by Dinah Roe
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–94)
Poet, short-story and devotional prose writer; born in London; for family, see entry on DGR; raised as a devout High Anglican; modelled for DGR’s early paintings; her gender precluded PRB membership, but her early work is associated with Pre-Raphaelitism; only woman to publish poems in the Germ; engaged to James Collinson, 1848, but broke engagement on his re-conversion to Roman Catholicism, 1850; Goblin Market (1862) is the first book of Pre-Raphaelite associated poetry to win critical acclaim; ACS a fervent admirer of her poems; work was illustrated by DGR and Arthur Hughes; wrote short stories and poems for children; later work almost exclusively devotional; diagnosed with Graves’ disease in 1872; died of breast cancer; EBJ designed decorations for her memorial in Christ Church, Woburn Square.
Works: Goblin Market and Other Poems, illustrated by DGR (1862); The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, illustrated by DGR (1866); Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870); Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, illustrated by Arthur Hughes (1872); Speaking Likenesses, illustrated by Arthur Hughes (1874); A Pageant and Other Poems (1881); Verses (1893); New Poems, dedicated to ACS by WMR (1896); The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, ed. WMR (1904).
Arthur Hughes (1832–1915)
Painter and illustrator; born in London; attended the RA Schools, 1847; met FMB and DGR, 1851, and JEM in 1852; married Tryphena Foord in 1855; one of the illustrators of William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855); WMR writes that ‘he was one of those who most sympathized with the ideas which guided the Praeraphaelite Brotherhood, and his style conformed pretty faithfully (not servilely) to theirs; if the organization had been kept up a little longer, and if new members had ever been admitted … Mr Hughes would doubtless have been invited to join’ (SR 1, 147); participated in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and helped paint the Oxford Union murals, 1857; founder member of the Hogarth Club, 1858; illustrated Alfred Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1865), the frontispiece of Thomas Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady, third edition (1866), CGR’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) and Speaking Likenesses (1874).
Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98)
Painter, designer; born in Birmingham; studied at Oxford, where he met WM, 1853; read Ruskin and saw Pre-Raphaelite pictures; admired Pre-Raphaelite illustrations for William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855); read Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; published short stories in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856; met DGR and ACS, moved to London and shared rooms with WM; helped paint Oxford Union murals, 1857; became a member of the Hogarth Club, 1858; married Georgiana Macdonald, 1860; founder member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1861; designed stained glass, textiles and ceramics; elected to the Old Watercolour Society, 1864; resigned, 1870; produced illustrations (never published) for WM’s The Earthly Paradise (1868–70); exhibited at Grosvenor Gallery, 1877; elected Associate of the RA, 1885; baronetcy in 1894.
William Morris (1834–96)
Poet, translator, designer, painter; born in London, educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he met EBJ and DGR; contributed poetry to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856; helped paint the Oxford Union murals, 1857; member of Hogarth Club; stimulated Pre-Raphaelite interest in Arthurian legend; married Pre-Raphaelite model Jane Burden, 1859, who later became DGR’s muse and lover; moved into Red House, Upton, 1860; active in the Arts and Crafts Movement; founder member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1861, along with DGR, FMB and EBJ, among others, which became William Morris & Co., 1875; other interests were Icelandic literature and folklore, also socialist politics; contributed to and edited Socialist League journal the Commonweal, 1885–90; befriended W. B. Yeats in the late 1880s; set up Kelmscott Press, 1891.
Works: The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858); The Life and Death of Jason: A Poem (1867); The Earthly Paradise: A Poem (1868–70); Love is Enough, or the Freeing of the Pharamond: A Morality (1873); Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1877); Poems by the Way (1891).
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
Poet, literary critic; born in London to an admiral in the Royal Navy and a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham; raised Anglican but later rejected Christianity; educated at Eton and Oxford, where he met DGR, WM and EBJ; lifelong friend of WBS; published pieces in Undergraduate Papers, 1856–8; sent away for a term, then left Oxford for London without a degree, 1860; famous for unconventional behaviour, interest in flagellation, shared by his friend homosexual painter and Pre-Raphaelite associate Simeon Solomon; defended George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862); in 1866 caused a literary scandal with the explicit Poems and Ballads and defended his own work in Notes on Poems and Reviews, as did WMR in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads; sympathy with the struggle for Italian independence inspired A Song of Italy (1867); a remarkably prolific writer, he produced critical essays and verse plays, along with many volumes of poetry, including influential pieces on Blake and Baudelaire; rescued from alcoholism by Rossetti friend Theodore Watts-Dunton, with whose family he lived until his death.
