33 - Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

Summary

The clandestine marriage and elopement of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett (1806–61) with Robert Browning (1812–89) – hereafter for convenience EBB and RB – has mated them for ever in the popular imagination. They go together here for that reason, and also because one strong force behind their artistic development, not to mention marital compatibility, was the stake each held in the cultural formation of evangelical dissent that did so much to create the modern world. This was the insurgent interest that in the crisis of early Victorian Reform assumed control of the long-standing Anglican state and made it over, in modern non-sectarian terms, between the founding of the University of London (1826) and the Great Exhibition (1851). The dissenting ascendancy represented a convergence of commercial, engineering, banking and legal concerns to which both the Barrett and the Browning family belonged; and its Whiggish patriotism meant business. In the name of a newly self-conscious middle class, Reform MPs enacted measures enfranchising Britons to worship without penalty outside the Established Church and to sell their goods and labour on the laissez-faire principles of contractual individualism. Reviving the suspended momentum of revolutionary zeal from the latter eighteenth century, they aimed to extirpate slavery, prostitution and child labour, to reshape national education and to loosen the privileged bond between Church and state by combating the prejudices on which both ancient bulwarks rested. To these aims both Brownings made their poetry, in the largest sense, an accessory.