The Diary's Not for Burning:
The Lifelong Diary Keeping of William Michael Rossetti
The British Diarist, August 2003, by Angela Thirlwell

Sibling of the famous Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was one of the original seven Pre-Raphaelite 'Brothers', keeper of the PRB Journal, editor of the Germ and the glamorous group's 'catalytic agent' and mythmaker. He was a bohemian who was also a taxman, critic and populariser of shocking contemporary art for nervous Victorian gallery visitors, man of letters, biographer, historian, autodidact, radical, liberal pragmatist, cosmopolitan, artist, connoisseur and collector. Swinburne thought his starkly realistic poem Mrs Holmes Grey 'beats everything but Balzac' and artist John Brett called him 'the best judge [of art] I know after John Ruskin'.

In spite of his Italian name and parentage (father Gabriele Rossetti, an asylum seeker from Naples, became Professor of Italian at King's College, London, and mother Frances Polidori was three quarters Italian) William was born in London and never considered himself anything other than British. Although he fiercely identified with Italy in her struggle for unity and independence, counted Garibaldi as his 'greatest and most flawless personal hero' and loved the land of his ancestors which he regarded, as he told the Italian Ambassador, as being his 'native country almost in equal degree with England', William thought of himself as English, his natural sphere of operation was always England. Moreover he was a Londoner and never lived anywhere else, although he was an extensive traveller and a natural cosmopolitan.

Throughout his long life William confided in a whole range of private diaries. They provided the raw material for his publications about the Pre-Raphaelite movement and for his thousands of surviving letters. Because his siblings were regarded from infancy as geniuses, they were not expected to go out to work. Therefore, when the Rossetti fortunes declined with the failing health of their paterfamilias, William's education was brusquely terminated. In 1845, aged just fifteen, he began full-time employment as a clerk at the Excise Office (later the Board of Inland Revenue), not leaving until retirement at sixty-five in September 1894, when he had achieved the senior position of Assistant Secretary. His duties as a civil servant included daily experience in recording minutes and making notes, a specific writing course which underpinned a lifetime of keeping diaries.

Expertise in minute taking made William the logical choice as administrator to the exciting young art movement founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. As Secretary to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it was William's special function to keep a record of their informal meetings and day-to-day doings in the P.R.B Journal, an invaluable record of Pre-Raphaelite activities between 1849-1853. William's P.R.B. Journal, published by William E. Fredeman in 1975, gives us the only first-hand insight, apart from a few surviving letters, into the early days of this radical new art movement. At their most vivacious, perhaps when William took annual leave from the day-job, his P.R.B. Journal entries are concise, informative and amusing:

'Tuesday 29th May 1849: I went in the morning to the Society of British Artists… Scarcely anything good at the Gallery… Between 10 and 11 Hunt called…Talked and did portraits. We have received a letter from Millais, who says that there's a most splendid critique of his and Hunt's work in the Builder. Wednesday 30th May 1849: …On going to the Class in the afternoon, I was told that, on her unrobing [the Model's], she was unanimously requested not to give herself so much trouble; and we have determined, as the preferable alternative, to draw her dressed almost entirely. She is very fat and at least 45.' (William himself was a far more graceful model and was often asked in his spare time to pose, although clothed, for the full-time artists in the group.)

The P.R.B. Journal was the diary of a group, written single-handedly by William, and the first of his surviving diaries. Perhaps it inspired him to keep his own personal diary or perhaps he had been keeping a diary since childhood. William's diaries that can be read today fall into three distinct categories: travel diaries dating from 1855-1896; his séance diary of 1865-8; and his regular, day by day diaries, the friend and confidant of an intensely busy but sensitive and private man maintaining two concurrent professional lives, one in the Revenue and one as a prolific writer on art and literature. They were also the repository for his radical political views, private thoughts, ambitions and disappointments, and charted the course of his erotically charged but ultimately tragic twenty-year marriage to the tubercular artist, Lucy Madox Brown. William kept these diurnal diaries throughout the central period of his life and into old age, from at least 1866 until 1913 when he was eighty-four.

