Brothers Beyond the Brotherhood: the Special Relationship of Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti A talk given at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 27 November 2003

WMR: Few brothers were more constantly together, or shared one another’s feelings and thoughts more intimately, in childhood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood, than Dante Gabriel and myself.

DGR: Your love, dear William, is not less returned by me than it is sweet to me, and that is saying all.

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With the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in autumn 1848, both William and Gabriel Rossetti acquired five new ‘brothers’, but none ever replaced the other as ‘first brother’ in their mutual affections. Only sixteen months separated Gabriel and William, born in 1828 and 1829, but Gabriel’s unalterable seniority was a shaping factor in William’s temperament and self-esteem. Gabriel and William grew up in an empathetic union, more often associated with twins. But the almost uncanny, twin-like sympathy between them was based on complementary - rather than similar - personalities.

The peculiar dynamic between William and Gabriel was established early. Headstrong, imperious and self-willed, Gabriel was the dominant ‘leopard-cub’ while more equable William was his subordinate, peaceful kid. As junior brother and the ‘calm’ to his ‘storm’, William followed where Gabriel led, read ‘the same authors, coloured prints in the same book, collected woodcuts for the same scrapbook’. From infancy onwards, they were the very best of friends, inter-dependent and self-involved. Their favourite books were simply inscribed ‘Rossetti’ because they unquestioningly belonged to both, and ‘the initials of either [brother] would have been out of order’. Until Gabriel left school, they were rarely apart, but ‘rose, talked, walked, studied, ate, amused ourselves, and slumbered, together’.

Neither William nor Gabriel relished schooldays. Both attended King’s College School in London, but Gabriel left to become a painter in 1841, while William stayed on until 1845. William had been moderately studious until Gabriel left, when he instantly became ‘audaciously lazy’. Released from the tedium of school, Gabriel was free to choose his own intellectual agenda, and William simply decided he would do the same, drifting far away from the school curriculum. His real world of mental thought lay outside the schoolroom, with Gabriel.

Although their parents, Gabriele and Frances Rossetti, showed no overt favouritism between their children, William nevertheless sensed his father’s preference for Gabriel, and his mother’s for himself. These parent-child demarcations deeply marked William’s character. Gabriel, the eldest son, named after his father Gabriele, unconsciously modelled himself on his excitable and exotic father. William, by contrast, absorbed the feminine ideals, although not the religion, of his ministering, stoical mother. Although like her, he learnt to repress any aggressive feelings, William remained in tune with his emotional life, although he firmly disguised it for outsiders.

The adult relationship between the brothers was founded, therefore, on the paradigm of their parents’ marriage. William repeated the dynamics he saw enacted every day between his parents. As Frances had been handmaiden to her husband’s intellect and temperament, William became the foil and facilitator to Gabriel’s so-called genius.

Genius and its demands shaped William’s life and the development of his character. He could not ‘remember any date at which it was not understood in the family that “Gabriel meant to be a painter.”’ Accordingly, William aged fifteen, was harnessed to paid employment in the Inland Revenue. ‘It was a hard necessity, and was felt as such’, William told his sister-in-law, Cathy Madox Brown, 40 years later. A different brother might have been jealous, but William never exhibited any outward resentment towards Gabriel, or his parents, for categorising him in this secondary rank. From childhood he had been subtly undermined and told he was uncreative. ‘[Gabriel’s] mind was inventive, mine un-inventive.’ He simply accepted the family myth about his inferiority. It is remarkable, that in spite of this early typecasting in a supporting role, William went on to make a major career in 19th century art criticism and literature, unrelated to his livelihood at the Board of Inland Revenue, which supported many Rossettis over 50 years.

The Rossetti brothers

William believed he owed the impetus for his literary career to Gabriel. ‘If it had not been for him, I might perhaps never have attempted anything in the way of literature, art-criticism, and the like’. But once motivated by Gabriel, William ‘relied entirely on my own resources, not consulting him at all as to how I should fashion the work, or what code of opinions I should adopt.’ In his autobiography, William pointed out that his career in art-criticism had led to a separation from Gabriel, not a symbiosis. Many people supposed that he was Gabriel’s mouthpiece, particularly during the years that Gabriel was a Pre-Raphaelite painter, and William a Pre-Raphaelite critic. ‘But I did not criticize in a certain tone at his dictation, or to subserve his opinions, but because I myself entertained the views which I expressed.’

