The pre-Raphaelites.

Boos, Florence S.

The sixth volume of D. G. Rossetti's letters, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Last Decade, 1873-1882 (D. S. Brewer, Cambridge and the Modern Humanities Association), offers six hundred fifty-eight annotated letters from 1873 and 1874, as well as a number of useful appendices, such as "Rossetti's Relations with the Morrises," in which Robert C. Lewis reviews what is known about this charged topic, and "The Oil Versions of Rossetti's Proserpine," in which Allan Life considers the eight known versions of Rossetti's well-known portrait of Jane Morris as Proserpine holding a pomegranate. A separate section entitled "Completing Editors and Their Contributions" also offers helpful clarification of editorial responsibilities for the edition in the years following William E. Fredeman's death.

In "Monna Innominata: Alexa Wilding," finally, Allan and Page Life tell us something of the life and character of the woman who became Rossetti's chief paid model, and whose face appears frequently in Rossetti's later canvasses. Rossetti gave Wilding a salary to prevent her from taking other employment, and she was often present at Kelmscott Manor, though Rossetti timed her visits carefully to avoid her co-residence with Jane Morris.

The Lifes characterize Wilding's relations with Rossetti as strictly professional and offer evidence that her two later children, born in 1876 and 1877, were fathered in fact by George Ernest Shelley, a marksman, ornithologist, and nephew of the poet. Alexa Wilding died young, at thirty-seven in 1884, and her son Charles gave several pictures of her to Oswald Doughty in 1948 as Doughty prepared his biography of Rossetti.

As the letters make clear, Rossetti lived at Kelmscott Manor in 1873 and the first half of 1874, and may have considered permanent residence there, with or without consultation with his co-lessor William Morris, for he investigated the possibility of assuming their joint lease in April 1874. He designed elaborate stationery for Jane Morris to use in her new town home in Turnham Green and sought a large secluded house in the London area at one point, but was unable to find what he wanted.

Somewhat surprisingly in the light of these plans, Rossetti abruptly decided to leave Kelmscott for good in July 1874. William Michael Rossetti attributed this to an incident which signaled the onset of another breakdown, in which Dante became fearful and enraged at the presence of fishermen he imagined had insulted him while he and George Hake walked along the Thames. Roger C. Lewis suggests that he may also have wearied of practical problems with carriage, loss, and breakage of his paints and canvasses, as well as rural Kelmscott's difficulties of access for his models and friends.

He did in fact pen many insistent appeals to Dunn, Howell, his brother and others for materials, and expressions of frustration when an order was not fulfilled or the exact objects he wanted could not be located at Cheyne Walk. Whatever the reasons for his ultimate decision, it is hard not to surmise that his intermittent affair with Jane Morris might have begun to dwindle into a kind of accessory to his principal preoccupations, the progress of his art and his public image.

In early 1874, moreover, Morris had begun to plan a reorganization of the Firm which he eventually carried out later in the year, and he wrote Rossetti to ask him to assume the cost of full-time occupation of the Manor. Jane Morris may have had reasons of her own for her reluctance to rejoin Rossetti in Kelmscott, for May and Jenny Morris were twelve and thirteen in 1874, and Jenny had begun to suffer the seizures which eventually blighted her life. Perhaps Jane simply decided to draw back from a relationship which had begun to puzzle or distress her adolescent children.

In any event, many of the preoccupations expressed in Rossetti's voluminous correspondence of the period were commercial as well as artistic. He wrote relatively little poetry-a revised "Cloud Confines," "Sunset Wings," and sonnets on "Spring," "Winter," and the death of Oliver Madox Brown-but did bring out a Tauchnitz edition of his Poems, translations of some poems of Niccolo Tommaseo, and a slightly revised edition of his 1861 volume Early Italian Poets as Dante and his Circle.

In contrast, his works at the easel went forth and multiplied. Relations with his patrons were on the mend, and he completed Blanzifiore, La Ghirlan. data, Marigolds, The Blessed Damozel, The Roman Widow, The Damsel of the Sanct Grael, and several versions of Proserpine, as well as a long series of watercolors, pastels, and pen and ink drawings. His desire to retouch or repaint earlier canvasses became ever more marked, and he borrowed several works back from their owners to this end.

