Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL (1828–1882), painter and poet, eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and of Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori (1800–1886), was born on 12 May 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. His full christian name was Gabriel Charles Dante, but the form which he gave it has become inveterate. Charles Lyell [q. v.], the father of the geologist, was his godfather. His father, born at Vasto in the kingdom of Naples on 28 Feb. 1783, had been successively librettist to the opera house and curator of antiquities in the Naples museum, but had been compelled to fly the country for his share in the insurrectionary movements of 1820 and 1821. After a short residence in Malta he came over to England in 1824, and established himself as a teacher of Italian. In 1826 he married the sister of John William Polidori [q. v.] In 1831 he was appointed professor of Italian in King's College. He was a man of high character, an ardent and also a judicious patriot, and an excellent Italian poet; but he is perhaps best remembered by his attempts to establish the esoteric anti-papal significance of the ‘Divine Comedy.’ He published several works dealing with this question, namely a commentary on the ‘Divina Commedia,’ 1826–7 (2 vols.), ‘La Beatrice di Dante,’ 1842, and ‘Sullo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la riforma,’ 1832 (placed on the pontifical index and translated into English by Miss C. Ward, 1834, 2 vols). He died on 26 April 1854, leaving four children, Maria Francesca [see under Rossetti, Christina Georgina], Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgina [q. v.] Mr. W. M. Rossetti alone survives (1897).
Dante Rossetti's environment—political, literary, and artistic—was such as to stimulate his precocious powers. At the age of five or six he composed three dramatic scenes entitled ‘The Slave,’ childish in diction, but correct in spelling and metre. At the age of eight he went to a preparatory school, and at nine to King's College, which he left at thirteen, having made fair progress in the ordinary branches of knowledge. His reading at home was more important to him; his imagination was powerfully stimulated by a succession of romances, though he does not appear to have been then acquainted with any English poets except Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. The influence of the last is visible in his boyish ballad of ‘Sir Hugh the Heron,’ written in 1840, and printed three years later at his maternal grandfather's private press. Of artistic attempt we hear comparatively little; he was, however, taught drawing at King's College by an eminent master, John Sell Cotman [q. v.], and upon leaving school in November 1841 he selected art as his profession. He spent four years at F. S. Cary's drawing academy in Bloomsbury Street, where he attracted notice by his readiness in sketching ‘chivalric and satiric subjects.’ Neither there nor at the antique school of the Royal Academy, where he was admitted in 1846, was his progress remarkable. The fact appears to have been that in his impatience for great results he neglected the slow and tiresome but necessary subservient processes. His literary work was much more distinguished, for the translations from Dante and his contemporaries, published in 1861, were commenced as early as 1845. Up to this time he seems to have known little of Dante, notwithstanding his father's devotion to him. By 1850 his translation of Dante was sufficiently advanced to be shown to Tennyson, who commended it, but he advised careful revision, which was given. His poetical faculty received about this time a powerful stimulus from his study of Browning and Poe, both of whom he idolised without imitating either. He would seem, indeed, to have owed more at this period to imaginative prose writers than to poets, although he copied the whole of Browning's ‘Pauline’ at the British Museum. ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ ‘The Portrait,’ the splendid sonnets ‘Retro me Sathana’ and ‘The Choice,’ with other remarkable poems, were written about 1847. They manifest nothing of young poets' usual allegiance to models, but are absolutely original—the product, no doubt, of the unparalleled confluence of English and Italian elements in his blood and nurture. The result was as exceptional as the process.
