Victorian Poetry

In Robert Browning’s epic exploration of a 1698 murder case, Count Guido Franceschini confesses to killing his wife Pompilia, confident that her alleged dishonor justifies his action and, crucially, that the money he married for will pass into his hands despite his guilt. Because his responsibility for the deed is never in question, the poem’s twelve-book, multivocal narration of Guido’s trials uses this murder less to assign blame than to invite assessments of seventeenth-century systems of gender, justice, and property. Those systems may seem remote from the companionate marriages and reformed divorce laws of the nineteenth century, yet The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) also encourages Victorian readers to judge their own present legal system through its critique of the earlier Italian laws, softening the implications of more direct commentary by “Linking our England to his Italy.”¹ Along these lines, Pompilia’s tragic union with Guido has been compared to the Victorian marriage market, commonly understood to traffic in women.² Guido unequivocally views his wife as a possession, “avow[ing that he] dared buy / A girl,” calculating “the market-price” of his title in that exchange, and expecting that “when I buy, timber and twig, a tree— / I buy the song o’ the nightingale inside” (V: ll. 425–426; V: l. 462; V: ll. 605–606). Pompilia’s struggle for ownership has been framed, accordingly, in terms of her claims to body, spirit, and child, rather than to the substantial material wealth for which she acts as conduit. Discussions of material property in the poem, on the other hand, generally emphasize inheritance and its vertical and male lines of descent, focusing on birth and confusion over rightful heirship rather than on wives or marriage (Petch, “Law” p. 318). Yet a wife’s economic agency is central both to the poem’s tragedy and to English legal debates during the years when The Ring and the Book was being written. Whether or not women should lose their claims to property upon marriage or continue to inherit, earn, possess, or alienate independent wealth was a vital question during the 1860s, and Browning’s poem [End Page 1] engages in it, not only through Pompilia and her embattled inheritance but also through the actions of her biological and adoptive mothers.

The decades-long Victorian reform of married women’s property law is typically understood in terms of its effects on wives and marriage, but as we will see, the prospect of changing marital rights affected entire families and unsettled other features of Victorian life as well. In its depictions of money-wielding mothers, Browning’s poem reflects cultural tensions regarding these economic developments. By demonstrating sympathy toward disempowered wives along with widespread concern regarding the generational ramifications of maternal economic agency, The Ring and the Book underscores the dissonance in popular attitudes toward women’s property rights shortly before the first legal reforms. If in this telling the “British Public” the poem addresses remains ambivalent,³ depictions of Guido’s trial render a more consistent verdict, finally suggesting the necessity not only of improving individual laws but of altering the court system itself.