Lizzie Siddal

by Lucinda Hawksley

  The wedding took place on Wednesday, May 23, 1860, at St Clement’s Church. They had no family or friends present, just a couple of witnesses whom they had asked in Hastings. The church of St Clement’s is famed in history for taking a direct hit from a cannon-ball when the town was under fire from Dutch ships. The missile remained lodged in the outer wall of the tower, looking down on Rossetti and Lizzie as a decade of courtship finally culminated in wedding vows, of which none must have been more poignant to Rossetti than the line “In sickness, and in health”. No doubt Lizzie was eagerly listening out for “Forsaking all others”.

  The period 1859–60 was a popular time for romance and marriage among Rossetti’s group of friends: William and Janey Morris had been married in April 1859; in 1860 Lydia Siddall walked down the aisle, four months pregnant, to marry Joseph Wheeler; Ned Burne-Jones married Georgiana in June, just a couple of weeks after Rossetti and Lizzie finally made it to the altar; and Charles Collins married Katey Dickens in July. Meanwhile, a heartbroken Fanny Cornforth was in London, mourning Rossetti and too miserable to eat or even get out of bed. Within a few months she was also married, to a mechanic called Timothy Hughes, distinguished only by his capacity for alcohol consumption.80

  After the wedding, as soon as Lizzie was well enough, the Rossettis left for their honeymoon in France. They travelled to Folkestone where they took a boat to Boulogne; here they stayed with the Maenzas, friends of the Rossetti family with whom a young Dante had spent an enjoyable few months in the autumn and winter of 1843. The Maenzas, according to Dante, “quite fascinated” his new wife, whose health continued to fluctuate wildly. After Boulogne they returned to Paris, where they had been so happy with one another five years previously. On arriving, they checked into the Hotel Meurice, one of the city’s most popular and expensive hotels, but after a week decided they could not afford to keep paying such high prices and moved into lodgings run by an English landlady, Mrs Houston, at 128 rue de Rivoli (the less desirable end of the street).

  On their honeymoon, Dante reworked the slightly macabre How They Met Themselves, which may seem a strange choice of picture for one’s honeymoon, but was absolutely in keeping with the feeling of predestination he had experienced the first time he had met Lizzie. They spent their time wandering slowly around Paris. Lizzie was still too weak to enjoy the rigours of being a tourist, but they were content with each other. They read books, one listening as the other read aloud, and sketched and painted together. As Rossetti observed, Paris agreed with Lizzie as well as it had done before, and her health was gradually improving. They befriended a couple of stray dogs, “a big one and a little one” as Rossetti wrote home with glee, adding that when they returned home, he planned to bring the dogs too.81

  It had been hoped that Ned and Georgie Burne-Jones would join them for a joint honeymoon, but Ned was ill again so a disappointed Georgie had to write to Rossetti and tell him they were unable to make the journey to Paris. After receiving her letter, the newlywed Rossettis heaved a collective sigh of relief that their honeymooning was over and they could return home. In Dante’s own words, they were tired of “dragging about” and looking forward to seeing all their friends and settling down again to the “refuge” of London life. “We are quite sick of it here,” he wrote to Georgie, “as she is not well enough to enjoy sightseeing much.”

  On their return, they rented a cottage not far from Hampstead Heath, near Lizzie’s former lodgings and an easy distance from the Madox Browns. Spring Cottage was very small and their rooms did not contain a studio, so Dante left every day to work in Blackfriars, leaving Lizzie alone with her thoughts. The depression and illness soon began to return. She had no idea who Rossetti was with all day and the possibility of him taking up again with Annie Miller, or Fanny, or some other new model was slowly eating away at her. She was, however, feeling creative once more and started her own work again. In the first few months after marriage, she worked on the aptly titled The Woeful Victory, another medieval battle scene. This painting has not survived, but a series of Lizzie’s preliminary drawings are still in existence. They tell the story of a princess whose beauty has inspired two knights to fight a tournament to win her hand. The princess is in love with one of the knights – but it is his opponent who is victorious and her lover is killed. The story is identical to that of her poem “True Love”.

