| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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full-length treatments: Oswald Doughty’s 1949 Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jan Marsh’s 1999 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet.
Even after her own indefatigable effort, Marsh still held that the story of Rossetti’s “posthumous reputation remains to be written in detail.” But her research, along with that of Doughty and Fredeman, gives a sense of the development of some of the representations and reputations that surrounded Rossetti immediately after his death. The early works were mixed in their interpretations and, thus, they provided the seeds for the diverse portrayals examined in this study. Marsh unearthed the fact that “within weeks of Rossetti’s death a book appeared entitled Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Work and Influence, written by William Tirebuck,” but she did not find it of much value: “Without quoting from a single poem or citing a single painting, this biographically worthless volume stressed Rossetti’s notoriety without explaining it” (Legend 17). Tirebuck may have been the first and, as Marsh suggests, the worst Rossetti biographer, but he soon had considerable company, for Dante Gabriel Rossetti compelled attention. If, as Paula Backscheider defines it, biography “tells the life of a fascinating person,” then Rossetti’s life qualifies for the telling by almost any standard (xviii). In that same year, 1882, two more works appeared. Rossetti’s friend William Sharp published Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and Study, which, as Doughty sneered, “buried him under a mass of verbose adulation” (6). With help from the Rossetti family, Sharp was almost certainly reacting to the simultaneous efforts of others to capitalize on claims of intimacy with Rossetti and to exploit the rumors that had long circulated about him. Fredeman reports, “Dead, he attracted wide curiosity, especially following the publication of Hall Caine’s Recollections in 1882, with its hint of dark secrets involving drugs and triangulated love affairs” (Formative xxv).
The Rossettis, especially William Michael, Dante Gabriel’s younger brother and literary executor, could scarcely observe this outpouring in silence. According to Fredeman, William Michael Rossetti produced a dozen volumes on his brother before his own death in 1919 (Formative xxvi).