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Robert Browning (1812–1889) was born in a London suburb to middle-class parents. As a young man, Browning’s father had longed to live a scholar’s life, but financial circumstances forced him into work as a bank clerk. Even so, memory of his youthful ambition enabled him to support his son’s aspiration to become a poet. Browning’s first success came with his children’s verse, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” written for a family friend’s son. Because he had an extra page to fill at the end, he included it in his 1842 collection Dramatic Lyrics. Despite being appended as an afterthought, critics singled out the children’s verse. Yet this was the same volume where Browning had first perfected the form for which he’d become famous: the dramatic monologue. Browning’s output diminished in the mid-1840s, when he eloped to Italy with fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But his star rose again two decades later, with the publication of a second volume of monologues, titled Dramatis Personae (1864), along with a novel in verse, The Ring and the Book (1867–1869). Though adulation for Browning waned in the early twentieth century, his dramatic monologues have since regained a wide and admiring readership.

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