After the first three months of pregnancy, Lizzie began to feel much less nauseous. Unfortunately, for those first months her discomfort had been relieved by the accepted remedy for morning sickness: laudanum. During her pregnancy, both Rossettis had to accept the possibility that the baby might not survive. Lizzie’s addiction and general poor health stacked the odds against them; added to which was the fact that many babies born in England in the 1860s did not live, as had been brought home to them by the death of Arthur Madox Brown. Pregnancy was also a highly dangerous time for the mother-to-be, the possibility of death following miscarriage or during the birth was an ever-present spectre and women who experienced healthy pregnancies and safe births often died needlessly through haemorrhaging after childbirth or developing an infection due to the deplorable lack of hygiene practised by so many medical workers. With every month that passed, however, Lizzie and Rossetti could relax a little more and believe that – just maybe – this pregnancy would be uncomplicated.
Lizzie wrote the melodramatic poem “At Last” during her pregnancy. It is the story of a young woman who dies in childbirth, bequeathing the care of her baby son to her mother. The poem voices the trepidation all prospective mothers of the period must have felt. It is a fitting tribute to Lizzie’s sense of the melodramatic and her desire to write great ballads in the style of Lord Tennyson or Sir Walter Scott.
At Last
O mother, open the window wide
And let the daylight in;
The hills grow darker to my sight
And thoughts begin to swim.
And mother dear, take my young son,
(Since I was born of thee)
And care for all his little ways
And nurse him on thy knee.
And mother, wash my pale pale hands
And then bind up my feet;
My body may no longer rest
Out of its winding sheet.
And mother dear, take a sapling twig
And green grass newly mown,
And lay them on my empty bed
That my sorrow be not known.
And mother, find three berries red
And pluck them from the stalk,
And burn them at the first cockcrow
That my spirit may not walk.
And mother dear, break a willow wand,
And if the sap be even,
Then save it for sweet Robert’s sake
And he’ll know my soul’s in heaven.
And mother, when the big tears fall,
(And fall, God knows, they may)
Tell him I died of my great love
And my dying heart was gay.
And mother dear, when the sun has set
And the pale kirk grass waves,
Then carry me through the dim twilight
And hide me among the graves.
With her medical history it is not surprising that Lizzie was assailed with trepidation about the birth and whether she would survive it. At the age of 31 she was old to be having her first baby, especially as she was living in an era when every birth – no matter how ideal the circumstances – held the possibility of causing the mother’s death.
But Lizzie’s pregnancy was not just a period of worry and sickness, it was also a time when she felt emotionally energized and alive. She was artistically creative, poetically inspired and happy to be sociable – with their friends, if not with her in-laws. The poet Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) moved to London in October 1860 and became an inseparable friend to both the Rossettis. He was included in most of their social engagements and was constantly at their home. Swinburne did not try to hide the fact that he adored Lizzie, he looked upon her as a favoured sister, whom he would do anything to protect. When Rossetti spent long hours working in his studio, Swinburne would come and keep Lizzie company, reading aloud to her on days she felt too weak to venture outdoors. She took great pleasure in his visits and felt comfortable enough in his company to lie back on her invalid’s couch and listen to him reading or participate in brilliant conversation. Even while Rossetti was painting a delectable model behind closed doors, Swinburne could make Lizzie cry with laughter.
Although Swinburne was notorious for his attempts to seduce almost every woman he met, he was always respectful and brotherly to Lizzie. He had had an awkward childhood and recognized in her someone who had also dealt with life’s difficulties. He had often been derided for his nervous twitch, slight stature and flame-coloured hair, but Lizzie found him wonderfully appealing. Their affinity for one another was increased by the coincidence of their hair being almost exactly the same shade of red. Swinburne had been teased for his colouring all his life, but Lizzie had made red hair acceptable. She had even succeeded – in certain quarters of society – in making it fashionable.87
Rossetti, normally jealous of anyone close to Lizzie, was uncharacteristically happy about her friendship with Swinburne. The poet was no threat and he kept Lizzie amused and happy so Rossetti could get on with his work without feeling guilty. Lizzie had been growing increasingly difficult about his models, paranoid from early experiences, but when Swinburne was around, Rossetti knew he needed to worry less about suffering a sudden jealous outburst while he was working. At this time Rossetti was not only painting increasingly sensual pictures, his career as a writer and translator was also in the ascendant. In 1860 Rossetti had realized a dream – he had been commissioned to produce a volume of translations from the early Italian poets, including Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova.This was to be published in December 1861 and the volume dedicated to Lizzie. Rossetti’s increased and more cerebral workload meant he needed to work longer hours and did not have the time to be with Lizzie as often as she desired; the comical redheaded poet was therefore a welcome addition to Chatham Place. Swinburne’s biographer, Edmund Gosse, described them in the following way: “Rossetti was much entertained by their innocent intimacy, occasionally having to call them both to order, as he might a pair of charming angora cats romping too boisterously together.”
