Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

Key Words and Expressions
Realism, critical realism, feminism, novel, to hinder the development, spiritual 
degradation, the realm of beauty, sarcasm, to expose the vices, human psychology 
THE VICTORIAN ERA
1837 until 1901
John Henry 
Newman
Thomas 
Babington 
Macaulay
Matthew 
Arnold
Robert 
Browning
Jane Austen
Elizabeth 
Barrett 
Browning
George 
Meredith
Thomas 
Carlyle
Alfred, Lord 
Tennyson
Charles 
Dickens
William 
Makepeace 
Thackeray
George 
Eliot
Sisters 
Brontë
Anthony 
Trollope
Robert Louis 
Stevenson

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Queen Victoria and the Empire 
Queen Victoria was only eighteen when she ascended the throne, and she ruled not only 
the world’s most powerful nation but also an empire extending to Canada, Australia, India, and 
parts of Africa. After the death of her uncle, William IV, the young Princess Victoria was 
awakened from a sound sleep and brought downstairs in her dressing gown. Her diary for that 
day records that on the staircase that morning she had felt quite preparate to be queen until her 
death sixty-four years later at the age of eighty-two. Her long reign was a period of progress and 
prosperity for the nation.
Victoria’s personal life was rich also. She married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-
Gotha (a name that their successors would eventually change to the more British-sounding 
Windsor) Victoria and Albert had a happy family life with four sons and five daughters and they 
traveled often to visit royal reletives on the Continent, especially in Germany. The queen’s 
exemplary personal life, along with her famous honorsty, sense of morality, and propriety, won a 
new respect for the monarchy. 
The Victorian age did contain conflict, inevitable an in empire that spent the globe, an 
empire upon which the sun literally never set. А dispute between Upper and Lower Canada led 
to union between the two and the beginning of self-government. In the Crimean War (1853 — 
1856) Britain joined France in an effort to prevent Russia from gaining а Mediterranean port. 
Mutiny in India in 1857 caused the British government to take control of the entire Indian 
subcontinent from the East India Company, which besides handling trade had always shared the 
responsi- bility of governing the colony. Britain was also economically involved in the American 
Civil War because factories in northern England depended upon raw cotton from the Confederate 
states.
British interests in China were threatened in 1900 by the Boxer Rebellion against foreign 
influence. In addition, British troops were fighting in Africa со defend British possessions there. 
The Boer War, а destructive war against Рыси settlers in South Africa, had begun in 1899. Its 
end, in 1902, marked the end of British empire building, but by that time the Empress of India 
(as Parliament had dubbed Victoria in 1877) had died.
Although she was а success- ful and well-loved monarch, Vic- toria's powers were only advi- 
sory, and she was fortunate to have an array of distinguished ministers. Wellington, the hero who 
had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, was а statesman as well as а military leader. Sir Robert Peel 
served the queen well in domestic affairs; he initi- ated the practice of unarmed police oflicers, 
nicknamed bobbies after him. The British роlitical scene was dominated, however, by the 
dramatic rivalry between Liberal Party (Whig) leader W. Е. Gladstone, а "Little Englander" 
opposed tо the expansion of the empire, and Conservative (Tory) Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli 
was the queen's favorite and prevailed. Later, however, the "Little England" philosophy would 
become an inevitable reality because of world events in the years after Victoria's death.
Life in Victorian Times 
Victoria's reign saw imporсапс developments in transportation, manufacturing, and 
commerce. The queen herself became а patron of the growing railways when she took her first 
train trip in 1842 from Windsor Castle, west of London, into the city. According to reports, the 
queen's coachman insisted that duty called for him to drive the engine. Steamship lines also grew 

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during this period, facilitating trade with colonies and with the United States. British commerce 
flourished as raw materials were imported and manufactured goods were exported.
Newly powerful industriafisfi and merchants rapidly ехраnded the British middle class, а group 
whose attitudes increasingly came to represent the age. Their values included hard work, strict 
morality, social reform, and pragmatism. Progress inspired self-assurance and optimism. At the 
same time, however, new ideas in government, science, and economics fostered curiosity, doubt, 
and controversy.