If William was prepared to act as Gabriel’s editor, proof-reader, Italian linguistic adviser, moneylender, mediator, confidant, memorialiser and general gofer throughout a lifetime, these functions were all willingly embraced out of William’s absolute belief in his brother’s genius. This faith was built on William’s huge capacity for hero-worship. His heroes were drawn from literature - Dante, Blake, Shelley, Whitman - or from contemporary politics - Garibaldi, Mazzini, Abraham Lincoln - but his brother Gabriel was his first, nearest, and supreme hero. Hero-worship was the outlet for William’s diffidence, indeed it was a logical outcome of his own lack of self-belief. He accessed his heroes by writing about their achievements, and establishing their reputation with the public. Later, William showed particular gifts for recognising neglected or unknown talents and nurturing them - Walt Whitman, James Thomson, Francis Adams, Katharine Tynan - because he knew from first-hand experience, however resolutely he sublimated it, what it felt like to be marginalized.

William’s relationship with Gabriel was constant - although it did not run on an even continuum. Shared interests in literature and the arts always cemented it. In autumn 1848, it was Gabriel’s initiative that included William as one of the seven founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the P.R.B. The P.R.B. probably meant more to William than it did to the other ‘brothers’. He basked in the moonlit strolls by the Thames, the meetings, the intense discussions on art and literature.

This sketch, a PRB meeting by Holman Hunt, copied by Arthur Hughes, shows Gabriel on the extreme left of the group, William on the extreme right. (DGR, Millais, Woolner, Collinson, FG Stephens, WMR)

Encouraged by Gabriel, William wrote a long poem, Mrs. Holmes Grey, based on an actual court-case, strictly adhering to the Pre-Raphaelite code of realism. Gabriel who was with Holman Hunt in Paris - ‘the females, the whores, the bitches - my God!!’ - responded enthusiastically. ‘The arrival of your poem yesterday was about the best thing that has happened’. ‘Your Inquest is… a very clever and finished piece of writing - wonderfully well-managed … The woman’s letter is exceedingly truthful and fine. The rest of the poem is very first-rate indeed - some passages really stunning … very remarkable, and altogether … the best thing you have done’. By writing articles and poetry, acting as the P.R.B.’s secretary, editing their private Journal as well as their magazine, The Germ, William’s links with Gabriel, his personal hero, deepened and consolidated.

The P.R.B was an extension of their boyhood. They still shared literary and artistic enthusiasms for a list of Immortal heroes, ranging from Homer to Robert Browning, from Leonardo to Raphael. They also shared new friendships. ‘Being of a very retired and self-poised character’, William knew he might never have made these friendships without Gabriel. ‘It was almost invariably through Gabriel that I got to know people, to like them, and sometimes to love them’. Gabriel transported William from the bureaucracies of government office, where he found no genuine comradeship of mind, to the exciting liberation of a place among artists. In his turn, William was useful and highly efficient. He was well-read, well-informed and an asset to the Brotherhood. Some of his most enduring friendships with the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, such as Holman Hunt and F.G. Stephens, were deeper and more lasting than Gabriel’s.

The P.R.B was an extension of their boyhood. They still shared literary and artistic enthusiasms for a list of Immortal heroes, ranging from Homer to Robert Browning, from Leonardo to Raphael. They also shared new friendships. ‘Being of a very retired and self-poised character’, William knew he might never have made these friendships without Gabriel. ‘It was almost invariably through Gabriel that I got to know people, to like them, and sometimes to love them’. Gabriel transported William from the bureaucracies of government office, where he found no genuine comradeship of mind, to the exciting liberation of a place among artists. In his turn, William was useful and highly efficient. He was well-read, well-informed and an asset to the Brotherhood. Some of his most enduring friendships with the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, such as Holman Hunt and F.G. Stephens, were deeper and more lasting than Gabriel’s. William’s day job may have lacked glamour, but his Italianate good looks and undoubted personal presence kept him in demand as a model for Pre-Raphaelite pictures. Between 1849-50 he sat twice to Holman Hunt, for Rienzi and for A Converted British Family, to Millais for the head of Lorenzo in Lorenzo and Isabella, and for the figure of the angel (on the left here) in Gabriel’s Ecce Ancilla Domini.

