"Porphyria's Lover" was published early in Browning's career in the first issue of the journal The Monthly Repository under the title "Porphyria." It received little notice upon its initial publication in 1836, and critics were similarly unresponsive when it was reprinted in 1842 in Dramatic Lyrics together with a companion piece "Johannes Agricola" under the general title, "Madhouse Cells." When it appeared again in 1863 in Poetical Works under its present title, Browning's reputation had grown, and all his earlier poems were more favorably reviewed than when they were first published, but the work was not singled out for praise. In Browning: The Critical Heritage, which includes all major critical assessments of Browning's works in his lifetime, "Porphyria's Lover" is mentioned but twice, and at that only briefly and in passing. The English writer Charles Kingsley writing in 1851 is said to have disliked it, but an anonymous 1876 critic refers...