One innovative and positive aspect of the Victorian Age was that many people, including the 
lower classes, could share in the great events of the time. News, sent by train, steamship, and 
telegraph, traveled faster than ever before, and there was good news tо be shared. In spite of their 
lack of political influence, their long working hours and inadequate wages, in spite of the danger 
of poor sanitary conditions and disease (even the plague returned in 1849 ай 1853), the working 
class enthusiastically cheered reports of overseas victories and domestic advances. They flocked 
to London for the Great Exhibition of 1851. This display of British industrial success was held in 
the Crystal Palace, а construction of glass that continued to symbolize Britain's triumphs until 
destroyed by fire in 1936.
Although the lives of British workers remained dificult, major steps were taken to correct abuses 
against the working class. Women and children по longer worked in coal mines and could not be 
expected to work more than ten hours а dау in factories. Workers in the textile industry were 
granted а half-dау holiday on Saturday.
Although diseases like the plague could still remind people of the limits of science, progress was 
made in sanitation and medicine. Adequate sewers were becoming а reality, and people were 
using the clean water now being piped into cities instead of contaminated wells and springs. The 
use of anesthetics in hospital operating rooms became widespread; Victoria herself aided their 
acceptance by agreeing to an anesthetic during the birth of her seventh child. During the plague 
in London, bystanders were surprised to see аn elegant, wealthy woman working as а nurse in 
the makeshift hospital rooms that were set up on the city’s streets. Florence Nightingale would 
later win fame in the same role in hospital tents on the Crimean front.
Life in England, especially in london, changed in other ways. Parliament prohibited the use of 
“climbing boys” to clean chimneys in 1840, more than ten years after William Blake’s death. 
Debtors’ prisons were abolished in 1869. The first underground railroad in London was 
completed in 1884, and in the first year of the twentieth century, horses in the streets began tо 
grow accustomed to the few steam-driven cars that sped about the city at more than four miles an 
hour.
Poetry in the Victorian Age 
The Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats — were revolutionary 
poets. They wrote when they were young and, except for Wordsworth, died young. William 
Wordsworth (1770 — 1850) survived into the Victorian Age, turned away from rebellion, and 
became Queen Victoria's poet laureate, the official poet writing verse cusrom-made for state 
occasions. When he died, Wordsworth was succeeded as poet laureate by Alfred, Lord 
Tennyson, then in the midst of а long and illustrious poetic career. Unlike the poetry of the 
Romantic Age, Tennyson's poems demonstrate the conservatism, optimism, and self-assurance 
that marked the Victorian Age. The Brownings — Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning — were not rebels either; they too were positive роеts for а positive time.

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Other original poetic geniuses of the period include Matthew Arnold, who was also an educator 
аnd essayist, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also а scholar and priest. Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti, а poet and painter, was at the center of а group that called themselves the Рге-
Raphaelites because they sought to bring со their poetry the simplicity and directness notable in 
medieval Italian art before the Renaissance painter Raphael came on the scene. Toward the end 
of the nineteenth century, Victorian optimism began со wane. Even Tennyson and Browning had 
acknowledged the darker side of life in some of their best verses, but now А. Е. Housman and 
Thomas Hardy added distinguished and pessimistic poetry tо the Victorian Age. The Victorian 
Age gave us memorable poetry as Rudyard Kipling (1865- 1936), Algernon Swinburne (1837-
1909), and Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), who achieved fame for work in other genres as well.
