that he relinquished every prospect, supported himself while there in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father's profound astonishment and rage."[2] At the age of twenty-two he obtained a clerkship in the Bank of England, an employment which, his son says, he always detested.
Eight years later he married Sarah Anna, daughter of William Wiedemann, a Dundee shipowner, who was the son of a German merchant of Hamburg.

The young man's father, on hearing that his son was a suitor to Miss Wiedemann, had waited benevolently on her uncle "to assure him that his niece would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged."[3] In 1811 the new-married pair settled in Camberwell, and there in a house in Southampton Street Robert Browning--an only son--was born on May 7, 1812.

Two years later (Jan.

7, 1814) his sister, Sarah Anna--an only daughter--known in later years as Sarianna, a form adopted by her father, was born.

She survived her brother, dying in Venice on the morning of April 22, 1903.[4] Robert Browning's father and mother were persons who for their own sakes deserve to be remembered.