Lizzie Siddal

by Lucinda Hawksley

  On November 14, Rossetti was called away urgently to Matlock, where Lizzie had suddenly been taken terribly ill. Her success in Sheffield had not been able to negate her feelings for Rossetti and, in lieu of absence making the heart grow fonder, she had recognized the signs that he was, instead, enjoying living without her. Jane Burden was not the only problem. There was another new model in London, a voluptuous blonde replacement for the discarded Annie Miller. This new model was, in contrast to Lizzie, so large that she was often referred to as “The Elephant”. Her name, or at least the name she assumed for modelling, was Fanny Cornforth (her real name was Sarah Cox).74

  Fanny was a tender-hearted, working-class girl with a dissolute past and a genuine love for Rossetti. His friends derided him for dallying with a woman many of them perceived as unattractive, but he adored her face, her rippling blonde hair and her energizing vitality, so different from a Lizzie grown whiningly discontent through the years. In 1857 Rossetti had conceived an idea for the first painting he was to make of Fanny Cornforth, Bocca Baciata which, translated from the Italian, means “the mouth that has been kissed”. The subject was taken from the fourteenth-century Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. It is the story of a woman who has had eight lovers before marrying her ninth. Unlike the moral message in most literary works of its era, the woman is not condemned for her sexually liberated behaviour. Instead, she is hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world, a woman in full command of her sensuality and generous in its bestowal. She is perceived as a heroine who gives and receives exquisite pleasure without any repercussions of bitterness or regret and who luxuriates in a fulfilled, happy and faithful married life. The full quotation, in translation, reads: “The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its fortune, rather it renews itself as does the moon”. By 1858 there was little doubt whom the mouth had been kissing during the painting of Bocca Baciata.

  From Sheffield and Matlock, Lizzie was in correspondence with Emma. In recent letters she had been receiving worrying communications about Rossetti’s new model in London. In addition, Rossetti’s own letters were making her equally nervous about this new girl in Oxford, discovered just as Lizzie had been, and full of the potential excitement Rossetti’s inattentions had smothered in her own once-eager personality. Rossetti’s letters may have pretended that Jane was Topsy’s “property”, but Lizzie had learned the painful way that, when it came to sex versus friendship, Rossetti was not a loyal friend. Even worse was the fact that Jane was just 17 years old. Lizzie was acutely aware that in the years she had been waiting for Rossetti to marry her she had metamorphosed from a fresh young girl of 20 to a listless woman of 28, who was still unmarried. Knowing she could not supersede the physical temptations of a 17-year-old beauty, Lizzie reverted to the proven method of getting Rossetti’s attention. She languished and sent word that she needed him – that she was frightened she might die. It worked, as always, and Rossetti rushed away from the painting party, of which he was supposed to be in charge, and made his way as fast as possible to Derbyshire.

  In 1858, Matlock was a small but lively town surrounded closely by limestone quarries and other disfiguring signs of the Industrial Revolution and, a little further out, by idyllic, unspoilt countryside. The Romans had settled in Matlock to glean lead from its rich mines and the nineteenth-century manufacturers were determined to finish off what their ancestors had started. Nearby Matlock Bath had been renowned as a spa since the seventeenth century and Lord Byron had described it as “a romantic fragment of Switzerland set in the heart of England”. The first spa-fed pool was built in Matlock Bath in 1698 and, to the hoteliers’ delight, a second spring was soon discovered. An industry in invalids grew up rapidly as the town emulated the success of fashionable Harrogate.75

  Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expensive hotels were built, including therapy pools fed by the spa water, but these facilities were aimed exclusively at the wealthy, not at the local population of miners and factory workers, a large proportion of whom were in desperate need of treatment for work-and poverty-related ailments. By the late 1830s, the price of a simple plunge-bath or a cold shower was a shilling per person; to take a dip in a thermal pool, or to have a hot shower, cost half-a-crown, prices that the hard-working locals were unable to afford. In the 1850s a local manufacturer and mill owner, John Smedley, decided to change all that.