Diary keeping was a crucial aspect of his natural archival interests which embraced writing biography, autobiography, bibliography, anthologies, endless list making of works of art, books, finances, travel expenses, and dozens of volumes of ephemera which he bound up as Miscellanies - all strategies for preserving or shaping the past. William published extracts from his diaries in various books he edited, Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism (1899), Rossetti Papers 1862-1870 (1903), and used his diaries as raw material for his great 2 volume biography of his brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1895) and his own Reminiscences (1906). But the great mass of his diaries today remain as unpublished manuscripts in the Angeli-Dennis Collection at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Rare Books and Special Collections, and on microfilm at the Bodleian, Oxford.

'I feel a certain qualm at seeing that you mean to destroy your old diaries', William wrote to his old friend, fellow Pre-Raphaelite 'Brother' and co-critic, Frederic George Stephens, on 22 August 1906. 'I don't mean to destroy mine: they will pass to one of my children, & will, I suppose, be scarcely or not at all used at any future time for any purpose which one could regret. However, every man must judge for himself in such matters.' If William had wanted anonymity or oblivion, he could always have chosen the fire. But he chose transparency and entrusted himself to posterity. His decision makes a direct parallel with his preference for untouched photographs, and his warts and all approach to writing biographies, even of some of his greatest heroes such as the Romantic poet Shelley, and his own brother the artist-poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Travel Diaries William was a keen tourist during the central years of the nineteenth century, travelling almost annually around Britain or to the Continent. These holidays from office routine were carefully planned and anticipated, high spots of his year. To express his sense of purposeful liberty he carried with him a narrow, flip over pocket diary to record instant verbal and visual impressions. These notebooks are much smaller than the larger format exercise books he used for his regular Diaries. There are clear signs that William re-read all his diaries in later years, identifying sections to re-use in his publications. In the surviving travel diaries nothing is crossed out or pasted over. The focus is topographical and cultural. Wherever he went he visited art galleries and exhibitions, sometimes as part of his artistic self-education and sometimes specifically as a reviewer. From his diary notes he worked up finished articles on art and literature for the Victorian periodical press - to which he was a prolific contributor.

With attractive decorative endpapers, the travel diary notebooks he bought from a shop in the Strand were not cheap at two shillings each, a further indication of how dearly he valued these holiday weeks. And value was a key issue for William. On the back of his diary entries are detailed accounts, how much he spent on meals, railway tickets (2nd class) and laundry en route. He budgeted economically down to the last franc. As well as this simple arithmetic, the diaries are studded - in these years before pocket cameras - with rapid drawings of what he saw, often unusual details of church architecture, occasionally a portrait, or diagram of a major art work. Sadly, many pages are now faint and indistinct, almost illegible with time.

William's travel diary for 14 July - 10 August 1867 is one of his most personal and atmospheric. He set off north for the enchantments of Penkill Castle to visit the curious ménage à trois of William and Letitia Bell Scott and Alice Boyd. Scottish Penkill Castle was set in exquisite if drenched grounds and hung with Bell Scott's captivating picture series The King's Quair. In between downpours Alice suggested William should model for a head in Scott's picture the Palace of Venus which turned out 'quite recognizably like me.' Through the rain-spattered dining room windows William glimpsed 'merely the ghost of Ailsa Craig, which is properly the most striking object seen in the distance'. Before going on later in his vacation to the operatic pleasures of Paris, he relished the 'scattered and jagged rocks' on the coast at Ardmullan where he quietly lamented 'no jellyfish, hermit crab or cuttle bone'. Although a man for whom art and aesthetic concerns were primary, he also noticed the details of the animal world with genuine curiosity and compassion.

Always reading, writing or going for nature walks, William kept his eyes peeled. 'Picked up a mole in coming along the only one I ever saw walking about above ground: he was going along at a good trundling pace'. One very wet day he found a young swallow almost 'overcome by rain and chill: I warmed him up again, and left him where his parents seemed likely to find him'. Entirely self-sufficient in the years of his bachelorhood, equally absorbed in rocks and glaciers, paintings, poetry or moles, he never seemed lonely for a moment. He could find himself in time alone, away from both office life and home life crammed with Rossettis.

