Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

In contrast to last year's work on EBB, in which religion formed a dominant theme, 2006 has brought a return to a strong emphasis on politics--both the politics of nation and gender politics. Works on which attention seems to have converged include the explicitly political Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress, along with Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet," one of the most discussed works in Last Poems (1862). Among major new primary resources on EBB, Volume 15 of The Brownings' Correspondence has appeared from Wedgestone Press, as carefully edited and beautifully produced as its precursors in this indispensable comprehensive collection of the Brownings' letters, edited by Philip Kelley with Ronald Hudson (Volumes 1-8), and with Scott Lewis (Volumes 9-14). Other topics discussed this year include EBB's treatment of the city, her representation of melancholy, her collaborative engagement with Robert Browning's works (and his with hers in works such as "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"), echoes of Shakespeare, and her treatment of social problems. As the bicentenary of EBB's birth, 2006 has also brought conferences such as the Armstrong Browning Library's "This is Living Art" (held March 3-6), and exhibits in libraries and archives, such as the one mounted by the British Library in February and March.

Volume 15 of The Brownings' Correspondence is a reminder, should any be needed, of how rich a resource this annotated collection of letters, reviews, and other materials related to the Brownings can be. Although numerous letters in this particular volume (covering the period from January 1848, to August 1849) have appeared in whole or in part in earlier collections, there are also many previously unpublished letters--including letters to correspondents as close to EBB as the Brownings' friend, the writer and art critic Anna Jameson, and RB's sister, Sarianna Browning, as well as letters by both the Brownings to the American writer William Ware, and occasional letters from readers of EBB's poetry.

Important subjects that recur in Volume 15 include the movements of "revolution and counter-revolution" in Italy and elsewhere in Europe (p. 271), EBB's second miscarriage in March 1848, her pregnancy, and the birth of the Brownings' son on March 9, 1849. The most intimate and detailed of the letters, not surprisingly, are those to her two sisters, Arabella and Henrietta. The full texts of the Arabella letters have earlier appeared in Scott Lewis' annotated two-volume The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella (containing letters from the time of EBB's marriage and move to Italy in 1846 up to her death in 1861--see the "Year's Work," 2002). The 1848-49 letters to Henrietta, however, have previously appeared only in part (and without the ample annotation that The Brownings' Correspondence provides) in Leonard Huxley's edition, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859 (1929). In some cases as well, previously published letters appear in Volume 15 with dates corrected by Kelley and Lewis.

Like some of the letters in this new volume of the Correspondence that have previously appeared in Frederic G. Kenyon's The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897), the full texts of the letters to Henrietta show how much was suppressed by earlier editorial deletions-particularly in relation to medical details such as EBB's use of morphine and matters of the body. (On this point, an extended analysis of Kenyon's typescript of his edition of the letters, now in the British Library, with cancelled passages clearly marked, would be of some interest.) In Volume 15's letters to Henrietta, EBB details the bodily sensations associated with the "quickening" during her pregnancy with Pen, for example (p. 149); she subsequently frankly and fully expresses her views on the mistake of treating pregnancy as a disease and not one of "the things of pure nature" (p. 221). These letters also make clear the important role that Robert played in reducing her reliance on opium during her pregnancy with Pen, which she willingly did despite her views, consonant with much of the medical opinion of the time, concerning its appropriate therapeutic uses. She wrote to her sister-in-law Sarianna encouraging her to consider proposing morphine to help Robert's mother deal with the pain of illness, observing, "I was never tempted beyond the medical prescription, in taking it, nor have I suffered from the practise in any specific way.. not from headache, not from indigestion.. nor am I prevented from leaving it off, you see, (Robert must have told you) when it becomes desirable to leave it off, notwithstanding the long habit & the excessive use.. few persons having taken such large doses as I" (p. 201).

