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The Inn Album: A Record of 1875

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Ashby Bland Crowder
Ashby Bland Crowder
Affiliation:
Hendrix College
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Extract

It is generally agreed that Robert Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, in expressing his notions about painting, is to a certain extent putting forth the poet's own artistic creed, which was very much like George Eliot's: “to give a faithful account of men and things.” The Florentine monk captured in painting those he saw from day to day, and, after writing “Fra Lippo Lippi,” Browning himself became increasingly insistent upon basing his poems on contemporary people and surrounding them with the bric-a-brac of daily life. Following Men and Women (1855), then, Dramatis Personae (1864) marks the end of Browning's overwhelming predilection for the historical personage; thenceforward he was to have a much greater interest in presenting the men and women of his day. Of course, some poems are concerned with the contemporary only indirectly, such as “A Death in the Desert,” the poet's answer to Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus (1863). Many others, however, portray men of the day speaking in their own voices. “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,’” for example, consists of the voice of D. D. Home, the American medium, whom Mrs. Browning had admired. This interest in treating contemporaries seems much of the time to have accompanied a desire to enlarge his characters' living space. In such works as Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Browning allowed his dramatis personae to speak for about a hundred and fifty pages instead of for a few hundred lines as most often before. Still, his contemporaries continued to have prominent voices in collections of shorter poems: Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, especially “Clive” (1880); Jocoseria, especially “Donald” (1883), and Parleyings with Certain People, especially “With George Bubb Doddington” (1887).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 2 , Spring 1974 , pp. 43 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

NOTES

1. Adam Bede (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 178.Google Scholar

2. DeVane, W. C., A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), pp. 386–88.Google Scholar This work mistakenly identifies the man as the nineteenth Baron de Ros, but it was the twenty-second Baron de Ros, born 1793 and who died, as Charles Greville records in his Memoirs (Greville Memoirs, A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV by the Late Charles C. F. Greville, Esq., Clerk of the Council to those Sovereigns, ed. Reeve, Henry, 3 vols [London: Longmans, Green, 1874]), on 29 03 1839.Google Scholar See Montagne-Smith, P. W., ed., Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, and Companionage (Kingston Upon Thames: Kelly's Directories, 1967), p. 348Google Scholar, and Townend, Peter, ed., Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 104th ed. (London: Burke's Peerage, 1967), p. 734.Google Scholar

3. Furnivall, F. J., “Mr. Browning's ‘Inn Album,’” Notes and Queries, 5 (25 03 1876), 244–45.Google Scholar

4. This and subsequent references to The Inn Album are to the first edition (London:Smith, Elder, 1875).Google Scholar

5. The Times, 1 Apr. 1875, p. 115, for example. Although Ess (a reference to a trade name of the perfume Ess Bouquet) was not new in 1875, it was nevertheless popular, and it was produced by the same company that made Psidium (Piesse, G. W., Art of Perfumery [London: Longmans, Green, 1855], p. 118).Google Scholar

6. The full-column advertisement and a Smith, Elder & Co.'s notice on the publication of Browning's latest poem, Aristophanes' Apology, were juxtaposed (p. 14).

7. See p. 57 above.

8. Tent-Pegging,” p. 17.

9. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1970 ed.). The Hurlingham Club also provided grounds for other sports and was “surrounded with such accessories and so situated as to render it an agreeable country resort” (Hurlingham Club [London: privately printed, (1891)], p. 3).Google Scholar

10. See, for example, “What the World Says,” World, 16 June 1875, p. 16; and at the end of the year, John Bull reprinted an article from the Globe on “Rinko-Mania” (11 Dec., p. 855), which overviewed the frantic interest in the new pastime. The earliest citation of “Roller-skate” in OED is 1874. (Hitner, John, Browning's Analysis of a Murder: A Case for “The Inn Album” [Marquette, Mich.: Northern Michigan Univ. Press, 1969], p. 139Google Scholar, is mistaken in saying that “the Rink” is where one practices “Tent-pegging.”)

11. Times, 14 July 1875, p. 12. Galopin sold for 8,000 guineas several years later. (Hitner, p. 139, mistakenly identifies the race-horse as a painter; see my review of this book in Victorian Studies, 15 [March 1972], 385).

12. “Doctor” is a sporting term from about 1860 for “to ‘dope’ a horse” (Partridge, Eric, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 6th ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1967]Google Scholar; hereafter cited as Partridge).

13. Between 1 Jan. and 30 June there were forty-six articles in the Times on the Arctic Expedition (e.g., 31 May 1875, p. 10).

14. Proctor, R. A., The Expanse of Heaven, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), p. 114.Google Scholar

15. Astronomical Register, XIII (1876), 75.Google Scholar

16. Elliott-Binns, L. E., Religion in the Victorian Era, 2nd ed. (London: Lutterworth Press, 1964), pp. 230–31Google Scholar; and see pp. 226–42.