Séance Diaries

B etween November 1865 and August 1868 William attended over twenty séance sessions and kept Séance Diaries in which he recorded and attempted to make sense of what he saw and heard. By his mid-thirties, William had been close to deathbed scenes, his father's in 1854, and Gabriel's wife, Lizzie Siddal's - probably suicide by laudanum - more recently in 1862. Séance mania and the discussion of apparently paranormal experience was at its height during the mid-nineteenth century. William went to séances in the spirit of research. As an agnostic who continually asked himself questions about religion, it was an awkward but intriguing subject for him.

William recorded his last séance in his special diary on Friday 14 August 1868. The craze had lasted just under three years. Very late that night between midnight and 2 a.m. at Gabriel's studio, William, Treffry Dunn (Gabriel's studio assistant) and Fanny Cornforth (Gabriel's mistress) gathered on a whim round a solid table in 'quasi-darkness'. Gabriel joined the group as soon as rapping was heard under the table. Inevitably, perhaps, it was Lizzie's spirit that invaded Gabriel's mind with recurrent, torturing themes. 'Are you my wife? Yes - Are you now happy? Yes - Happier than on earth? Yes - If I were now to join you, should I be happy? Yes - Should I see you at once? No - Quite soon? No. Tilt the table to the person you like best: it came to G[abriel]. Do you now like F[anny]? Yes - But some while ago you used not to like her? No - Did you pull her hair on a particular occasion?' (William had witnessed it) 'Yes - Will you pull her hair now? Yes.' But nothing transpired.

Gabriel asked Lizzie's spirit if it knew his father 'in the world of Spirits? Yes.' He asked her to bring his father to the table. After a short delay, he was thought to be present although, unusually, he 'spoke' in English rather than Italian. William asked the former Dante scholar, 'Do you see Dante in your present condition? Yes - Were your Dantesque theories correct? Yes - is Dante then really an atheist? Yes - Is Atheism true? Yes - Then there is no God? No - is there such a being as Christ? Yes - In other words, Christ is not God? Yes (i.e. he is not). Do you know where Christina is? Yes - Is it the South of England? Yes (Wrong: she is at Leeds.)' His answers faded out until 'the manifestations came to a standstill'.

William's Séance Diaries came to a standstill, too, with this final entry. He had aimed to record objectively everything he observed. He had worried about logical plausibility and physical explanations for psychic phenomena. He had suspected trickery but he was open to experience. He had treated levitating tables without levity and listened to 'messages' from the long and newly dead. When his daughters tried ouija boards at the beginning of the twentieth century, he could not resist joining in. 'Gabriel professed to communicate with me, & to be happy', William noted. He put some questions to test the genuineness of the spirit 'but nothing satisfactory came of them. As of old, I remain unable to account for what happens'.

Regular Diaries

William's regular diary was a long-standing friend to him over more than half a century. In it he recorded not only his day-to-day doings, details of his literary work, family news but also close accounts of what pictures and poetic projects his brother Gabriel was currently engaged in. But in moments of intense emotional crisis William abandoned his diary, sometimes for months, occasionally for years at a time. One of the most painful events that bound him to his brother was Gabriel's nervous breakdown and suicide attempt in June 1872. 'This diary-work is becoming too painful now if important matters are to be recorded, and too futile and irritating if the unimportant are made to take their place. I shall therefore drop it', which he did until November when Gabriel had made an unexpected recovery, resumed work and was living adulterously at Kelmscott with Janey Morris.

A decade later he discontinued his diary for three months after witnessing the painful spectacle of Gabriel suffering an agonising form of kidney-disease, precipitated by years of drug and alcohol addiction. On the evening of Easter Day 9 April 1882, Gabriel 'fell back, threw his arms out, screamed out loud two or three times close together' in a convulsive fit that distorted his face, and immediately collapsed. It was 9.31 p.m. Within three minutes Lucy appeared, having travelled all day from her father's in Manchester. 'Lucy's arrival at the very moment almost', William told Madox Brown, 'was an unspeakable comfort to me, & so continues'. After three weeks compassionate leave, William returned to the office. It was three months before he could resume writing his diary again.

