On this day...

King William IV died in 1837, leading to the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne of England and beginning arguably one of the most productive literary eras. Described by Matthew Arnold as 'a deeply unpoetical age', the Victorian era was dominated by the novel. Yet these works were not the managable romances of Austen, but heavy tomes of social injustice - their tortuous syntax leading Henry James, guilty himself of several, to name them 'loose baggy monsters'. The main culprits include Charles Dickens, author of almost a dozen major novels, George Eliot of 'Middlemarch' fame and the man of tragic persuasion, Thomas Hardy.

In conjunction with the growing suffrage movement, the Victorian era also saw the rise of the female novelist, most notably highlighted by the Bronte sisters, but supplemented also by names such as Elizabeth Gaskell. English drama is perhaps harder to find, but the one man could make up for it all, as the brilliance and wit of Oscar Wilde takes the stage by storm, preceeding the later George Bernard Shaw, and overshadowing the foreign imports of Chekhov and Ibsen. Despite Arnold's claim, Victorian literature was by no means devoid of poetry, producing Robert Browning, master of the dramatic monologue, blank verse devotee Alfred Lord Tennyson and romantic poet Christina Rossetti.

On this day...

English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806. One of the most prominent poets of the Victorian Era, Barrett was the eldest of 12 children, whose father had his fortune tied up in the sugar plantations of Jamaica. Throughout Browning's childhood and adolescene, she had an unquenchable desire for knowledge. Tutored in Shakespeare and Milton as a young girl, by the age of twenty, she had read all the notable classical authors in the orginal, read the Old Testament in Hebrew, and had written numerous poems, including an 'epic'.

Yet it was at twenty that she first experienced what was to be a life-long illness, an illness which doctors failed to ever diagnose. She kept publishing however, often on a social theme, and it was one such publication that inspired Robert Browning to write to her, starting a secret courtship that led to their marriage a year later. One of Elizabeth's most famous works is indeed on the subject of her marriage. 'Sonnets From the Portugese' expresses doubts that Robert would ever love such an invalid as herself. Described by Edgar Allan Poe as 'the noblest of her sex', Browning went on to influence numerous poets and her death, in 1861, did nothing to diminsh her legacy.

On this day...

Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845, and so began one of the most famous literary relationships of all time. He started; ' I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,--and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write' and continued in a similar vein throughout, ending with a request for a meeting. Duly granted, the pair began a secret romance and in the twenty months that followed they exchanged 575 letters, all without the knowledge of Elizabeth's father, who had banned her and her ten siblings from marrying. Yet Barrett found solace in Browning, and indeed his courtship inspired in her a recovery from her once dehibilating illness. It also inspired some of her most famous works, notably 'Sonnets from the Portugese'; in which she expressed doubts that a man of such calibre would love a woman six years his senior. Having eloped to Itay and married, they both continued to publish exceptional works, until Barret Browning's death in 1861, and Browning's in 1889.

On this day...

English poet and critic Matthew Arnold was born in 1822. Son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, Arnold had a privileged education, including a scholarship at Balliol College in Oxford. During his childhood, perhaps due to close frienship with neighbour William Wordsworth, Arnold won numerous literary prizes from both Latin and English poetry. Yet in 1851, finding himself short of the income to support a marriage, Arnold applied for the post of Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, which he got, but later described as 'drugedy'. It was in 1857, having been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, that his literary career took off; his most famous works being 'Dover Beach' and 'The Scholar Gypsy'. He has been called the third greatest Victorian poet behind Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.

On this day...

Victorian poet Robert Browning died in 1889, at the age of 77. Athough Browning was an astute learner, fluent in French, Latin, Greek and Italian by the age of 14, his mother's evangelical faith prevented him gaining a place at either Oxford or Cambridge; both only open to Church of England members. He therefore resumed his childhood hobby of writing poetry; a career which did not gain him recognition until 1840. Besides his writings, Browning is arguably most famous for his marriage to fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The courtship and ceremony was carried out in secret from Barrett's father, and the couple eloped to Italy, in an imitation of Browning's idol Shelley. Six years his senior and an invalid, Elizabeth was doubtful that Browning was truly sincere in his feeling, and she later expressed the idea in one of her best known works, 'Sonnets from the Portugese'. Browning's own poetic works are recognisable for their use of the dramatic monologue. They often take the form of an unpleasant character, as in 'My Last Duchess', 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'The Laboratory', yet many are set in a different epoch to distinguish them from the Victorian society of the day.