could easily live on her independent inheritance Robert also had a fairly substantial family kitty and so the Brownings could live quite well and do nothing but write poetry.

Three years after their marriage, Elizabeth gave birth to their only child, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, who they called Pen. Pen later became a successful artist and today his paintings are displayed in major museums. He painted in a classical and realistic style and his portrait of his dad now at Baliol College is particularly notable.

In 1844 Elizabeth published one of her most popular poems, Lady Geradline's Courtship. The next year Edgar Allan Poe - who made no bones that he admired Elizabeth's poetry - dedicated to her what was to be his most famous collection. When he published The Raven and Other Poems in 1845, he wrote:

TO THE NOBLEST OF HER SEX -

TO THE AUTHOR OF

"THE DRAMA OF EXILE"

TO MISS ELIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT,

OF ENGLAND,

I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME,

WITH THE MOST ENTHUSIASTIC ADMIRATION

AND WITH THE MOST SINCERE ESTEEM.

E. A. P.

However, some who read "The Raven" thought that Edgar may have admired Elizabeth's poetry in a manner beyond which the bounds of good taste permit. You see, Edgar would sometimes get his dander up about authors who borrowed (in his opinion) too heavily from poets of less affluence but greater genius such as (in his opinion) himself. But what really put starch in Eddy's shorts was when the borrowing was from rich fat-cat professors from Harvard like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Henry's "borrowing", Edgar felt, was flat out plagiarism.

Edgar wasn't shy about making his opinions known. In 1840 he had vented his spleen in Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine after he read a collection of Henry's poems, Voices of the Night.

Edgar really dropped a load when he read Henry's "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year". Here the professor had used similar words and themes to an earlier poem "The Death of the Old Year" which had been written by none other than the famous English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

For instance, in "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year" Henry wrote:

Then, too, the Old Year dieth,

And the forests utter a moan,

Like the voice of one who crieth

In the wilderness alone,

Vex not his ghost!

... while in the "Death of the Old Year" Alfred had written:

For the old year lies a-dying.

Old year you must not die;

You came to us so readily,

You lived with us so steadily,

So in a spittle flinging diatribe against such effrontery Edgar had written:

 We have no idea of commenting, at any length, upon this plagiarism; which is too palpable to be mistaken; and which belongs to the most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property, is purloined.

Specifically what Edgar griped about was Henry's:

 ... use of the capitalized "Old Year," the general peculiarity of the rhythm, and the absence of rhyme at the end of each stanza...
 But then nearly all that is valuable in the piece of Tennyson, is the first conception of personifying the Old Year as a dying old man, with the singularly wild and fantastic manner in which that conception is carried out. Of this conception and of this manner he is robbed. Could he peruse today the "Midnight Mass" of Professor Longfellow, would he peruse it with more of indignation or of grief?

Everyone knew that Edgar had a beetle in the keister about plagiarists. In fact, one jokester wrote a poem about Edgar who because of his savage criticism had been dubbed "The Tomahawk Man":

With tomahawk upraised for deadly blow,

Behold our literary Mohawk, POE!

Sworn tyrant he o'er all who sin in verse--

His own the standard, damns he all that's worse;

And surely not for this shall he be blamed--

For worse than his deserves that it be damned!

Who can so well detect the plagiary's flaw?

"Set thief to catch thief" is an ancient saw.

Of course, "Set thief to catch thief" is just the old way to say "It takes one to know one."

And sure enough, after "The Raven" was published in 1845, careful readers - particularly those who didn't like Edgar - gleefully pointed out considerable similarities to Elizabeth's "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" which had been published only the previous year.

For one thing, both poems were, the poets tell us, written in trochaic octameter. So the basic line is:

...also called the "bump-a-bump-a-bump-a-bump-a-bump-a-bump-a-bump-a-bump-a" meter.

And Elizabeth's opening line (spread over two lines for reasons of space) is:

... while Edgar began with the same meter:

Now of course using the same meter as someone else doesn't mean it's plagiarism anymore than claiming the composers of the theme song of Gilligan's Island plagiarized Emily Dickinson.⁶ But the similarities between Edgar and Elizabeth become particularly acute when you read where in "The Raven" Edgar wrote:

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

... while Elizabeth's earlier poem had:

With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air the purple curtain

Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows,

And then in "The Raven" Edgar also wrote:

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

    Of "Never - nevermore".

And Elizabeth? Well, in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" there is:

Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling,

And approached him slowly, slowly, in a gliding measured pace;

So the conclusion is pretty much inescapable. If Henry had pinched Alfred's poems, surely Edgar was doing exactly the same and many times over with Elizabeth's verse. The story of the Poe-Longfellow Battle has been and continues to be discussed by many critics and historians. All in all, though, most people think Edgar was just being a jerk.

During Elizabeth's lifetime, she was the more famous of the Brownings. But in 1861 while she and Robert were in Italy she died at age 55 and was buried in Florence. Robert, though, lived a long and poetically prolific life and became one of England's top versifiers. He outlived Elizabeth by 27 years and died in 1889. Like Elizabeth he was buried in Italy - but in Venice, not in Florence.

Now we have to be honest. Robert Browning is the type of poet people know they should like but sometimes find it hard to "get" into his poems. Of course, given how much he wrote ultimately there's something for everyone. Probably Robert's most "accessible" poem is "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". It tells the story of, well, of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It begins:

Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,

By famous Hanover city;

The river Weser, deep and wide,

Washes its wall on the southern side;

A pleasanter spot you never spied;

But, when begins my ditty,

Almost five hundred years ago,

To see the townsfolk suffer so

From vermin, was a pity.

Actually we kind of prefer Malvina Reynold's version that starts out:

Rats, rats, everywhere,

In the kitchen and down the stair,

Rocking babies in their cradles,

Tasting soup in the cooks' soup ladles,

Eating flour from every bin,

And raising the devil in Hamelin,

Hamelin, Germany, a long time ago.

References and Further Reading

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Poetry, Margaret Forster, 1989.

"Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861)", Poetry Foundation.

The Brownings' Correspondence - Volume 1 (September 1809 - December 1826), Letters 1 - 244, Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, Wedgestone Press, 1984.

"Mystery of Victorian-era Poet's Illness Deciphered After 150 Years", Pennsylvania State University, December 19, 2011 (Updated: July 28, 2017).

"House and Home", Stephen Fry (presenter), Alan Davies (permanent panelist), Bill Bailey (guest panelist), Danny Baker (guest panelist), and Eddie Izzard (guest panelist), Qi, November 12, 2010, BBC.

The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849, Dwight Thomas and David Jackson, G. K. Hall & Company, 1987, (Available at The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1921/tplg00ca.htm).

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