The astonishing advance in poetical powers from ‘Sir Hugh the Heron’ to ‘The Blessed Damozel’ had not been visibly attended by any corresponding development of the pictorial faculty, when in March 1848 Rossetti took what proved the momentous step of applying for instruction to Ford Madox Brown. His motive seems to have been impatience with the technicalities of academy training and the hope of finding a royal road to painting; great, therefore, was his disappointment when his new instructor set him to paint pickle-jars. The lesson was no doubt salutary, although, as his brother says, he never to the end of his life could be brought to care much whether his pictures were in perspective or not. More important was his introduction through the school of the Royal Academy to a circle of young men inspired by new ideas in art, by a resolve to abandon the conventionalities inherited from the eighteenth century, and to revive the detailed elaboration and mystical interpretation of nature that characterised early mediæval art. Goethe and Scott had already done much to impregnate modern literature with mediæval sentiment. A renaissance of the like feeling was visible in the pictorial art of Germany. But what in Germany was pure imitation became in England re-creation, partly because the English artists were men of higher powers. Little, however, would have resulted but for the fortune which brought Rossetti, Madox Brown, Woolner, Holman Hunt, and Millais together. The atmosphere of enthusiasm thus engendered raised all to greater heights than any could have attained by himself. By 1849 the student of pickle-jars had painted and exhibited at the free exhibition, Hyde Park Corner, a picture of high merit, ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’ which sold for 80l. One inevitable drawback was a spirit of cliquishness; another, which might have been avoided, was the assumption of the unlucky badge of ‘pre-Raphaelite,’ indicative of a feeling which, though Rossetti shared in early years to a marked degree, he very soon abandoned. No one could have less sympathy with the ugly, the formal, or the merely edifying in art, and his reproduction of nature was never microscopic. The virtues and failings of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ school were well displayed in the short-lived periodical ‘The Germ,’ four numbers of which appeared at the beginning of 1850, under the editorship of Rossetti's brother William Michael, and to which he himself contributed ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and the only imaginative work in prose he completed, the delicate and spiritual story ‘Hand and Soul.’
In November 1852 Rossetti, who had at first shared a studio with Holman Hunt in Cleveland Street, and afterwards had one of his own in Newman Street, took the rooms at 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, which he continued to occupy until his wife's death. The street is now pulled down. From 1849 to his father's death in 1854 his history is one of steady progress in art and poetry, varied only by the attacks, now incomprehensible in their virulence, made by the press upon the pre-Raphaelite artists, and by a short trip to Paris and Belgium, which produced nothing but some extremely vivid descriptive verse. It is astonishing that he should never have cared to visit Italy, but so it was. The years were years of struggle; the hostile criticisms made his pictures difficult to sell, although ‘The Annunciation’ was among them. He eschewed the Royal Academy, and did not even seek publicity for his poems, albeit they included such masterpieces as ‘Sister Helen,’ ‘Staff and Scrip,’ and ‘The Burden of Nineveh.’ These alone proved that Rossetti had risen into a region of imagination where he had no compeer among the poets of his day. Rossetti did not want for an Egeria; he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a Sheffield cutler and herself a milliner's assistant, a young lady of remarkable personal attractions, who had sat to his friend Walter Deverell as the Viola of ‘Twelfth Night,’ and came to display no common ability both in verse and water-colour painting. Her constitution, unhappily, was consumptive, and delicacy of health and scantiness of means long deferred the consummation of an engagement probably formed about the end of 1851. She sat to him for most of the numerous Beatrices which he produced about this time. A beautiful portrait of her, from a picture by herself, is reproduced in the ‘Letters and Memoirs’ edited by his brother.
Rossetti's partial deliverance from his embarrassments was owing to the munificence of a man as richly endowed with genius as he himself, and much more richly provided with the gifts of fortune. In spite of some prevalent misconceptions, it may be confidently affirmed that Mr. Ruskin had nothing whatever to do with initiating the pre-Raphaelite movement, and that even his subsequent influence upon its representatives was slight. It was impossible, however, that he should not deeply sympathise with their work, which he generously defended in the ‘Times;’ and the personal acquaintance which he could not well avoid making with Rossetti soon led to an arrangement by which Ruskin agreed to take, up to a certain maximum of expenditure, whatever work of Rossetti's pleased him, at the same prices as Rossetti would have asked from an ordinary customer. The comfort and certainty of such an arrangement were invaluable to Rossetti, whose constant altercations with other patrons and with dealers bring out the least attractive side of his character. The arrangement lasted a considerable time: that it should eventually die lay in the nature of things. Ruskin was bound to criticise, and Rossetti to resent criticism. Before its termination, however, Mr. Ruskin, by another piece of generosity, had enabled Rossetti to publish (1861) his translations of the early Italian poets. Another important friendship made in these years of struggle was that with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who came to Rossetti, as he himself had gone to Madox Brown, for help and guidance, and repaid him by introducing him to an Oxford circle destined to exercise the greatest influence upon him and receive it in turn. Its most important members were Mr. Swinburne and William Morris. Other and more immediately visible results of the new connection were the appearance of three of Rossetti's finest poems in the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,’ to which Morris was an extensive contributor, and his share (1857) in the distemper decorations of the Oxford Union, which soon became a wreck, ‘predestined to ruin,’ says Mr. W. M. Rossetti, ‘by fate and climate.’ About the same time ‘The Seed of David,’ a triptych for Llandaff Cathedral, Rossetti's only monumental work, representing the Infant Saviour adored as Shepherd and King, with pendants depicting David in both characters, was undertaken, though not completed for some time afterwards. It is most difficult to date Rossetti's pictures from the variety of forms in which most of them exist, and the uncertainty whether to adopt as date that of the original sketch, or of some one of the completed versions. Generally speaking, however, his most inspired work may be referred to the decade between 1850 and 1860, especially the magnificent drawings illustrative of the ‘Vita Nuova.’ ‘Mary Magdalen,’ ‘Monna Rosa,’ ‘Hesterna Rosa,’ ‘How they met themselves,’ ‘Paolo and Francesca,’ ‘Cassandra,’ and the Borgia drawings may be added. These were the pictorial works in which Rossetti stands forth most distinctly as a poet. He may at a later period have exhibited even greater mastery in his other predominant endowment, that of colour; but the achievement, though great, is of a lower order. Another artistic enterprise of this period was his illustration of Tennyson, undertaken for Edward Moxon, in conjunction with Millais and other artists (1857). The fine drawings were grievously marred by the carelessness and mechanical spirit of the wood-engravers. He succeeded better in book illustration at a somewhat later date, especially in the matchless frontispiece to his sister's ‘Goblin Market’ (1862). He was also labouring much, and not to his satisfaction, on his one realistic picture, ‘Found,’ an illustration of the tragedy of seduction, occupying the place among his pictures which ‘Jenny’ holds among his poems. It was never quite completed. Somewhat later he became interested in the undertaking of William Morris and Madox Brown, for that revival of art manufacture, which produced important results.
During this period he wrote little poetry, designedly holding his poetical gift in abeyance for the undivided pursuit of art. The ‘Early Italian Poets,’ however, went to press in 1861, and was greeted with enthusiasm by Mr. Coventry Patmore and other excellent judges. The edition was sold in eight years, leaving Rossetti 9l. the richer after the acquittal of his obligation to Mr. Ruskin. It was, however, reprinted in 1874 under the title of ‘Dante and his Circle, with the Italian Poets preceding him: a collection of Lyrics, edited and translated in the original metres.’ The book is a garden of enchanting poetry, steeped in the Italian spirit, but, while faithful to all the higher offices of translation, by no means so scrupulously literal as is usually taken for granted. The greatest successes are achieved in the pieces apparently most difficult to render, the ballate and canzoni. That these triumphs are due to genius and labour, and not to the accident of Rossetti's Italian blood, is shown by the fact that he evinced equal felicity in his renderings of François Villon. The ‘Early Italian Poets’ comprised also the prose passages of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ admirably translated.
Rossetti's marriage with Miss Siddal took place at Hastings on 23 May 1860. He had said, in a letter written a month previously, that she ‘seemed ready to die daily.’ He took her to Paris, and on their return they settled at his old rooms at Chatham Place. No length of days could have been anticipated for Mrs. Rossetti, but her existence closed prematurely on 11 Feb. 1862, from the effects of an overdose of laudanum, taken to relieve neuralgia. Rossetti's grief found expression in a manner most characteristic of him, the entombment of his manuscript poems in his wife's coffin. They remained there until October 1869, when he was fortunately persuaded to consent to their disinterment. Chatham Place had naturally become an impossible residence for him, and he soon removed to Tudor House, Cheyne Walk, a large house which for some time harboured three sub-tenants as well—his brother, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. George Meredith. He occupied it for the rest of his life. For the seven years following his wife's death Rossetti was an ardent collector of old furniture, blue china, and Japanese bric-à-brac. The same period proved one of great pictorial productiveness, and his partiality for single figures, generally more or less idealised portraits, increased. The place in this department which had been held by his wife and the beautiful actress, Miss Herbert, was now to a large extent filled by Mrs. William Morris; but many beauties in all ranks of society were proud to sit to him, as appears from the list given by his brother (Letters and Memoirs, i. 242–3). He hardly ever attempted ordinary portraiture, except of himself or some very intimate friend or near connection. Among the most famous of the single figures painted about this time may be mentioned ‘Beata Beatrix,’ ‘Monna Vanna,’ ‘Monna Pomona,’ ‘Il Ramoscello,’ ‘Venus Verticordia,’ and ‘Sibylla Palmifera.’ Of work on a grander scale there is little to notice, though some previous works were repeated with improvements. ‘The Return of Tibullus to Delia,’ one of the most dramatic of his productions of this period, exists only as a drawing; and he never carried out the intention he now entertained of making a finished picture from his magnificent drawing of ‘Cassandra.’ A work of still more importance fortunately was accomplished, the publication of his collected ‘Poems’ in 1870 (new edit. 1881). The new pieces fully supported the reputation of those which had already appeared in magazines; and the entire volume gave him, in the eyes of competent judges, a reputation second to that of no contemporary English poet after Tennyson and Browning.