Works: Poems and Ballads (1866); Songs Before Sunrise (1871); Songs of Two Nations (1875); Poems and Ballads II (1878); Studies in Song (1880); The Heptalogia (1880);Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882); A Century of Roundels (1883); A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (1884); Poems and Ballads III (1889); Astrophel and Other Poems, 1894; A Channel Passage (1904); The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols. (1904).
Simeon Solomon (1840–1905)
Painter, born in London to a Jewish merchant family; attended RA Schools, 1856; first RA painting exhibited, 1857; received critical acclaim and commissions; interest in painting Jewish subjects and themes such as Carrying the Scrolls of the Law (1867); friend of DGR and EBJ, but especially close to ACS; painting strongly influenced by DGR, as in Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (1859–63); became member of the Savile Club, 1868; produced stained-glass designs for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.; in the 1860s and 1870s his work began to emphasize the erotic and the mystical, such as The Sleepers and the One Who Watcheth (1870), increasingly featuring androgynous figures; wrote prose tale, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871); arrested for homosexual offences, 1873; subsequently abandoned by Pre-Raphaelite friends and patrons; spent time in the workhouse; his reputation revived in 1880s, but he died destitute and alcoholic.
John Payne (1842–1916)
Poet and translator; born in Devon; met Arthur O’Shaughnessy and the Pre-Raphaelite circle in the 1860s; dedicated The Masque of Shadows (1870) to O’Shaughnessy; skilled in languages, he translated François Villon, Boccaccio, One Thousand and One Nights and The Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nishapour, among other works; own poems heavily influenced by DGR; Robert Buchanan’s essay mentions his ‘queer allegories’ (FS, 347).
Works: The Masque of Shadows and Other Poems (1870); Intaglios: Sonnets (1871); Songs of Life and Death (1872); New Poems (1880).
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–81)
Poet; born in London, of Irish descent; protégé of his mother’s friend Lord Lytton; junior assistant at the British Museum, 1861; became senior assistant in the Natural History Department, 1863 until his death; first volume of poems, An Epic of Women (1870), dedicated to fellow poet John Payne, who dedicated The Masque of Shadows to O’Shaughnessy in the same year; frequent guest at FMB’s home where he met the Rossetti siblings, WM, WBS, ACS and OMB; married Eleanor Kyme Marston, sister of Philip Bourke Marston, 1873; poems heavily influenced by ACS and Baudelaire; Buchanan calls him ‘a second-hand Mr Swinburne’ (FS, 347).
Works: An Epic of Women (1870); Lays of France (1872); Music and Moonlight (1874); Songs of a Worker (1881).
Philip Bourke Marston (1850–87)
Poet; born in London; blind from age three; DGR and ACS were family friends; known for melancholy poetry and his tragic life story, which involves the deaths of his mother in 1870, his fiancée Mary Nesbit in 1871, his closest friend OMB in 1874, his two sisters in 1878 and 1879 respectively; close frie
nd of Arthur O’Shaughnessy, who married his sister Eleanor; began a literary club, ‘The Vagabonds’, 1883; heavily influenced by DGR and ACS; Robert Buchanan writes that ‘every poem of Mr Marston’s reminds us of Mr Rossetti’ (FS, 347).
Works: Song-Tide and Other Poems (1871); All in All: Poems and Sonnets (1875); Wind-Voices (1883).
Oliver Madox Brown (1855–74)
Poet, painter and author; born at Finchley, Middlesex; son of FMB; close friend of Philip Bourke Marston and Arthur O’Shaughnessy; first-exhibited painting, The Infant Jason Delivered to the Centaur (1869), based on events in WM’s The Life and Death of Jason (1867); showed promise when he turned from painting to writing in 1871; his gothic novel, Gabriel Denver (1873), and its earlier version, The Black Swan, were admired by DGR and friends; died of peritonitis; WMR and Francis Hueffer brought out an edition of his unpublished works, The Dwale Bluth (1876).
Works: Gabriel Denver (1873); The Dwale Bluth, Hebditch’s Legacy, and Other Literary Remains, ed. WMR and Francis Hueffer, vol. 2 (1876).