Ecce Ancilla Domini! Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Without Gabriel’s fraternal love for William, he would never have made those early contacts that shaped his life in the art world. As his contribution, William publicised Pre-Raphaelite artists and heir radical new principles in the Spectator and the Critic. Between the brothers in their early twenties, Gabriel, the commanding new artist and William his promoter and supporter, relations were interactive. Here they are in Gabriel’s self-mocking caricature at that time: William on the left with his top hat, Gabriel on the right with a cane.

Early in the 1850s, two significant new factors entered fraternal relations. Women and money. ‘Tin is no more’, became Gabriel’s habitual refrain as he repeatedly besieged William - ‘Please don’t forget - but I know you won’t - about that tin - as soon and as much as you can manage like a brick. I have an awful lot of claimants’. ‘I am really ashamed to plague you but could you lend me £10 for a fortnight […] £5 would be better than none - or anything indeed - but if you could lend me 10 it would be the greatest service now that I am so engrossed with my picture and so wanting to get it finished’. Frances Horner, daughter of William Graham, Gabriel’s Glaswegian patron, remembered William’s legendary forbearance. She recalled how Madox Brown said one day: “Gabriel, you really ought to pay William; it isn’t the thing, my dear fellow, to be so much in his debt.’ And Gabriel said, ‘Pay my brother William? Good God, Brown, you must be mad’’.

The 1850s was also the decade of women. William courted Henrietta Rintoul, daughter of his editor at the Spectator, and Gabriel fell in love, then out of love with the attenuated Lizzie Siddal, before he finally married her in 1860. Gabriel pursued golden Annie Miller, the girl Holman Hunt put into The Awakening Conscience and planned to marry. In August 1856, Fanny Cornforth entered Gabriel’s life and some of his most suggestive and sensuous pictures -The Blue Bower, Bocca Baciata, Fazio’s Mistress, Lady Lilith and Found - for which William modelled in this early study for the head of the farmer:

In 1857, Gabriel’s life was further complicated. He was in Oxford, painting the Oxford Union murals - the charismatic focus of a second circle of younger Pre-Raphaelite artists, including Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes and William Morris. A new raven-haired stunner, Jane Burden, the daughter of a groom, bewitched him. In retrospect, he should have taken his chance with Janey then. But he was tied by the guilty old connection to sickly, languid Lizzie. By 1859 it was too late - when Jane made an upwardly mobile marriage to William Morris. A year later, after a decade of prevarication, Gabriel finally married Lizzie.

Thus, in the 1850s, there were, at least, four major women in Gabriel’s life. All would model for him. All came from working or lower middle-class backgrounds, propelled by their contrasting types of beauty into a bohemian world of artistic aspiration and self-improvement. Lizzie, the most intellectually ambitious, learned to paint and write poetry under Gabriel’s passionate tutelage. William admired her and found a graceful purity ‘stamped upon everything she did’. Then, Gabriel’s attentions to Annie Miller caused a bitter rift between him and Holman Hunt, and ruined Annie’s chances with either. Janey was the most successful in a worldly sense, outlived them all, managed to keep her husband in a social arrangement, and inspired (even though she deranged) her lover. Fanny was the only one who gave Gabriel sustained happiness and uncomplicated sexual fulfilment. During his dramatic illnesses in the 1870s, it was her financial security he wanted to safeguard. She never bothered to disguise her Sussex vowels, her lower-class origins or her blatant sexuality. But the women in the Rossetti family had to be protected from too much knowledge of her central presence in Gabriel’s life. Consequently, she was not mentioned in Gabriel’s will, and William even had to bar her from the funeral.

William was worldly, and privately non-judgemental about Gabriel’s women. The one about whom he was publicly most ambivalent was Janey Morris, concealing the exact date when the relationship began, partly because it was adulterous, and partly because she was still alive when he published his biography of Gabriel in 1895. William was susceptible to feminine allure and women found him attractive throughout his life. Like Gabriel, whom Mrs. Gaskell called, ‘not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad’, William responded to the physicality of his brother’s women. During the 1850s, he was in love with Henrietta Rintoul, who also had abundant ringlets of hair. Lucy Madox Brown, whom he eventually married, arranged her auburn hair in complicated coils. William’s descriptions often lingered over massive wreaths of gorgeously rippled hair - either with a ‘deep-sunken glow’ like Janey’s or coppery golden like Lizzie’s.

