Browning's Yankee Medium

ROBERT BROWNING NEVER visited America, but his American associations were hardly less intimate than those of Dickens. The fifteen years of Browning's married life with Elizabeth Barrett were spent in a happy exile in Italy, where he came in almost daily contact with a variety of American artists and tourists. In his later years, he became increasingly interested in American publishing arrangements and his critical reception in America.' Indeed, Browning had closer ties with this country than did any other major English poet of his century, and we may regret that only once, and then in a bitter mood, did the poet turn to America for subject matter. Browning's single poetic flight across the Atlantic-and into American speech-is "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium,' " which appeared in Dramatis Personae (1864). "Mr. Sludge" is a fierce attack on spiritualism, at that time a recent American import to Europe. The setting of the poem is Boston, the speaker a charlatan Yankee medium named Sludge, who confesses his duplicity to his wealthy, gullible benefactor, one Hiram H. Horsefall. Mrs. Browning was sympathetic to spiritualist claims, and Browning made no secret of the fact that he thought his wife, and others like her, were being cynically exploited by tricksters. In particular Browning thoroughly detested the most celebrated medium of the entire nineteenth century, the Scottish-American "wizard," Daniel Dunglas Home, with whom he had had an unpleasant experience at a s6ance in 855 .2 There can be no doubt that Browning's Yankee medium Sludge was inspired by Home, though what concerns me here is not Sludge's identity but his speech." For Browning's poem is a thousand-line monologue in what he apparently intended to be American English. Few American readers of "Mr. Sludge" have found Browning's Bostonian setting or his medium's lingo very convincing. William C. DeVane says, "As for the curious Americanisms which Sludge uses in his speech, it is to be