Drama in the Victorian Age 
Drama did not thrive during the Victorian Age. Although Tennyson and Browning tried со create 
poetic dramas, the real theater celebrities of the age were actors — William Macready, Henry 
Irving, and Ellen Terry— rather than playwrights. When the Victorians finally produced great 
drama, the age was approaching its close. An accomplished critic, novelist, and poet, Oscar 
Wilde also wrote several comic plays that satirize upper-class manners and morals. Lady 
Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) — considered by many 
tо be а perfect comedy— still delight audiences today. Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) 
represents а movement toward the well-made play, а play with carefully crafted plot, characters, 
and setting; The Second Мrs. Tanqueray (1893) is an example. For audiences of Victoria's day, 
the high point of theatrical enjoyment was а series of light comic operas by William Gilbert 
(1836 — 1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842 — 1900), including The Pirates of Репzапсе (1880) 
and The Mikado (1885).
Prose in the Victorian Age 
А highly imaginative and satirical masterpiece of the Victorian Age was written as а children' s 
story. Charles Dodgson, using the pen name Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), wrote Alice’s 
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its companion piece, Through the Looking Glass (1871), 
for the entertainment of а friend's daughter. John Ruskin (1819-1900) achieved fame with books 
about art such as Stones of Venice (1851 — 1853). The era also produced great historical works. 
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 — 1859) was the most popular historian of his day; 
publication of his five-volume History of England was completed after his death. The Scottish 
philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote а major history of the French Revolution. In his 
philosophical work Carlyle decried the materialism and lack of purpose of his dау. Another 
philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), championed individual liberty and the power of 
reason. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) wrote а series of essays intended tо inspire religious 
reform, and Walter Pater (1839 — 1894) wrote impressionistic essays onRomantic poets.
The Novel in the Victorian Age 
During the reign of Queen Victoria, the English novel came of age suddenly, swiftly, and 
dramatically. One innovation of Victorian novelists was Realism, which presented а detailed 
portrait of life in nineteenth-century England. The novel dominates the literary scene of the 
period; even Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was а novelist. Many of the great novels of the 
dау were also rousing popular successes, making authors like Charles Dickens celebrated public 

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figures. Some of these novels were published in installments in weekly magazines. This style of 
presentation often affected the content of the work, as popular novels were stretched out to 
prolong сешеа success and unpopular works were altered in attempts to win the public's 
affection.
Among the most popular and productive Victorian novelists is Charles Dickens, whose work 
combined social criticism with comedy and sentiment to create а tone that the world identifies as 
Victorian. Like Chaucer and Shakespeare before him, Dickens enjoyed inventing а vast array of 
memorable characters in novels such as Oliver Twist (1837- 1839), А Tale of Two Cities (1859), 
and Great Expectations (1860-1861). His heartfelt criticism helped to change British institutions 
that badly needed reform, especially prisons and schools. 
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) like Dickens a journalist of humble background was 
a satirist of the morality, the hypocricies, and the manners of the English middle class. 
Thackeray is best remembered today is the creator of Becky Sharp, heroin of Vanity Fair (1847-
1848). Becky is a schemer who prettily but cold-heartedly plots her way from poverty to social 
success. Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), the third major midcentury novelist set much of his 
fiction – for example, Barchester Towers (1857) – against a background Anglicand Church life. 
By focusing on British institutions, these three novelists dissected an age as well as entertained 
their readers and commented on life itself. 
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). Her novels include The Mill 
on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1871-1872). Charlotte (1816-1855) 
and Emily (1818-1848) Brontë made literary history while living in almost complete seclusion in 
a Yorkshire villiage. From their pens came two particularly remarkable and well-loved novels, 
Charlotte’s Jain Eyre and Emily’a Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847. 
A fascination with history is revealed in novels like Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Edward 
George Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Charles Reade’s Cloister and the Hearth 
(1861), and Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855). The Scotish author Robert Louis 
Stevenson (1850-1894) created a remarkable series of adventure novels with exotic, historical 
settings. Best known are Treasure Island (1882), The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister 
Hyde (1886), and Kidnepped (1886) another famous storyteller was Rudyard Kipling, whose 
novels include Captains Courageous (1897) and Kim (1901). Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) wrote 
what may be the first widely admired mystery novel, The Moonstone (1858). Toward the end of 
the era, two of the best-known characters in literature came into being when Arthur Conan Doyle 
(1859-1930) created his master detective, Sherlock Holmes, and Bram Stoker (1847-1912) 
created Count Dracula. 