Elizabeth Siddal

William admired Lizzie’s mind and the privacy that fuelled it. ‘All her talk […] was like the speech of a person who wanted to turn off the conversation […] she seemed to say - “My mind and my feelings are my own, and no outsider is expected to pry into them”’. William fully accepted Lizzie’s pre-marital relationship with Gabriel. Their closeted interdependence in the early 1850s, tête à tête in his studio at Blackfriars, supplanted the boyish comradeship of the P.R.B. in Gabriel’s mind. In William’s view, the Lizzie-Gabriel entente hastened the break-up of the Brotherhood. Her long anticipated marriage to Gabriel was delayed, as Gabriel admitted ‘almost beyond possibility’, and only took place when Lizzie, ‘ready to die daily and more than once a day’, was wrecked by illness and opium addiction. Later observers have found it hard to credit William’s opinion that the pre-marital relationship was not a sexual one, although he admitted ‘it may have gone beyond the conventional fence-line’.

After ten years of vacillation, even William was surprised when the couple suddenly decided to marry. Gabriel agonised over Lizzie’s ragged and dramatic ill-health. ‘My dear William’, he wrote, ‘Many sincere thanks for your brotherly letter. I assure you I never felt more in need of such affection as yours has always been, than I do now’. William was the one person in whom he could confide, ‘as I could not bear doing it, to any other than you.’ William commented privately, ‘She is a beautiful creature, with fine powers and sweet character’… ‘if only her health should become firmer after marriage, I think it will be a happy match’ Less than two years later in February 1862, Lizzie’s addictive and addicted personality was extinguished, when perhaps due to post-natal depression following the birth of a still-born child, she took an overdose of laudanum.

Fanny was a total contrast to Lizzie and was established in Gabriel’s life both before and during his marriage to Lizzie. Shortly after Lizzie’s death, Fanny was reinstated as Gabriel’s live-in mistress. William accepted her and was easy with her. Gabriel was occasionally absent from his new home at Cheyne Walk. During the mid-1860s William contributed to the rent and stayed the night on a regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday basis. Sometimes he spent evenings alone with Fanny, trying to summon spirits, absorbed in their joint passion for séances. William signed himself ‘affectionately yours’ to Fanny and sent her thoughtful little presents.

The 1860s were fruitful years for Gabriel as an artist. His income far exceeded William’s - but so did his expenditure and his debts. Gabriel’s income was about £3,000 in 1867, the same year that William was promoted at the Inland Revenue to a salary of about £600, a fraction of Gabriel’s earnings. Gabriel continued to borrow freely from William but repaid some of that generosity when William was robbed in Venice in 1868. Gabriel continually expected clerical and scholarly assistance from his younger brother. ‘Can you help me at all, do you think, in collating my Vita Nuova with the original, and amending inaccuracies […] It ought to be done immediately’.

Since childhood, the Rossetti siblings had absorbed Dante almost by osmosis - both from their father Gabriele and from their maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori. Christina said the Rossettis’ Italian roots made the Divine Comedy their birthright. William may have modelled for this study by Gabriel of Dante in Meditation. In 1861, William translated the prose-arguments of Gabriel’s version of Dante’s Vita Nuova, and published his own blank verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, as The Hell in 1865.

William’s translation is a seductively tactile volume to handle, compact in format, bound in black cloth, now faded to deep sepia. It was the only one of William’s books to have a hyper-aesthetic cover design by Gabriel - who completed it just weeks before publication.

The brothers continued to share enthusiasms, but now they were for visits to Cremorne Gardens, blue china, Chinese artefacts and exotic beasts. Gabriel kept a series of calamitous animals in the garden at Cheyne Walk. William noted their fates with interest: Jessie, a barn owl whose head was bitten off by a raven, two grass green parakeets starved to death, a green Jersey lizard killed by a servant, a dormouse with a hole in its throat, a dog split up its back by a deerhound, a shrivelled tortoise, a rabbit eaten all but his tail, and a pigeon devoured by a hedgehog.

