Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Elizabeth Barrett Browning?s poetry evidently shows how aware she was of the contemporary social and political issues she was faced with, living in Victorian England. It looks at how she was, perhaps, one of the braver literary pioneers and how through her poetry she explicitly and directly confronted issues which many of her contemporaries may heave shied away from. It focuses on two of her poems; ?The Cry of the Children? (1843) and ?The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim?s Point? (1848).

From the Paper:

"Barrett herself was a devout Christian, but also liberal enough to accept that many of the little factory children would have found it hard to believe in God when they were treated so harshly, and believes them when they say "grief has made us unbelieving". The Victorian's spread the gospel throughout the world, and yet the children in the poem do not know how to pray, or even if they did they feel that God would neglect them, "We look up for God, but tears have made us blind". Barrett's questioning of religion would have shocked many of her readers, and provides us with a good example of how she was more concerned with the message she was portraying rather than the reviews she would receive."

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