  For a few weeks after they returned from their honeymoon Lizzie was too ill to go out – even though in Paris her health had seemed so much improved – but by July she was back in good spirits and ready to enjoy her new status as a married woman. They were a perfect little group now she and Rossetti were legally a couple. They saw the Madox Browns as often as possible and also met regularly with the Burne-Joneses. On July 26, they had a joint day out at Regent’s Park Zoo, after Rossetti sent Ford and Ned notes requesting them all to meet at “The Wombat’s Lair” at 2 p.m. They appeared as three happy-go-lucky couples without a care or whisper of ill health between them. It was the first occasion that Georgie and Lizzie had met and Georgie wrote a letter the following day describing Lizzie as being “as beautiful as the imagination”. Ned’s new young wife remembered the whole day with great fondness, especially recalling a feud at the zoo that occurred between Dante and an owl: “The moment their eyes met they seemed to rush at each other, Gabriel rattling his stick between the cage bars furiously and the owl almost barking with rage.”

  At the end of a perfect afternoon, the Burne-Joneses went back for tea at Spring Cottage. Georgie, several years younger than Lizzie, was obviously in awe of this worldly, beautiful and quite tragic woman, who had been brought back from the brink of death and whom men took seriously as an artist. Lizzie was kind to her and a firm friendship was established. When they reached the cottage, Lizzie took Georgie upstairs to her room so they could take off their bonnets and rearrange their appearance. The moment made a deep impression on Georgie who recalled it exactly, 44 years later:

  I see her in the little upstairs bedroom with its lattice window, to which she carried me when we arrived, and the mass of her beautiful deep-red hair as she took off her bonnet; she wore her hair very loosely fastened up, so that it fell in soft, heavy wings. Her complexion looked as if a rose tint lay beneath the white skin, producing a most soft and delicate pink for the darkest flesh-tone. Her eyes were of a kind of golden brown – agate-colour is the only word I can think to describe them – and wonderfully luminous: in all Gabriel’s drawings of her and in the type she created in his mind this is to be seen. The eyelids were deep, but without any languor or drowsiness, and had the peculiarity of seeming scarcely to veil the light in her eyes when she was looking down.82

  Lizzie also showed Georgie her design for The Woeful Victory, before taking her back downstairs to join their husbands. The trip to the zoo was not the only occasion the three couples spent together – during that summer they were almost inseparable. They visited Henry VIII’s old palace, Hampton Court, in Surrey, where they braved the famous triangular maze and got lost among the hedges. They spent time at one another’s homes, painting or sketching and talking about grand plans for the future. Lizzie, with the air of a practised artist, encouraged a tentative Georgie in her newly discovered art of wood engraving and they even talked of doing joint illustrations. Lizzie was finally in the role she had longed to play, that of a respectable wife in the fashionable areas of London; but she was also still addicted to laudanum and by the end of July she was once again too ill to leave the house.

  Since returning from honeymoon, Lizzie had not made any effort to see her new in-laws, neither had they called on her (although convention dictated that she should have made the first visit). Her new mother-and sisters-in-law had not seen her for several years, but Lizzie claimed she felt too ill to make the journey to Albany Street – in spite of having been energetic enough to jaunt out to Surrey with the Madox Browns and Burne-Joneses. In answer to a letter that had asked Christina about her brother’s new wife, the poet replied:

>   Some years ago I knew her slightly; she was then extremely admired for beauty and talent … His marriage would be more of a satisfaction to us if we had seen his bride; but owing I dare say in great measure to the very delicate state of her health, we have not yet met. She suffers much from illness … I hope we shall be good friends some day.

