The Uxorious Unearthing by the Pre-Raphaelite Poet

n                   Gabby loved Guggums and Guggumsnloved Gabby. 

nTo death. 

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nGabby was Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, son of Italiannémigrés, born in London in 1828, and savvy, street-smart and cocky. He was ancharmer, good-looking (and he knew it), a smouldering Latin-lover with an eyenfor the girls, his ‘stunners’. When he was twenty, Gabby started a gang – butnthese were no Mohocks or Hawkubites. They were the PRB – The Pre-RaphaelitenBrotherhood. Seven young Turks, out to make their mark. There was Gabby, poetnand painter, and there was his brother William Michael, writer and would-bencritic. There was John Everett Millais, an artistic child protégé from thenChannel Isles, naive and brilliant. There was William Holman Hunt, passionatenand troubled, whom Gabby had sought out when he had seen Hunt’s painting ThenEve of St Agnes. 

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nThere was James Collinson, a confused Christian whonsecretly fancied Gabby’s sister, Christina. There was Frederic George Stephens, anothernwould-be critic, writer and poet. And there was Thomas Woolner, the onlynsculptor in the group. All seven believed that Art (with a capital A) had takenna wrong turn and needed to return to the honesty and intensity of the paintersnwho worked before Raphael, the artists who were pre-Raphael, thenPre-Raphaelites. The PRB derided Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the RoyalnAcademy of Arts, who they called Sir Sloshua Slosh, mocking the influence ofnhis contrived compositions, his commonplace conventionality and his academicnconformity. Gabby’s gang wanted complex compositions, intense attention tondetail and concentrated observation drawn directly from Nature. In 1848, thenyear of revolutions in Europe, they started a revolution of their own. 

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nWhennMillais exhibited Lorenzo and Isabella in 1849 it provoked the intendednsensation. Based on a poem by an almost unknown poet, John Keats, it depictsnthe doomed lovers from the poem, in startling detail and vivid colour, obtainednby using the oil painting technique of laying thin glazes of colour over anstill wet white ground, which allows the light to reflect through the glaze,ngiving it a jewel-like intensity, in stark contrast to the heavy, brownnbituminous varnishes favoured by Sloshua Slosh and his ilk. The composition isncomplex, angular in the manner of the Quattrocento, the figures starknand without the chiaroscuro of the Mannerists, and drawn entirely from life.nThat’s Gabby at the far end of the table, draining his wine-glass. Millais’snMum and Dad are at the table, and the servant on the right is an art studentncalled Plass. On the bench where Isabella sits, Millais has tagged the paintingnwith the letters PRB. He was nineteen when he painted the picture. 

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nHolman Huntnfollowed his signature with PRB on his Rienzi vowing to obtain justice fornthe death of his young brother, slain in a skirmish between the Colonna and thenOrsini factions (he was fond of long, descriptive titles), which hungnbeside Millais’s Isabella at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1849, andnRossetti did the same on his painting The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary. 

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nBut the PRB needed new models – they could not paint each other or theirnfamilies forever – and one was to change Rossetti’s life forever. She was firstnspotted working in a milliner’s shop in Cranbourne Alley – tall and slender,nwith intensely blue eyes and a mass of copper-coloured hair, she was eighteennyears old. Her name was Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. At first, she sat for themnall – she is a Celt in Hunt’s Christians sheltering from the Persecution ofnthe Druids and Sylvia in his Two Gentlemen of Verona, Viola innDeverell’s Twelfth Night and Ophelia in Millais’s painting of the samenname. 

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nWhen Rossetti saw her, he instantly fell in love with her. It was an oddnkind of love – he was, after all, Italian. It was the intense, passionate,nidealised love of Dante for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. In his writtennworks, Rossetti moved the name Dante to the start of his name, in honour of thengreat Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. Dante was part of Rossetti, not just innname. Miss Siddal became ‘Lizzie’, ‘Liz’, ‘The Sid’, ‘Sids’ and eventuallyn‘Guggums’ but in his heart, she was his dream woman, his Muse, his Beatrice. 

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nHendrew her to the point of obsession, over and over again, the same sad, hoodedneyes, the flowing tresses, and the long, stately neck. In 1851, an engagementnwas announced; in 1860, they married (it was a long, Victorian engagement). Butnit was not a happy marriage. The intensity of their love had turned stale andnstifling, the passion airless, and the longing had become frustrated jealousy.nShe began to suffer from bouts of intense depression and after the birth of anstillborn daughter in 1861 these intensified, as did the attacks of acutenneuralgia. 

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nRossetti had always had affairs, known or unknown to her, and onnFebruary 10^th 1862 they dined together at a restaurant in LeicesternSquare, after which she returned home while he went to a late drawing class atnthe Working Men’s’ College. If this was merely an excuse, we may never know,nbut when he came home he found her unconscious in bed. Doctors were sent fornbut they could do nothing – accidentally or on purpose, she had overdosed onnlaudanum, and died at about seven o’clock on the following morning. She wasnpregnant for the second time. Rossetti’s close friend, Ford Madox Brown, isnsaid to have advised Rossetti to burn a letter that she had left, as suicidenwas both illegal and immoral, and in addition to the inevitable scandal, wouldnhave denied her a Christian burial. She was buried, in Highgate cemetery, andnbefore the coffin was closed, Rossetti placed a notebook containing the onlyncopies of his unpublished poems beside her head, wrapped in her hair. Whatnmotivated him? Guilt? Grief? We will never know. 

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nHe painted her again, in BeatanBeatrix, once more in reference to Dante, where she sits in prayer, herneyes closed and lips parted (a dying breath?), with a sun-dial behind her (time isnpassing), and a dove brings her an opium poppy (the source of laudanum). Innthe background are the shadowy figures of Love and Dante, on his journeynthrough the Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise, where he can be reunited withnhis dead love, Beatrice. 

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nRossetti was devastated by her death – he began tontake laudanum in brandy and became addicted to both. He was convinced he wasngoing blind and his hands shook so much he could no longer paint. His mentalnhealth declined drastically, he spoke often of suicide and began to suffer fromndelusions. On day, whilst out walking, he found a chaffinch on the path, whichnallowed him to pick it up and carry it home; it was, to him, the spirit of hisndead wife. He became obsessed with the poems he had placed in his wife’s coffinnand tried to recreate them but his memory was too damaged to recall themnproperly. 

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nUnder the influence of his literary agent, the extremely shadynCharles Augustus Howell, discrete enquiries were made and an order from thenHome Secretary, Mr Bruce, obtained. On the night of either October 6^thnor 7^th 1869, whilst Rossetti remained at home, Howell and othersnwent to Highgate, where fires were lit, the grave opened and the coffinnexhumed. Howell opened it and took the manuscript out. He said later that thenbody was preserved perfectly, in all her beauty, and her hair had continued tongrow so that the coffin was full (an impossibility). The book, with some hairnattached, was cleaned with formaldehyde, but a worm had eaten through some ofnthe pages, making them impossible to read. The poems were returned to Rossetti,nwho copied them out as best he could, and he then destroyed the volume; thenpoems, with newer works, were published to mixed reviews in 1870. 

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nMemories ofnthe exhumation haunted him ever after and he spent his final days in a mist ofnwhisky and chloral hydrate. 

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nHe died from Bright’s Disease on April 9^thn1882.

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