Braddon's ‘Protracted Search’

One argument of the preceding chapter has been that The Ring and the Book represents an epic or large-scale version of what William James called ‘a mosaic without a bedding’, a mobile assemblage of positions and components that allow for various ways of association and (re)alignment while (yet) missing an overarching design to hold them in place. As a result, Browning's work offers the reader no opportunity to recognise it from without, as a (generic) form that is already known, or already whole. Instead, The Ring and the Book invites its readers to take part in the composition and evaluation of ‘something else’, an experimental form that transfers the tradition of the epic into ‘a novel country’ (as well as into the ‘country’ of the novel) to create a type of writing ‘in difficulties’, filled with ‘obstacles’ and ‘encumbered with incongruities’, to repeat Bagehot's phrase. For the reader, this form of writing ‘in difficulties’ is not least a writing that is difficult to comprehend in terms of general definitions or distinct ideas. It demands attention and intellectual exertion.

On the face of it, therefore, much of Browning's poetry seems to contrast sharply with the fast-paced eventfulness of sensation fiction which has often been taken to cater primarily to a need for shortlived entertainment and easily digestible consumption. Yet, while the immediate popularity of the ‘Sensational School’ of fiction in the 1860s is certainly at odds with Browning's long poetic struggle for acknowledgement by the British public, both kinds of creative practice had in common that they were perceived as relatively unfamiliar and difficult to assign to predefined types. Like much of Browning's poetry, sensation fiction, as Janice M. Allan has pointed out, was viewed as a ‘phenomenon that required reviewers to adjust their critical vocabulary and discursive practices’. Of course, most of the elements of which sensation writing is made up could easily be recognised to have been derived from established genres, such as Gothic fiction, melodrama and domestic realism. Yet, the way these lines of tradition were adapted and rewoven yielded a gathering of pieces and threads that many critics perceived as puzzling or even threatening, since they could not (yet) capture it in predefined terms or assign it to a common place.