  They had made no effort to make her feel welcome when she would have welcomed it; now Lizzie felt no need to make an effort in return. At the beginning of August she was too unwell to attend a small dinner party for family and close friends hosted by Dante’s mother. It was the first such family party since they had been married and the bride did not put in an appearance. Lizzie did, however, have a genuine reason for not attending the party – she was suffering from morning sickness.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Queen of Hearts

  For the first few months of her pregnancy Lizzie was a contented artist’s model, just as she had been when they met, happy to pose for her husband and thrilled at the prospect of having a baby. Everything she had once feared denied to her was now tantalizingly within reach. Rossetti painted her as the Queen of Hearts in Regina Cordium. It is a little-known but beautiful picture in which Lizzie appears wistful and even sorrowful.83 In the preliminary sketch, Rossetti’s usual monogram and the date appears inside a stylized heart. In the finished oil painting, the same motif is used, worked into a golden background of hearts. The sketch is a much more flattering portrayal of Lizzie than the oil painting. In the latter, her drooping eyelids and the pallor of her skin – unfortunately appearing an unhealthy greenish hue against the rich gold of the background – are more suggestive of a woman in an advanced state of ill health than the captivating queen of the title. There is, however, an exquisite chalk drawing of Regina Cordium, in which Lizzie appears beautiful and alluring – though strangely untouchable. Rossetti was to use the title Regina Cordium again for pictures of other models, but the depictions of Lizzie as the Queen of Hearts demonstrate his feelings at the time of their marriage and are a fitting tribute to a marriage so many have derided as an unmitigated sham.

  In early September 1860 Ruskin turned up at Chatham Place, unannounced, to offer his congratulations on their marriage – he had been abroad when the couple returned from honeymoon. There was no one in the studio but, in common with all Rossetti’s friends, Ruskin knew where the key was kept, so he let himself in. He wandered around the studio looking at the paintings and discovering a wealth of new pictures of Lizzie. He was so touched by these that when he returned home he wrote Rossetti a letter about how wonderfully he drew when Lizzie was the subject:

  I looked over all the book of sketches at Chatham Place yesterday. I think Ida should be very happy to see how much more beautifully, perfectly, and tenderly you draw when you are drawing her than when you draw anybody else. She cures you of all your worst faults when you only look at her.

  Ruskin was genuinely happy for the couple and relieved to see his Ida respectably married at last.

  Lizzie was once more convalescing. This time she and Lydia had gone to Brighton, on the south coast, a popular health resort, more expensive and more lively than Hastings. Lizzie’s decision to choose Brighton instead of returning to Mrs Elphick is illustrative of the new phase in her life. Hastings was where she had been as an unmarried woman, not all her memories associated with the town were happy and Hastings was a small place where people had long memories. In Brighton no one knew her. They had not known the unwed, miserable Lizzie. Here she was a married woman, expecting her first child with a hopeful and excited outlook on life – an outlook of the kind that she had not experienced for five years, since the first weeks of her trip to France.

  While Lizzie was in Brighton, Dante was worrying about their home. Spring Cottage was much too small, especially with a baby so imminent, but finding a suitable place to rent near the Heath was proving a Herculean task. He was particularly disappointed after losing out on renting a place which had a “glorious old-world garden”, which he knew would have been the ideal location for painting most of the backgrounds to his pictures, thereby saving him at least £200 a year in travelling expenses and rental fees. He knew that Hampstead had the best air for an invalid such as his wife, but properties in this invalid-ridden age were nigh on impossible to discover before someone else snapped them up. Meanwhile, paying rent on Chatham Place as well as Spring Cottage was fast clearing out his bank account. Lizzie was also agitating to come home and he was worried that she would make herself more ill by doing so. A letter, in which she apologizes for threatening to return home early, survives:

  My Dear Gug,

  I am most sorry to have worried you about coming back when you have so many things to upset you. I shall therefore say no more about it.