Much of the remainder of Rossetti's life is a tragedy which may be summed up in a phrase: ‘chloral and its consequences.’ Weak in health, suffering from neuralgic agony and consequent insomnia, he had been introduced to the drug by a compassionate but injudicious friend. Whatever Rossetti did was in an extreme, and he soon became entirely enslaved to the potion, whose ill effects were augmented by the whisky he took to relieve its nauseousness. His conduct under the next trouble that visited him attested the disastrously enfeebling effect of the drug upon his character. In October 1871 an article entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ and signed Thomas Maitland (soon ascertained to be a pseudonym for Mr. Robert Buchanan), appeared in the ‘Contemporary Review.’ In this some of Rossetti's sonnets were stigmatised as indecent. Rossetti at first contented himself with a calm reply in the ‘Athenæum,’ headed ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism,’ and with a stinging ‘nonsense-verse’ hurled at the offender when he discovered his identity. But the republication of the article in pamphlet form, with additions, early in 1872, threw him completely off his balance. He fancied himself the subject of universal obloquy, and detected poisoned arrows in ‘Fifine at the Fair’ and the ‘Hunting of the Snark.’ On 2 June his brother was compelled to question his sanity, and he was removed to the house of Dr. Hake, ‘the earthly Providence of the Rossetti family in those dark days.’ Left alone at night, he swallowed laudanum, which he had secretly brought with him, and his condition was not ascertained until the following afternoon. Rossetti's recovery was due to the presence of mind of Ford Madox Brown, who, when summoned, brought with him the surgeon, John Marshall (1818–1891) [q. v.], who saved Rossetti's life. He was still in the deepest prostration of spirits, and suffered from a partial paralysis, which gradually wore off. He sought change and repose, first in Scotland, afterwards with William Morris at Kelmscott Manor House in Oxfordshire, and on other trips and visits. The history of them all is nearly the same sad story of groundless jealousy, morbid suspicion, fitful passion, and what but for his irresponsible condition would have been inexcusable selfishness. At last he wore out the patience and charity of many of his most faithful friends. Those less severely tried, such as Madox Brown and Marshall, preserved their loyalty; Theodore Watts-Dunton, a new friend, proved himself invaluable; William Sharp, Frederick Shields, and others cheered the invalid by frequent visits; and his own family showed devoted affection. But the chloral dosing went on, forbidding all hope of real amendment.
The most astonishing fact in Rossetti's history is the sudden rekindling of his poetical faculty in these dismal years, almost in greater force than ever. ‘Chloral,’ says his brother, ‘had little or no power over that part of his mind which was purely intellectual or inventive.’ The magnificent ballad-epic of ‘Rose Mary’ had been written in 1871, just before the clouds darkened round him. To this, in 1880, were added, partly under the friendly pressure of Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘The White Ship’ and ‘The King's Tragedy,’ ballads even superior in force, if less potent in imagination. The three were published towards the end of 1881, together with other new poems, chiefly sonnets, in a volume entitled ‘ Ballads and Sonnets,’ which was unanimously recognised as equal in all respects to that of 1870. Some of its beauties, indeed, were borrowed from its predecessor, a number of sonnets being transferred to its pages to complete the century entitled ‘The House of Life,’ the gap thus occasioned in the former volume being made good by the publication of the ‘Bride's Prelude,’ an early poem of considerable length. About the same time Rossetti, who had been a contributor to the first edition of Gilchrist's ‘Life of Blake’ in 1863, interested himself warmly in the second edition of 1880. His letters of this period to Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. William Sharp, and others show excellent critical judgment and undiminished enthusiasm for literature. He also, very shortly before his death, completed the still unpublished ‘Jan van Hunks,’ a metrical tale of a smoking Dutchman (originally composed at a very early date). His painting, having never been intermitted, could not experience the same marvellous revival as his poetry, but four single figures, ‘La Bella Mano’ (1875), ‘Venus Astarte’ (1877), and, still later, ‘The Vision of Fiammetta’ and ‘A Day Dream,’ rank high among his work of that class. His last really great picture, ‘Dante's Dream,’ was painted in oil in 1869–71, at the beginning of the hapless chloral period; he had treated the same subject in watercolour in 1855.