  Smedley was a philanthropic eccentric who owned a hosiery-making business and preached Methodist principles to any of his employees who would listen. In his spare time he read books about medicine, teaching himself about illness and its cures and deciding that he now knew as much as a doctor (most of whom he dismissed as no better than quacks). Having himself been treated successfully at a spa for a breakdown, he was brought to a firm belief that the best form of medicine was hydropathy, or water treatments, and he determined to built a hydropathic centre. The centre would not only be opened to paying invalids, it would also be a place which his mill workers could visit for absolutely free treatments.

  Smedley’s first water therapy experiments were conducted in 1853 at a small house he had bought for the purpose. His grand plan, however, was far more exalted – he wanted to build a hydropathic centre on a sparsely inhabited hill on the outskirts of Matlock, an area known as Matlock Bank.76 It is a long, imposing, dark stone building, crenellated all along the top like a fortress. The treatment rooms were decorated with wood panels, marble columns and stained glass.77 It was to Smedley’s hydropathic spa that Lizzie went for treatment.

  Lizzie really was ill this time. The years of laudanum addiction had taken hold and her symptoms were advanced and pathetic. She was unable to ingest anything without vomiting, she was weak, terribly thin and could summon up little creative energy. She could not paint, she could only write poetry about death and unhappy love affairs. Her daily routine had become dependent on when she was able to take her next dose of the drug. She was at this stage physically incapable of leaving Matlock, being far too ill to undertake the long journey back to London, so she remained there for several months.

  For those tiresome months Rossetti travelled back and forth between London and Derbyshire, unable to find time to go back to Oxford and help finish off the project, which was a pity as the murals were doomed to failure. The artists – Rossetti included – had not known enough about fresco painting to realize that they should have primed the walls before laying the paint onto them. It was not apparent straight away, but eventually the images began to fade away.78 As his band of happy artists continued their carefree painting party, Rossetti juggled his time between the corpulent vitality of Fanny in London and the wan misery of Lizzie in Matlock, dividing his energies feverishly between perfecting Bocca Baciata and attempting to prevent Lizzie from dying.

  In the meantime, Lizzie’s reputation as an artist was suffering as miserably as her health. The Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, which had proved such a success in London’s Fitzroy Square, had crossed the Atlantic where it had been eagerly awaited as part of the American Exhibition of British Art. Unfortunately, not all the works were as well received as had been hoped – amongst them Lizzie’s, which was derided. By the time the travelling exhibition had reached Boston, Clerk Saunders, which had shown so much promise and had already been bought by the American collector Norton, was withdrawn from view. Heated correspondence had begun between the exhibition’s backers in America and William Rossetti, complaining about the quality of art on display. One of the organizers, William Stillman, included in a letter to William Rossetti: ”You should have thought that the eccentricities of the school were new to us, and left out things such as Hughes’s Fair Rosamond and April Love, The Invasion of the Saxons, with Miss Siddal’s Clerk Saunders, and The London Magdalene; all of which may have their value to the initiated, but to us generally are childish and trifling…” When Clerk Saunders was withdrawn, Dante Rossetti was drawn into the fray, corresponding cajolingly with Norton who was uncertain whether he should also withdraw his offer
to purchase Lizzie’s painting now it had been so criticized by his compatriots.

  Norton was not Rossetti’s only preoccupation that spring. While Lizzie fretted in Derbyshire about her advancing age, Rossetti was fast approaching the age of 30. At the start of May 1858 he was in Matlock with Lizzie, but he left her before his birthday, on May 12, to return to London. The birthday was an important landmark for him and he wrote enthusiastically to Bell Scott, “I am 30 this year, and want to try if I am ever to begin anything.” This proclamation did not, however, relate to marriage or parenthood. He was at an exciting stage in his career, not only were his paintings being appreciated but he was gaining a staunch reputation as a literary translator of Italian texts.

  After his birthday, Lizzie was relieved to welcome Rossetti back to Matlock, but he did not stay with her for her own 29th birthday at the end of July. As the ultimate in treachery, he left her side to travel to Oxford, where he drew a portrait of Jane Burden. Lizzie must have been aware that Morris was currently travelling in France, and the knowledge of Rossetti and Jane spending time together was gnawing at her.