While much in this volume concerns the Brownings' private lives in a period that saw not only Pen's birth, but also--immediately following this joyful event--the death of Robert's mother, another recurrent subject is Italian politics and the events that inspired Casa Guidi Windows. In a previously unpublished letter to Fanny Dowglass dated April 6, 1848, EBB writes, "I say to my husband, when he goes to look at the newspaper, 'Bring me news of a revolution or two.' And he brings me news of three. And then the peculiar features of these movements--the manner in which the breath of the people bows down fields of drawn swords, like the breath of God Himself!" (p. 46). Her comment conveys the reaction of many in a year that saw revolutions throughout the Italian states, in France, and in several other European countries. By 1849, of course, there had been "counter-revolutions" in Tuscany and in Rome, while in France the new republic brought the election of Louis Napoleon--which EBB skeptically viewed as an instance of "true king-worship" (p. 203), in her initial mistrust of the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. These developments made her less optimistic about the power of the people to effect political change, although she remained a republican.

As in previous volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 15 includes "Biographical Sketches," "Supporting Documents," and contemporary reviews of the Brownings' works (in this instance, very different from earlier volumes, the reviews are all on Browning's poetry). The supporting documents include a rather sniping comment to a correspondent by Mary Russell Mitford from an autograph letter at Yale: "By the way Mrs. Browning is to be confined in February. She always speaks of her husband rapturously--but I cannot forgive him for not working (I mean by that word writing paying literature) to supply to her some of the comforts she forfeited for him, but living upon his wife in contented idleness just as he did before upon his father" (p. 363).

The detailed yet succinct biographical sketch (pp. 345-354) of the Brownings' son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning or "Pen," in Volume 15 is of particular interest as a portrait in miniature of one of literature's most celebrated children, who grew up into a young man with the burden of great expectations heaped upon him. Within a week of his mother's death, Pen's long hair was shorn--"the golden curls & fantastic dress gone ... just as Ba is gone"--and he became "a common boy all at once," RB wrote to his sister Sarianna. Within the next month, he was removed by his father from Italy to England. Looking back on his mother's death, it is not surprising that Pen observed, "I have always remembered that date ... and the pain and anguish of it all are only too vivid and enduring" (p. 347). Pen's less than stellar performance as a student at Oxford is treated in some detail, and the biographical sketch casts some light on the bitter differences with his father provoked by his continental love affair with the daughter of a Belgian innkeeper in Dinant--a young woman whom he resolved to marry until finally persuaded to break the relationship off. In this instance, Kelley and Lewis draw on the large trove of unpublished letters by Browning's close friend, Joseph Milsand, recently acquired by the Armstrong Browning Library--letters which will no doubt greatly enrich volumes of the correspondence yet to appear, as well as new biographies of the Brownings and accounts of their relationship.

Among the articles dealing directly or indirectly with gender issues and politics in EBB's poetry this year, Katherine Montwieler's "Domestic Politics: Gender, Protest, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems before Congress" (TSWL 24 [2005]: 291-318) is particularly ground-breaking. Montwieler rightly points out that "several book-length studies of Barrett Browning's poetry" omit any "sustained" analysis of Poems before Congress as a whole (p. 292). The only poem to receive detailed treatment to date has been the final one, "A Curse for a Nation." In discussing this particular poem, Montwieler largely covers ground traversed in earlier articles and books (the controversy in the reviews, the poem as a powerful "speech act," its gender politics, and its pun on "right" and "Write"). What makes her essay innovative is the illuminating discussion of the works in Poems before Congress that precede "A Curse for a Nation." This is the first critical study to treat Poems before Congress comprehensively as a whole, considering its rhetorical intentions, the artistry of its structure, and the complex dialogical relations that operate within the sequence of poems it includes. Montwieler approaches the much misunderstood collection "not as an aesthetic failure or as a political blunder but as a carefully wrought poetic articulation of international and gender politics by a sophisticated and knowing mid-nineteenth-century poet" (p. 294). She analyses the relations between the personal and the political in the collection, showing how poems such as "The Dance" and "A Court Lady" contribute to its treatment of the intersections between "the events that structure women's married lives--courtship, motherhood, and widowhood" and political events. Refreshingly, she also reads the complex opening ode to Napoleon III--traditionally approached as an expression of EBB's naive hero-worship of the French emperor--in counterpoint with the "hardly respectful" dramatic monologue in his own voice, "An August Voice," appearing midway through the sequence (p. 306). She furthermore treats the ode as a work as much about "the right of the woman poet to speak of any subject she chooses" (p. 299) as Napoleon III. "On one level," the poem represents "the baptism of a new leader," she argues, while on another, it is "an assertion of the extraordinary powers and role of the woman poet" (p. 300).