The novels of Thomas Hardy are set in the lonely farm country of Wessex, and they slice 
pessimistically through manners and cosial customs to touch on the nature of life itself. They 
include Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the 
D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896). Samuel Buttler (1835-1902) also satirized 
his own time; his novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) was such a strong attack on Butler’s own 
Victorian family that it was not published until after his death.
In an age when literature was a major form of popular intertainment, British novelists provided a 
remarkably diverse body of work that appealed to a mass audience. Today many of these novels 
are still read and enjoyed, and they also provide us with much of our knowledge of life and 
thought during the age of Queen Victoria. 

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Critical Realism in England 
“Brilliant school of novelists in England, whose graphic and eloquent descriptions have revealed 
more political and social truths to the world than have all the politicians, publicists and moralists 
added together, has pictured all sections of the middle class, beginning with the “respectable” 
rentier and owner of government stocks, who looks down on all kinds of “business” as being 
vulgar, and finishing with the small shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. How have they been 
described by Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell? As full as self-conceit, 
prudishness, petty tyranny and ignorance. And the civilized world confirmed their verdict in a 
damning epigram which it has pinned on that class, that it was servile to its social superiors and 
despotic to its social inferiors.” 
In the thirties of the XIX century English capitalism entered a new stage of developmnet. 
England became a classical capitalist country. At the same time England was experiencing an 
aggravation of contradictions both at home and abroad. In India and Ireland national-liberation 
movements were developing while the metropolies itself witnessed a powerful upsurge of labour 
movement, known as Chartism. The period of these tense struggles was attended by the 
appearance of a new literary current – critical realism. The critical realism of the 19th century 
flourished in the forties and in the beginning of the fifties. 
The greatness of the English realists lies not only in their critical and realistic, satirical portrayal 
of the bougeosie and in the exposure of the greed and hypocrysy of the ruling classes but also in 
their profound humanism which is revealed in their sympathy for the labouring people. These 
writers created positive characters who are quite alien to the vices of the rich and who are chiefly 
common people. In the best works of the realist writers, the world of greed andf cruelty is 
contrasted to a world where all the unwritten laws of humanism rule in defiance of all the 
sorrows and inflections that befall the heroes. 
The critical realists of the XIX century didn’t and due to their world outlook couldn’t find a way 
to eradicate social evils. They strive for no more than improving it by means of reforms which 
brings them to a futile attempt of trying to reconcile the antagonistic class forces – the 
bourgeosie and proletariat. The English working class can be, in full justice, called to be the 
supporters of chartist literature, for it developed among the participants of the chartist movement 
before and after the revolutionary events of 1848. The chartist writers introduced a new theme 
into English literature – the struggle of the proletariat for its rights. The second half of ther XIX 
century in England produced a number of outstanding poets such as Alfred Tennyson (1809-
1892), Charles Algernon Swinburne (1809-1909) and others. 
Durung the Chartist movement numerous Chartist organizations published various newspapers 
and magazines which, besides articles on political and economical issues, contained poems, short 
stories and novels written by the Chartists themselves. They strove at describing the world as it 
was seen by the revolutionary workers. 
The Chartist poets’ work includes lyrical songs and satires, epical poems ans short epigrams. 
Heroic and revolutionary in its character, the Chartist poetry played an important role in the 
development of English democratic literature. 
Thomas Hood (1799-1845) wrote “Song of the Shirt” (1844), “The Bridge of Sighs”. 
Ernest Jones (1819-1869), the most gifted of them all, wrote “The Song of the Lower Classes”, 
“The Song of the Workingman”. His verses became the anthem of the chartists. Jones is in full 
justice considered the founder of the revolutionary proletarian literature in England. 

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Jerald Massey (1828-1907) created collections “Voices of Freedom” and “Lyrics of Love”. 
ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) 
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy! 
