My Last Duchess: Historical and Literary Context

Victorian Nostalgia for the Renaissance

Browning’s decision to write a poem set in sixteenth-century Italy reflects a broader Victorian fascination with the Renaissance. Named after the French word for “rebirth,” the Renaissance refers to a historical period spanning the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During these two centuries, European writers, philosophers, artists, and architects aimed to revive the foundational ideas and achievements of Greek and Roman antiquity. Widespread pursuit of this aspiration led to transformative advances in nearly every aspect of society. By the nineteenth century, the achievements of the Renaissance had long been relegated to museums and the history books, and a new time of transformation was well under way. The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in the eighteenth century, profoundly impacted Victorian society and politics. Amidst the increased urbanization, pollution, and mechanization, many Victorian writers and artists cast a nostalgic gaze back to the Renaissance and its Neoclassical spirit. In his book Culture and Anarchy (1869), the cultural critic Matthew Arnold captured the essence of this nostalgia when he championed the Neoclassical “atmosphere of sweetness and light.” Browning at once reflects and troubles Victorian nostalgia for the Renaissance by depicting a sixteenth-century patron of the arts who is, as it turns out, dangerous and deranged.

Women in Victorian England

Browning lived during the Victorian period, which was a time of massive economic growth and societal change in England. As industrialization churned on into the nineteenth century and people flocked from the country to the city, British urban centers became crowded and subject to poverty and disease. Even so, working-class people enjoyed expanded voting and labor rights and an overall increase in their standards of living. Women both did and did not benefit from these economic and social shifts. For even though many aspects of daily life were changing, Victorian morality remained rigidly conservative and patriarchal. Men—whether fathers, husbands, uncles, or brothers—continued to exert control over women’s lives. As such, women’s mobility remained highly circumscribed and mostly constrained to the domestic sphere. This constraint on women’s agency reflected deep-rooted moral conventions that expected women to uphold traditional values such as humility, purity, and service. When women failed to uphold these values, they were liable to be punished, often through violence that intended to bring women back under male control. Browning understood the cruel dynamics of Victorian morality, and the numerous examples of violence against women in his poems arguably aim to bring the cruelty to light.

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