Poetry Context
Peter Grimes (Georgian)
Crabbe attempted to realistically portray the misery and degradation of rural poverty. He is often called the last of the
Augustan poets because he used the heroic couplet. Like the Romantics, who esteemed his work, he was a rebel
against the realms of genteel fancy that poets of his day were forced to inhabit, and he pleaded for the poet’s right to
describe the commonplace realities and miseries of human life, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of
the life of the poor and the middle classes.
Prior to the French Revolution, poems and literature were typically written about and to aristocrats and clergy, and
rarely for or about the working man. However, when the roles of society began to shift resulting from the French
Revolution, and with the emergence of Romantic writers, this changed. The French Revolution was seen as being the
beginning of a change in the current ways of society and helping to improve the lives of the oppressed
The first act to regulate child labour in Britain was passed in 1803. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to
regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were
largely ineffective. Most Georgian children had moved out and found work by the time they’d reached 13
Workhouse took in children of the poor or of seamen/soldiers. They taught children to reader and write and gave them
work until they could become apprentices. Jeremy Bentham described how workhouses were essentially prison-like
structures, designed principally ‘to grind rogues honest’. In the 1750s social investigator Jonas Hanway discovered that
the death rate amongst workhouse children in London was over 90%.
The Protestant Church was very powerful in rural England. Social life for ordinary people revolved around choir and
Sunday School outings. Religion inspired reformers such as William Wilberforce.
The slave trade was abolished in 1807 – perhaps linking this to how there is still a ‘slave trade’ amongst the poor
Had been questioning human nature – Rousseau asserted that people were innately good but corrupted by society.
Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than
through physical punishment.
Browning (Early Victorian)
Many of his poems deal with the combination of romance and death or violence. This macabre sentiment was very
popular with the Victorian audience who were interested in death and the supernatural. However, it also reflects a
prudishness that emerged during the period where restraint rather than expression in terms of sexuality and emotion was
practiced. One of the hallmarks of Victorian culture was sexual restraint and an overarching sobriety of conduct. The
dark side of such repression was an obsession with sex; Victorian London had more brothels than schools and some
80,000 working prostitutes. “Porphyria’s Lover” is a poem that reveals the culture’s dark view of sexuality. Porphyria, with
her overt sexuality, represents the kind of woman the Victorians shunned. All in all, the sexual material in the poem
would have been viewed as taboo by Browning’s contemporaries. The poem serves as a fascinating document of the
Victorian era in Britain, revealing the grotesque side of society’s wary preoccupation with sexual desire. The speaker
dramatizes tense power dynamics between the sexes and inadvertently challenges the strictly enforced gendered roles
of this time period.
As the Victorian era progressed, they became more and more interested in the mind and how it worked concluding the
century with Freud‘s psychoanalysis. Like Browning, Freud was fascinated by sexual perversion such as the lover’s
sadism. (Browning pre-dates but can link to modern reader)
My Last Duchess is loosely based this poem on the life of Alfonso II d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara from 1533 to 1598. Ferrara
married Lucrezia di Cosimo Medici when he was twenty-five. Lucrezia was part of the Medici family, an incredibly
wealthy banking family that gained political prominence during the 15th century. Although the Medici family was
wealthy, they did not have the social status that the Este family would have had as long-standing members of the
aristocracy. Lucrezia died at seventeen, only three years after the couple had married. Though she is thought to have
died of tuberculosis, it was widely speculated that she had been poisoned by her husband, who was then seeking the
hand of Barbara, the eighth daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and a woman of significantly more social
importance than his young wife. Browning’s character is presumably the Duke of Ferrara. In this poem, he reveals his
sociopathic mind and suggests that Lucrezia was murdered.
The Laboratory is based on a real-life figure, a French woman named Madame de Brinvilliers, a notorious serial killer.
