Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when he wrote _The Alchemist_, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted the subject to the dregs.

The writer's zeal from first to last knows no abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a demonstration.
"Mr Sludge the Medium" is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a dramatic scene in the history of a soul; and Browning, with his democratic feeling in things of the mind, held that every soul however mean is worth understanding.

If the poem is a satire, it is so only in a way that is inevitable.

Browning's desire is to be absolutely just, but sometimes truth itself becomes perforce a satire.

He takes an impostor at the moment of extreme disadvantage; the "medium" is caught in the very act of cheating; he will make a clean breast of it; and his confession is made as nearly as possible a vindication.