Rossetti often invited his brother, mother, Christina, Ford Madox Brown, and other friends and associates to visit, but wrote Brown at one point to tell him not to "let it enter your head to suggest [Morris'] coming down with you on Tuesday (when I hope to see you) as it's a bore showing him one's work, & not to do so is awkward" (June 7, 1873). He also refused to attend the wedding reception given by Brown for William and Brown's daughter Lucy, on the grounds that he did not "feel equal to a big party of comparative strangers," but would have come if "the party were strictly confined to old friends without admixture of new acquaintances" (to Ford Madox Brown, February 27, 1874, and to William Michael Rossetti, February 14, 1874). Rossetti did, however, continue to give generous help to less fortunate artists and the families of deceased artist-friends, and offered critical advice to writers who sent samples of their work, among them Theophile Marzials, Thomas Gordon Hake, Philip Bourke Marston, Oliver Brown, William Davies, Edmund Gosse, and Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

His few literary-critical remarks were forthright and acute. To William Bell Scott, for example, he wrote that "Keats ... had ... no faults at all later than Endymion, & those not monstrous. Coleridge was perfect & the real model. Shelley was ungrammatical now & then through carelessness, but never wrong prepensely after Alastor." To Thomas Hake he described George Meredith's style as "Tennysonian in its descriptive imagery and Rabelaisian in its humorous side," and recommended his novels as "all well worth reading and all irritating to the nervous system" (July 13, 1873).

In his letters to patrons such as William Graham and Frederick Leyland, Rossetti understandably strove to present his accomplishments and represent his financial interests to best effect. In many of the volume's six hundred forty-five pages these aims seemed to hold his entire and minutely zealous attention, so much so that I felt a twinge of sympathy with his somewhat devious dealer Charles Augustus Howell, the object of many of his obsessive reproaches and incessant demands for immediate attention.

A different sort of attention to detail marked his affectionate but somewhat condescending letters to his housekeeper in Cheyne Walk, Fanny Cornforth, who might (he believed) have taken certain forbidden items for herself. In one letter, for example, he included an amusing sketch of her as "the Elephant," digging a hole in the garden for a jar he wanted to retrieve.

Rossetti consistently addressed the volume's most thoughtful and substantive letters to Ford Madox Brown, to whom he expressed emotional solidarity, set forth his views and preoccupations without reserve, and gave advice--when Brown prepared to deliver some lectures on art history, for example, but got certain facts wrong. When Brown's young son Oliver died suddenly, for example, Rossetti wrote him that "your son, with such a beginning, would probably ... have proved the first imaginative writer of his time. This is what is lost to him, to you, & to the world. Alas, alas! what can one say? Is it lost everywhere as here? If so, there is neither gain nor loss in anything, for all is dross.... My dear Friend, may you find help in yourself, for elsewhere it is vain to seek it" (November 6, 1874).

I know of only one article this year devoted to D. G. Rossetti's poetry: "The 'Fiery Serpent': Typological Typography in Dante Rossetti's 'Jenny'" UPRS 15, Fall), in which Brian Rivers interprets the narrator's claim that Jenny would someday experience self-knowledge as "A fiery serpent for your heart," an allusion to Numbers 21.8-9, as also a punning allusion to the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park, a site of many suicides.

In Rivers' view, this unsettling premonition adds depth and resonance to the poem, and he concludes that "just as Moses exposed the brazen serpent, an artificial representation of the plague of serpents afflicting the Israelites, in order that all who gazed upon it might be cured of their sin, so Rossetti published his poem 'Jenny' as an artistic representation of the real plague of prostitution afflicting Victorian London, in an effort to change public attitudes and behaviour" (p. 11).

Four articles focused on the life and work of Christina Rossetti appeared in print this year. In "Christina Rossetti's Breast Cancer: 'Another Matter, Painful to Dwell Upon'" (JPRS 15, Fall), Diane D'Amico confronts Christina Rossetti's excruciatingly painful death after surgery and more than two years of illness in 1894--an agony so extreme that one of her neighbors complained of her nightly "distressing screams." There is little need to defend the stoically dignified Rossetti from charges of self-pity, but D'Amico argues persuasively that earlier biographers have overinterpreted her agonie in religious terms, and she meticulous describes what breast cancer meant in the 1890s, citing case histories, descriptions of home surgeries, and published writings of contemporary authorities, among them Rossetti's surgeon George Lawson, who favored radical mastectomy of the sort Rossetti apparently underwent in 1892.

Against the background of this study, D'Amico examines Rossetti's final gathering of her religious poems in a single volume of Verses, published in 1893, and interprets "Good Friday Morning," its sole new addition, as a final expression of hope in extremis. The graphic details she marshalls confirm Rossetti's patience and concern for others, and support her view that "now [may be] the appropriate time for the scholarly community to undertake this reassessment of Rossetti's last illness" (p. 47).

