Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite Principles: Science, Nature, and Knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s “Fancies at Leisure” and “Mrs. Holmes Grey”

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in the summer of 1848. As William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and James Collinson began to make their names exhibiting paintings, and Thomas Woolner embarked on a career as a sculptor, it fell to the two remaining P.R.B.s, Frederic George Stephens and William Michael Rossetti, to articulate in print the principles on which their new artistic movement was founded. Two early essays stand out as manifestos for the Pre-Raphaelite movement: Stephens’s “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” published in the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite magazine the Germ in February 1850, and Rossetti’s “Pre-Raphaelitism,” published in the Spectator in October 1851. Both ground Pre-Raphaelite practice in the arts in the scientific pursuit of knowledge. In a well-known passage, Stephens writes that “Truth in every particular ought to be the aim of the artist,” as it is of the scientist:

The sciences have become almost exact within the present century. Geology and chemistry are almost re-instituted. The first has been nearly created; the second expanded so widely that it now searches and measures the creation. And how has this been done but by bringing greater knowledge to bear upon a wider range of experiment; by being precise in the search after truth? If this adherence to fact, to experiment and not theory,—to begin at the beginning and not fly to the end,—has added so much to the knowledge of man in science; why may it not greatly assist the moral purposes of the Arts?

(61)¹

The sciences, for Stephens, typify the precision that the Pre-Raphaelites demand of the artist. The goal of both is to discover “truth,” and both must proceed through practical “experiment,” not mere abstract theory. In science, this has resulted in remarkable progress over the fifty years since 1800. Like the sciences, the arts too can be progressive. In his Spectator essay, Rossetti defines the aim of the Pre-Raphaelite artists as “investigation for themselves on all points which have hitherto been settled by example or unproved precept, and unflinching avowal of the result of such investigation.”² For both these Pre-Raphaelite theorists, the artist ought to be bound by the same code of scrupulous honesty and dedication as the scientist. He should not defer to authority, nor should he be wedded to any preconceived view of what he will find out through his investigations. Through adopting these scientific methods, he can ensure that his art too will be, in Stephens’s words, “an advance . . . nearer to truth” (59). Crucially, however, this “truth” is not merely a matter of “knowledge” of the material world, as in science itself, but also of “moral purposes.” At the end of a second essay in the Germ, “Modern Giants,” Stephens demands “Letting observation sleep, what can you know of nature?” (173). Grounding itself in the meticulous observation of nature—informed and verified by modern science, achieved through experimental approaches to art, and constituting an investigation in its own right—Pre-Raphaelitism lays claim to moral authority. Through rigorous study, Stephens implies, the Pre-Raphaelite artist gains a knowledge not only of physical but also of human “nature.”

In this article, I will examine how this ideal of an art modeled on science was realized in the poetry written by the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their early associates. Hunt was surely right to point out in his memoir that the very name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood marked out painting as its primary medium.³ Yet all seven P.R.B.s wrote poems, as did their closest artistic collaborators, the painters Walter Deverell and Ford Madox Brown and the sculptor John Lucas Tupper. Many of these poems were published in the Germ, while others are recorded as works in progress in the P.R.B. Journal, the official logbook of the Brotherhood’s artistic activities kept by William Rossetti. My aim is to show how the...