Aurora Leigh

The poem engages with the widespread social change in England that accompanied the exodus of farm laborers to work in the factories during the Industrial Revolution. During this time frame, the enclosure of the land forced farm workers to seek new employment in the cities’ factories, and this trend radically reshaped both the social structure and topography of Britain, introducing a disquieting element of uncertainty around the proper distribution of formerly communal natural resources.

As a result of this social upheaval, geographical and psychological metamorphoses are linked in the British poetry of the time, and this trend is most notable in the first generation Romantic poet laureate, William Wordsworth, whose poetry is often location-specific and elides walking, thinking, and writing into one collective activity. Within the second generation of the Romantic Movement, Barrett Browning’s work displays her own awareness of the social changes that surrounded her, for despite her family’s economic and social prosperity due to her father’s status as an enslaver, she made it a point to write two poems urging for the abolition of slavery: “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” and “A Curse for a Nation.” She also publicly expressed her pleasure when the Emancipation Act was passed in 1833, despite the fact that her father’s Jamaican business incurred losses as a consequence of the new legislation.