He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations by dedicating himself to poetry. He had inherited substantial musical ability through his mother, and composed arrangements of various songs. His parents' evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford or Cambridge University, both then open only to members of the Church of England. At 16, he studied Greek at University College London, but left after his first year. He became an admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley, whom he followed in becoming an atheist and a vegetarian. By 14 he was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin. ![]() After attending one or two private schools and showing an insuperable dislike of school life, he was educated at home by a tutor, using the resources of his father's library. ![]() īy the age of 12, Browning had written a book of poetry, which he later destroyed for want of a publisher. His father encouraged his children's interest in literature and the arts. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brother's companion in his later years, after the death of his wife in 1861. His mother, to whom he was close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. Robert's father, a literary collector, amassed a library of some 6,000 books, many of them were rare so that Robert grew up in a household with significant literary resources. His paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle, had inherited a plantation in St Kitts and was rumoured in the family to have a mixed-race ancestry including some Jamaican blood, but author Julia Markus suggests she was Kittitian rather than Jamaican. Browning's mother was the daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee, Scotland, and his Scottish wife. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation, but due to a slave revolt there, had returned. Browning's paternal grandfather was a slave owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies, but Browning's father was an abolitionist. His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year. He was baptised on 14 June 1812, at Lock's Fields Independent Chapel, York Street, Walworth, the only son of Sarah Anna (née Wiedemann) and Robert Browning. Robert Browning was born in Walworth in the parish of Camberwell, Surrey, which now forms part of the Borough of Southwark in south London. Societies for studying his work survived in Britain and the US into the 20th century. By his death in 1889 he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. ![]() By her death in 1861 he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). In 1846 he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. His early long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. Robert Browning ( – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. ![]() Robert Browning (Father) Sarah Anna Wiedemann (Mother)
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