“And talks to his own self, howe’er he please”

Chapter 2 takes up Robert Browning’s representations of antisocial speech in The Ring and the Book (1868-69). The mid-Victorian period saw a great outpouring of research on the relationship between language and sociability. I consider these developments in light of the Second Reform Act of 1867, and I argue that Browning’s startling diction, jagged prosody, and excessively wicked characters work to make visible the lingering, authoritarian presence of aristocratic rule and the millions of subjects still left unenfranchised by liberal reform. I show how philology informs his opposition to triumphant contemporary accounts of democracy imagined through the shared national project of the New English Dictionary.