Word-making 'as erst in Eden': Robert Browning and the question of the origin and growth of language in Victorian England, 1861--1889

The central concern in any study of Robert Browning attempting to locate his thought within the philological milieu of the mid-nineteenth century is to determine the extent of his sympathy with the new comparative, "scientific" study of language. Distrusted for its seeming to locate the origin of language in the material realm of reflex response to nature and for its apparently univocal view that each word has one "root" meaning, "new" philology has been continually rejected as an intellectual interest of Browning's. This study analyzes Browning's statements about language in his correspondence and prefaces and his use of onomatopoeia, interjection, neologism, and archaism in the later poetry, especially Dramatis Personae, The Ring and the Book, Fifine at the Fair, Ferishtah's Fancies, the Parlevings , and Asolando to show Browning's interest in a particular brand of the "new" philology promoted by both Frederic W. Farrar and F. Max Muller in the 1860s--80s. Although Farrar and Muller differ with regard to the assertion that humans "imitate" nature in word-making, they both work against the notion of the material origin of words by focussing on the role of the human mind in this process. By attending to imagery used for word-making and to places in the texts that envision mythic points of origin, we see Browning's view of the poet, and indeed all humans, as continuing the work of a new-philological "Adam," promoting the growth of language through mental changes in initial, natural sounds that are preserved in history for the sake of their acceptance into public currency. This notion of a scientifically determined "root" suggested to these Victorians a permanency in language or a stability of meaning at the root level that was attractive to Browning as a poet concerned with making words to reach his audience.