Robert Browning

Robert Browning was born in 1812 in Camberwell, south London, the son of a well-paid clerk at the Bank of England who owned a large library. He was educated mostly at home, where he read widely, and at sixteen he studied Greek at University College London for a year. His early long poems, such as Sordello (1840), received little attention. He developed the dramatic monologue, a poem spoken by a character who reveals himself to a silent listener, as in 'My Last Duchess' (1842), in which a duke shows a visitor a portrait of his late wife, and he also wrote the children's poem 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin'. In 1845 he began writing to the poet Elizabeth Barrett, whose work he admired; they married secretly in 1846 and moved to Italy, settling in Florence, where their son was born. After Elizabeth's death in 1861 he returned to London. The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), a long poem telling a seventeenth-century Roman murder case from several points of view, made him famous. He died in Venice in 1889 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Robert Browning is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: His parents became Dissenters; he abandoned Christian dogmas but kept religious interests. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) (via Wikisource)