Robert Browning grabbed a séance ghost and found the medium's bare foot
At a séance in 1855, a spirit face appeared that the medium Daniel Dunglas Home said was Robert Browning's dead baby son. Browning seized it and found Home's bare foot. He had never lost a child. The poet who mastered voices not his own had no patience for fake ones.
Browning was born in 1812 in Walworth, south London, the only son of a Bank of England clerk who earned around 150 pounds a year and collected roughly 6,000 volumes, plenty of them rare. He hated school, so a tutor taught him at home from those shelves; by 14 he could handle French, Greek, Italian and Latin. His parents' evangelical faith barred him from Oxford and Cambridge, then open only to Anglicans, and he left University College London after a single year. He lived at home, supported by his family, until he was 34.
Success came slowly. Pauline, published anonymously in 1833 with money from an aunt, sold not a single copy, and Sordello, which appeared in 1840, was mocked as obscure; Tennyson joked that he understood only its opening and closing lines. Recovery began with a series of eight pamphlets in the early 1840s, which his publisher persuaded him to fill partly with dramatic lyrics.
In 1845 he met Elizabeth Barrett, a poet six years older, living as a semi-invalid in her father's house on Wimpole Street. Their letters became a romance, and on 12 September 1846 they married, secretly, because her father forbade his children to wed; he disinherited her. The couple settled in Florence, where their son Pen was born in 1849, and Browning later called Italy his university. Elizabeth believed in Home's powers, and the séance remained a sore point between them.
After her death in 1861 he returned to London, and only then did his fame grow. Dramatis Personae (1864) and the long poem The Ring and the Book made him a leading voice, prized for dramatic monologues, irony and dark humour. A liberal, he backed women's emancipation, opposed slavery and antisemitism, and attacked vivisection in verse. When he died in 1889 he was revered as a philosopher-poet.
Source: Robert Browning
