Elizabeth Barrett Browning originally published "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" in the first volume of Charles Dickens's Household Words. Because the statue was, at the time of the poem's inception, being displayed across the U.S. and Britain, it is likely that EBB either saw the statue (or a model cast) for herself at the studio of Hiram Powers, with whom she and Robert Browning were acquainted and near-neighbors in Florence, prior to its journey, or saw it as part of the United States exhibit at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" is the fourth of EBB's five anti-slavery poems and is primarily responsible for shifting the statue's popular context away from that of the Greek War of Independence that had initially inspired Powers' work and towards broader questions of morality surrounding slavery abroad in the United States.