ABSTRACT
Browning's modernity, G. K. Chesterton once observed, is recognisable by an unparalleled interest in small things. Chesterton's and James's insights about the material 'muchness' of the poetry raises questions about how we might understand the collocation in Browning's poetry of a messy embeddedness of things and the porousness of the boundaries between categories such as art, commodities, oddities and rejects with his smart understanding of the ethics and feelings associated with collecting and connoisseurship. D'Israeli's Curiosities begins with entries on 'Libraries' and 'Bibliomania' and includes such Browningesque topics as 'Popes and Monarchs' and 'Trials and Proofs of Guilt, in Superstitious Ages'. Henry James attempted to get at the cluttered materiality of The Ring and the Book in a different way when he compared the poem's structure to a vast gothic cathedral, noting the poet's habit of looking at his subject from the point of view of a 'curiosity'.