Mr. Hall Caine was an inmate of Rossetti's house from July 1881 to his death, and did much to soothe the inevitable misery of the entire break-up of his once powerful constitution. One last consolation was the abandonment of chloral in December 1881, under the close supervision of his medical attendant, Mr. Henry Maudsley. He died at Birchington, near Margate, 9 April 1882, attended by his nearest relatives, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Caine, and Mr. F. Shields. He was interred at Birchington under a tomb designed by Madox Brown, bearing an epitaph written by his brother.
Rossetti is a unique instance of an Englishman who has obtained equal celebrity as a poet and as a painter. It has been disputed in which class he stands higher; but as his mastery of the poetic art was consummate, while he failed to perfectly acquire even the grammar of painting, there should seem no reasonable doubt that his higher rank is as a poet. His inability to grapple with the technicalities of painting was especially unfortunate, inasmuch as it encouraged him to evade them by confining himself to single figures, whose charm was mainly sensuous, while his power, apart from the magic of his colour, resided principally in his representation of spiritual emotion. The more spiritual he was the higher he rose, and highest of all in his Dante pictures, where every accessary and detail aids in producing the impression of almost supernatural pathos and purity. More earthly emotion is at the same time expressed with extraordinary force in his ‘Cassandra’ and other productions; and even when he is little else than the colourist, his colour is poetry. The same versatility is conspicuous in his poems, the searing passion of ‘Sister Helen’ or the breathless agitation of the ‘King's Tragedy’ being not more masterly in their way than the intricate cadences and lingering dalliance with thought of ‘The Portrait’ and ‘The Stream's Secret,’ the stately magnificence of the best sonnets, and the intensity of some of the minor lyrics. Everywhere he is daringly original, intensely passionate, and ‘of imagination all compact.’ His music is as perfect as the music can be that always produces the effect of studied artifice, never of spontaneous impulse; his glowing and sumptuous diction is his own, borrowed from none, and incapable of successful imitation. Than him young poets can find few better inspirers, and few worse models. His total indifference to the political and religious struggles of his age, if it limited his influence, had at all events the good effect of eliminating all unpoetical elements from his verse. He is a poet or nothing, and everywhere a poet almost faultless from his own point of view, wanting no charm but the highest of all, and the first on Milton's list—simplicity. Notwithstanding this defect, he must be placed very high on the roll of English poets.
Rossetti the man was, before all things, an artist. Many departments of human activity had no existence for him. He was superstitious in grain and anti-scientific to the marrow. His reasoning powers were hardly beyond the average; but his instincts were potent, and his perceptions keen and true. Carried away by his impulses, he frequently acted with rudeness, inconsiderateness, and selfishness. But if a thing could be presented to him from an artistic point of view, he apprehended it in the same spirit as he would have apprehended a subject for a painting or a poem. Hence, if in some respects his actions and expressions seem deficient in right feeling, he appears in other respects the most self-denying and disinterested of men. He was unsurpassed in the filial and fraternal relations; he was absolutely superior to jealousy or envy, and none felt a keener delight in noticing and aiding a youthful writer of merit. His acquaintance with literature was almost entirely confined to works of imagination. Within these limits his critical faculty was admirable, not deeply penetrative, but always embodying the soundest common-sense. His few critical essays are excellent. His memory was almost preternatural, and his knowledge of favourite writers, such as Shakespeare, Dante, Scott, Dumas, exhaustive. It is lamentable that his soundness of judgment should have deserted him in his own case, and that he should have been unable to share the man of genius's serene confidence that not all the powers of dulness and malignity combined can, in the long run, deprive him of a particle of his real due. He altered sonnets in ‘The House of Life’ in deference to what he knew to be unjust and even absurd strictures, and the alterations remain in the English editions, though the original readings have been restored in the beautiful Boston reprint of Messrs. Copeland & Day. His distaste for travel and indifference to natural beauty were surprising characteristics, the latter especially so in consideration of the gifts of observation and description so frequently evinced in his poetry.