When William Rossetti had married the artist Lucy Madox Brown on 31 March 1874, true to their unbelief at St. Pancras Register Office, it was an alliance of two of the most resonant Pre-Raphaelite names. Lucy had been appearing in William's diary with increasing frequency during the late 1860s and early 1870s.

Marriage brought William undoubted happiness and five children during its first decade. He recorded their births in his diary with poetic precision and rueful humour. Arthur was born in the frosty small hours of 28 February 1877: '4.16 a.m. Lucy gave birth to a son: this is the anniversary of my father's birth which. must have occurred, I believe, in 1783. Nothing particularly bad happened till about 1. a.m: at 3.15 I had to go round for the Surgeon, Gill, in a most brilliant frosty moonlight. He accompanied me back, arriving by 3.45, & in another half hour all was over. Lucy has gone on extremely well ever since, & the baby, tho' grotesque enough in aspect, seems to be sound & hearty.'

William's diary constantly referred to Lucy's health, or lack of it. In 1877, after the birth of their second child, Arthur, Lucy was exhausted and by January 1878 William confided to his diary that Lucy's health was 'certainly not strong of late, with persistent thinness & want of appetite'. He also noted with his taxman's exactitude that the doctor's bills during 1877 amounted to a hefty £47.5.0d.

Three further children followed, Helen on 10 November 1879, and finally twins Mary and Michael on 22 April 1881 - 'a serious look-out'- as William sighed to his diary. On 6 May 1880 William noted the healthy weights of his family: 'Self 11 st. 5, Lucy, 9-10, Olive (aged four and a half) 3-6'.

In 1892 William agonized about his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, who underwent an operation for breast cancer on 25 May. On 6 July he noted that Lucy had 'seldom been tolerably well this year'. By November he accepted, if only in the privacy of his diary, that Lucy's illness had changed from bronchial pneumonia 'to an incipient form of phthisis' [pulmonary consumption or tuberculosis] and he conceded inwardly that it had already reached an advanced stage. "There is a line in Mrs. Browning which reflects too truly the feeling of many of us as we get old - 'All things grow sadder to me, one by one,'" he wrote bleakly in his diary for 2 March 1894.

Lucy died eventually in San Remo, Italy, in the presence of her family. William noted in a tiny, brown silk pocket book, 'Dear L died Thursday morning 12 April 1894 - 3 a.m. - asked in pain to be turned over on left side - Olive did this and [...] came the end. Her last words were addressed to Ol - O how I love you dear'. Love was on her lips, if not for William. Conscious to the last, 'her courage never flinched for a moment' and William did not flinch from recording it.

Lucy's death on 12 April 1894, six months almost to the day after the funeral of his closest friend and father-in-law, the painter Ford Madox Brown, pitched William into one of his wordless black holes, when as usual he refrained even from writing in his diary. The gap was significant - four months from March to July 1894. When he resumed his diary, he had taken the decision to retire from the Inland Revenue, a decision which heralded one of the most productive literary phases of his life.

For the first time since he began school at the age of seven, he was his own master - with the novelty of scheduling his working day to suit himself. When he put the final sentence to his Memoir of Dante Gabriel, he calculated with schoolboyish exactitude that the writing had 'occupied me 219 days, or 7 lunar months 3 weeks & 2 days'. He continued to maintain his relentless publishing schedule in tandem with regular diary keeping until his mid-eighties.

William's diary thoughts oscillated between the past and present, counterpointing national events with domestic, and moved without drawing breath between his inner and outer worlds. The externals of quotidian living, public events in art, literature, politics, as well as dramatic and trivial physical ailments, the doings of children, servants and animals absorbed him equally. But the diaries rarely commented directly on his interior emotional life. His diary entries together with their omissions, elisions, reticences and long gaps revealed as well as concealed the complex nature of this very private man.

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