Browning's Curiosities: 'The Ring and the Book' and the 'Democracy of Things'

Abstract

Browning's modernity, G.K. Chesterton once observed, is recognisable by an unparalleled interest in small things. In the 'turbulent democracy of things' that is 'The Ring and the Book', he goes on to say, a human face and the pattern on the wall behind it, a porcelain vase or a cabbage lay equal claim to the poet's attention: 'There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind.' Henry James attempted to get at the cluttered materiality of 'The Ring and the Book' in a different way when he compared the poem’s structure to a vast gothic cathedral, noting the poet's habit of looking at his subject from the point of view of a 'curiosity'. Chesterton's and James's insights about the material 'muchness' of the poetry raises questions about how we might understand the collocation in Browning's poetry of a messy embeddedness of things and the porousness of the boundaries between categories such as art, commodities, oddities and rejects with his smart understanding of the ethics and feelings associated with collecting and connoisseurship. Could it be that Browning understood the rules of taste and discrimination so well - in the sense Bourdieu explicates in his influential analysis of the way in which cultural capital, 'habitus' and field interrelate to create judgements of taste and discrimination and to legitimate social difference - that he refused the constraints of conventional good taste to talk about anything in any terms without losing caste, and in a way that allowed him to explore areas of human experience that had hitherto been denied to poetry?