The dramatic monologue18 Robert Browning, The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, 2 vols.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1981), I, 347. For a discussion of the relation
of the dramatic monologue to what Browning calls "Lyric... expression," see
Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," in Lyric Poetry:
Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 226-43.
19 Langbaum, Poetry of Experience, 75.
20 Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977), 42. Sinfield
argues that, while this poetic form "had an unprecedented importance for the
Victorians... there is no single aspect of it that was not anticipated" (53).
21 Fuson, Browning and His English Predecessors, 22.
22 For a more detailed examination of the processes the Bishop undergoes by way
of his monologue, see Cornelia D.J. Pearsall, "Browning and the Poetics of the
Sepulchral Body," Victorian Poetry 3 0 (1992), 43-61.
23 The diary entry is by W.H. Thompson and dated 11 November 1833, cited in
Peter Allen, The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), 163.
24 Ekbert Faas, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 51.
25 Daniel A. Harris, "D.G. Rossetti's 'Jenny': Sex, Money, and the Interior
Monologue," Victorian Poetry 22 (1984), 197. Harris suggests various reasons
for the speaker's silence, including his internalizing of "a powerful public
censorship" (201) on the subject of prostitution, his fear of "an explosive and
hostile reply" (202), and his ultimate "revulsion with deceptive male speech"
(209).
26 Christina Rossetti herself performed extensive volunteer work for a number of
years at St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary, Highgate, an Anglican refuge for
prostitutes founded in 1855. Her own "fallen women" poems include the
dramatic monologue "The Convent Threshold" (1862); for a discussion of
Christina Rossetti's works in this context see Leighton, "'Because Men Made
the Laws': The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet," Victorian Poetry 27
(1989), 109-27.
27 Quotations from Dora Greenwell, "Christina" are taken from Victorian
Women Poets: An Anthology, eds. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); line references appear in parentheses. The poem is
also reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, eds.
Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), 439-48.
28 Webster's "A Castaway" is reprinted in Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology,
eds. Leighton and Reynolds, 433-48, and in Nineteenth-Century Women
Poets, eds. Armstrong and Bristow with Sharrock, 602-17.
29 Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlot-
tesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 200.
30 A chief proponent of this theory was W. R. Greg, in "Why are Women
Redundant?" National Review 14 (1862), 434-60. Webster takes up aspects of
the redundant woman question in her essay "The Dearth of Husbands," in A
Housewife's Opinions, 239-45. See also Greg's "Prostitution," Westminster
Review 53 (1850), 238-68. Mary Poovey briefly discusses Greg's essays in