The trouble with feeling now: Robert Browning, Thomas Woolner and the touching case of Constance and Arthur

Using a marble statue by the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner as its focus, this article discusses historical and present-day concerns about the act of feeling for aesthetic objects. The statue, entitled Constance and Arthur, a portrait of two deaf children, was first shown at the chaotic and commercially driven 1862 International Exhibition. Woolner asked Robert Browning to write a poem to act as a catalogue entry for the statue. The completed eight-line stanza would serve the purpose of encouraging exhibition visitors to focus on the statue, and promote Woolner’s reputation as a sculptor of note. Examining the history of the poem’s production, I argue that Browning’s words work both as a tool to focus attention, and a critique of the ways in which commercial pressures prevent attentive feeling. Drawing on the work of Tobin Siebers, David Getsy, and others, I suggest that such commercial pressures persist today, not simply in exhibitions and museums, but in the academy, particularly through the dominant mode of literary historicism. Paired together, the statue and poem become a way of probing the limits of a historicist approach to emotion, and of suggesting the possibility of alternatives