  I seem to have gained flesh within the last ten days, and seem also much better in some respects, although I am in constant pain and cannot sleep at nights for fear of another illness like the last. But do not feel anxious about it as I would not fail to let you know in time, and perhaps after all I am better here with Lyddy than quite alone at Hampstead…

  I should like to have my watercolours sent down if possible, as I am quite destitute of all means of keeping myself alive. I have kept myself alive hitherto by going out to sea in the smallest boat I can find. What do you say to my not being sick in the very roughest weather? I should like to see your picture when finished, but I suppose it will go away somewhere this week. Let me know its fate as soon as it is sealed…

  I can do without money till next Thursday, after which time £3 a week would be quite enough for all our wants – including rent of course.

  Your affectionate

  Lizzie

  She also came up with a solution he had not dared offer and by which he was vastly relieved. She suggested they move back to Chatham Place permanently. She wanted them to be together in the same house all day. There would be no more mornings of her husband leaving for the studio and his models and Lizzie having no idea of what he was up to or what time he would be home. Rossetti spoke to his Blackfriars landlord, who also owned the next-door building. He obligingly agreed to knock through the wall between the two houses, giving them rooms in number 13 as well as number 14 and transforming them into one large apartment.

  They moved in in October 1860 and spent several months turning the bachelor flat into a marital home, having curtains made, buying carpets and decorating, all of which Lizzie found exhausting. Rossetti, however, threw himself into the decorating with enthusiasm, writing to his mother to send them any reliable curtain maker she might know of (something Lizzie was supposed to have arranged, but had not). He had by now developed a passion for buying yards of sumptuous materials, which he wound around and pinned on to his models when he painted, transforming them on canvas into rich gowns or ethnic clothing. These fabrics appeared from his studio and were draped over unglamorous furniture, making the rooms rich with colour.84 In addition, Rossetti proudly covered the walls of the new drawing room with Lizzie’s paintings, made new wallpaper by hand and installed a birdcage to house Lizzie’s pet bullfinch.85 The couple shared a passion – in common with the rest of the group – for collecting blue-and-white china. Examples of this were displayed around their home – even the tired-looking ancient fireplace was given a new lease of life by the addition of blue-and-white tiles. This china passion was mentioned in the only note Georgie ever received from Lizzie. It was written when Lizzie was happy and vivacious and the younger woman kept it as a memento of her friend. “My dear little Georgie, I hope you intend coming over with Ned tomorrow evening like a sweetmeat, it seems so long since I saw you dear. Janey will be here I hope to meet you. With a willow-pattern dish full of love to you and Ned, Lizzie.”86

  Lizzie, however, was far too exhausted and listless to become involved in the decorating of Chatham Place with anything approximating enthusiasm. Pregnancy was absorbing all her energy and she had no more at her disposal to allow her to become excited about soft furni
shings. She was also perfectly content to let her husband take command and create a home for her, something she had been longing for him to do for ten years. In early November she was, once again, too ill to visit her mother-in-law. The Rossetti family’s feelings toward Lizzie had, however, mellowed since discovering she was having a baby. Christina in particular was overjoyed at the prospect of becoming an aunt. In February 1861 she wrote happily to her friend Mary Haydon, “Some day I suppose I shall rival you in Auntship … My sister-in-law proves an acquisition now that we know her better … you cannot think how quaintly and prettily they have furnished their … drawing room.” For some years now Frances had resigned herself to the fact that there might be no grandchildren: her daughters were getting beyond the age when they could be expected to marry and have children and neither of her sons had seemed to show much propensity toward matrimony. Yet her prayers were being answered. Even if Lizzie was not the ideal daughter-in-law, Frances could forgive a great deal in return for the gift of a grandchild.

  Dante’s and Lizzie’s plan was not to stay in Blackfriars indefinitely. After the baby was born, they planned to move somewhere “more suburban”, as Rossetti wrote to Bell Scott, hopefully into a shared home with the Burne-Joneses, who were also expecting their first baby. The idea of an artists’ commune had not been forgotten and, now Annie Miller was well and truly out of the frame, Lizzie embraced the idea wholeheartedly. As Rossetti also included in his letter to Bell Scott, Lizzie had been “rather better on the whole of late” and the future looked considerably more reliable than he had previously dared to hope.