Having a bit of a Robert Browning moment, except I am in England thinking about England in April, while he was in Italy. Robert Browning grew up here in south east London. He attended a local non conformist chapel with his mother who was devout. Robert was, it seems, less devout than his mama, and was rebuked by the minister George Clayton for fidgeting and inattention. The chapel has gone, as has Browning Hall which it became later, home to the Browning Settlement which played a key role in the campaign for old age pensions more than a century ago. On the site of the graveyard is a small garden. It was looking pretty sorry for itself until a couple of years ago when Sokari Douglas Camp, the celebrated sculptor who lives close by, started working on it and encouraging other neighbours to join her.
Browning is buried in Westminster Abbey. He was in Italy with his wife, fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was in ill health. She died there and is buried in the English cemetery in Florence. She gets a footnote mention on Browning’s gravestone. Both Robert and Elizabeth were opponents of the slave trade. They would probably be derided as woke by some today. Next to Browning’s grave in the abbey is that of Alfred Tennyson. Best known for Maud, The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Lady of Shalott, he also wrote some eye-poppingly nationalistic poems.
Not everyone remembered in Poet’s Corner is a poet. Granville Sharp, the abolitionist and close friend of Olaudah Equiano, has a memorial there, as does the musician and composer George Frederick Handel. Memorials to women writers are still vanishingly rare, but hopefully that will change.
Guided By Isobel 