Performing Suffering: From Dickens to David

“That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” (Forster 1: 25 and Dickens 218). Charles Dickens's description of the anguish of his childhood is wreathed in paradoxes the author savors but does not acknowledge. Like his scandalous successor Oscar Wilde, Dickens luxuriates in the spectacle of his own martyrdom. His commendation “exquisitely” turns a lament into a boast, undermining the sincerity that assures us his suffering has no language. Yet despite their half-concealed pleasure at his own pain, these sentences pleased Dickens so much that, after writing them to John Forster in his secret confession of his childhood humiliation, he gave them to his abused, beloved David Copperfield and thereby to the world. David, however, subdues the pride in emotional virtuosity his creator could not suppress.

“Development” and Browning's Philosophy of Inadequacy

Robert Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889. On the same day Asolando: Fancies and Facts was published in London. During this centennial year I should like to look at the poet's last publication and take note of his valedictory remarks particularly as they touch on his well-known “philosophy of the imperfect,” which I believe can be better understood as a philosophy of inadequacy. To that end I shall focus on the poem “Development,” which gives a general idea of what Browning had to say not only in Asolando but in much of his earlier work as well.

William Rothenstein Reads Browning

William Rothenstein's The Browning Readers (frontispiece) is one painter's tribute to a favorite poet. It also offers a fascinating glimpse of the “idea” of Browning at the turn of the century, a pictorial impression of the atmosphere in which his work was read and of the mood it evoked in his readers. Its original and thoughtful approach to the relationships between reader, writer, artist, and spectator sets it apart from the general run of charming but lightweight variations on the popular theme of women reading and places it, a particularly English example, among the masterpieces of the genre from Corot to Hopper. Together with Rothenstein's other Browning subjects, Porphyria and two paintings from “Parting at Morning,” The Browning Readers contributes to that alternative critical heritage of “paintings from books“ which parallels and supplements the written commentaries of reviewers and literary critics (Altick 248).