In "A 'Bad Patriot'?: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Cosmopolitanism" (VIJ 33 [2005]: 69-95), Christopher M. Keirstead takes a less heroicizing approach than Montwieler to EBB's engagement with politics. Where Montwieler finds a "triumphant woman poet" intervening in the political sphere in Poems before Congress, Keirstead finds less triumph and more conflict in tracing the "poetics of cosmopolitanism" that emerges in "complex dialogue" with "nationalist devotion" in EBB's later poetry (p. 69). In Casa Guidi Windows EBB "commits poetry to the political objective of Italian nationalism and privileges the poet's access to an idealized language of the nation" in order to articulate an internationalist vision in which the individual is subsumed by the nation, he argues (p. 73). Such "[e]vangelical nationalism" gave her "a way of expressing a connection to Italy that could be at once political but also safely feminine," he argues (p. 75). In later works such as Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet," she continues to "give voice to this inter(nationalist) ideal," while also doing more to "close the gap between the personal and the political and between the private and the public" (p. 73). Whereas in Casa Guidi Windows, she casts "Italians as souls rather than bodies," largely "erasing individual Italians" (p. 77), in Aurora Leigh she embodies and "narrativizes" cosmopolitanism in the hybrid nationality of the poet protagonist. Noting, but passing over Poems before Congress as EBB's "most explicitly cosmopolitan work" (p. 84), Keirstead focuses instead on the "conceptual leap" he finds in "Mother and Poet." "If Poems before Congress expresses the dream of internationalism via nationalism, 'Mother and Poet' explores the difficulty and personal cost of truly realizing that vision" through "its inability to conjoin individual and collective identity under the banner of nationhood" (pp. 84-85). While Kierstead thus investigates as Montwieler does the intersections of the personal and political, the private and the public, in EBB's later political poetry, he focuses on differing manifestations of this, and finds a less triumphant poetics. "At the end of her career," he concludes, "Barrett Browning was trying to find a way out of the extremes of international politics--a way of replacing sacrifice with survival" (p. 87).

Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet" are also the principal works treated in Olivia Gatti Taylor's "Written in Blood: The Art of Mothering Epic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning" (VP 44 [2006]: 153-164), which reflects, as Keirstead's work does, an emphasis on the poetics of the body. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of the maternal in the essay "Stabat Mater," as well as her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic in Revolution in Poetic Language, Taylor explores the "link between the maternal and the poetic" by analyzing the literal and metaphoric relations between bearing children and creating poems in Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet" (pp. 153-154). While some mention of EBB's own adaptation of a Medieval version of the hymn "Stabat Mater" might have added to Taylor's analysis, she presents some thought-provoking connections between the two works she focuses on, avoiding the perils of essentialism that her central analogy might seem to provoke, much as the poet herself does. She approaches EBB's complex adaptation of the myth of Jove and Danae to express poetic inspiration and creativity in Aurora Leigh by embedding it within the numerous "gestational" images of this novel-epic written in nine books. "According to Barrett Browning, the mother/poet must clothe 'unspeakable poetry' in flesh, thereby becoming a Marian figure," Taylor argues, contesting earlier critics such as Linda Lewis who have found a troubled passivity in Aurora becoming a "'receptacle of wisdom and word in the poetic sense as Mary was the receptacle of Christ the Word and Wisdom'" (Lewis, cited by Taylor, p. 161). Taylor's article gives the most attention to religious dimensions of EBB's poetics in the articles published this year, approaching the "child/text" in Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet" as "a type of Christ, a messianic force which both subordinates and elevates the maternal poet as an agent of loving apocalypse" (p. 154). Like Kierstead, however, she emphasizes the cost and pain of such maternal and poetic creativity, especially in "Mother and Poet," where human progress "comes at the price of blood" (p. 160). She makes especially suggestive use of Kristeva's observation that "A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language" (p. 157) in treating Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet," bringing home her argument concerning the pain of maternal and poetic creativity by a sensitive analysis of the sob and drum-like rhythms of "Mother and Poet."