All the extant pictorial likenesses of Rossetti, mostly by himself, have been published by his brother in various places. One of these of himself, aged 18, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. No portrait so accurately represents him as the photograph by W. and E. Downey, prefixed to Mr. Hall Caine's ‘Recollections.’ A posthumous bust was sculptured by Madox Brown for a memorial fountain placed opposite Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk. Another portrait was painted by G. F. Watts, R.A. A drawing by Rossetti of his wife belongs to Mr. Barclay Squire. Exhibitions of his pictures have been held by the Royal Academy and by the Arts Club. His poetical works have been published more than once in a complete form since his death.
The National Gallery acquired in 1886 his oil-painting ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ (1850), in which his sister Christina sat for the Virgin. His ‘Dante's Dream’ (1869–71) is in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. But with very few exceptions his finest works are in private hands.
[It was long expected that an authentic biography of Rossetti would be given to the world by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, who contributed obituary notices of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti to the Athenæum. The apparent disappointment of this anticipation led Mr. W. M. Rossetti to publish, in 1895, the Memoir (accompanying the Letters) of his brother. The letters are entirely family letters, and exhibit Rossetti to much less advantage as a correspondent than do the letters addressed on literary and artistic subjects to private friends. Mr. Rossetti had previously (1889) published ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer.’ The record of Rosetti's squabbles with picture-dealers and other customers is not always edifying, but the chronological list of his works is indispensable. Mr. Rossetti subsequently issued in 1899 ‘Ruskin, Rossetti and Preraphaelitism’ [papers 1854–62], in 1900 ‘Præraphaelite Diaries and Letters’ [early correspondence 1835–54]; and in 1903 ‘Rossetti papers, 1862–70.’ Mr. Joseph Knight has contributed an excellent miniature biography to the Great Writers series (1887), and Mr. F. G. Stephens, an old pre-Raphaelite comrade, has written a comprehensive and copiously illustrated account of his artistic work as a monograph in the Portfolio (1894). The reminiscences of Mr. William Sharp and Mr. Hall Caine refer exclusively to his latter years; but the first-named gentleman's Record and Study (1882) may be regarded as an excellent critical handbook to his literary work, especially the sonnets; and the latter's Recollections (1882) include a number of interesting letters. The best, however, of all Rossetti's letters, so far as hitherto published, are those to William Allingham, edited by Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill and published in London in 1897. The autobiographies of Dr. Gordon Hake and Mr. William Bell Scott contain much important information, though the latter must be checked by constant reference to Mr. W. M. Rossetti's biography. Much light is thrown on Rossetti's pre-Raphælite period by Mr. Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and the P.R. Brotherhood, 1905. Esther Wood's Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (1891) deserves attention, but is of much less authority. See also Sarrazin's Essay in his Poètes Modernes de l'Angleterre (1885), Mr. Watts-Dunton's article in Nineteenth Century (‘The Truth about Rossetti’), March 1883, and communication to the Athenæum, 23 May 1896; Robert Buchanan's Fleshly School of Poetry (1872), with the replies by Rossetti and Swinburne; Coventry Patmore's Principle in Art; Mr. Hall Caine in Miles's Poets of the Century; and Hueffer's Life of Ford Madox Brown, 1896.]
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.239
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
| Page | Col. | Line | |
| 284 | i | 19 f.e. | Rossetti, Dante G.: for 1826 read 1826-7 (2 vols.) |
| 2-1 f.e. | for fourteen read thirteen | ||
| ii | 9 | for two years read three years | |
| 15 | for July 1842 read Nov. 1841 | ||
| 18 f.e. | for Sathanas' read Sathana' | ||
| 285 | i | 9 | for Madox Brown read the school of the Royal Academy |
| 25-22 f.e. | for by which the majority . . . in the least. read which, though he shared in early years to a marked degree, he very soon abandoned. | ||
| 287 | ii | 12-13 | for procure his removal read he was removed |
| 9 f.e. | for when the clouds read just before the clouds | ||
| 288 | i | 19 | for wrote read completed a still unpublished poem, which was originally composed at a very early date |
| 24 | for Mario' read Mano' | ||
| 29-30 | omit originally sketched in watercolour in 1855, | ||
| 31 | after period insert (He had treated the same subject in watercolour in 1855) | ||
| 22 f.e. | for 10 April read 9 April |