Lizzie Siddal

by Lucinda Hawksley

  Lizzie’s sister and brother, Clara and James, had rushed from Southwark as soon as they had received Rossetti’s message, reaching Blackfriars at about 3 a.m. They held her hands and spoke to her, but she did not regain consciousness and they had no idea if she even knew they were there. Despite the best attempts of the medical men and the ministrations of her doting siblings, Lizzie was on the brink of death and nothing could pull her back. Ford returned to Blackfriars with Rossetti, leaving a miserable Emma at home with the children to wait for any news. They arrived at Chatham Place at five o’clock in the morning.

  At around twenty past seven on the morning of February 11, 1862, Lizzie Rossetti was pronounced dead by all four doctors present. She was just 32 years old and pregnant – yet another baby destined not to survive. Perhaps Lizzie had again felt her baby stop moving inside her and knew it was dead, or maybe she felt she could not risk the possibility of another stillbirth and its miserable repercussions.101 Perhaps her postnatal depression had tragically led her to believe she would be a bad mother and brought about a decision not to bring her child into the world, or maybe the thought of motherhood inside such a tormented marriage was overwhelming. We will never know.

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti was devastated. He had lost his wife and another baby and the memory of the suicide note was eating away at his conscience. Of all his friends, only a handful genuinely grieved at his wife’s death. Algernon Swinburne, Ford and Emma Madox Brown, William Allingham and Georgiana Burne-Jones were amongst the few genuinely saddened that such a young woman, and their friend, had died. Allingham noted in his diary, “Short, sad and strange her life; it must have seemed like a troubled dream.” Swinburne later wrote, “To one at least who knew her better than most of her husband’s friends, the memory of all her marvellous charms of mind and person – her matchless grace, loveliness, courage, endurance, wit, humour, heroism and sweetness – it is too dear and sacred to be profaned by any attempt at expression.”

  Rossetti’s family, however, and many of his friends were secretly relieved that such a tragic and troublesome woman had finally gone out of Rossetti’s life for good.102

  Lizzie’s poem “Early Death”, although undated, is believed to have been written just a few months before her suicide:

  Early Death

  Oh grieve not with thy bitter tears

  The life that passes fast;

  The gates of heaven will open wide

  And take me in at last.

  Then sit down meekly at my side

  And watch my young life flee;

  Then solemn peace of holy death

  Come quickly unto thee.

  But true love, seek me in the throng

  Of spirits floating past,

  And I will take thee by the hands

  And know thee mine at last.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Coroner’s Verdict

  He and She and Angels Three

  Ruthless hands have torn her

  From one that loved her well;

  Angels have upborn her,

  Christ her grief to tell.

  She shall stand to listen,

  She shall stand and sing,

  Till three winged angels

  Her lover’s soul shall bring.

  He and she and the angels three

  Before God’s face shall stand;

  There they shall pray among themselves

  And sing at His right hand.

  Elizabeth Siddal

  date unknown

  An inquest on the death of Lizzie Rossetti was held at Bridewell Hospital, London, on Thursday February 13, 1862. Many of Rossetti’s friends and relations were fearful that despite the non-appearance of a note, there would still be grounds to claim Lizzie took her own life. They were unaware of the note that had been burned in the Madox Browns’ hearth, but Lizzie’s mental state had left most people who had known her in little doubt as to what had really happened that evening. Rossetti, Swinburne, Clara Siddall, Mrs Birrill, Catherine Birrill and Ellen Macintire were called upon to give evidence. For some reason, Swinburne’s name does not appear in any of the newspaper reports of the inquest.

  Ellen Macintire told the coroner that she had been with Lizzie on the evening she died, at about half past eight, just after she and Rossetti had come home from the restaurant. They had talked in her bedroom and, she reported, Lizzie “seemed cheerful then”. She added that Lizzie, “told me once that she had taken quarts of laudanum in her time”.

