Robert Browning

On the train, Robert Browning read a Greek play for pleasure—and seemed never to realise how little most people knew.

William Lyon Phelps begins his study in 1812 London, where Browning grew up among books, music, and parents who made room for his unusual gifts. His father wrote verse for pleasure; his mother’s music and faith helped shape the boy’s inner life. Rather than attend school or college, Browning studied what interested him, with private tutors at hand—and by twenty, he had written a poem that would bring no money and scarcely any readers. Phelps traces the man behind the poems, from this singular upbringing toward the passions and places that would feed his imagination. What did Browning learn when he was left free to follow his own mind?

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