X-Nico

19 unusual facts about Robert Browning


Battle of Ratisbon

Robert Browning's poem "Incident of the French Camp" is set during the Napoleonic Wars Battle Of Ratisbon/Regensburg.

Ca' Rezzonico

In the 1880s, it became the home of the painter Robert Barrett Browning, whose father Robert Browning, the poet, died in his apartment on the mezzanine floor in 1889.

Eton College Collections

Casa Guidi is a small house in Florence which was owned and inhabited by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Herschel V. Jones

His first collection of about 600 first editions of modern authors was started with the purchase of a first edition of Robert Browning's Inn Album.

Humphrey S. Milford

Milford himself edited volumes of works of Robert Browning, William Cowper, and Leigh Hunt; and was principal editor of The Oxford Book of Regency Verse (later The Oxford Book of Romantic Verse) and a moving force behind the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Joaquin Miller House

He planted the surrounding trees and he personally built, on the eminence to the north, his own funeral pyre (not used) and monuments dedicated to Moses, explorer General John C. Frémont, and the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Nigel Birch, Baron Rhyl

He extracted his revenge when in the wake of the Profumo scandal he attacked the Macmillan government and quoted in his memorable speech the devastating words of Browning on Wordsworth - "Never glad confident morning again".

Pippa Passes, Kentucky

A donation from the Browning Society led to the post office's being named after Robert Browning's Pippa Passes, a verse drama which coined the phrase "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world".

Robert and Elizabeth

It is an operetta-style musical which tells the story of the romance and elopement of poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett.

Robert Browning

In The Browning Version (Terence Rattigan's 1948 play or one of several film adaptations), a pupil makes a parting present to his teacher of an inscribed copy of Robert Browning's translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included in the final volume's appendix.

-- The inscription may be a verse from the original rewritten as a hexameter, unless that was just in The Browning Version. -->

The role of Elizabeth became a signature role for the actress Katharine Cornell.

-- Note that, on 2013-02-16 anyway, The Browning Version links to a disambiguation page, which is "almost always unintended" (as Wikipedia automatically notified me after the fact), but in this case its targets are exactly those specified between parentheses above, and it does not seem opportune to instead single out either the original play or one of the film adaptations, which would seem a matter of personal experience and preference.

Robert Schumann in Three Pieces

The first piece, entitled Ash on the Ground is a passacaglia in which various compositions by Schumann are quoted; the second piece, entitled Love in a Life has a soprano soloist, and is a miniature song cycle to texts by Robert Schumann himself, along with poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Royal Literary Fund

Throughout the nineteenth century and until 1939 much of the charity's money came from an annual fund-raising dinner at which major public and literary figures (including Gladstone, Lord Palmerston, Dr Livingstone, Stanley Baldwin, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Robert Browning, J. M. Barrie and Rudyard Kipling) exhorted guests to make generous donations.

Santa Prassede

The church provided the inspiration for Robert Browning's poem "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church."

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia

There are also articles on historical figures, ranging from Robert Browning to Marshall McLuhan.

Transport on the Regent's Canal

This part of the canal was originally called Browning's Pool, after the English poet Robert Browning who lived here from 1862 to 1887, and who is believed to have coined the name "Little Venice".


1846 in poetry

September 12 – Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning marry privately in St Marylebone Parish Church, London, departing for the continent a week later.

Baldassare Galuppi

His name was brought back to public notice by the English poet Robert Browning's 1855 poem "A Toccata of Galuppi's", but this did not restore the composer's work to the general repertoire.

Bessie Rayner Parkes

Bessie Rayner Parkes’ wide circle of literary and political friends included George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lord Shaftesbury, Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, John Ruskin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Cadaver Synod

Robert Browning's lengthy poem, The Ring and the Book, devotes 134 lines to the Cadaver Synod, in the chapter called The Pope.

Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day

Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, a Poem (1850) is, despite the title, often treated as two poems by Robert Browning, rather than as one poem in two parts.

Eliza Flower

In addition to her own work, Flower became known for her friendships including those with William Johnson Fox, Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor.

English Cemetery, Florence

He surrounded it with studios for artists, including that of Michele Gordigiani (who painted the portraits of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London).

Giampietro Vieusseux, Swiss, the founder of the Gabinetto Vieusseux (where John Ruskin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, and Robert Browning were readers), is also buried here; and likewise the Swiss historian Jacques Augustin Galiffe, who with Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi pioneered genealogical, archival research.

Giacomo Pacchiarotti

Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper is the title poem of a collection of the same name by Robert Browning, published in 1876.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

That autumn, and continuing to the spring of 1886, Dickinson joined the University Extension Scheme to give public lectures that covered Carlyle, Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson.

Henrietta Montalba

She mainly devoted herself to portrait or fancy busts; some executed in marble, like those of Doctor Mezger of Amsterdam (Grosvenor Gallery, 1886), and Dr. Schollander, the Scandinavian artist; others in bronze, like that of the Marquess of Lorne; but the greater part of her work was executed in terra cotta, as in the case of her bust of Robert Browning (Grosvenor Gallery, 1883).

Jack Dash

Dash, who was interested in poetry and would quote Samuel Butler or Robert Browning in his speeches, was often invited to address prestigious bodies: he spoke at 40 student meetings, and opposed the motion 'This House would outlaw unofficial strikes' at the Oxford Union debating society.

Johannes Agricola

In 1836, Robert Browning used him as the subject of an early poetic solioquy, "Johannes Agricola in Meditation".

Lucrezia de' Medici, Duchess of Ferrara

It is possible that she is the girl referred to in the poem "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning.

Pebble in the Sky

The title was a misquotation of Robert Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra, the first few lines of which (starting "Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be...") were included in the final novel.

Peter Fribbins

A number of his key works are literary-inspired, and much of his music is for strings, notable exceptions being the early wind quintet 'In Xanadu' from 1992 (after Coleridge), 'Porphyria’s Lover' (1999) for flute and piano (after Browning), and the clarinet and piano '...That Which Echoes in Eternity' (after lines from Dante's Divine Comedy).

Pope Innocent XII

Innocent XII appears as one of the narrators in Robert Browning's long poem "The Ring and the Book" (1869), based on the true story of the Pope's intervention in a historical murder trial in Rome during his papacy.

Samuel Laurence

Thomas Erskine, 1838; Thomas Carlyle, 1841; Sir Frederick Pollock, bart., 1842 and 1847; Charles Babbage, 1845; Dr. William Whewell, 1847; James Spedding, 1860; the Rev. William Hepworth Thompson, master of Trinity, and Robert Browning, 1869; Sir Thomas Watson, bart., M.D., 1870; and the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, 1871.

Sydney Thompson Dobell

Next year he travelled through Switzerland with his wife; and after his return he formed friendships with Robert Browning, Philip Bailey, George MacDonald, Emanuel Deutsch, Lord Houghton, Ruskin, Holman Hunt, Mazzini, Tennyson and Carlyle.