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British Romantic Poetry

Browning wrote “Porphyria’s Lover” in 1836, at a time when Romanticism still greatly influenced the British literary landscape. Two trends from the Romantic era influenced Browning’s poem. First is the revival of lyric poetry spearheaded by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Contrary to the elaborate scenarios and elevated diction of neoclassical poetry, Romantic lyrics feature first-person speakers who reflect on their experience in simple, natural language. The second trend is a fascination with strange phenomena. Poems like Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” along with novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, exemplify this interest in the supernatural. In dramatic monologues like “Porphyria’s Lover,” Browning marries the lyric form and a fascination with the bizarre by centering first-person speakers with abnormal psychologies. He also playfully references Romantic tropes. The dark and stormy night that opens the poem is one such trope. Another is the Romantic hero, which is also known as the “Byronic hero” after Lord Byron, who often wrote about gloomy men characterized by isolation, alienation, and misanthropy. The speaker of Browning’s poem is a twisted version of a Romantic hero. Finally, Porphyria’s name may be a cheeky reference to Porphyro, a character in John Keats’s 1920 poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

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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