Whereas Taylor explores the paradoxical agency of maternal metaphors for creativity in Aurora Leigh and "Mother and Poet," Leslee Thorne-Murphy's "Prostitute Rescue, Rape, and Poetic Inspiration in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh" (Women's Writing 12 [2005]:241-257) explores the "Greek myths of rape that Aurora uses as metaphors for her own poetic inspiration" (p. 241). Thorne-Murphy's subtle investigation of the "interrelation of rape, prostitution, and inspiration" in Aurora Leigh connects Marian Earle's rape with Aurora's poetic theories in order to explain "why the elimination of sexual violence is essential to Barrett Browning's vision of a reformed world" (p. 242). Like Linda Lewis, whom she cites (pp. 243-244), Thorne-Murphy considers Aurora's "shocking" use of "three different rape episodes from Greek mythology"--involving Ganymede, Io, and Danae--to depict divine inspiration, giving particular attention to the last. She differs, however, from Lewis to some degree, and even more so from Joyce Zonana (in Zonana's much cited article on "The Embodied Muse") in her reading of the myth of Danae. While Zonana draws parallels beween "Aurora's idealizing images of divine rape" in her invocations of Danae and the actual rape of Marian in the poem (Zonana, cited by Thorne-Murphy, p. 245), Thorne-Murphy argues that "at no time does Aurora refer to Danae's tale as a rape" (p. 245). Instead, EBB uses this metaphor of "sexual union" to symbolize the "willing union of moral and divine," in contrast to Marian's rape, which "threatens that union and the poetic inspiration that it represents" by separating "the spiritual from the material" or physical world (p. 246). In a second section of her essay, Thorne-Murphy considers EBB's adaptation of contemporary paradigms of prostitute rescue in Aurora's relationship with Marian, approaching this in the context of feminist dimensions of French socialist thought (Fourier's works in particular) and mid-Victorian discourse on prostitution, especially as represented by Henry Mayhew. While earlier critics have emphasized that Marian's innocence (by virtue of her rape) contributes to the conventionality of EBB's portrayal of prostitution in Aurora Leigh, Thorne-Murphy argues that Aurora's belief in Marian's "wild story of betrayal, rape, and injured innocence" without the evidence from corroborating sources emphasized by Mayhew and others "would have sent a shudder down the spine of any self-respecting Victorian philanthrophist." Indeed, "this is the reaction which philanthropic women were most warned against" (pp. 251-252). The innocence that modern readers assume in Marian, in other words, would by no means have been obvious or uncontested in Victorian contexts. Emphasizing Aurora's "middle-class values" and unreliability as a narrator before her encounter with the bitter truth of "rape in all its murderous violence" (pp. 251,254), Thorne-Murphy points out that Aurora's conception of and approach to facts differs from Mayhew's, in relying on poetic intuition and "divine truth" (p. 253). Moreover, in forming a personal and passionate relationship with Marian and moving with her to Italy, Aurora "goes well beyond the practical efforts of most prostitute-rescue workers" (p. 252); in turn, her confrontation with Marian's violation contributes to her poetic maturation (p. 254).