In this new song of David, from Browning's “Saul”, we have a suggestion of the astonishing 
vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning,the one poet of the age who, after 
thirty years of continuous work, wasfinally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom 
future ages may judge to be a greater poet,--perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature since 
Shakespeare. 
The chief difficulty in reading Browning is the obscurity of his style,which the critics of half a 
century ago held up to ridicule. Their attitudetowards the poet's early work may be inferred from 
Tennyson's humorouscriticism of “Sordello”. It may be remembered that the first line of this 
obscure poem is, "Who will may hear Sordello's story told"; and that the last line is, "Who would 
has heard Sordello's story told." Tennyson remarked that these were the only lines in the whole 
poem that he understood, and that they were evidently both lies. If we attempt to explain this 
obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly critics, we find that it has many 
sources. First, the poet's thought is often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language 
expresses it imperfectly,--
Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 
Fancies that broke through language and escaped. 
Second, Browning is led from one thing to another by his own mental associations, and forgets 
that the reader's associations may be of an entirely different kind. Third, Browning is careless in 
his English, and frequently clips his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations. As we do not quite 
understand his processes of thought, we must stop between the ejaculations to trace out the 
connections. Fourth, Browning's, allusions are often far-fetched, referring to some odd scrap of 
information which he has picked up in his wide reading, and the ordinary reader finds it difficult 
to trace and understand them. Finally, Browning wrote too much and revised too Little. The time 
which he should have given to making one thought clear was used in expressing other thoughts 
that flitted through his head like a flock of swallows. His field was the individual soul, never 
exactly alike in any two men, and he sought to express the hidden motives and principles which 
govern individual action. In this field he is like a miner delving underground, sending up masses 
of mingled earth and ore; and the reader must sift all this material to separate the gold from the 
dross. 
Here, certainly, are sufficient reasons for Browning's obscurity; and we must add the word that 
the fault seems unpardonable, for the simple reason that Browning shows himself capable, at 
times, of writing directly, melodiously, and with noble simplicity. 

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So much for the faults, which must be faced and overlooked before one finds the treasure that is 
hidden in Browning's poetry. Of all the poets in our literature, no other is so completely, so 
consciously, so magnificently a teacher of men. He feels his mission of faith and courage in a 
world of doubt and timidity. For thirty years he faced indifference or ridicule, working bravely 
and cheerfully the while, until he made the world recognize and follow him. The spirit of his 
whole life is well expressed in his “Paracelsus”, written when he was only twenty-two years old: 
I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
I shall arrive,--what time, what circuit first, 
I ask not; but unless God send his hail 
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive; 
He guides me and the bird. In his good time. 
He is not, like so many others, an entertaining poet. One cannot read him after dinner, or when 
settled in a comfortable easy-chair. One must sit up, and think, and be alert when he reads 
Browning. If we accept these conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most 
stimulating poet in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and tremendous. His 
strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his invincible optimism enter into us, making us 
different and better men after reading him. And perhaps the best thing he can say of Browning is 
that his thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well-educated men and women. 
LIFE. Browning's father was outwardly a business man, a clerk for fifty years in the Bank of 
England; inwardly he was an interesting combination of the scholar and the artist, with the best 
tastes of both. His mother was a sensitive, musical woman, evidently very lovely in character, 
the daughter of a German shipowner and merchant who had settled in Scotland. She was of 
Celtic descent, and Carlyle describes her as the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman. From his 
neck down, Browning was the typical Briton,--short, stocky, large-chested, robust; but even in 
the lifeless portrait his face changes as we view it from different angles. Now it is like an English 
business man, now like a German scientist, and now it has a curious suggestion of Uncle 
Remus,--these being, no doubt, so many different reflections of his mixed and unremembered 
ancestors. 