  Ellen’s words backed up Rossetti’s own evidence: “She was in the habit of taking large doses of laudanum. I know that she has taken a hundred drops.” In case the coroner was still veering towards suicide, Rossetti added:

  She had not spoken of wishing to die. She had contemplated going out of town in a day or two and had bought a new mantle the day before. She was very nervous and had I believe a diseased heart.103 My impression is that she did not do it to injure herself but to quiet her nerves. She could not have lived without laudanum. She could not sleep at times nor take food.

  Clara Siddall was slightly more circumspect in her account, telling the coroner she had seen her sister the previous Saturday, when she “seemed in tolerably good spirits”. She added that Lizzie was in the habit of taking laudanum and that she did not suspect anyone else of causing Lizzie “any harm”. It is noteworthy that Clara did not state that she did not suspect Lizzie of causing harm to herself. Strangely, Clara got her sister’s age wrong, claiming Lizzie was only 29 at her death when she was, in fact, 32.

  Sarah Birrill, the loyal housekeeper, admitted to having known Lizzie for nine years – although she only admitted to Lizzie living in the house since her marriage. She told the court that she knew Lizzie kept a phial of laudanum under her pillow. Fearing for the safety of her dear Mr Rossetti, she felt moved to add, “I knew of no hurt to her nor don’t suspect any. Her husband and herself lived very comfortable together.” The latter statement had obviously not been true for much of their relationship, especially following the death of their child after which Lizzie had often been abusive and manipulative.

  Catherine Birrill backed up her mother’s assertions and told the court:

  I had not bought any laudanum for the deceased for 6 months… I bought a shilling’s worth… The Phial was about half full….The Phial found was the one she generally used…. I never saw her take any… I know of no hurt to her… I waited upon her and they lived very happily together.

  Swinburne’s evidence was brief, as he had not been there on the night she died. He arrived on the scene the following morning for his arranged portrait sitting, and found the household in devastation. He told the court that at dinner, “I saw nothing particular in the deceased except that she appeared a little weaker than usual.”

  The worst was past. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death and Rossetti was free to arrange his wife’s funeral.104 At first he refused to believe she was gone, reportedly standing by her open coffin and pleading with her to come back to him. He even asked a surgeon friend of Madox Brown to come round and attend to her as he could not accept her death and was certain something could be done to revive her. In the end she was buried near Gabriele Rossetti, the father-in-law she had never been deemed good enough to meet, in the family plot at the western side of Highgate Cemetery. Over the years, Frances and Christina would also be buried there. It is an odd location for Lizzie’s grave, among all those disapproving Rossettis and none of her own family. Lizzie was destined never to be reunited with her husband – on his death, in 1882, his will included strict instructions that he should “on no account” be buried at Highgate.105

  Lizzie‘s funeral took place on February 17. Despite the ravages of the doctors’ and coroner’s medical attentions, she was laid in an open coffin at their home. Rossetti, in the early stages of the insanity that was to dog his later years, was inconsolable. He believed that love had died with Lizzie and that nothing was any use without her. He forgot all the irritations
and misery of their later years together and mourned her as his flawless, innocent Beatrice. For several years he had been composing a volume of poetry, of which he had only one copy. Fired by the sudden, and erroneous, thought that the poems had all been inspired by Lizzie, he decided to bury them with her. Just before the coffin was taken to the hearse, he slipped into the room where she lay and, lifting her hair, tenderly laid the slim volume of poetry between it and her cheek. He also placed her Bible against her hair. As he watched his wife, his unborn child and his manuscript disappear into the north London soil, Rossetti believed he would never write poetry again.

  A month after the inquest, Swinburne wrote to his mother giving a more elucidating account of the death than he had admitted in court:

  I am sure you will understand how that which has happened since I last wrote to you has upset my plans and how my time has been taken up…. I would rather not write yet about what has happened – I suppose none of the papers gave a full report, so that you do not know that I was almost the last person who saw her (except her husband and a servant) and had to give evidence at the inquest. Happily there was no difficulty in proving that illness had quite deranged her mind, so that the worst of all was escaped … I am only glad to have been able to keep his company and be of a little use during these weeks.

