… for she lingers
There like sunshine over the ground
And ever I see her soft white fingers
Searching after the bud she found.10
There are any number of anecdotes that attest to a happy childhood and none that imply any serious cause for parental or official reprobation—saving only the exasperation of the Revd George Clayton who, in the course of a church service, had cause to admonish ‘for restlessness and inattention Master Robert Browning’. The boy had been reduced by impatience to gnawing on a pew.
The question of Robert the Third’s education was settled when his head became filled with so much random information that it increased what Mrs Orr describes as his ‘turbulent activity’ and it was thought desirable that he should be off-loaded for an hour or two every day into the care of a ‘lady of reduced fortunes’ who kept a dame school or local kindergarten. There, Robert’s precociousness so dispirited the mothers of the other children in the school, who reckoned that Robert was getting all the poor lady’s attention to the disadvantage of their own dullard sons, that they complained and demanded his removal. Thereafter, until the age of eight or nine, Robert enjoyed the advantages of a home education. His mother mostly took care of his moral, musical, and religious education, his father fired up his imagination with his own squirrelled store of learning and his inspired, fanciful methods of imparting it.
Robert the Second, thoroughly versed in the Greek poets, is conjured irresistibly in his son’s poetic memory: the poem ‘Development’, first published in Asolando, probably dates from 1888 or 1889, and is often quoted to illustrate Browning’s first encounter with Homer in 1817 or thereabouts.
My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
‘What do you read about?’
‘The siege of Troy.’
‘What is a siege and what is Troy?’
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—
Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance
And put to flight Hector—our page boy’s self.
Adds Browning,
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old:
And when, after two or three years, the game of Troy’s siege had become familiar,
My Father came upon our make-believe.
‘How would you like to read yourself the tale
Properly told, of which I gave you first
Merely such notion as a boy could bear?’
whereupon, at about the age of eight, Robert the Third opened Pope’s translation of The Iliad and
So I ran through Pope,
Enjoyed the tale, what history so true?
Attacked my Primer, duly drudged,
Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—
The very thing itself, the actual words,
in Greek by the age of twelve. Thereafter, for a lifetime, there was no end to Homer and Greek and the worm casts of scholarship, the dream-destroying detritus of peckers through dust and texts, winnowers of grain from chaff, who tumbled the towers of Ilium more surely to rock and sand than the hot force of vir et armis, desiccating the blood of heroes and giving the lie at Hell’s Gate to Hector’s love for his wife.
‘Development’ raises questions as to whether Robert the Second was to blame for encouraging his son’s learning through play and—strictly speaking—falsehood rather than, in Gradgrind fashion, sticking strictly to the facts:
That is—he might have put into my hand
The ‘Ethics’? In translation, if you please,
Exact, no pretty lying that improves
To suit the modern taste: no more—no less—
The ‘Ethics’.
In no mistrustful mind of dry-as-dust nonagenarian scholarship, unburdened by the Ethics, bubbling with guiltless, childlike nine-year-old innocence of any distinction between accredited reality and mythological falsehood, between truth-to-fact and truth-to-fiction, Robert was sent to school.
Browning’s biographers can become thoroughly intoxicated in the well-stocked cellar of fine vintage learning that their subject laid down from his earliest years and drew upon in draughts for the rest of his working life as a poet. He read everything and ‘could forget nothing’—except, as he claimed later, ‘names and the date of the Battle of Waterloo’. The boy’s virtual self-education at home rather than his formal schooling informed a lifetime’s poetry and play-writing. School was the least of it—a pretty perfunctory performance lasting only some five or six years. Robert boarded, from Mondays to Fridays, with the Misses Ready, who with their brother, the Revd Thomas Ready, kept an elementary school for boys at number 77 Queen’s Road, Peckham.11 It was reputedly the best school in the neighbourhood, highly regarded both in respect of pedagogy and piety. Mr Ready instructed the older boys while the younger boys, up to the age of ten, were physically and spiritually improved by the two Ready sisters, who sang the hymns of Isaac Watts as they oiled and brushed out the hair and brushed up the moral fibre of their charges. Robert attended the Ready school until he was fourteen.
His distress at leaving his mother was more than he thought he could bear. And what was it for, this dolorous separation? He later remarked to Alfred Domett,12 whose two elder brothers had been at the Ready school, that ‘they taught him nothing there, and that he was “bullied by the big boys”’. John Domett recalled to his brother Alfred for his memoir, ‘young Browning, in a pinafore of brown holland such as small boys used to wear in those days, for he was always neat in his dress—and how they used to pit him against much older boys in a “chaffing” match to amuse themselves with the “little bright-eyed fellow’s” readiness and acuteness at retort and repartee’. Robert distinguished himself not only by a smart mouth but also by occasional sharp practice: when the master’s attention was diverted, he would close the Revd Ready’s lexicon, obliging him to open it again to look for the word he’d been referring to. He also learned how to suck up to Mr Ready, composing verses that earned him some privileges and would have warmed the heart of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Great bosh they were,’ Robert said, quoting two concluding lines:
We boys are privates in our Regiment’s ranks—
’Tis to our Captain that we all owe thanks!
and followed this piece of blatant toadying by reciting from memory to Alfred Domett, while they