He was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, in 1812. From his home and 
from his first school, at Peckham, he could see London; and the city lights by night and the 
smoky chimneys by day had the same powerful fascination for the child that the woods and 
fields and the beautiful country had for his friend Tennyson. His schooling was short and 
desultory, his education being attended to by private tutors and by his father, who left the boy 
largely to follow his own inclination. Like the young Milton, Browning was fond of music, and 
in many of his poems, especially in "Abt Vogler" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's," he interprets the 
musical temperament better, perhaps, than any other writer in our literature. But unlike Milton, 
through whose poetry there runs a great melody, music seems to have had no consistent effect 
upon his verse, which is often so jarring that one must wonder how a musical ear could have 
endured it. 

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79 
Like Tennyson, this boy found his work very early, and for fifty years hardly a week 
passed that he did not write poetry. He began at six to produce verses, in imitation of Byron; but 
fortunately this early work has been lost. Then he fell under the influence of Shelley, and his first 
known work, “Pauline” (1833), must be considered as a tribute to Shelley and his poetry. 
Tennyson's earliest work, “Poems by Two Brothers”, had been published and well paid for, five 
years before; but Browning could find no publisher who would even consider “Pauline”, and the 
work was published by means of money furnished by an indulgent relative. This poem received 
scant notice from the reviewers, who had pounced like hawks on a dovecote upon Tennyson's 
first two modest volumes. Two years later appeared “Paracelsus”, and then his tragedy 
“Strafford” was put upon the stage; but not till “Sordello” was published, in 1840, did he attract 
attention enough to be denounced for the obscurity and vagaries of his style. Six years later, in 
1846, he suddenly became famous, not because he finished in that year his “Bells and 
Pomegranates” (which is Browning's symbolic name for "poetry and thought" or "singing and 
sermonizing"), but because he eloped with the best known literary woman in England, Elizabeth 
Barrett, whose fame was for many years, both before and after her marriage, much greater than 
Browning's, and who was at first considered superior to Tennyson. Thereafter, until his own 
work compelled attention, he was known chiefly as the man who married Elizabeth Barrett. For 
years this lady had been an almost helpless invalid, and it seemed a quixotic thing when 
Browning, having failed to gain her family's consent to the marriage, carried her off 
romantically. Love and Italy proved better than her physicians, and for fifteen years Browning 
and his wife lived an ideally happy life in Pisa and in Florence. The exquisite romance of their 
love is preserved in Mrs. Browning's “Sonnets from the Portuguese”, and in the volume of 
“Letters” recently published,--wonderful letters, but so tender and intimate that it seems almost a 
sacrilege for inquisitive eyes to read them. 
Mrs. Browning died in Florence in 1861. The loss seemed at first too much to bear, and 
Browning fled with his son to England. For the remainder of his life he lived alternately in 
London and in various parts of Italy, especially at the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice, which is 
now an object of pilgrimage to almost every tourist who visits the beautiful city. Wherever he 
went he mingled with men and women, sociable, well dressed, courteous, loving crowds and 
popular applause, the very reverse of his friend Tennyson. His earlier work had been much better 
appreciated in America than in England; but with the publication of “The Ring and the Book”, in 
1868, he was at last recognized by his countrymen as one of the greatest of English poets. He 
died in Venice, on December 12, 1889, the same day that saw the publication of his last work, 
“Asolando”. Though Italy offered him an honored resting place, England claimed him for her 
own, and he lies buried beside Tennyson in Westminster Abbey. The spirit of his whole life is 
magnificently expressed in his own lines, in the Epilogue of his last book: 
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

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80 
WORKS. A glance at even the titles which Browning gave to his best known volumes--
”Dramatic Lyrics” (1842), “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics” (1845), “Men and Women” (1853), 
“Dramatis Persona” (1864)--will suggest how strong the dramatic element is in all his work. 
