Robert Browning was born in 1812 within the London suburb of Camberwell. Until the time of his marriage, at the age of thirty-four, Browning was rarely absent from his parents' home, where he was tutored in foreign languages, music, boxing, and horsemanship and where he read omnivorously. From this unusual education he acquired a store of knowledge on which to draw for the background of his poems.

Browning’s reputation has persisted into the twenty-first century and is often admired by two groups of readers widely different in tastes. To one group, Browning is a wise philosopher and religious teacher who resolved the doubts that had troubled Arnold and Tennyson. Caliban upon Setebos, for example, is a highly topical critique of Darwinism and of natural (as opposed to supernatural) religions. Browning’s own attitude toward these topics is partially concealed because of his use of speakers and of settings from earlier ages, yet we do encounter certain recurrent religious assumptions that we can safely assign to the poet himself. The most recurrent is that God has created an imperfect world as a kind of testing ground, a “vale of soul-making.” It followed, for Browning’s purposes, that the human soul must be immortal and that heaven itself be perfect. Armed with such a faith, Browning sometimes gives the impression that he was himself untroubled by the doubts that gnawed at the hearts of his contemporaries; yet, Browning’s apparent optimism is consistently being tested by bringing to light the evils of human nature. His gallery of villains – murderers, sadistic husbands, mean and petty manipulators – is an extraordinary one. Few writers, in fact, seem to have been more aware of the existence of evil than Browning.

To the second group of Browning fans, he is less admired for his attempt to solve problems of religious doubt than for his stylistic separation from the Victorian age. The most representative Victorian poets (such as Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), write in the manner of Keats, Milton, Spenser, and of classical poets such as Virgil. Theirs is the central stylistic tradition in English poetry – one that favors smoothly polished texture, elevated diction and subjects, and pleasing liquidity of sound. Browning draws from a different tradition, more colloquial and discordant, a tradition that includes the poetry of John Donne, the soliloquies of Shakespeare, and certain features of the narrative style of Chaucer. Of most significance are Browning’s affinities with Donne. Both poets sacrifice, on occasion, the pleasures of harmony and of a consistent elevation of tone by using a harshly discordant style unexpected juxtapositions that startle us into an awareness of a world of everyday realities and trivialities.

The link between Browning and the Victorian prose writers is not limited to style. With the later generation of Victorian novelists (George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James), Browning shares a central occupation. Like Eliot in particular, he was interested in exposing the devious ways in which our minds work and the complexity of our motives. His psychological insights can be illustrated in such poems as The Bishop Orders His Tomb and Andrea del Sarto, spoken monologues which require readers to follow the rapid shifts of the speaker’s mental processes as jumps are made from one cluster of associations to another. This energetic buoyancy is the most characteristic aspect of his writing, as well as his own personality, and imparts a creative vitality to all of Browning’s works.