17. Elliott-Binns, p. 186.

18. See The Inn Album I. 303; II. 37; IV. 232, 420; VI. 61–80.Google Scholar

19. Chew, Samuel C., Byron and England (London: John Murray, 1924), p. 294.Google Scholar Browning's character's derogatory comment regarding Byron (see IV.232) could well have been prompted by Alfred Austin's active support of the Byron Memorial Fund in 1875 (“What the World Says,” World, 21 July 1875, p. 15), for Austin's praise of Byron in The Poetry of the Period (1870) had come at the expense of Browning. The Inn Album MS reveals that the attack on Byron was inserted into the poem some time after the original passage in which it appears was completed.

20. The practice of joking about himself and commenting on his work is not uncommon with Browning: see Pacchiarotto (XXVI.380–93), “A Light Woman” (XIV), “Development” (l. 84), “House,” “A Round Robin,” and “Rawdon Brown” (these last two poems are not in the Centenary Edition but appear in Kenyon, F. G., ed., New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning [London: Smith, Elder, 1914], pp. 31, 41).Google Scholar

21. Mason, James, The Annual Summary: A Complete Chronical of Events at Home and Abroad, 1875–76 (London: Ward and Lock, 1877), pp. 129, 130.Google Scholar During this period of his life, Browning attended almost all musical events in London with Miss Anne Egerton Smith (DeVane, p. 421).

22. 8 May was the first time Lohengrin nad been performed by either of London's two Italian opera companies. See the Times, 10 May 1877, p. 12; 17 May 1875, p. 7; 31 May 1875, p. 11; 29 June 1875, p. 8; 5 July 1875, p. 9.

23. Another allusion to Othello appears in VII.299.

24. On the last night of Salvini's London engagement, Browning wrote a congratulatory letter to the actor (see Autobiography, p. 170).

25. See DeVane, pp. 385–86.

26. See, for example, a report of Keneally's address to a crowd of 3,000 at the Hanley Theatre, in the Times, 19 May 1875, p. 7.

27. Keneally, who in 1875 was elected to the House of Commons, was named in The Inn Album MS version (II.36), but Browning deleted the name when correcting the proofs and added “the Laureate,” in reference to Tennyson, instead.

28. MacGreagor, Geddes, The Tichborne Imposter (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957), pp. 282–83.Google Scholar

29. Why Browning has Orton standing for Finsbury is not certain: it may have been that he wanted to use this timely name but to avoid a clear reference to the Orton residing at Newgate. The last general election before The Inn Album was published, the first in which the secret ballot system was used, was held in February of 1874, and the Islington Gazette reveals that the Finsbury election proceeded normally, there being no unusual circumstances.

30. Times, 6 Apr. 1875, p. 11.

31. 28 May 1875, p. 5.

32. Pearson, Hesketh, Dickens, His Character, Comedy and Career (New York: Harper, 1949), pp. 260–63.Google Scholar

33. Watkinson, Ray, William Morris as Designer (New York: Reinhold, 1967), p. 48.Google Scholar

34 Crowder, Ashby Bland, “Browning's Use of Landseer, Millais and Hunt,” American Notes and Queries, forthcoming.Google Scholar

35. The Club was founded in 1764 by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Samuel Johnson. This once very exclusive club accepted large numbers in the nineteenth century. The Alfred was a London club somewhat like the Athenaeum of which Browning was a member. (Neville, Ralph, London Clubs: Their History and Treasures [Chatto and Windus, 1911], pp. 263–66, 283.)Google Scholar

36. Thackeray refers to Écarté in Vanity Fair, Chap. 25.

37. See OED, sense 26b for “clear out” and sense 4b for “cleaned out.”

38. I have consulted the OED, Websters New International, Farmer's Slang and Its Analogues, Partridge, as well as several other colloquial, slang, cant, and dialect dictionaries.

39. A Times editorial on the trial states that “the most material part of the evidence against Lord de Ros [was] that called sauter la coupe, which for the sake of our English readers we shall translate into changing the turn-up card” (14 Feb. 1837, p. 5).

The common game of “pitch and toss” is described in the OED.

40. Hitner (p. 135) says that he finds only twenty-four “Victorian words” in The Inn Album; however, none of the words he lists can properly be termed Victorian words, but I easily found forty words that were introduced during the Victorian period or shortly earlier.

41. This usage is from “drawing a badger”; draw in this sense, viz. “to drag or force (a badger or a fox) from his hole,” was also first used in the nineteenth century (earliest OED citation is 1834).

42. See Partridge. The Inn Album has only “bib and tucker,” though in context “best” is implied (see III.236).

It is also interesting that not until the year following the publication of Browning's poem did Gladstone make “bag-and-baggage,” which is used by the Younger Man (V.23), a household phrase. His “bag-and-baggage” policy appeared in a pamphlet called Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.