George Crabbe, Robert Browning and Oscar Wilde: ‘Peter Grimes’,‘The…

The idea

This cluster of pre-1900 poems explores crime through monologue, narrative and ballad. Crabbe's Peter Grimes presents a fisherman whose cruelty and suspected murders are judged by a community and by his own haunted conscience. Browning's dramatic monologues give voice to criminals and killers: the poisoner in The Laboratory, the controlling Duke in My Last Duchess and the strangler in Porphyria's Lover. Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol examines state punishment, the hanging of a fellow prisoner and the shared guilt of humanity.

What earns the marks

• Analyses how Crabbe presents Peter Grimes through community judgement, suspicion and the protagonist's haunted conscience.
• Examines Browning's dramatic monologues as studies in criminal psychology, self-justification and the gap between speaker and reader.
• Explores Wilde's treatment of state punishment, the death penalty and shared guilt in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
• Compares the poets' use of form and voice, including ballad metre, rhyming couplets, dramatic monologue and narrative commentary.
• Considers how imagery of possession, poison, strangulation and imprisonment shapes the reader's response to crime and punishment.
• Connects the poems to the genre of crime writing through motive, detection, confession, judgement and retribution.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Assuming a dramatic monologue expresses the poet's own views.

  Put it right: Distinguish between speaker and poet and analyse how Browning creates ironic distance.

• Treating the Duke in My Last Duchess as merely a jealous husband rather than a criminal speaker.

  Put it right: Examine how his language reveals control, possession and the implied murder.

• Reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol only as protest without attention to its ballad form and religious imagery.

  Put it right: Analyse how form and imagery shape its argument about guilt and punishment.

Exam tips

• Prepare comparative points that link at least two poems through a shared idea such as self-justification, punishment or the failure of human judgement.
• Use short embedded quotations and comment on form and voice, because the assessment rewards analysis of how meaning is made rather than plot summary.
• When discussing context, focus on relevant attitudes to crime, class, gender and punishment in the nineteenth century rather than listing biographical facts.