Work, Lack, and Longing: Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" and the Working Men's College

This essay argues that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sense of the relationship between lack and artistic labor was strengthened during the time he spent teaching alongside John Ruskin at the Working Men's College. The influence of the school's mission and the pedagogy Ruskin and Rossetti developed in their art courses registers in the revisions that "The Blessed Damozel" underwent soon after Rossetti began teaching at the college, suggesting that his consideration of the relationship between artistic production and perpetually unfulfilled desire played an integral role in the development of his aesthetic practices in the late 1850s and early 1860s.