"Christina Rossetti, the Communion of Saints, and Verses," by Karen Dieleman (JPRS 15, Spring: 27-49), might be construed as a kind of companion piece to Diane D'Amico's study. Dieleman examines the religious ethos and ethical context f Rossetti's final compilation, interprets Rossetti's egalitarian interpretation of an Anglo-Catholic ideal of a "communion saints" as a rebuke of the hierarchical practices of her own church, and suggests that Rossetti sought to print her final volume inexpensively in an effort to bring a message of inclusion to the working poor.

In "The Letters of Christina Rossetti: Two New Letters" UPRS 15, Spring), Maura Ives prints two letters found in the Texas A & M University Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University and gleans a number of possible additions and emendations to Antony Harrison's edition of Rossetti's letters, from her preparation of a descriptive bibliography of Rossetti's works. In the first letter, Rossetti sends the American Mary Mapes Dodge a poem "An Alphabet from England" for printing in her periodical St. Nicholas, and in the second she endorses the selection from her poems chosen for reprinting in Representative Poems of Living Poets (1885).

In "Too Late: The Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson and Browning" (JPRS 15, Spring), an intertextual study of a recurrent Victorian motif, Ernest Fontana argues that W. L. Windus' portrait of a consumptive woman confronting a faithless former lover may have served as a partial source for Rossetti's poem "Too late for love, too late for joy" in The Prince's Progress. He also contrasts Rossetti's poem with Tennyson's "Come not, when I am dead" (1851) and later poetic studies of abandonment by Adelaide Proctor and Robert Browning, which may have been influenced by Windus' work.

William Morris was the focus of three books and several articles this year. Users of the checklists of Morris' addresses and lectures in Eugene LeMire's Unpublished Lectures of William Morris will welcome his extensive Bibliography of William Morris (Oak Knoll Press and the British Library), which appears with an index, an introduction and many fine illustrations of Morris' texts, covers, and title-pages. They will also be grateful for a work whose integrity they can trust, for it replaces a prior bibliography published in 1897 by H. Buxton Forman, a collaborator in Thomas J. Wise's forgeries who devised a few more of his own.

The breadth and complexity of the present volume's three hundred eighty six double-columned pages also reflects the intricacy of Morris' publishing history and permits its users to follow the history of particular works. LeMire has divided the book into five sections--"The Original Editions with Posthumous Editions to 1915 and First Editions to the Present"; "Morris's Contributions to Books"; "Morris Collections and Selections"; "Morris in Periodical Publications"; and "Forgeries, Piracies, and Sophistications"--the first, I believe, the most copious and the fifth the most entertaining. LeMire devotes twenty pages of "Original Editions," for example, to a list of the many reprintings and formats of Morris' Earthly Paradise to which its early editions' unexpected popularity gave rise, and in "Forgeries, Piracies, and Sophistications" to distinguishes outright theft from careless misattributions and harmless echoes of Morris' accomplishments.

Professional collectors and bibliographers will want to scrutinize LeMire's detailed bibliographic citations, and ordinary readers will often be able to learn which version of Morris' texts he himself preferred, deepen their knowledge of copyright law, and explore the differences between British and North American editions and publishing practices. Of particular interest to me were LeMire's citations of essays and poems unpublished since the nineteenth century, hidden away in sections entitled "Morris Collections and Selections" and "Morris in Periodical Publications."

Understandably, LeMire has not attempted to canvass the many translations of Morris' works into other languages, but his decision to treat works in extenso in each sub-section sometimes makes it more difficult to understand these works' publication histories, and his criteria for inclusion and exclusion of works reprinted after 1915 are not always consistently applied. Such criticisms aside, LeMire's work offers a worthy tribute to the range of Morris' literary achievements, and the care and energy with which he reconfigured them for presentation to different audiences.

Tony Pinkney has completed a project initiated by the late Nicholas Salmon in We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96 (Spire Books), which reprints thirteen interviews recorded by Morris' contemporaries for Bookselling, Justice, the Clarion, the Daily Chronicle, the Woman's Signal, and other publications during the height of his socialist activities and work for the Kelmscott Press. In the book's introduction, Pinkney comments on the ways in which these interviews reflected the late-Victorian fashion for interviewing authors and public figures in their homes, as well as Morris' contemporaries' interest in his apparently incompatible interests in literature, socialism, book arts, and tapestry weaving. Some of the interviewers obviously viewed Morris as an eccentric sui generis, but most asked well-informed and probing questions.

