Four volumes consisting of 21,075 lines, twelve books, ten dramatic monologues and two statements by a narrator in service to providing different perspectives on the rape and murder of a young wife by her aristocratic husband in seventeenth-century Rome. When the first volume appeared in 1868, few Victorian readers knew what to make of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. A contributor to The Dublin Review singled out its ‘deliberate offenses, as we are compelled to regard them, against rhythm, good taste, and even the English language’ (Doherty 1869: 52). By the time the final volume was published the following year, some critics were objecting to the work's length. An essay on modern English poets in The Quarterly Review complained: ‘It is a weariness to the flesh to read so many arguments pro and con … on a critical case with so many ignoble elements in it …’ (Mozley 1869: 347).

In the March 1869 issue of The Fortnightly Review, John Morley, then editor of the journal, defended the poem against those who ‘pronounced [it] … sordid, unlovely, morally sterile’: ‘in its perfection and integrity, [it] fully satisfies the conditions of artistic triumph’ (1869: 331, 336). Readers had become ‘so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by idylls, not robust and Theocritean, but such little pictures as might adorn a ladies’ school, by verse directly didactic’, Morley scoffs, ‘that a rude inburst of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to spread a shock, which might show in what simpleton's paradise we have been living’ (1869: 331). He laments, ‘Our public is beginning to measure the right and possible in art, by the superficial probabilities of life and manners within a ten-mile radius of Charing Cross’ (331). While he acknowledges the poem's many flaws, he affirms that ‘a grievous sterility of thought’, so typical of ‘contemporary verse’, is not among them (341). Morley praises Browning for his poetry's impersonality; his objective approach to assembling the facts of the case; and, in considering all possible perspectives on the issue, his many-sidedness (341).