Selected List of Paintings and Illustrations
This list is intended as a starting point for those interested in Pre-Raphaelite visual culture, and is by no means comprehensive. It includes paintings and illustrations cited in the biographical and textual notes.
PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
Ford Madox Brown: Lear and Cordelia (1849–54); The Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851–9); Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1852–6); Work (1852–65); The Last of England (1855); The Death of Sir Tristram (1864).
Oliver Madox Brown: The Infant Jason Delivered to the Centaur (1869); Exercize, Obstinacy (1870); Mazeppa, Prospero and the Infant Miranda (1871); Silas Marner (1872).
Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Sidonia von Bork (1860); The Madness of Sir Tristram (1862); The Wine of Circe (1863–9); The Beguiling of Merlin (1870–74); Laus Veneris (1873–5); The Hours (1882); The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (1881–98).
James Collinson: The Charity Boy’s Debut (1847); Italian Image Makers at a Roadside Alehouse (1849); Answering the Emigrant’s Letter, The Renunciation of St Elizabeth of Hungary (1850); To Let, For Sale (1857).
Walter Howell Deverell: Twelfth Night (1850); The Grey Parrot (1852–3); The Mock Marriage of Orlando and Rosalind, A Pet (1853).
Arthur Hughes: Ophelia (1852); April Love (1855–6); The Eve of St Agnes (1856); The Annunciation (1858); Aurora Leigh’s Dismissal of Romney (1860); La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1861–3); The Lady of Shalott (1873).
William Holman Hunt: The Eve of St Agnes (1848); Rienzi (1849); Claudio and Isabella, A Converted British Family (1850); The Hireling Shepherd (1851); The Light of the World (1851–3); Our English Coasts (1852); The Awakening Conscience (1853); The Great Pyramid (1854); The Scapegoat (1854); Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867); The Shadow of Death (1870–73); The Triumph of the Innocents (1883–4); The Lady of Shalott (1886–1905).
John Everett Millais: Isabella (1849); Christ in the House of His Parents (1850); Mariana, The Woodman’s Daughter (1851); A Huguenot, Ophelia (1852); The Rescue (1855); The Blind Girl (1856); Autumn Leaves (1856); The Vale of Rest (1858–9); Esther (1863–5); The Sound of Many Waters (1876).
William Morris: La Belle Iseult (or Queen Guenevere) (1858).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849); The Annunciation (or Ecce Ancilla Domini!) (1849–50); Arthur’s Tomb (1855); The Blue Closet, The Tune of the Seven Towers (1857); A Christmas Carol (1857–8); Bocca Baciata (1859); Beata Beatrix (1860); Venus Verticordia (1864–8); Monna Vanna (1866); Proserpine (1874); The Blessed Damozel (1875–8); Astarte Syriaca (1877).
William Bell Scott: King Arthur Carried from the Battlefield to the Land of Enchantment (1847); Iron and Coal (c.1855–60); The Gloaming (1862); The Eve of the Deluge (1865).
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal: The Lady of Shalott (1853); Lovers Listening to Egyptian Girls Playing Music, Pippa Passes (1854); The Quest of the Holy Grail (1855), a collaboration with DGR; The Eve of St Agnes, Lady Affixing Pennant to a Knight’s Spear, Sir Patrick Spens (c.1856); Clerk Saunders, Lady Clare, The Ladies’ Lament (1857).
Simeon Solomon: Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (1859–63); The Mother of Moses (1860); Love in Autumn, Damon and Aglae (1866); Carrying the Scrolls of the Law (1867); The Sleepers and the One Who Watcheth, Dawn (1870).
ILLUSTRATIONS
Ford Madox Brown: ‘Cordelia’ in the Germ 3 (March 1850); ‘Ehud and Eglon’, ‘The Coat of Many Colours’, ‘Elijah and the Widow’s Son’ in Dalziels’ Bible Gallery, a collection of wood engravings of the Old Testament by a number of Pre-Raphaelite artists (1881).
Oliver Madox Brown: ‘Mazeppa’ and ‘The Deformed Transformed’ in The Poetical Works of Byron (1870), ed. WMR.
Edward Coley Burne-Jones: ‘Ezekiel and the Boiling Pot’ in Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881); frontispiece, ‘The Frankleynes Tale’, ‘The Tale of the Wife of Bath’, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ in the Kelmscott edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896).
James Collinson: ‘The Child Jesus’ in the Germ 2 (February 1850).