  For years after her death, Rossetti was haunted by images of Lizzie. He told his doctor and his family that she was not at peace, that her ghost visited him every night. He was unable to remain at their shared home – staying with his family or friends until he could relocate – but, wherever he slept, Lizzie’s ghost apparently found him. He was determined to move house and within weeks had moved his possessions out of Chatham Place, with its unhealthy air and unhealthy memories, and was setting up home with Swinburne in Cheyne Walk, a fashionable and extremely desirable riverside area of Chelsea. It was a location which would have been much more suitable for one of Lizzie’s delicate health than the riverside at Blackfriars. Rossetti’s poem “The Portrait”, one of the collection that he buried in Lizzie’s coffin and which was presumably written during a melancholy moment in which he believed her to be dying, encapsulates the loneliness he felt after Lizzie’s death:

  The Portrait

  This is her picture as she was:

  It seems a thing to wonder on,

  As though mine image in the glass

  Should tarry when myself am gone.

  I gaze until she seems to stir, –

  Until mine eyes almost aver

  That now, even now, the sweet lips part

  To breathe the words of her sweet heart: –

  And yet the earth is over her…

  In painting her I shrined her face

  Mid mystic trees, where light falls in

  Hardly at all; a covert place

  Where you might think to find a din

  Of doubtful talk, and a live flame

  Wandering, and many a shape whose name

  Not itself knoweth, and old dew,

  And your own footsteps meeting you,

  And all things going as they came…

  Here with her face doth memory sit

  Meanwhile, and wait the day’s decline.

  Till other eyes shall look from it,

  Eyes of the spirit’s Palestine,

  Even than the old gaze tenderer:

  While hopes and aims long lost with her

  Stand round the rimage side by side,

  Like tombs of pilgrims that have died

  About the Holy Sepulchre.

  Now Lizzie really was dead, but she was not to be allowed to rest in peace. Instead, she was destined to become more famous in death than she had ever been in life. Her demise began a series of ugly rumours, suggestions that it had not been accidental. The whispered suggestions were not, however, of suicide, but of murder perpetrated by her husband. The stories were fuelled by those who were jealous of Rossetti, who disliked him or simply by those who enjoyed a scandalous gossip. The stories remained in existence for decades. One of the most famous of those to spread the vindictive rumours was the playwright and celebrated wit Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who was still a child at the time of Lizzie’s death. Never one to be perturbed by suspicions about the veracity of a good story, Wilde created his own version of a scene that had succeeded the dinner at La Sablonière with Swinburne. Years after the event, he was telling his own depiction of that evening, a story that began with Rossetti being incensed by Lizzie’s unseemly behaviour at dinner. This was elaborated grossly, building up to the crescendo of the story, which included a spectacular row and culminated in a murderous Rossetti thrusting a full bottle of laudanum at Lizzie and ordering her to “take the lot” before striding out of their home to meet another woman.

  Lizzie’s death did not only begin a campaign of rumours against herself and her husband, it also began the first rumours of a legend that would be created around her life – the legend of a woman who had been the first supermodel, in a world where the term had not yet been coined.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Without Her

  It was not only Dante Rossetti who became haunted by the vision of Lizzie. William Rossetti, Swinburne and even William Bell Scott began to believe in ghosts and the spirit world. Dante became obsessed with the idea of séances, regularly inviting a medium to his Cheyne Walk home, where he and his brother or friends attempted to reach the “other side”. William Rossetti, usually so rational and conventional, became entirely convinced, telling Bell Scott that Lizzie rapped out answers to the medium about things that only she could possibly have known. Several years after her death, by which time the once-abstemious Dante Rossetti had become addicted to chloral and was a regular drinker, he became convinced that her soul had migrated into a bird’s song, certain that via the voice of a specific chaffinch he was being communicated with by Lizzie from beyond that Highgate grave.