That autumn of 1860 was a time of friendship and sociability. Chatham Place once again became the scene of parties and small gatherings of friends. They would sit around in the studio for hours by candlelight, watching the river and making sketches of one another or planning future projects. Lizzie improved her intimacy with Georgie Burne-Jones, in whom she confided and to whom she talked about art, but Lizzie was never fully happy just to be on her own with Georgie, or anyone else, panicking when Rossetti was out of her sight. Georgie later recalled how nervous Lizzie would be whenever Rossetti was out of the room, her whole body on edge as she waited anxiously for him to come back in, whereupon she would uncoil and sit reassured with him beside her, finally able to take an interest in the conversation.
Georgie also remembered an evening at the theatre, when a group of them went to see the play Colleen Bawn. There was such a large number in their party that they filled an entire row, with Swinburne sitting at one end and Lizzie at the other. According to Georgie’s memoirs, the two shocks of red hair were a terrifying sight to a superstitious boy who was selling programmes: “[He] looked at Swinburne and took fright, and then, when he came round to where she was, started again with terror, muttering to himself, ‘There’s another of ’em!’” The play was one that must have had a certain resonance for Lizzie, being about a marriage of two social unequals. Colleen Bawn, written in 1860, was a popular melodrama set in Killarney. In it a matchmaking mother attempts to arrange a marriage between her son, Hardress, who is in danger of losing his estates through lack of finances, and his wealthy cousin, Anne, whose money could save the family’s home and reputation. Unknown to his mother, Hardress is already married, having wed in secret a poor but beautiful peasant girl, Eily O’Connor, known as the Colleen Bawn. Having grown bored with his young wife and eager to taste wealth again, Eily’s husband arranges to have her murdered. Despite his behaviour, she still loves him and – having been rescued from her fate – makes a dramatic appe
arance as he is about to marry Anne. When the shock is past, Eily is accepted into Hardress’s family and no longer shunned for her poverty. Anne, who has also been reconciled to her ex-lover – whom she was attempting to spite by marrying Hardress – agrees to pay off the mortgage, allowing Hardress and Eily to live together in comfort. Sitting in the stalls, Lizzie must have been embarrassingly aware of how similar her own situation was to Eily’s, with a mother-in-law who had viewed her, before her pregnancy, as the canker in her son’s life because of her social status.
In October 1860, while Rossetti was busy working, Lizzie went to stay with William and Janey Morris. They had recently moved into the brand-new Red House, which had been built beside the hamlet of Upton, near Bexleyheath in Kent. It was created for Morris by his designer friend and colleague Philip Webb (1831–1915).88 The house is L-shaped, with a tower in the middle, and was inspired by Gothic and medieval architecture. Its name derived from the red brick used for its construction as well as the red roof tiles.89 After visiting Upton, Rossetti wrote to Charles Norton saying, “I wish you could see the house which Morris, who has money, has built for himself … It is a most noble work in every way, and more a poem than a house … but an admirable place to live in too … It is a real wonder of the age that baffles all description.”
The Pre-Raphaelites helped Morris design some of the furniture and to decorate the interiors. During her stay in the autumn, Lizzie helped with the painting of murals. In company with many visitors to the house, she also modelled for the wall paintings.90 Rossetti went to join them when he was able to take time away from his studio and he and Lizzie appeared happy and optimistic together. He painted three panels about love – a Garden of Eden, an allegory about Love, and Dante’s last meeting with Beatrice. For a time Renaissance Florence was forgotten. Dante and Beatrice were now married and expecting a baby. For a short time at least, in the autumn of 1860, life and love seemed to be allowing them to be happy. Lizzie’s health was improved also by the visit – Upton was then in the middle of countryside and, as Georgie described, visitors to Red House “were met with this fresh air full of sweet smells” and an exquisitely laid out garden with “roses growing thickly”.
Red House in the early 1860s was a place of house parties and friendship. Almost every weekend visitors would arrive to stay and help decorate the house, play bowls or croquet on the lawn and go for rides in the eccentric carriage Philip Webb had designed for William and Janey to gad about in. Their daughter May later described this vehicle as being like “an old-fashioned market cart” which was hung with brightly patterned fabric in various patterns. It caused the local villagers much hilarity as the eccentric young arty couple from the new red-brick house drove their equally eccentric friends around the surrounding countryside, although the pious locals were less than impressed by some of the “exotic” clothing worn by guests and shocked by the Morrises holding tea parties on Sunday afternoons. To reach Red House from London, visitors took the train to Abbey Wood where they were fetched by the carriage. Georgie later recalled wistfully, “Oh the joy of those Saturdays to Mondays at Red House … the getting out at Abbey Wood station … and then the scrambling swinging drive of three miles or so to the house, and the beautiful roomy place where we seemed to be coming home.”91 The house had four bedrooms and no bathrooms (which was usual for a house of that period).The water source was a well in the garden, from which water was hand-pumped into the house, and vegetables were grown in the kitchen garden. The Morrises and their guests lived mainly on the first floor, while the ground floor was the domain of the servants. Georgie wrote about a particularly splendid medieval banquet, for which Morris and Rossetti had improvised a minstrels’ gallery and after which the extra guests were accommodated on “beds strewn about the drawing room” while Swinburne slumbered on the sofa.
