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Pippa Passes is a verse drama by Robert Browning. It was published in 1841 as the first volume of his Bells and Pomegranates series, in a low-priced two-column edition for sixpence, and republished in his collected Poems of 1849, where it received much more critical attention. It was dedicated "most admiringly to the author of Ion, Thomas Noon Talfourd. It is best known for the lines "God's in his heaven— / All's right with the world!" Origins The author described the work as "the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals". A young, blameless silk-winding girl is wandering innocently through the environs of Asolo, attributing kindness and virtue to the people she passes. She sings as she goes, her song influencing others to act for the good—or, at the least, reminding them of the existence of a moral order. Alexandra Orr described the moment of inspiration: Mr. Browning was walking alone, in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa, or Pippa. Another source for the work, according to David G. Riede, is that while working on a description of a Paduan peasant girl in book 3 of Sordello (1840), Browning came to the realization "that his art ought not to flatter the pretensions of the great, but to speak for the masses". In a letter to Fanny Haworth, he wrote that the "sad disheveled form" of the girl "wherein I put, comprize, typify and figure to myself Mankind, the whole poor-devildom one sees cuffed and huffed from morn to midnight" had inspired a resolution in him to "keep my pact in mind, prick up my republicanism". Pippa, a working-class girl from Asolo, not far from Padua, was the result of this pact. Structure Introduction The silk-winding girl Pippa rises on New Year's Day, her only day off for the whole year. Her thoughts concern the people she dubs "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones": Ottima, the wife of the rich silk-mill owner Luca Gaddi (and the lover of Sebald, a German) Jules, a French art student, who is today marrying Phene, a beautiful woman he knows only through her fan letters Luigi, an Italian patriot who lives with his mother in the turret on the hill Monsignor, a cleric I.—Morning Pippa passes a shrubhouse on the hillside, where Sebald and Ottima are trying to justify to each other the murder of Ottima's elderly husband, Luca. A group of art students, led by Lutwyche, discuss a cruel practical joke they are hoping to play on Jules, of whom they are envious. II.—Noon Pippa enters Orcana valley, and passes the house of Jules and Phene, who have been tricked into marriage. (The song they overhear refers to Caterina Cornaro, the Queen of Cyprus.) The English vagabond Bluphocks watches Luigi's turret in the company of Austrian policemen. The Austrians' suspicions hinge on whether Luigi stays for the night or leaves. III.—Evening Pippa passes the turret on the hill. Luigi and his mother discuss his plan to assassinate an Austrian official. (The song they overhear, A king lived long ago (1835), was originally a separate poem by Browning.) Four poor girls sit on the steps of the cathedral and chatter. At the behest of Bluphocks, they greet Pippa as she goes by. IV.—Night Pippa passes the cathedral and palace. Inside, Monsignor negotiates with the Intendant, an assassin named Uguccio. The conversation turns to Pippa, the niece of the cardinal and true owner of the ecclesiastic's property, and Ugo's offer to remove her from Asolo. Pippa returns to her room. Critical reaction The work caused some controversy when it was first published, due to the matter-of-fact portrayals of the more disreputable characters—notably the adulterous Ottima—and for its frankness on sexual matters. In 1849, a writer in The English Review complained: We have already referred to the two drawbacks, of which we have to complain in particular: the one is the virtual encouragement of regicide, which we trust to see removed from the next edition, being as unnatural as it is immoral: the other is a careless audacity in treating of licentiousness, which in our eyes is highly reprehensible, though it may, no doubt, have been exhibited with a moral intention, and though Mr. Browning may plead the authority of Shakespeare, Goethe, and other great men, in his favour. However, the work was described by William Kingsland as "perhaps the most beautiful [of Browning's] dramas", presenting a "charming picture of Pippa […] whose song, as she descends like a child-angel into the light of a new morning, with the spring-world bathed in the glory and gold of a blessed sunrise, is" The view of Kingsland and other late-Victorian commentators like Stopford Brooke, who wrote that Pippa "passes like an angel by and touches with her wing events and persons and changes them to good", was challenged in the twentieth century. D. C. Wilkinson pointed out that Sebald's reaction to Pippa's song is to express scorn and revulsion of Ottima, "a grand shifting of responsibility" for his own crime; Dale Kramer argued that Pippa's songs "influence people during moments of crisis into performing deeds which seem to abnegate self, but which are on the whole egoistic"; and Jacob Korg synthesized these criticisms into the claim that the effect of Pippa on the other characters is "the sudden recovery of moral awareness". Her songs, Korg says, "enable each character to escape the control of passion, deception, or some other compulsion, and to restore his capacity for exercising enlightened free will and moral judgment", whether for good or evil. Ambiguities Pippa's song influences Luigi to leave that night for Vienna, preserving him from the police. But does he give up his plan to assassinate the Austrian Emperor Franz? In 1848, a reviewer for Sharpe's London Magazine chided Browning for failing to clarify: We trust that he may be supposed to have abandoned his execrable design. Indeed, we cannot conceive it possible that an author, animated in general by such Christian feelings as Robert Browning, should recommend regicide, in cold blood, as a deed praiseworthy and heroic. But he has erred greatly in leaving the slightest doubt upon such a subject; unless, indeed, our lack of comprehension be alone responsible for the error. But we do not like playing with edged tools. However, Luigi's line "'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay?" suggests that "what has come to him is the conviction of the necessity of the assassination." Browning sympathized with the republican cause in Italy, believing that "once the Italians regained liberty and independence, all of the dormant positive qualities that had made them the foremost Eueropean nation during the Renaissance would reawaken", a view he expressed in the poem 'Old Pictures in Flore.... Discover the Pippa Grant popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Pippa Grant books.