The Pre-Raphaelites

The year 2018 brought several excellent commentaries on Pre-Raphaelitism in general, as well as new approaches to William Morris. This year’s review will consider a monograph and several essays that feature literary Pre-Raphaelitism, as well as three books and additional articles on William Morris.

Pre-Raphaelitism

First, John Holmes’s beautifully presented and illustrated The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2018) brings a new sophistication to the discussion of Pre-Raphaelite “truth to nature” in painting and art. His introduction notes that for John Ruskin, as well as for several of his contemporaries, Pre-Raphaelite painting was closely allied with the development of nineteenth-century science; in Ruskin’s words, “the grotesque and wild forms of imagination” characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite art were “a part of [recent] science itself” (p. 1). Holmes explains that two divergent Victorian interpretations of scientific discovery accorded with Pre-Raphaelite practice. During the 1840s and 1850s, a respect both for detailed observation as the search for “natural laws” and for nature as an orderly creation expressive of “natural theology” underlay Pre-Raphaelite practice in both art and poetry, as seen in the paintings of Holman Hunt and John Tupper’s poems in the Germ. By the 1860s and 1870s, however, professional scientists had moved toward a paradigm of scientific naturalism, characterized by skepticism and objectivity, features that their supporters found in the poetry of D. G. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne (p. 11).

Two chapters deal more directly with Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and both demonstrate the ability of Holmes’s approach to unlock meaning from what had seemed relatively marginal texts. Chapter 3, “The Knowing Hand of the Anatomist: Embodied Psychology in Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Poetry,” outlines what mid-Victorians saw as the relationship between anatomy and the emergent field of psychology. Though not phrenologists per se, the Pre-Raphaelites believed that emotions would over time imprint themselves on the face and body; observation of gestures and postures was thus seen as granting access to an inner mind. In Rossetti’s early, uncompleted poem “The Bride’s Prelude,” for example, the shock and pain experienced by its central characters, Aloÿse and Amelotte, is expressed in outward signs of repressed emotion; in five stanzas cited by Holmes, a character is portrayed as sighing, gasping, bowing her head, covering her eyes with her hands, or experiencing disrupted speech, throbbing temples, or loss of consciousness. For the Pre-Raphaelites, “All emotion, all psychology, is experienced as bodily sensation . . . and expressed in the minute details of our changing gestures and postures” (p. 77).

Holmes offers several examples of the sophisticated presentation of emotion in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. He notes Rossetti’s special interest in the annunciation, as conveyed both in a sonnet for the Germ and his painting Ecce Ancilla Domina; the “absolute harsh nether darkness” experienced by the poem’s Mary similarly appears in the painting’s representation of a tearful maiden who shrinks in fear from the angel and his message (p. 85). Holmes also suggests the value of psychological approaches in interpreting Pre-Raphaelite narrative poems; in “A Last Confession,” for example, the speaker’s increasing obsession with the body of his child ward, whom he murders to avoid loss of control, exposes “the possibility for the willful misinterpretation of one’s own bodily impulses and desires inscribed on other people’s bodies” (p. 92). William Michael Rossetti’s “Mrs. Holmes Grey,” another less-frequently-discussed poem, offers three forms of external testimony to the circumstances of a wife’s sudden death—medical, legal, and journalistic—but Holmes concludes that for its author, “it is poetry, not such morally and intellectually bankrupt ‘quackery,’ that can lead us to a proper understanding of psychology” (p. 95).

In chapter 7, “The Facts of the Case: Scientific Naturalism and Pre-Raphaelite Poetry,” Holmes argues that literary critics who espoused the new scientific naturalism of the 1860s and 1870s were attracted to the aesthetic poetry written by Rossetti, Morris, Meredith, W. B. Scott, and Swinburne during this period. The contributions of these authors were solicited by John Morley, editor of the liberal...