Excerpt from The Complete Poetical Works of Mrs. Browning

Such is the entry in the register of the parish church of Kelloe, a small village in the county of Durham, England, about five miles south of the Cathedral town of the same name. The event thus recorded took place at the seat of the child's paternal uncle, Samuel Barrett Moulton, M. P., and her unusual wealth of cognomina was due to the fact that her father, Edward Barrett Moulton, assumed again his mother's maiden name of Barrett, on inheriting from her father a large estate in Jamaica, where the families of both his parents had been established for two or three generations. It was, however, as plain Elizabeth Barrett that the most remarkably gifted woman of the Victorian era who came before the swallow dares' upon the bleak Scottish border in the first decade of her century was destined to become known to the world.

The child herself had no early recollections of the north, for while she was still an infant, her father purchased the beautiful estate of Hope End in Herefordshire, among the Malvern Hills, and continued to reside there until Elizabeth was past twenty. She was the eldest of eleven children, three girls and eight boys, who came in rapid succes sion, and one, at least, of her brothers, Mr. Charles Moulton Barrett, about four years younger than herself, is yet living in Jamaica.

It does not appear that any other member of this numerous family showed marked literary aptitude or distinguished talent of any kind. The father had the sort of early training and associations which are implied in his having been, for a little while, at Harrow School, - which he left for the very un-english reason of not liking to be flogged, as fag, for burning his elder's toast, and for a short time also at Cambridge, where, however, he took no degree, having left the University to be married while still an undergraduate.

Mr. Moulton Barrett was proud of the precocious talent which he soon detected in his eldest child, and did his best, ' as she herself confessed, to spoil' her, by printing, at his own expense, fifty copies of her epic, in four books, on the Battle of Marathon, which was completed at the ripe age of thirteen! This complacent father was, by all accounts, a peculiarly despotic ruler of his own household, but his clever child was dutifully and even devotedly fond of him, and remained the most submissive of his subjects up to the memorable moment when the strong will which she had inherited from himself clashed once for all with his, and she revolted successfully from what seems to-day a simply incredible stretch of his paternal power.

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