  For whatever reason, Rossetti was being deliberately hurtful to both Lizzie and Morris, who was by now one of Rossetti’s closest friends and a man who admired him more than any other of his disciples. Morris, pitifully in love with Janey, was to spend their married life stepping back and allowing Rossetti to be her lover, all the time pretending to turn a blind eye to the affair. At this early stage Rossetti and Janey were not lovers, but he was nonetheless cuckolding Morris through his art. Morris was painfully aware of what he believed to be his inferior abilities as an artist. While Rossetti and Ned Burne-Jones had the confidence to know that their work was good, Morris always felt his paintings came a poor second best. When painting Janey for the first time, as Guinevere, desperate for her to know how he felt about her and becoming increasingly despondent about the way the image of her in his mind was translating to the canvas, Morris wrote in chalk on the back of the canvas – the side the model would see – “I cannot paint you but I love you.” He was forever to feel belittled by Rossetti’s ability to make Janey appear on canvas far more beautiful than she was and by his own perceived inability to live up to his friend’s great genius. If Rossetti had been the possessor of Morris’s inherited riches – an income of £900 a year – the story could have ended very differently. Janey was never content with Morris, telling him after Rossetti’s death that she had never been in love with him. During their marriage she had two long-term affairs, the first of which was with Rossetti. She married, however, as any intelligent Victorian woman born into poverty would have been expected to do if offered the chance. Her matrimonial decision was a financial one, not one dictated by love.

  The summer of 1858 was a time of illness for much of the group. While Lizzie was languishing in Derbyshire, Emma, at home in Kentish Town, was also extremely ill, causing Ford to fret tirelessly over her; she had not been strong since Arthur’s birth and had not recovered from his death. Ned Burne-Jones, who was engaged to an adoring girl named Georgiana Macdonald, known as “Georgie”, became so very ill that summer that he was swept off to Little Holland House, the beautiful Holland Park home of Valentine Prinsep’s parents, where Val’s mother nursed him back to health. Georgie and Ned had met when she was a child and he a pupil at school with her older brother. He had proposed in 1856, when she was 15 years old, but both knew their engagement would – out of financial necessity – be a long one.

  When Ned was ill, Georgie worried impotently. Her vivacious older sister had died of consumption just a few years previously, and she was unsure how to cope with the sudden onslaught of calamities as so many of her new circle of friends seemed blighted by ill health. She wrote in her memoirs that she had been thrilled when a distracted Madox Brown, unable to cope with his children, the incapacity of his wife and his worry about her, coupled with the pressing need to work and earn money to pay for the medical bills, gratefully allowed Georgie to take three-year-old Nolly Madox Brown back to her parents’ home and to care for him there until his mother was better.

  While all these concerns were occupying the group in London, Lizzie’s movements in Derbyshire and Yorkshire are uncertain. After July 1858, any mention of Lizzie disappears from Rossetti’s letters, Madox Brown’s diary and all other Pre-Raphaelite memorabilia. No letters to her, or from her to Emma or her family, survive and her whereabouts and what funds she was living on remain an unsolved mystery to this day. She may have remained in the north of England, visited her sister Annie in Scotland or returned to the family home in Southwark. The death of her father occurred in July 1859, and it seems likely that Lizzie was at home with her family around this time.

  Of Rossetti, during this period, there is a wealth of information. He is known to have spent months vying with his friend George Boyce for the affections of Fanny Cornforth and then, at the end of 1859, after Holman Hunt finally ended his engagement to her, vying with Boyce for the affections of Annie Miller as well. He and Morris were rowing over Janey, with Morris’s uncontrollable temper alienating himself from most of his friends – even the faithful Burne-Jones. Rossetti seems to have been the only one in the group who did not shrink from Morris’s fury, despite being the object of it. He was painting and translating as usual, but of Lizzie or their relationship there is no mention at all. It is possible that she was mentioned in correspondence or diaries that did not survive, but to all intents and purposes Lizzie seemed to disappear from Rossetti’s life altogether until April 1860, when she was once more terribly ill.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “So we two wore our strange estate: Familiar, unaffected, free”79

