"Christmas-Eve" is an account of a vision in which the narrator is taken to a Nonconformist church, to St. Peter's in Rome, to a Göttingen lecture theatre where a practitioner of the Higher criticism is discoursing on the Christian myth, and back to the Nonconformist church.
[1] Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day gives valuable clues to the religious opinions of Browning himself, as opposed to those of his characters, but, as his wife warned a correspondent, "Certainly the poem does not represent his own permanent state of mind, which was what I meant when I told you it was dramatic.
In recent years it has been edited by Ian Jack, Rowena Fowler and Margaret Smith as part of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol.
4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan as part of The Poems of Browning, vol.
This article related to a poem from the UK or its predecessor states is a stub.