Red Cotton Night-Cap Country has never been one of Browning's more popular poems, originally because of the perceived sordidness of the story, and later on grounds thus summarised by the critic C. H. Herford: The poet followed on the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a little of his methods.

[1]It opens by setting the scene in the Norman village of Saint-Rambert amid countryside which the poet discusses with his friend Anne Thackeray, the dedicatee of the poem.

Having been originally told about the case of Antoine Mellerio in 1870 by his friend Joseph Milsand, Browning went on to research the facts with great thoroughness, reading newspaper reports and transcripts of the legal documents and interviewing residents of the district.

He originally used the real names of the characters and places in the affaire Mellerio, but on submitting the manuscript to his friend Lord Coleridge, then Attorney-General, he was advised that he might be sued for libel.

"[5] The anonymous reviewer in Harper's Magazine was undeterred by the fact that he had not read the poem through: It is not necessary to traverse every square mile of the Great Desert to know that its scenery is tame.