Howell needed no further prompting and instantly communicated Rossetti’s wishes to the Home Secretary, Mr Bruce. Howell requested from Bruce an exhumation order to retrieve the poems, impressing on him the need for secrecy. Howell and Rossetti were wise to insist on secrecy – after all, Lizzie had been buried in a communal family grave. Gabriele Rossetti was buried in the same plot and the owner of the grave was Mrs Frances Rossetti. The rigidly Christian Mrs Rossetti senior would never have agreed to desecrate any grave, let alone her husband’s, neither would Maria or Christina have approved of their father’s grave being opened and plundered. Yet, somewhat astonishingly, the order for the exhumation was granted without the Home Secretary questioning Howell’s suggestion that the grave be opened without permission from the plot’s owner. Mr Bruce apparently stood in awe of Rossetti and illegally agreed to waive the need for Frances Rossetti to add her signature to the written permission for the grave to be reopened. Dante Rossetti, eager to dissociate himself from the action he was about to sanction, signed over Power of Attorney to Howell, authorising the latter to act for him “in all matters as he thinks best”.
Rossetti’s feelings of guilt did not allow him to attend the exhumation. He remained at Howell’s home in Fulham, nervously awaiting news and being attended to by Howell’s wife, Kitty. There were very few people present at the cemetery. In addition to the diggers, there were only Howell and the official lawyer, who had the ironic name, for an observer of such a deed, of Mr Virtue Tebbs. So as not to upset visitors to the cemetery or mourners, the deed had to be carried out at night. There was no light in that part of the graveyard so a large fire was built to help the diggers see what they were doing, as well as to keep the observers warm. Howell declared that, when the coffin was opened, Lizzie remained fully preserved. She was not a skeleton, he claimed, she was as beautiful as she had ever been in life and her hair, which had kept growing after death, now filled the coffin and was as brilliantly copper-coloured as it had been in life, glinting mesmerizingly in the firelight.
The character of Howell, as well as the obvious impossibility of the facts, prevent his words from being taken seriously, but they have been repeated time and again in stories about Lizzie, obviously sometimes believed, as though poor dead Lizzie had become some kind of saintly miracle. Howell’s words, however, were not only prompted by his fantastically over-active imagination but also by a desire to comfort a guilt-consumed Rossetti.
Indebted to Howell’s gloriously conceived fiction is the myth of the prevailing beauty of the original supermodel, even in death. It is a story that continued to be played out long after Lizzie’s demise. Even today the mythical beauty of her untainted corpse can still be found repeated on numerous adulatory websites. Alive, she had often not been appreciated, but in death Lizzie apparently remained a thing of extraordinary beauty.
Gone
To touch the glove upon her tender hand,
To watch the jewel sparkle in her ring,
Lifted my heart into a sudden song
As when the wild birds sing.
To touch her shadow on the sunny grass,
To break her pathway through the darkened wood,
Filled all my life with trembling and tears
And silence where I stood.
I watch the shadows gather round my heart,
I live to know that she is gone –
Gone gone for ever, like the tender dove
That left the Ark alone.
Elizabeth Siddal date
unkown
Notes
CHAPTER ONE
The Red-Haired Model
Information about the area around Cranbourne Street courtesy of the local studies library in St James’s. Information about Mrs Tozer and her shop obtained from Robson’s and Pigot’s commercial directories of London.
The exact date on which Allingham met Lizzie and the date she began modelling for Deverell are unknown. It is generally accepted that it was the winter of 1849–50; as Deverell’s painting was displayed in the spring of 1850, she must have begun modelling for him around the end of 1849 or very early in 1850.
CHAPTER TWO
A Pre-Raphaelite Muse
Information about the Siddall family and their family business obtained from the Family Records Office in Islington, the censuses for 1841, 1851 and 1861, the local studies library in Holborn and Robson’s and Pigot’s commercial directories of London. Information about Hope and the Crossdaggers courtesy of the Hope Historical Society and the Old Hall pub in Hope.
The rates of pay for an artist’s model are quoted by Diana Holman Hunt.
CHAPTER THREE
Dante and Beatrice
That Charles Siddall was influenced by Rossetti’s changing of their surname to “Siddal” is shown in the census: in the 1841 census it was spelt as Siddall, but in the 1851 census the family is listed as Siddal. In the census of 1861, by which time Charles was dead and Elizabeth listed as the head of the household, the spelling is returned again to Siddall. For the rapidity with which Charles Siddall changed it back again, see Watkin’s commercial directory of London businesses for 1852, in which it is once again Siddall.
Valentine Prinsep quoted by Georgiana Burne-Jones.
For Christina’s comment that her brother was too ensnared by Lizzie to go abroad and about Lizzie’s dislike of Holman Hunt, see Diana Holman Hunt.
CHAPTER FIVE
Falling In Love with Ophelia
The description of Emma Hill is taken from Helen Rossetti Angeli’s biography of Dante Rossetti.
CHAPTER SIX
“Why does he not marry her?”
Victorian contraception information obtained from the Wellcome Institute library.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lizzie’s Mysterious Illness
Lizzie has previously been assumed to have taken possession of the rooms in Weymouth Street in 1856, but Fredeman claims a letter sent by Rossetti asking William Allingham to join him and Lizzie at Weymouth Street and “take a chop” with them before going on to a theatre was sent in April 1854. As Lizzie was not yet receiving Ruskin’s pension, Rossetti must have been paying her rent at this date.
CHAPTER TEN
Seeking a Cure
The date for Rossetti arriving in Paris is from Fredeman’s edition of DGR’s letters and corrects an earlier assertion made by Oswald Doughty.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In Sickness and In Health
Dr Jan Marsh has looked into the genealogy of the Ibbitts and the Siddalls and found no evidence that they were actually related. However, correspondence and newspaper cuttings at the Sheffield Local Studies Library, dating from the early twentieth century, demonstrates that the Ibbitts and Siddalls believed themselves to be related. Even if there was no actual connection, both Lizzie Siddal and William Ibbitt believed themselves to be cousins by marriage, both descended from the Greaves family and, prior to that, from the Eyres.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“So we two wore our strange estate: Familiar, unaffected, free”
The fact of Lydia Siddall being pregnant when she married is reported by Jan Marsh in her biography of Rossetti.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Lord May I Come?”
For notes on their final evening and the death, see DGR’s letters; Swinburne’s letters and biographies by Humphrey Hare and Edmund Gosse; coroner’s notes (quoted in Violet Hunt); and Jan Marsh’s books.
The suicide note was originally mentioned in William Bell Scott’s memoirs, but was edited out by William Rossetti before publication. Violet Hunt asserted in her 1932 book that Lizzie had committed suicide and left a note – a claim that was roundly refuted by Dante Rossetti’s niece and Ford Madox Brown’s granddaughter, Helen Angeli Rossetti. It was therefore surprising that, in her own biography of Rossetti, published in 1949, Helen Angeli Rossetti admitted the existence of a suicide note, revealed its contents and related that her grandfather and uncle had made the decision to burn it.
> Lucy Madox Brown’s feelings about the death of Lizzie recorded by Jan Marsh.
Valentine Prinsep’s article was printed in the Magazine of Art and quoted by Brian and Judy Dobbs.
Helen Rossetti Angeli remembered her father receiving occasional visits from a man she was told was Lizzie’s brother. They always went into her father’s study and she assumed he was receiving some kind of payment.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Coroner’s Verdict
Rossetti’s housekeeper’s name is spelled variously as Birrill, Birrell and Burrill.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Without Her
For a description of the exhumation and Lizzie’s body being perfect in death, see Hall Caine’s recollections.
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