Were his socialist convictions not inconsistent with his operation of the Firm, for example? How could he advocate women's equality when he seemed to assume that most wives would expect or prefer to keep house? Didn't the socialist movement's factionalism and infighting undermine its higher aims? Did he seriously intend to advocate production of books according to Kelmscott Press standards for all? Morris responded to such interrogatories with a mixture of humor, hospitality, and what might be called his characteristic plainspoken hyperbole.

The interviews also document a measure of evolution in Morris' considered views. In 1890, for example, he thought capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradiction (p. 50), but by 1894 he had concluded that "in England, at any rate, it would be simply madness to attempt anything like an insurrection" (p. 82). As for wryly "plainspoken hyperbole," consider his impulsive response to a reporter for the Clarion that "John Bull is a STUPID UNPRACTICAL OAF ... Do you not think so?" (p. 64).

Not many of the interviewers asked Morris about his poetry, but in response to a question from a reporter for the Daily Chronicle, whether there was "a danger of our losing a poet in the Kelmscott printer[?]" the man who had written thousands of lines of verse as he managed and designed for the Firm answered that "if a man writes poetry it is a great advantage that he should do other work. His poetry will be better, and he is not tied to making money out of his poetry. I do not believe in a man making money out of poetry--no, I don't believe in it for the sake of the poetry either" (p. 71).

In William Morris's Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, the year's most extended critical study of Morris' work, Marcus Waithe argues that "far from representing a quaint prelude to the mature political conviction of his socialist years, Morris' medievalism formed an integral part of his peculiar brand of socialism" (pp. xiii, xiv). Observing the ambivalence inherent in medieval ideals of hospitality, Waithe examines Victorian evocations of such ideals in the works of Scott, Pugin, Dickens, and Ruskin. He also explores "hospitable" implications of the design of the Red House's Green Dining Room and the "idle singer"'s frame and medieval tales of The Earthly Paradise, and observes that "if medievalist hospitality was conditioned by a dependence on anachronism wedded to its exemplary function, it is also possible to see Morris learning from this problem, and in the process developing a more sophisticated utopianism" (p. 69).

Waithe considers several aspects of Morris' efforts to visit or study a past culture "hospitably" (without defacing its integrity): his concern to respect Icelandic customs, for example; his unorthodox translation methods, which he hoped would draw back from "translation in its total sense" and pay tribute to the integrity of his Old Norse originals (p. 91); and his frontal opposition to nineteenth-century "restoration," on the grounds that "modern architecture cannot reproduce a workmanship inimical to its own processes" (p. 110).

Waithe also suggests that at some point in the 1880s Morris experienced a "faltering of confidence in the redemptive power of the guest from another time" (p. 116), and considers in chapter four Morris' evocation of deeper forms of historical change in his two Germanic romances and News from Nowhere. The tribespeople in The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains are sometimes receptive to outsiders, for example, and Nowhereans carefully balance utopian pluralism with "the obligations life in [their] community confers" (p. 169).

In his final chapter's comments on "Legacies," Waithe construes pre-"Great-War" utopias and plans for Garden Cities as reflections of "hospitality" (which Morris would have called "fellowship," and other similar socialists "solidarity") and concludes rather bleakly that such ideals are forever "locked within a social and political milieu long since past," and that ours is a time in which we must seek the "meaning of home for a mobile workforce driven from one location to another by the exigencies of life in a global economy" (p. 198).

In "'Caught in the Trap': William Morris, Machinery, and Popular Film from Charlie Chaplin to Nick Park" (JPRS 15, Spring), Margaret Stetz comments on tensions between early-twentieth-century artists' anti-capitalist message and "the attendant dangers associated with turning over control of the means of production to a larger, industrialized corporate establishment" (p. 62). She finds emblems of resistance in the creative efforts of Charlie Chaplin ("the world's most famous creative artist who was also sympathetic to socialism" [p. 63]), and in Nick Park and Peter Lord's winsome allegory of avian liberation in Chicken Run (2000), which "used the production and sale of goods ... [in Morris' spirit] to finance ... anti-capitalist ideological goals" (p. 72).