  When Lizzie’s family became convinced that this time she really was going to die, they contacted Ruskin, who instantly relayed the news to Rossetti. He rushed to Hastings to be at her side and realized how fervently he wanted her to live. Lizzie’s emaciated frame was being tortured by her addiction, her limbs were now so weak she could barely move at all. She was a heartrendingly pathetic sight, lying inert on her rented bed. Every day Rossetti willed her to keep going and prayed she would not die. Day and night she vomited, seemingly unable to keep enough sustenance in her body to sustain life. Her body was by now in such a terrible state that she longed to die just to be rid of the pain. This was no longer a ruse with which to manipulate her errant lover; Lizzie’s laudanum addiction was destroying her body and she believed this was truly the end. Suddenly Rossetti could not stop talking about marriage. Every day he told her if she could just make it to the church at the bottom of the High Street, they would be married – he had even purchased the licence. For the first time in nine years, Lizzie did not want to talk about weddings. All she wanted to do was be free from this agonizing pain.

  On April 13, 1860, Rossetti wrote to his mother, “Lizzy and I are going to be married at last, in as few days as possible … Like all the important things I ever meant to do … this one has been deferred almost beyond possibility. I have hardly deserved that Lizzy should still consent to it, but she has done so, and I trust I may still have time to prove my thankfulness to her.” But the wedding was not to take place so soon. Although the church was no real distance from the house – just a short walk down to the bottom of the hill or a negligible amount of time in a carriage – Lizzie was far too ill to leave her bed. Rossetti’s letters back to London grew increasingly desperate as he fought to keep his Guggum alive long enough to marry him. His guilt at having deferred the marriage for so many years was almost overwhelming as he gazed at the emaciated creature lying listlessly still on her lodging house sheets, moving only to vomit, screaming from the gut-wrenching pains. He was aware that most of her miseries had been prompted by his negligent behaviour.

  A few days after writing to his mother, Rossetti wrote to William:

  I assure you I never felt more in need of such affection as yours has always been, than I do now. You will be grieved to hear that poor dear Lizzy’s health has bee
n in such a broken and failing state for the last few days as to render me more miserable than I can possibly say. The spectacle of the fits of her illness when they come on would be heartrending to a stranger even.

  There seems to-day to be a slight rally, but till yesterday she had not been able to keep anything – even a glass of soda-water on her stomach for five minutes, and this has been the case more or less for a long while. She gets no nourishment, and what can be reasonably hoped when this is added to her dreadful state of health in other respects? If I were to lose her now I do not know what effect it might have on my mind, added to the responsibility of much work commissioned and already paid for, which still has to be done – and how to do it in such a case? I am sorry to write you such a miserable letter, but really it does me some good to have one person to whom I can write it, as I could not bear doing to any other than you.

  His letters continued in a similar vein, with Rossetti becoming increasingly fretful about his paintings being left unfinished and his overwhelming fear that Lizzie’s failing health would cheat him of his bride. The letters are a jumble of emotions, of pity and love for Lizzie followed by self-pity or self-reproach. Emma suggested she should travel to Hastings and nurse Lizzie, but Rossetti refused her permission, writing to Ford: “Emma made a kind offer of coming here … but I find Lizzy prefers being alone with me, and indeed it would be too painful for anyone to witness. I assure you it has been almost too much for me.” Despite the last eighteen months – the cosy tea parties at Fanny’s rooms and the flirtatious boat trips with Annie Miller – Rossetti still wanted Lizzie all to himself. If she were going to die, she would do so in his arms, not while being held by Emma.

  When April ended and the licence was still languishing in his drawer, Rossetti determined they should make it a double celebration and be married on his birthday, but May 12 also went past without Lizzie being well enough to travel to the church. She was, however, beginning to regain something of her old adoring personality, her health was showing marked improvement and he was no longer so fearful that she would die unwed. His presence had seldom failed to revive her in the past, so he stayed with her, talking about where they would go on honeymoon and how they would live now he was more financially stable than he had ever been before. He told her of the artworks they would create together and proudly designed a monogram of her married initials, which she could use on her poems and paintings as soon as they were husband and wife. It had taken nine long years, but she was finally going to be E.E.R. instead of E.E.S.