While prostitution became a particularly pronounced and controversial subject associated with the growth of cities in the mid-Victorian period, it does not figure prominently in Daniel Karlin's analysis in "Victorian Poetry of the City: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh," included in the interesting collection, Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature, ed. Valeria Tinker-Villani (2005) (pp. 113-123). Karlin focuses mainly on the ways in which Aurora Leigh draws on the Romantic "rhetoric of the sublime" as this was adapted by Victorian poets to "the modern city" (p. 113). As Karlin presents it, however, Aurora's life, like EBB's own, is less of the city, than simply in it. Although Aurora seems to be a "busy professional woman, immersed in literary life" in London "in a way quite foreign to Barrett Browning's own experience"; in fact she leads a kind of "double existence" there, "one which takes advantage of urban culture and economic conditions, but which is not in fact committed to urban identity" (p. 116). He supports this argument in part through a perceptive analysis of the rhetoric of the sublime and metaphors of dissolution in a "densely figurative" passage that he rightly terms "remarkable" in Book III of Aurora Leigh (ll. 169-203), but which has hitherto not been treated in criticism on the poem (pp. 117-118). In this passage, Aurora evokes the city as a "source of visionary creative power," as she observes the sun "[on] lurid morns or monstrous afternoons," or contemplates the "great tawny weltering fog" sucking up the London streets like a sponge--watching "the city perish in the mist / Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea" (ll. 196-197). Contemplating these spectacles, Aurora affirms her right like "Miriam" to "sing the song" she chooses. Karlin points out how these "apocalyptic images of loss and dissolution reverse those of clarity, stillness, and harmony" in Wordsworth's Westminster Bridge sonnet (p. 118). In treating passages "which are not about writing poetry in the city, but about the city itself," Karlin turns to the much-cited passages in which Aurora describes the slums of St. Margaret's Court, arguing as some earlier critics have done, that it is "filled with standard images, familiar to middle-class readers who were shocked and thrilled by accounts of darkest London" (pp. 120-121). He doubts "if Barrett Browning knew how priggish, condescending, and self-serving Aurora sounds when she blesses the prostitute" she encounters in St. Margaret's Court, concluding that Aurora gets to the New Jerusalem of the poem's conclusion by "not much caring who she tramples on to get there" (p. 123). This phase of Karlin's argument might have been more con vincing if he had engaged with earlier critics such as Margaret Reynolds (in the "Critical Introduction" to the edition of Aurora Leigh that Karlin uses) who argue that EBB dramatically portrays Aurora as an unreliable narrator in her response to the slums in Book IV of the poem. One wonders, as well, if Aurora's encounter with Marian in Paris and her subsequent move with her to Florence reflect a differing engagement with urban realities than we see in the London scenes? Certainly, this is the view that Thorne-Murphy seems to take in considering the trajectory of Aurora's relationship with Marian in the context of narratives of prostitute rescue.

Unlike the majority of new criticism this year focused on political dimensions of EBB's later poems, David G. Riede's "Elizabeth Barrett and the Emotion of the Trapped," chapter three in his book Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy and Victorian Poetry (2005), treats poetry written in the first half of her career. Not surprisingly, Riede emphasizes the religious dimensions of much of this work, given his subject matter: "the allegorical figurations of melancholy" in the poetry of the Brownings and Tennyson (p. 38). Framing his approach to melancholy within a masculine tradition of Romantic poetics, and a body of Freudian and post-Freudian theory that he acknowledges as "gendered" in its bias (p. 91), Riede argues that, despite "struggles to formulate a social position for the woman poet's separate will as well as her official sentiments," EBB "ends up in her early work reinscribing the accepted role of the female poet with an eloquence and creativity that highlights the fault lines separating the limits of creativity for women poets from those of men and distinguishing between a female tradition of sentimental poetry and a male tradition of melancholy" (pp. 92-93). Riede points out that "the majority of Barrett's most recent critics have argued that even her early poetry is subtly subversive of conventional morality," but his argument, to the contrary, is that this "poetry is in fact conservative in its sentimentality at least throughout her early career writing as a trapped 'Mariana' figure in her father's house" (p. 93). It is conservative, he maintains, because the "latent Byronic melancholy" in EBB's earlier poetry "is, in fact, kept in check by the 'cruel policing' of her orthodox Christian conscience" (p. 94). Riede's argument in relation to "The Poet's Vow," "The Seraphim," and at greater length, A Drama of Exile, is often thought-provoking, though less persuasive than it might have been if he had engaged more robustly with earlier criticism that takes a different tack than his own. I was also left wondering if a different historical and theoretical framing of the poetics of melancholy than he employs (one that included female Romantic writers as well as male writers, for example) might have yielded very different readings. That said, Riede offers a subtle analysis of EBB's earlier works and concludes with a particularly original argument concerning the "transgendered" melancholy (p. 40) of Sonnets from the Portuguese and the ways it which it functions as a turning point in the poet's career, away from "the emotion of the trapped" (p. 125).