Around Christmas-time the Rossettis went once again to stay at the Morrises’ new home, in company with the Burne-Joneses. It was a happy party with all three couples expecting their first babies. In Georgie’s words there was “certainty of contentment in each other’s society. We laughed because we were happy.” For Morris it was a dream come true – the incarnation of his desire to found an artistic working community. He was already making designs for an extra wing to the house in which he hoped Ned and Georgie would live, the Morris and Burne-Jones children growing up as one happy family. That Christmas their lives seemed blessed and content. They sang together, played cards, painted and drew, dined on delicious food and drank Morris’s carefully chosen wines. The atmosphere could not have been perfected – until Rossetti, eaten up by jealousy about Janey and over William’s idyllic new home for his prospective family, started to mock his host’s ability to paint. The two men had a furious row and a cloud formed over the celebrations, Morris’s irascible temper was legendary and the party was ruined for everybody. The Rossettis and Burne-Joneses soon returned to London, with the pregnant Lizzie excruciatingly aware of her husband’s feelings for the wife of his friend.
Though relations with the Morrises were temporarily soured, those with Rossetti’s family continued to improve. Lizzie was aware she had been accepted not for herself but as the mother of the next Rossetti generation, but for the moment she was reasonably happy and the future was exciting.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“The hour which might have been…”
In January 1861, Lizzie was ill again. She was so ill that, even though Frances Rossetti was also unwell, Dante could not leave his wife to visit his ailing mother. Meanwhile, he was making sure everything was ready for the birth of their child. He found a suitable doctor, an obstetrician and a live-in nurse. The latter was described by Georgie as, “a delightful old country woman, whose words and ways we quoted for years afterwards; her native wit and simple wisdom endeared her to both Gabriel and Lizzie, and were the best possible medicine for their overstrained feelings”.
As was quite usual, the Rossettis’ baby would be born at home – most Victorian babies were born at home as “lying-in” hospitals were best avoided at all costs. In these hospitals, there was an incredibly high risk of developing puerperal fever (also known as childbed fever or lying-in fever), which usually resulted in death. No one had yet worked out the causes of this mysterious killer and Rossetti was not willing to risk the lives of his wife and child.92
Rossetti voiced his fears in a letter to William Allingham, in January 1861:
Lizzie is pretty well for her, and we are in expectation (but this is quite in confidence as such things are better waited for quietly) of a little accident which has just befallen Topsy and Mrs. T who have become parients [sic]. Ours, however, will not be (if at all) for two or three months yet.93
Even at this early stage, Rossetti’s parenthetical “if at all” revealed his fears that Lizzie would never be able to carry a foetus to full term.
In the middle of April, Lizzie sensed that something had gone badly wrong. Thus far the pregnancy had progressed as expected, the feared miscarriage had not happened and her confinement was due in just a couple of weeks, but suddenly the baby seemed to have stopped moving inside her. Although a doctor and an obstetrician were called in by Rossetti, there was nothing they could do. There were no medical scans or emergency procedures available. At that date Caesareans, despite having been performed for millennia, were still little understood by British medics and usually proved fatal to the mother. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Caesareans brought about death in 75 per cent of cases. A doctor would choose to perform the procedure only if he was convinced the mother was going to die anyway and he was battling to save the baby. There was no way to find out what was wrong. When her baby stopped moving, Lizzie Rossetti had no choice but to pray and to wait.
Able to observe at first hand the abuse Lizzie dealt her body, Rossetti must have been aware from an early stage that his baby was fighting against difficult odds to survive. It was this knowledge that allowed him to write to his mother quite stoically on May 2, 18
61, “Lizzie has just been delivered of a dead child. She is doing pretty well, I trust. Do not encourage any one to come just now – I mean, of course, except yourselves.” Rossetti’s main fear now was that Lizzie herself would not recover from the birth and her bereavement. His letters to friends over the ensuing hours and days are all tinged with a sense of relief – relief that he did not lose his wife as well as his daughter.
He wrote to Madox Brown, “Lizzie has just had a dead baby. I know how glad Emma and you will be to hear that she seems as yet to be doing decidedly well … I dare say she would be very glad if Emma could look in for a little tomorrow.”
And to a family friend, Mrs Dalrymple:94 “My dear wife has just given birth to a still-born child. However she herself is so far the most important, and seems as yet to have got through so much better than we ventured to hope, that I can feel nothing but thankfulness. God send she may continue to do well!”
Although Rossetti’s letters written at the time of the birth may appear to modern readers to be quite heartless, this was an act as he struggled to be strong for his grieving wife. Rossetti loved children and longed for his daughter to be alive. The loss of their baby may not have seemed to affect him at this stage, but it was something he never stopped thinking about.95 Years after Lizzie’s death, he wrote a poem entitled “Stillborn Love”, about a dead baby waiting in the afterlife for the arrival of its parents:
Stillborn Love
The hour which might have been yet might not be,
Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore
Lizzie Siddal Page 17