Special Features

Dedication Page

The dedication page was completed by Margaret Armstrong. She dedicated “these illustrations” to E. D. L. I have been unable to find out who E. D. L. is, although she did dedicate another book to that person as well. The dedication itself rests within a banner that is superimposed on a small bouquet of flowers.




Quotations

It is unclear why quotations were included in this edition of the Sonnets. They are not found in any other editions and it does not appear that this was something Browning had considered. It is also unclear who choose the poems that were used. However, given Armstrong’s penchant for creating individualistic editions and books that easily identified their authors – she may have used the quotations as a stronger grounding of the love poems found within the text. On purely aesthetic grounds, the quotations do add to the text to create a lovely edition with both classical and (then) modern poetry. Authors include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Spencer and Wordsworth.