"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" is one among several poems by EBB that figure in "'Singing Song for Song': The Brownings 'in the Poetic Relation,'" an essay co-written by Corinne Davies and Marjorie Stone in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (2006) (pp. 150-174). Part of a collection that treats the diversity of literary couplings and collaborations from the time of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, this essay, written in the form of letters, debates "the extent to which the Brownings attained a harmonious partnership as the two poets read, edited, and revised each other's poems in the courtship period; contemplated a literary collaboration; cast each other as "siren" muses; and, as a married couple, quarreled over politics and spiritualism" (p. 29). The focus, however, falls upon the Brownings' literary and textual exchanges, not upon their personal lives. Davies and Stone discuss criticism on the Brownings' writerly interactions (noting that female critics such as Adrienne Munich seem more inclined than male critics to see "poetic strife" between the Brownings as opposed to harmony), consider EBB's extensive editorial comments on poems by RB in the courtship period such as "The Flight of the Duchess," and examine how they learned from each other's innovations in the forms of the ballad and dramatic monologue. Their most pointed debate occurs over RB's penciled revisions in a fair copy of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," in particular his enclosure of EBB's characteristic signature initials at the end of the ms in heavy brackets, prefaced by the underlined word "my". (A photograph of the manuscript page is included with the essay.) Is RB's gesture a "charming instance of the fond new husband's terms of endearment"? Or a mark of enclosure and possessiveness akin to that which Munich finds in RB's "enringing" of EBB's name (and fame) with his own at the close of The Ring and the Book (pp. 166-167)? Ranging through works in Men and Women and some of EBB's Last Poems, Davies and Stone approach, from differing angles, the paradox that the Brownings, with their "legendary happy marriage produced some of the most powerful poetry about disillusionment in love, erotically charged revenge, and marital breakdown during the Victorian period" (p. 169) in works such as EBB's "Bianca Among the Nightingales" and RB's "James Lee's Wife." They close with a debate on RB's salute to EBB in Men and Women, "One Word More," Stone emphasizing the dissonances of this complex tribute, Davies its expression of the "redemptive qualities" (p. 173) of love, akin to the vision of Aurora and Romney's conjugal love at the close of Aurora Leigh.

Other new or recent treatments of EBB include Ruth Robbins' "Hidden Lives and Ladies' Maids" (Women: a cultural review 15 [2004]: 217-229), Jane Wood's "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare's Sonnet 130" (N&Q 52 [2005]: 77-79, and an article published in Korean, Hongsang Yeo's "Dialogism and Social Criticism in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetry," appearing in Segi Yongogwon Munhak (Nineteenth. Century Literature in English) 8 [2004]: 55-86). Robbins' essay, as much about Margaret Forster's novel Lady's Maid (1990) as EBB, explores issues of secrecy, the challenges of biographical writing, and the divisions of social class in an essay concerned both with writing women's reliance on others' labor and, more particularly, EBB's relationship with her maid Lily Wilson in particular (the protagonist of the Forster novel). While Robbins presents a thought-provoking consideration of class differences in particular, her assessment of Forster's representation of the woman EBB called "Wilson" might have been enriched by more use of The Brownings' Correspondence, and what it reveals about both Lily Wilson and EBB's relationship with her. Wood argues that the description of Marian's appearance in Aurora Leigh as "[n]o wise beautiful," " not white nor brown," echoes Shakespeare's famous sonnet, "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun." Unfortunately, I do not read Korean, but the English quotations and notes in Hongsang Yeo's substantial article indicate that her Bakhtinian analysis of EBB's social criticism draws on Marx as well, and includes consideration of "The Cry of the Children," "The Cry of the Human"--a much less discussed social protest poem published in Poems (1844)--and "A Song for the Ragged Schools of London."

Volume 26 of SBHC, a special issue entirely on EBB which I read in proofs kindly furnished by the Armstrong Browning Library and covered in last year's essay, actually appeared in print in the spring of 2006. I also overlooked mention last year of a comprehensive essay on EBB's literary biography of my own appearing in the New Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Like Beverly Taylor's comprehensive essay for the Dictionary of National Biography (1999), this seeks to address and correct some of the many myths and inaccuracies that have obscured accounts of EBB's life and works in the old Dictionary of National Biography and analogous sources. The coming year promises to bring a wave of new criticism on EBB to mark the bicentenary, including a special issue of Victorian Poetry on the poet, and another special issue of Victorian Review. One can only hope as well that many of the many interesting papers given at the Armstrong Browning Library's March 2006 conference will begin to make their way into print by that time.