Elizabeth Barrett was already a famous poet when she secretly married Robert Browning in 1846 and moved with him to Italy. In the following years, she produced some of her finest works, including Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and the long poem Aurora Leigh (1856). She was an early contributor to Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine, which was a rival to Dickens’s All the Year Round. Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’, a meditation on the suffering that produces art, appears here with a striking wood engraving after Frederic Leighton. Leighton, later president of the Royal Academy, designed Barrett Browning’s tomb in Florence.
Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s fifth novel, centred round the Gordon ‘No Popery’ Riots of 1780 and the murder of Reuben Haredale. Originally planned to be his first novel and entitled Gabriel Varden, the Locksmith of London, it was put aside because of the success of Pickwick. An historical novel in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, Barnaby Rudge first appeared in serial form in Master Humphrey’s Clock from February to November 1841. Maria Beadnell, Dickens’s first love, was the original of the flirtatious Dolly Varden.
[Chapter the First from Charles Dickens's ‘Barnaby Rudge’, in Master Humphrey’s Clock. 1st edition. Vol. II.]