Atheism served much the same purpose. That his speculative beliefs were sincerely held and admitted of no counter-persuasion from those who expressed concern for his physical and spiritual welfare was perhaps secondary to their practical effect. Robert Browning had got out into the world, and he would deal with it on his own terms. He might still be living within the narrow propriety of his parents’ house, which increasingly rubbed at his heels and elbows, but he was his own man. Sarianna, his sympathetic sister, admitted to Mrs Orr that ‘The fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them.’22
Robert had left the Ready school at the age of fourteen, and for two years thereafter he was educated privately at home, in the mornings by a tutor competent in the general syllabus; in the afternoons by a number of instructors in music, technical science, languages (French particularly), singing, dancing, exercise (riding, boxing, fencing), and probably art.23 In the evenings, if his father did not entertainingly contribute to the educational process, Robert worked at his own pleasure, voraciously reading, assiduously writing, sometimes composing music. None of his musical compositions have survived the incinerating fire he so loved to feed. Robert ‘wrote music for songs which he himself sang’, states Mrs Orr, citing three: Donne’s ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, Hood’s ‘I will not have the mad Clytie’, and ‘The mountain sheep are sweeter’ by Peacock. These settings were characterized to Mrs Orr, by those who knew of them, as ‘very spirited’.24
Robert also acquired a social life, associating with three Silverthorne cousins—James, John and George, the sons of Christiana Wiedemann, Sarah Anna Browning’s sister, who had married Silverthorne, a prosperous local brewer. All three were musically gifted and sometimes described as ‘wild youths’.25 The Silverthornes lived in Portland Place, Peckham. James came to be Robert’s particular friend, and his name is written in the register of Marylebone Church as one of the two witnesses at the wedding in 1846 of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. James, who succeeded to the family brewery, died in 1852. To mark his passing, Robert wrote the poem ‘May and Death’ which lovingly commemorates the friendship between himself and James (called Charles in the poem).
In addition to association with cousins, Robert acquired improving acquaintance with, notably, Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould (later to become Sir Joseph Arnould of the High Court bench of Bombay, but meanwhile something of a youthful radical and an admirer of Carlyle). Both were clever, ambitious young men of his own age, sons of established Camberwell families. He had, too, independent adventures. Stories are told—and credited by some—of his ramblings, following the tracks of gypsy caravans far across country. William Sharp, in his biography of Browning (1897), seems to think that Robert kept company with ‘any tramps, gypsies or other wayfarers’, though Mrs Orr in her more authoritative (less lyrical and very much less airily romantic) biography, published in 1891, quashes any suggestion that he caught them up or was detained in parleyings with them: ‘I do not know how the idea can have arisen that he willingly sought his experience in the society of “gipsies and tramps”.’
Both Sharp and Mrs Orr knew Robert Browning personally, and it must be admitted that the latter can lay claim to longer, more intimate and more extensive acquaintance with the poet. There is no doubting it from the tone of her book that Mrs Orr strives for a scrupulous fidelity to the facts—some of which, if deplorable, are omitted—but some caution is required when dealing with her inclination to polish the poet to his brightest lustre and to put the best and brightest face on failure. She can sometimes, in her emphases and suppressions, be inspired to what we now recognize as spin. However, Sharp invites comparison with Browning’s poem ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ and a song which Robert heard on a Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, with the refrain, ‘Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!’ that rang in his head until it found appropriate poetic expression years later. Chesterton sufficiently credits or relishes Sharp’s literary association as to repeat it in his own biography. It seems likely that, whatever romantic fascination Robert may have had with the itinerant life of gypsies, they represented his then feelings of freedom as a desirable thing rather than as an actuality in his life or as an alternative to it. He had neither any incentive to run away with the ‘raggle-taggle gypsies-o!’, nor any inclination to inquire too closely into the reality of lives less privileged, in conventional terms, than his own.
There is talk, too, of Robert’s taste for country fairs. This is elaborated by Griffin and Minchin, who charmingly describe how, ‘For three days each summer the Walworth Road from Camberwell Gate to the village green—a goodly mile—was aglow after sunset with candles beneath coloured shades on the roadside stalls: on the Green itself, besides the inevitable boats and swings and merry-go-rounds, there was the canvas-covered avenue with its gingerbread booths, there was music and dancing, and best of all, there was the ever-popular Richardson’s Theatre—appreciated, it is said, by the poet in his younger days. Peckham also had its fair, which was held just opposite Mr Ready’s school; and Greenwich, noisiest and most boisterous of fairs, was close at hand.’26 Again, with an implied note of reproof, Mrs Orr dampens any speculative fervour about Robert’s bohemian instincts by insisting that ‘a few hours spent at a fair would at all times have exhausted his capacity for enduring it. In the most undisciplined acts of his early youth, were always present curious delicacies and reserves.’
She is keen to return Robert to his books and his work, away from any suggestion of irreverent or—spare the mark—inappropriate interests and activities: ‘There was always latent in him the real goodness of heart which would not allow him to trifle consciously with other lives.’ Fifine might go to the fair, but Robert should stay home and satisfy himself with the habit of work as his safeguard and keep tight control of an imagination that, rather than mastering him, would serve him. This seems a little censorious, not to say apprehensive that Robert might have had yearnings that, if not severely restrained, would have led him into even more ‘undisciplined acts’. We must close our eyes in holy dread at the very thought and be thankful that nothing unworthy soiled the blameless page he worked upon, far less sufficiently overcame his ‘curious delicacies and reserves’ to distract him from it.
Better to think of Robert no longer incited by his early adherence to Byron—that libertine and sceptic who roamed at large as much in the world as in his meditations—but at sundown, on the brow of the Camberwell hill (now known as Camberwell Grove), among the spreading elms, suffused with the spiritual light of Shelley and looking down, deliriously, on the darkling mass of London sprawled at his feet, lit by the new gas lamps. For the time being, Robert remained safely distant from the snares and entanglements of the beautiful but seductive city: so many lives to refrain from toying with, so much noisy, messy—maybe vicious—life to assault curious delicacies and reserves should he dare to descend to put them to the test. Byronism, as Chesterton remarks, ‘was not so much a pessimism about civilized things as an optimism about savage things’. But now Robert was Byronic only in the dandyism of his dress. It was Shelley who suited his soul. And so, turning, Robert would go home to bed, sleeping in a bedroom that adjoined his mother’s, the door always open between them, and to give her a kiss—every night, even in the worst of their disputes—before retiring. He never willingly spent a night away from home.27
Robert’s fascination with and attachment to the natural as contrasted with the artificial world was innate. It took inspiration from his mother’s intense sympathy with flora and fauna, if we are to credit