  Rossetti took solace in the only way he knew how. Burying himself once again in the works of Dante Alighieri, Rossetti spent much of the 1860s attempting to paint the perfect memorial to his own Beatrice. Drawing from memory and from all those drawers full of Guggums, Rossetti created an oil painting that has come to be known as one of his masterpieces, Beata Beatrix (1864–70).106 The picture is a beatification of his dead bride, the image in which he wished Lizzie had remained: not a drug addict, not a depressive, but a deeply religious, saintly young woman, her eyes closed, her face raised to heaven and her hands held in prayer. A woman with attributes more keenly akin to his sisters than to his lover, but it was an image he pretended to himself he had sought and found in Lizzie. Flying towards her, with a flower in its beak which it intends to place in her hands, is a dove, not only indicative of his loving nickname for her and the symbol he used to depict her in letters but also the bird of peace, a symbol of love and a symbol of the Holy Spirit, guiding the soul to heaven. It is a red dove, the colour of Lizzie’s hair as well as the colour traditionally associated with Beatrice, love, heaven and the saints. In the background are two dimly discerned figures, Dante Alighieri and an angelic figure, dressed in a red robe and indicative of Love. A sundial marks the passing of time and the passing of life and there is a bridge which could represent the Ponte Vecchio, symbol of Florence, though it could also suggest Blackfriars Bridge, the span, at the start of their romance, between Rossetti’s and Lizzie’s homes and the site of their marital home. There is, however, a more disturbing way in which to analyse Beata Beatrix. The flower the dove is carrying is a white poppy, the provider of opium. Usually a white poppy is an innocent depiction of sleep or death, but in a work of art in homage to Lizzie Rossetti it is a sad indicator of the manner in which she died. Beatrice’s religious ecstasy can also, more prosaically, be read as Lizzie’s own expression after drinking laudanum; the ecstasy of an addict who has taken her fix. Rossetti described the work as “not a representative image of death … [but] … an ideal of the subject”. The overdose of his wife and its vividly undignified results could
not allow him to look on death as a peaceful process.107

  Seven years after Lizzie’s death, Rossetti published a collection of sonnets entitled The House of Life; contained within it was the poem, “Without Her”. It is a reflection on life once love has departed:

  Without Her

  What of her glass without her? The blank grey

  There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face.

  Her dress without her? The tossed empty space

  Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.

  Her paths without her? Day’s appointed sway

  Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place

  Without her? Tears, ah me! For love’s good grace,

  And cold forgetfulness of night or day.

  What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,

  Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?

  A wayfarer by barren ways and chill,

  Steep ways and weary, without her thou art,

  Where the long cloud, the long wood’s counterpart,

  Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill.

  Peaceful though Beata Beatrix may appear, Rossetti was not at peace, and neither would he allow Lizzie to remain so. In 1869, by which time he had started his tortuous affair with Janey Morris, as well as writing equally tortured poetry, Rossetti was keenly regretting the grand gesture of burying his poems with his dead love. Or, at least, of not having made a copy of them before doing so.

  It was his agent, the utterly unscrupulous Charles Augustus Howell, who suggested to Rossetti the idea of retrieving the poems. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Dante Rossetti’s niece,108 believed that Howell did so partly out of fear for Rossetti’s mental health; she claims Howell was convinced that the loss of his poems was worsening Rossetti’s mental illness and depression. Howell was, however, a shrewd businessman. By 1869, the name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was famous; by association with him and the poems, which were bound to create good publicity, Howell would also gain glory. Howell’s magnetism, which had worked so well in convincing less mentally tortured souls to place their trust in him, persuaded Rossetti to take up his suggestion. On August 16, 1869, Rossetti wrote to Howell: “I feel disposed, if practicable, by your friendly aid, to go in for the recovery of my poems if possible, as you proposed some time ago. Only I should beg absolute secrecy of everyone, as the matter ought really not to be talked about…”