Did I, three (?) years of hapless childhood pass—
D—d undiluted misery it was!
He got his revenge, though, by taking off the Misses Ready in full Watts voice, ‘illustrating with voice and gesture’ the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would sweep down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines:
‘Lord, ’tis a pleasant thing to stand
In gardens planted by Thy hand
…
Fools never raise their thoughts so high
Like brutes they live, like BRUTES they die.’
Mrs Orr, uncorseting a little in citing this anecdote, obligingly admits that Robert ‘even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things’. She quickly snaps back, though, Mrs Orr, remarking that Robert’s satirical swipe—even if it demonstrated some falling away from ‘the intense piety of his earlier childhood’—evidenced merely a momentary triumph of his sense of humour over religious instincts that did not need strengthening. His humour took a sharper, drier tone when, in 1833, some years after leaving the school, he heard of a serious-minded sermon delivered by the Revd Thomas Ready and commented:
A heavy sermon—sure the error’s great
For not a word Tom utters has its weight.13
The quality of the education at the Ready school was probably perfectly adequate for its times and most of its pupils. If it threatened to stultify the brilliance of Robert Browning, and if his contempt for it has condemned it in the estimation of posterity, the fault can hardly be heaped on the heads of the diligent Readys. Robert himself, quickly taking his own measure of the school in contrast to the pleasure of his father’s exciting, fantastic excursions into the education of his son, seems not to have bothered to make close friends with any of his slower-witted contemporaries, though he did dragoon some of his classmates into acting difficult plays, mostly way above their heads, some of which he wrote specially for them. He conspicuously failed to win a school prize (though, according to Mrs Orr, ‘these rewards were showered in such profusion that the only difficulty was to avoid them’) and took a somewhat de haut en bas attitude towards the school in general.
His satirical impulse was not entirely lacking in some grandiose, theatrical sense of his own superiority, to judge by Sarianna Browning’s later description to Mrs Orr of an occasion when her brother solemnly ‘ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own composition’. Such a performance was very likely not unknown at home.
It is hardly surprising that Robert was bullied at school, nor that he sometimes played up, nor that he learned virtually nothing that he later considered useful. If one of the purposes of such a school was to ‘knock the nonsense’ out of a boy, iron him out and apply his mind to the Ethics—as it were—there was a lot of knocking out to be done, since the boy Robert was immediately filled up again and creased with the learnedly fantastic ‘nonsense’ he got at home. ‘If we test the matter,’ wrote Chesterton, ‘by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, over-educated.’14
Robert’s scorn for the Ready school (despite acknowledging, on the later word of Sarianna in 1903, that ‘the boys were most liberally and kindly treated’), though perhaps fair enough in terms of his own needs, which the world and its books—far less an elementary school in Peckham and its primers—were not enough to satisfy, was conceived from what Chesterton acutely perceives as his elementary ignorance in one vital respect: Robert was ignorant of the degree to which the knowledge he already possessed—‘knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadors, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages’—was exceptional. He had no idea that he himself was exceptional, that the world in general neither knew nor cared about what he knew and, according to its own lights, got along without it very well. He never was wearied by knowledge and never was troubled by the effort taken to acquire it: learning was pleasure and increase, it never was a dispiriting chore or a burden to his brain. ‘His father’s house,’ commented Sarianna Browning to Mrs Orr, ‘was literally crammed with books; and it was in this way that Robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.’ ‘His sagacious destiny,’ remarked Chesterton, ‘while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.’
The books Robert read ‘omnivorously, though certainly not without guidance’ before and during his schooldays are known mostly on the authority of Mrs Orr, who gives a part-catalogue of them. In addition to Quarles’ Emblems in a seventeenth-century edition which Robert himself annotated, there may be counted ‘the first edition of Robinson Crusoe; the first edition of Milton’s works, bought for him by his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the introduction of printing; the original pamphlet Killing no Murder (1559) [sic], which Carlyle borrowed for his Life of Cromwell; an equally early copy of Bernard de Mandeville’s Bees; very ancient Bibles … Among more modern publications, Walpole’s Letters were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the Letters of Junius and all the works of Voltaire.’ Later, when Robert had sufficient mastery of ancient languages, Latin poets and Greek dramatists (including Smart’s translation of Horace, donated by his step-uncle Reuben) crowded his mind together with Elizabethan poets and playwrights, scraps from the cloudily romantic Ossian (by James Macpherson, another poet who had difficulty separating fact from fiction),15 Wordsworth and Coleridge (representatives of the English Romantics) and—to crown the glittering heap—the inimitable (though that stopped no one, including Robert Browning, from trying) poetry of Byron.
These works are not the end of it—hardly even the beginning. Wanley’s aforementioned Wonders of the Little World: or, A General History of Man in Six Books forever gripped Robert Browning’s imagination, its title-page advertising the contents as showing ‘by many thousands of examples … what MAN hath been from the First Ages of the World to these Times in respect of his Body, Senses, Passions, Affections, His Virtues and Perfections, his Vices and Defects.’ Nathaniel Wanley, Vicar of Trinity Parish in the City of Coventry published his Wonders in 1678, in an age when reports of wonder-working strained credulity less than they might now. The book furnished Robert’s poetry with morbid material for the rest of his life. He came across Wanley’s Little World of Wonders pretty much as Robert Louis Stevenson came across Pollock’s toy theatre and characters, ‘penny plain and tuppence coloured’.
The Emblems of Francis Quarles, first published in 1635, was relatively wholesome by comparison, though as a work of intense piety and severely high moral tone, it naturally directed the attention of readers (‘dunghill worldlings’) to the dreadful consequences of any lapse from the exemplary conduct of early and medieval Christian saints. The text was decorated with little woodcuts of devils with pitchforks, the Devil himself driving the chariot of the world and attending idle pursuits such as a game of bowls. Mythology and folklore were mixed with biblical allusions, the whole rich in an extensive, imaginative vocabulary. We have more qualms today about exposing young minds to the grim, the ghastly, the grotesque and the gothic, even the fairy tales of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm in the unexpurgated version, though children will generally seek out and sup on horrors for themselves. Robert Browning’s early exposure to morbid literature and its fine, matter-of-fact and matter-of-fiction examples of casual and institutionalized cruelties, injustices, and fantastical phenomena was balanced by early immersion in more authoritative