The Pre-Raphaelites

The past year has brought us The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Chelsea Years, 1863-1872, III. 1871-72, the fifth volume of a series originally to be prepared by the late William Fredeman, and completed after his death in 1999 by a consortium of editors listed as Roger C. Lewis, Jane Cowan, Roger W. Peattie, Allan Life, and Page Life. Fredeman's hand may be seen in the work's voluminous appendices, bibliography, and "Biographical and Analytical Index" (pp. 379-676), and one of the nine appendices reproduces his Prelude to the Last Decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Summer of 1872 (1971), a reconstruction of the period of Rossetti's mental breakdown that Fredeman based on his research in the Penkill and Angeli papers.

The work's "Biographical and Analytical Index," in particular, recapitulates prior entries in the indexes to the first five volumes (1835-72), and Fredeman (presumably) explained his rationale for such care as follows: "Among the many deficiencies of the Doughty-Wahl edition of Rossetti's letters, perhaps the most serious—certainly the most inconvenient—was the absence of an index. While some users may feel that this editor has erred in the opposite direction, the ultimate test will be in the reliability and usefulness of the index to scholars, students, and readers who consult it" (p. 487).

One reason why many may in fact wish to consult this index is that it offers a summary of the contents of all letters published in the edition to date, under a number of rubrics (names, artworks, and publications among them). Rossetti's relations with William Morris, for example, take up four columns, with Ford Madox Brown more than eight, and with Charles Augustus Howell about seven. Other appendices offer editorial views (presumably Fredeman's) of the antecedents of Elizabeth Siddal's suicide, as well as Rossetti's experiments with spiritualism and his conjectures about immortality (according to William Michael Rossetti, "he credited neither immediate bliss after death nor irrevocable 'damnation,' but rather a period of purgation and atonement, with gradual ascent, comparable more or less to the purgatory of Roman Catholics" [p. 403]).

As in earlier volumes, the letters in this one reveal a self-absorbed but often generous man at his best and worst: capable of genuine eloquence in notes to families of deceased artists and affection for close friends such as Ford Madox Brown and Thomas Hake; and of ill-temper in negotiations with much-tried patrons and overbearing demands on his long-suffering employees and friends.

Readers aware of the pain Rossetti's affair with Jane Morris caused her husband will also find evasive several of his letters from Kelmscott Manor in the summer and early fall of 1871, in which he blandly alluded to family readings of Shakespeare and made polite references to Morris' journey to Iceland, but pointedly ignored the reasons for his stoic friend's absence. Rossetti expressed urbane boredom with the nearby village ("only 117 inhabitants in Kelmscott, a hoary sleepy old lump of beehives as ever you saw" [September 4; p. 135]), but graciously acknowledged that "I have been here some days now & it is simply the loveliest place in the world—I mean the house and garden & immediate belongings" (July 16; p. 71), and for a time seriously considered the possibility of permanent settlement there. In an 1872 letter to Aglaia Coronio, Morris glossed such plans and other aspects of the situation as follows: "Rossetti has set himself down at Kelmscott as if he never meant to go away; and not only does that keep me away from that harbour of refuge, (because it is really a farce our meeting when we can help it) but also he has all sorts of ways so unsympathetic with the sweet simple old place, that I feel his presence there as a kind of a slur on it" (November 25, 1872; Letters, ed. Kelvin, 1:12).

Rossetti's 1871 letters also commented at length on his own and others' poetry, set forth blunt criticisms and suggestions for the work of friends and acquaintances such as Hake, John Payne, and...