Introduction

Well before his twentieth birthday, Browning had conceived a plan for startling the world: anonymously he would produce a play, an opera, a novel, and a poem and, when all had succeeded, disclose his authorship to an astonished world. The first and only fruit of this ambitious plan was Pauline, a ‘confessional’ poem published by Saunders and Otley in 1833. With a dozen copies of the poem, Browning sent a thinly veiled request for a favourable review to the Rev. William Johnson Fox, a family friend, whose influence extended beyond the pulpit and liberal politics into the reviews. At the time, Fox was editing the Monthly Repository and, within a month of the publication of Pauline, gave the poem the warmest praise it was to receive (No. 3). In return, a grateful Browning wrote, ‘I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise.’4 Nor did he forget, for Browning referred throughout his life to Fox as his literary god-father.