Pauline and Mill

Abstract

Browning was 14 when his friend Sarah Flower sent copies of two of his poems to her guardian, the Unitarian minister William Johnstone Fox. She added at the end of the letter: ‘I must just say a little word about that boy’s poems. he sic] is mad to publish them – you know there is a whole book full from which these two are extracted. What ought he to do?’¹ Fox did not yet know ‘that boy’: Sarah Flower probably hoped that her guardian, something of a public figure in London’s religious, political and intellectual life, might be able to place the poems somewhere. Like Browning and his family Fox was ‘a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels’.² He was also known as an orator for the cause of Parliamentary reform. As editor of a journal, The Monthly Repository, he was in a position to be of practical use to Browning by publicly noticing his poetry. Fox ran The Monthly Repository as a Unitarian periodical until 1831 when he bought the copyright and shifted his attention to social and political reform and literary criticism. His career shows a steady movement from religious concerns to broader issues of radical mass politics. He was friendly with the actor-manager William Macready, the eminent dramatist and lawyer Thomas Noon Talfourd and the literary and dramatic critic John Forster, all of whom later knew Browning well.