Maroon leather spine with raised banding and gilt title. Marbled boards. Dimensions are for one volume.

•       Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list

Hardcover. Complete set being dark brown calf and brown cloth. Gilt titles at spines (Robert Browning) Covers are bright clean with only gentle rubbing at corners. Please view our extensive photographs to illustrate the condition.

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterisation, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.

His early long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846, he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861, he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. By his death in 1889, he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for studying his work survived in Britain and the US into the 20th century.