| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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a week at the Working Men’s College. Things seemed to be working out well, but indications of Lizzie’s delicate health were soon apparent. Jan Marsh believes this prompted Rossetti to take her to Hastings for a convalescence, although evidence for this sojourn is slight (Dante Gabriel Rossetti 120). But Lizzie, accompanied by Rossetti’s cousin Mrs. Kincaid, surely did visit Nice and Paris on a rest-cure funded by Ruskin, and she later made a trip to Exposition Universelle (Marsh, Legend 60). In 1856 Rossetti was sought out by two Oxford undergraduates: William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The association of Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones and their work on the mural project at the Oxford Union is often referred to as a second incarnation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though in reality it was neither dedicated to Ruskinian tenets nor formally organized in any way (Angeli xv).
The years 1857 and 1858 were busy ones for Rossetti. Notable were his five illustrations for Edward Moxon’s edition of the poems of Tennyson and his showing of eight works in a private exhibition mounted by the Pre-Raphaelites at Russell Place, Fitzroy Square (Doughty 214). He also became acquainted with Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was a student at Oxford, and with Ford Madox Brown and Burne-Jones founded the Hogarth Club, an exhibiting and social club (Spencer-Longhurst 124). His relationship with Lizzie faltered, however, as he encountered other women. According to Spencer-Longhurst, he reportedly fell deeply in love with one of them, Jane Burden, and he could not bring himself to attend the ceremony when she married his friend, William Morris. In 1859 Rossetti met Fanny Cornforth, a prostitute with whom he remained involved to one extent or another for the rest of his life (124). Rossetti painted her as Bocca Baciata, the first of the idealized beauties that dominated his painting in the 1860s (Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 208). Perhaps influenced by her, he also reworked his poem about a prostitute, “Jenny,” and it grew to nearly 400 lines (Spencer-Longhurst 124).
In May 1860, Rossetti went to Hastings to visit Lizzie, who again was there because of her health. The two had evidently seen little of each other during the preceding two years while he had been so busily