Indeed, all his poems may be divided into three classes,--pure dramas, like “Strafford” and “A 
Blot in the 'Scutcheon”; dramatic narratives, like “Pippa Passes”, which are dramatic in form, but 
were not meant to be acted; and dramatic lyrics, like “The Last Ride Together”, which are short 
poems expressing some strong personal emotion, or describing some dramatic episode in human 
life, and in which the hero himself generally tells the story. Though Browning is often compared 
with Shakespeare, the reader will understand that he has very little of Shakespeare's dramatic 
talent. He cannot bring a group of people together and let the actions and words of his characters 
show us the comedy and tragedy of human life. Neither can the author be disinterested, satisfied, 
as Shakespeare was, with life itself, without drawing any moral conclusions. Browning has 
always a moral ready, and insists upon giving us his own views of life, which Shakespeare never 
does. His dramatic power lies in depicting what he himself calls the history of a soul. Sometimes, 
as in “Paracelsus”, he endeavors to trace the progress of the human spirit. More often he takes 
some dramatic moment in life, some crisis in the ceaseless struggle between good and evil, and 
describes with wonderful insight the hero's own thoughts and feelings; but he almost invariably 
tells us how, at such and such a point, the good or the evil in his hero must inevitably have 
triumphed. And generally, as in "My Last Duchess," the speaker adds a word here and there, 
aside from the story, which unconsciously shows the kind of man he is. It is this power 
ofrevealing the soul from within that causes Browning to fascinate those who study him long 
enough. His range is enormous, and brings all sorts and conditions of men under analysis. The 
musician in "Abt Vogler," the artist in "Andrea del Sarto," the early Christian in "A Death in the 
Desert," the Arab horseman in "Muteykeh," the sailor in "Herve Kiel," the medieval knight in 
"Childe Roland," the Hebrew in "Saul," the Greek in "Balaustion's Adventure," the monster in 
"Caliban," the immortal dead in "Karshish,"—all these and a hundred more histories of the soul 
show Browning's marvelous versatility. It is this great range of sympathy with many different 
types of life that constitutes Browning's chief likeness to Shakespeare, though otherwise there is 
no comparison between the two men. If we separate all these dramatic poems into three main 
periods,--the early, from 1833 to 1841; the middle, from 1841 to 1868; and the late, from 1868 to 
1889,--the work of the beginner will be much more easily designated. Of his early soul studies, 
“Pauline” (1833), “Paracelsus” (1835), and “Sordello” (1840), little need be said here, except 
perhaps this: that if we begin with these works, we shall probably never read anything else by 
Browning. And that were a pity. It is better to leave these obscure works until his better poems 
have so attracted us to Browning that we will cheerfully endure his worst faults for the sake of 
his undoubted virtues. The same criticism applies, though in less degree, to his first drama, 
“Strafford” (1837), which belongs to the early period of his work. 
The merciless criticism which greeted “Sordello” had a wholesome effect on Browning, 
as is shown in the better work of his second period. Moreover, his new power was developing 
rapidly, as may be seen by comparing the eight numbers of his famous “Bells and 
Pomegranates” series (1841-1846) with his earlier work. Thus, the first number of this wonderful 
series, published in 1841, contains “Pippa Passes”, which is, on the whole, the most perfect of 
his longer poems; and another number contains “A Blot in the 'Scutcheon”, which is the most 
readable of his dramas. Even a beginner must be thrilled by the beauty and the power of these 
two works. Two other noteworthy dramas of the period are “Colombe's Birthday” (1844) and “In 
a Balcony” (1855), which, however, met with scant appreciation on the stage, having too much 
subtle analysis and too little action to satisfy the public. Nearly all his best lyrics, dramas, and 

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81 
dramatic poems belong to this middle period of labor; and when “The Ring and the Book” 
appeared, in 1868, he had given to the world the noblest expression of his poetic genius. 
In the third period, beginning when Browning was nearly sixty years old, he wrote even 
more industriously than before, and published on an average nearly a volume of poetry a year. 
Such volumes as “Fifine at the Fair, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, The Inn Album, Jocoseria”, 
and many others, show how Browning gains steadily in the power of revealing the hidden 
springs of human action; but he often rambles most tiresomely, and in general his work loses in 
sustained interest. It is perhaps significant that most of his best work was done under Mrs. 
Browning's influence.