This Day in Literary History (Browning, Barrett Begin Taboo “Wimpole Street” Romance)

January 10, 1845—With a piece of fan mail that swiftly turned into something more, Robert Browning wrote to a fellow poet, invalid Elizabeth Barrett (in the accompanying photo), beginning one of the great literary romances—as well as the enduring question of why the object of his admiration and adoration had remained so long under the thumb of her tyrannical father. 

Time was, if you came of age between 1930 and 1960, you couldn’t help coming across an entertainment medium—stage, film, radio, or television—without some version or other of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the drama of how the dashing 33-year-old Browning spirited the frail, agoraphobic poet out of her house and eloped with her to Italy. The story is almost as famous as Sonnets From the Portuguese, the poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, a man six years her junior who revived her interest in life by awakening her sexuality. 

The tale of of this dark-haired, wan princess rescued from her bedroom and her ogre father contains the kind of drama that Browning was unable to create in his straight poetic dramas before this, but that he became famous for in his monologues such as "My Last Dutchess." Unfortunately, it also obscures the relative state of their reputations at the time--and, more important, the very real contribution to British poetry by Elizabeth that led Browning to take pen in hand to begin with. 

When they first began to correspond, Elizabeth enjoyed more critical and commercial success than her future husband, both in her own poetry and her criticism. Robert had only begun to gain an audience with Pippa Passes four years before. But it took another generation, after Elizabeth's death, before he rivaled Tennyson as the dominant figure of Victorian poetry.

Elizabeth was more famous at this time. Five years later, in fact, after Wordsworth's death, she became a credible candidate to succeed him as Britain's poet laureate. (The honor went instead to Tennyson.)

All this from a woman who, from her mid-teens, had been increasingly afflicted with what doctors of the time considered spinal and lung ailments. For the last six years, she had not left her bedroom at all, beset by grief over the death of a brother, with her beloved cocker spaniel Flush her only comfort.

But in early 1845, Browning changed her life. After commending her poetry for its “fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought,” Browning took matters a step further: “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too.” The extraordinary thing about this last statement is that he had never set eyes on its recipient before—and would not do so for another five months. 

The feeling was mutual. Before she met her eventual husband, Elizabeth had found a picture of him in a paper and tenderly clipped it out. It showed Browning with thick hair and an air of self-confidence—assets that would prove helpful in loosening her from her parental thrall. She responded the next day to his letter, and eloped with him, despite the disapproval of her father (and brothers), a year later. 

Why was Edward Moulton Barrett so adamantly opposed to his daughter’s courtship? At least a few theses have been advanced (including religious). Let’s examine some of these in turn: 

* He regarded Browning as lower-class. Read superficially, this sounds simply like snobbery. (It’s also slightly absurd—Browning’s parents took care of his expenses so he could afford to be a poet.) But it has an important implication, which I’ll call the “Dr. Sloper Corollary” (in honor of the Henry James father in Washington Square and the play and film it inspired, The Heiress): i.e., Browning was not so much interested in Mr. Barrett’s daughter as in her money—i.e., Mr. Barrett’s money, that is. 

* He had abused his eldest daughter and was insanely jealous of anyone who threatened to disrupt the relationship. In recent years, as such matters have become more talked-about on shows such as Oprah, this theory has gained traction. It’s a contention all but impossible to disprove, because, one could argue, the Victorians, with their standards of propriety, would surely have destroyed any documentary evidence proving this. One person who believed it was Charles Laughton, who played Edward Barrett, in all his muttonchop glory, onscreen in the 1934 film adaptation of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Told that the script would need to excise lines implying incest, Laughton responded: “They can’t censor a gleam in my eye.” (See this YouTube excerpt to see how Laughton made this one of his indelible screen portraits of tyrants.) 

* He feared the consequences of his family’s mixed-blood heritage—and especially couldn’t abide the thought that this racial impurity would be compounded if Elizabeth took up with another product of miscegenation. The prior two explanations are perfectly adequate in accounting for why Edward Barrett forbade Elizabeth from marrying. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why Edward Barrett forbade any of his kids who survived to adulthood from marrying—not just the three daughters, but all nine of his sons. Such a sweeping ban could be required, some have argued, only if Barrett feared that black blood in the family line would be perpetuated—multiplied, even—if his daughter married Browning.

Barrett's affluence was based on the family sugarcane plantation in Jamaica, where they had held slaves for years (until, that is, the practice had been banned in the British Empire the decade before). He could not be sure that none of his forbears did not have slave parentage.

Worse than this (for Mr. Barrett, anyway), according to biographer Julia Markus, was that Browning's own lineage posed the same issues.