were William Shipton Browning, a prosperous distiller, and Mariana Margaret, née Bridge, the daughter of a sea captain. He was the fourth child, and two more daughters followed. Oscar was born prematurely, the survivor of twins the elder of who died stillborn; Oscar escaped the same fate only through the diligence and determination of a nurse. While Oscar was still in his infancy the family moved to Windsor in Berkshire, where according to his own account Browning grew up in a succession of houses. One of these was close to the Long Walk, where "Queen [Victoria] passed our windows in her almost daily ride". Browning's early education was conducted in various schools and by tutors. Having failed to gain entrance to Eton College as a "lower boy" – on several occasions according to his own account – Browning was sent in 1848 to live with his elder brother William, by then curate of St Mary's Church, Everdon, near Daventry, to prepare for the entrance examinations that would admit him to Eton as a Scholar. He passed in the summer of 1850, and took up his place the following January as a "Colleger", just before his fourteenth birthday. Eton and Cambridge Browning was initially shocked by life at Eton, which his biographer Ian Anstruther describes at that time as "a rough world of its own in which the weaker boys were helpless, and where the delights and depravities of vice were imposed on the youngest without restraint". In 1853 Browning began a journal, in which his descriptions of daily life suggest, say Pam Hirst and Mark McBeth in their account of Browning's life, that Eton, "[r]ather than a royally-endowed school [was] more like a Dickensian orphanage". Although his first Eton years were unhappy, his work pleased his tutor, William Johnson, who wrote of him: "Oscar reads like a student of literature ... at last I have found a genuine student combining taste with knowledge, aesthetics with grammar, sociability with thoughtfulness". Johnson's approach to education and teaching influenced Browning for the rest of his life. Although not generally popular, Browning secured election to the exclusive Eton Society, known as "Pop". He also won a contest to write and deliver a suitable oration when Albert, the Prince Consort, visited Eton on Founder's Day in 1854. As Browning matured and his interests widened, his formal schoolwork suffered, to Johnson's distress, but the scope and