With the assistance of one of the king’s apothecaries, her lover obtained poisons, which she tested on patients in
hospitals. Eventually she poisoned her father (1666) and then her two brothers (1670), but an attempt on her husband
failed. After her lovers’ death (1672), the crimes were discovered. She escaped but was eventually arrested at Liège
Peter Grimes (Georgian)
Crabbe attempted to realistically portray the misery and degradation of rural poverty. He is often called the last of the
Augustan poets because he used the heroic couplet. Like the Romantics, who esteemed his work, he was a rebel
against the realms of genteel fancy that poets of his day were forced to inhabit, and he pleaded for the poet’s right to
describe the commonplace realities and miseries of human life, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of
the life of the poor and the middle classes.
Prior to the French Revolution, poems and literature were typically written about and to aristocrats and clergy, and
rarely for or about the working man. However, when the roles of society began to shift resulting from the French
Revolution, and with the emergence of Romantic writers, this changed. The French Revolution was seen as being the
beginning of a change in the current ways of society and helping to improve the lives of the oppressed
The first act to regulate child labour in Britain was passed in 1803. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to
regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were
largely ineffective. Most Georgian children had moved out and found work by the time they’d reached 13
Workhouse took in children of the poor or of seamen/soldiers. They taught children to reader and write and gave them
work until they could become apprentices. Jeremy Bentham described how workhouses were essentially prison-like
structures, designed principally ‘to grind rogues honest’. In the 1750s social investigator Jonas Hanway discovered that
the death rate amongst workhouse children in London was over 90%.
The Protestant Church was very powerful in rural England. Social life for ordinary people revolved around choir and
Sunday School outings. Religion inspired reformers such as William Wilberforce.
The slave trade was abolished in 1807 – perhaps linking this to how there is still a ‘slave trade’ amongst the poor
Had been questioning human nature – Rousseau asserted that people were innately good but corrupted by society.
Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than
through physical punishment.
Browning (Early Victorian)
Many of his poems deal with the combination of romance and death or violence. This macabre sentiment was very
popular with the Victorian audience who were interested in death and the supernatural. However, it also reflects a
prudishness that emerged during the period where restraint rather than expression in terms of sexuality and emotion was
practiced. One of the hallmarks of Victorian culture was sexual restraint and an overarching sobriety of conduct. The
dark side of such repression was an obsession with sex; Victorian London had more brothels than schools and some
80,000 working prostitutes. “Porphyria’s Lover” is a poem that reveals the culture’s dark view of sexuality. Porphyria, with
her overt sexuality, represents the kind of woman the Victorians shunned. All in all, the sexual material in the poem
would have been viewed as taboo by Browning’s contemporaries. The poem serves as a fascinating document of the
Victorian era in Britain, revealing the grotesque side of society’s wary preoccupation with sexual desire. The speaker
dramatizes tense power dynamics between the sexes and inadvertently challenges the strictly enforced gendered roles
of this time period.
As the Victorian era progressed, they became more and more interested in the mind and how it worked concluding the
century with Freud‘s psychoanalysis. Like Browning, Freud was fascinated by sexual perversion such as the lover’s
sadism. (Browning pre-dates but can link to modern reader)
My Last Duchess is loosely based this poem on the life of Alfonso II d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara from 1533 to 1598. Ferrara
married Lucrezia di Cosimo Medici when he was twenty-five. Lucrezia was part of the Medici family, an incredibly
wealthy banking family that gained political prominence during the 15th century. Although the Medici family was
wealthy, they did not have the social status that the Este family would have had as long-standing members of the
aristocracy. Lucrezia died at seventeen, only three years after the couple had married. Though she is thought to have
died of tuberculosis, it was widely speculated that she had been poisoned by her husband, who was then seeking the
hand of Barbara, the eighth daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and a woman of significantly more social
importance than his young wife. Browning’s character is presumably the Duke of Ferrara. In this poem, he reveals his
sociopathic mind and suggests that Lucrezia was murdered.
The Laboratory is based on a real-life figure, a French woman named Madame de Brinvilliers, a notorious serial killer.
With the assistance of one of the king’s apothecaries, her lover obtained poisons, which she tested on patients in
hospitals. Eventually she poisoned her father (1666) and then her two brothers (1670), but an attempt on her husband
failed. After her lovers’ death (1672), the crimes were discovered. She escaped but was eventually arrested at Liège