Walter Howell Deverell: ‘Viola and Olivia’ in the Germ 4 (April 1850).
Arthur Hughes: eight illustrations for William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855), including ‘The Fairies’, ‘Crossing the Stile’ and ‘Lady Alice’; over twenty illustrations in Alfred Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1865); frontispiece for Thomas Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady, third edition (1866); illustrations for CGR’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) and Speaking Likenesses (1874) and for Allingham’s Life and Phantasy (1889).
William Holman Hunt: ‘My Beautiful Lady’ in the Germ 1 (January 1850); ‘The Beggar Maid’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Godiva’ in the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857); ‘The Lent Jewels’ in Robert Willmott’s English Sacred Poetry (1862); ‘Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well’ in Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881).
John Everett Millais: ‘The Fireside Story’ in Allingham’s The Music Master (1855); ‘Mariana’, ‘St Agnes’ Eve’, ‘The Day-Dream’, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ in the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857); ‘The Lost Piece of Silver’, ‘The Lost Sheep’, ‘The Prodigal Son’ in The Parables of Our Lord (1864); frontispiece for Allingham’s Life and Phantasy (1889).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘The Maids of Elfen-Mere’ in Allingham’s The Music Master (1855); ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘St Cecilia’, ‘Sir Galahad’ in the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857); ‘Golden head by golden head’ and ‘Buy from us with a golden curl’ in CGR’s Goblin Market (1862); ‘The long hours go and come and go’, ‘You should have wept her yesterday’ in CGR’s The Prince’s Progress (1866); ‘The Queen’s Page’ in Allingham’s Flower Pieces and Other Poems (1888).
Simeon Solomon: ‘Abraham and Isaac’, ‘Hagar and Ishmael’, ‘Hosannah’, ‘The Infant Moses’ and ‘Melchizedek Blesses Abram’ in Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881).
Notes
The notes to each poem provide the date of its first publication. This is the first date given in each case, unless preceded by a composition date (not available for every poem). The phrase ‘First poetry volume’, together with a date, is used only if the poem first appeared in a particularly significant Pre-Raphaelite journal, magazine or other collection. (Some poems originally appeared in other contemporary journals, but I have noted only those publications of particular relevance to the Pre-Raphaelites.) The first volume of poetry cited is the source for the copy-text for each poem unless the poem wasn’t subsequently published in book form. Any exceptions to this are mentioned in the notes. Where a group of poems is drawn from the same source, this is stated at the top of the relevant section of notes. Note numbers refer to line numbers (marked in the margin of the poems themselves).
While some of the Pre-Raphaelite poets were in thrall to medieval legend and lore, all were very much engaged with the poetry of their own age. In order to emphasize the extent to which Pre-Raphaelitism was reshaping contempo
rary poetry, the notes themselves focus on the influence of Romantic and Victorian poetry. They also highlight the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite poets on one another. These ambitious writers responded to and promoted each other’s work, self-consciously creating their own poetic lexicons and traditions.
Notes also take account of other important works such as Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and the Bible. I have translated all foreign words that appear in the poems and provided limited summaries of some medieval stories to which the poems frequently allude. More scholarly work in general is needed on the influence of French, German and Italian literature on Pre-Raphaelite poetry, which often references Jean Froissart, Tannhäuser, Petrarch and Dante. Commenting on the vexed question of English translation in the nineteenth century, or on which poets were able to read poems in original European languages and how they used that experience to shape their own poetry, was considered beyond this volume’s scope.
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT
From Rosabell
Monthly Repository (February–March 1838). A heavily revised version entitled ‘Maryanne’ appeared in Poems (Smith, Elder & Co., 1854). The original version, from which stanza 12 is reproduced here, appeared in WBS’s Autobiographical Notes (Harper, 1892). DGR wrote of his admiration for this poem in his first letter to WBS in 1847. WBS claimed this ‘fallen woman’ poem inspired DGR’s unfinished painting Found and his poem ‘Jenny’.
25. She cannot wash Christ’s feet with them alludes to an unidentified female sinner in Luke 7:37–50, who washes Christ’s feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. The woman is associated with Mary Magdalene, a figure frequently represented as a reformed prostitute.
27. without the pale outside an area with defined boundaries.
Morning Sleep
Germ 2 (February 1850). First poetry volume Poems (Smith, Elder & Co., 1854).