In "William Morris and the Scrutiny Tradition" (JWMS 16, no. 4, Summer), Peter Faulkner studies F. R. and Q. D. Leavis' views of Morris and Morrisean ideals from Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930) to F. R. Leavis' posthumous The Critic as Anti-Philosopher (1983) and comments rather sadly on their dismissal of Morris' literary accomplishment ("Who would guess from his poetry that William Morris was one of the most versatile, energetic and original men of his time, a force that impinged decisively on the world of practice," New Bearings in English Poetry [1932]). He concludes that the Leavises "failed, for reasons perhaps associated with their dismissal of Marxism and their lack of interest in the visual arts, to recognize what a valuable ally they might have had in William Morris" (p. 43).

In "Kenji Ohtsuki and the Tokyo Centenary of the Birth of William Morris (JWMS 16, no. 4, Summer), Yasuo Kawabata examines the life and work of the first major promoter of Morris' works in Japan. Ohtsuki (1891-1977) admired The Earthly Paradise, translated Hopes and Fears for Art, shared Morris' commitment to ecological socialism, and wrote more than forty articles on Morris during the Taisho period (1912-26) which preceded the recrudescence of Japanese militarism. Kawabata concludes that Morris' example fostered and strengthened Ohtsuki's "temperamental bias in favour of human liberation [and] dauntless spirit of resistance towards authority."

In "William Morris: An Annotated Bibliography 2002-2003" (JWMS 16, no. 4, Summer), David and Sheila Latham briefly summarize English-language articles and books devoted to Morris under the categories "General," "Literature," "Decorative Arts," "Book Design," and "Politics." As these rubrics suggest, the Lathams' interdisciplinary coverage is wide-ranging and informative, and I hope they will consolidate their biennial supplements into a sequel to their Annotated Critical Bibliography of William Morris (1991).

The Cultural Reconstruction of Places, edited by Astra[??]ur Eysteinsson (Univ. of Iceland Press) offers several assessments of Morris' interest in Iceland and its history and culture. In "Icelandic Stoicism among the Victorians? The legacy of Old Norse Sagas in William Morris's Utopian Views of Humanity," for example, Paola Spinozzi of the University of Ferrara argues that Morris' "return to romance" in such works as The Glittering Plain reflected his growing awareness of latent "Aryanism" in contemporary interpretations of Old Norse culture, as well as a commitment to "women's independence, the anthropological diversity of mankind" (p. 196) and "ethical principles of community, heroism and stoicism" (p. 198).

In "Laxdale as William Morris's Interior Topography," Allessandro Zironi of the University of Ferrara argues that Morris carefully refined the laconic diary entries of his sojourns to Iceland to convey to his readers "an interior map, a topography in which names become the plaques testifying to heroic times, and places recall the past; its greatness, violence and pathos" (p. 219).

In "Barbarism and the 'New Goths': The Controversial Germanic Origins of Morris's Utopian Socialism," Vita Fortunati of the University of Bologna argues that Morris' attempts to fuse ideals of fellowship in medieval Icelandic life led to "a clash rather than a merger" and finds a "deep hiatus between the Victorian notion of the barbarian located at the beginning of the civilizing process, and consequently rich in utopian potentialities, and the idea of the barbarian as the exponent of an already refined civilization" (p. 79).

In "William Morris's Socialism and Utopia Built upon Old Icelandic Models and Rendered Plausible and Auspicious by Vico's Conception of History," by contrast, Adriana Corrado argues that it was "Iceland's indomitable nature that sharpen[ed] Morris's refusal of modernity" (p. 31) and compares the view of history and quasi-history in his saga translations and prose romances with Giambattista Vico's "theory of non-linear time progression," which spirals back on itself before it springs forward. She praises Morris' preoccupation with individual foresight and courage in service to communal aims: "A voice that becomes choral, even if attributed to an individual in epic poems, was initially most probably the voice of an entire people" (p. 40).

In "Stevenson, Morris, and the Value of Idleness" (Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries, ed. Richard Ambriosini and Richard Dury), Stephen Arata observes that the Victorians were particularly preoccupied with the nature and necessity of focused attention, and draws a parallel between Stevenson's celebration of "idleness" in An Inland Voyage and Morris' respect for "repose amidst of energy" in his "idle singer," prose essays, and News from Nowhere. He concludes that Morris embodied "a different mode of attention, one that works to integrate body and mind, hand and brain" (p. 10).

After fifteen years of near-constant activity, the output of new studies of the life and work of Christina Rossetti has somewhat diminished, but new scholarly resources for students of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris have given rise to critical studies which present Morris as a precursor of radical assessments of the spirit of his age and ours.