While William was his brother’s banker, zoo attendant, copy editor, and personal assistant, he recorded his doings in his daily diary, which was a long-standing friend to him over more than half a century. He recorded not only his own literary work which was prolific, but also what pictures and poems Gabriel was currently engaged in. But during intense emotional crises, William usually abandoned his diary, sometimes for months, occasionally for years at a time. The most painful event 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 1872, when Gabriel had made an unexpected recovery, resumed work and was installed at Kelmscott Manor with Janey Morris.

During summer 1872, when Gabriel was in extremis, William’s friends realised how close he came to following his brother into despair, but not into delusion. Gabriel’s breakdown was compounded of many factors, but they all involved feelings of guilt: Lizzie’s death, the exhumation of her body to recover the poems he had impulsively buried with her, his obsession with Janey Morris, the publication in 1870 of his Poems inspired by dead or illicit loves, and Robert Buchanan’s subsequent attack, which Gabriel had dreaded for months.

Gabriel did not involve William in recovering his poems from Lizzie’s grave but he did ask him to help transcribe their rotting pages. ‘I do not know if you would have time or inclination to assist in so unpleasant a job. If so, you could do some of the more difficult parts while I did others’. As a rather backhanded sop, Gabriel added, ‘You know I always meant to dedicate the book to you’, which he would do - ‘failing only one possibility [presumably Janey] which I suppose must be considered out of the question’. William offered absolution for Gabriel’s act of desecration. ‘Under the pressure of a great sorrow, you performed an act of self-sacrifice: it did you honour, … You have not retracted the self-sacrifice … but you now think - and I quite agree with you - that there is no reason why the self-sacrifice should have no term’. When Buchanan’s long-awaited attack on Gabriel’s Poems came in ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, an article in October 1871, it was partly in settlement of old scores with William, who had reviewed Buchanan’s own poetry disparagingly, and compounded the insult by calling him ‘so poor and pretentious a poetaster’. When Buchanan re-published his attack as a pamphlet in May 1872, it was the trigger which sent Gabriel, a raging insomniac, already addicted to a pernicious regime of chloral and whiskey, into persecution mania, conspiracy theory, hallucinations and derangement.

Looking back on that summer of 1872, William remembered the day the crisis broke which he spent entirely with his brother, as ‘one of the most miserable days of my life, not to speak of his’. Friends observed how William’s own state symbiotically began to mirror his brother’s. The artist, Bell Scott, claimed that in 1872, William had been ‘so prostrated by anxiety, loving Gabriel much and fearing him not a little’ that Ford Madox Brown had to partly take over Gabriel’s business affairs. William countered briskly: ‘I was not prostrated, though I assuredly was afflicted, and, had I not been so, the more shame to me’.

When Bell Scott went to dinner at the Rossettis a year after Gabriel’s recovery, they all discussed William, before he arrived. ‘They both, but especially Christina, confided to me how very much alarmed they had been for William ever since Gabriel’s illness, and that they were truly glad of the Lucy advent… For weeks they said he never uttered a word to any of them, and now he talked when Lucy is here; … Lucy duly turned up Billy accompanying, and we were all very cordial.’

Undoubtedly, William’s overpowering sense of responsibility for Gabriel, which went through several acute phases, between 1872 and 1882, profoundly affected his sensitive personality. At the time of Gabriel’s 1872 breakdown, and in its aftermath, Bell Scott noted that everyone around Gabriel had become his ‘absolute slave’. William was constantly sent on missions to Cheyne Walk to collect books, green drawing paper, brown chalks, handkerchiefs, thick trousers and waistcoats. He had to see to Gabriel’s business and domestic concerns, liaise with a succession of doctors, minders and friends, authorise treatments and placate Fanny. He was asked, peremptorily, to copy manuscripts, send money and deal with insurance payments. He was even expected to find saveloys to send down to Kelmscott.\

And through all these tasks and preoccupations, he continued to attend daily at the office at Somerset House. As he recovered, Gabriel became aware how much William had suffered, in his heightened exchange of sympathy. He thoughtfully observed, that ‘indeed, perhaps your suffering may have been more acute than my own dull nerveless state during the past months’. He began to see the strain showing in William’s face. ‘By the bye, when I saw you, I thought you showed fearful signs of fagging and overwork, as well you might’, yet he carried on setting William endless tasks. But from 1873 onwards, William’s engagement to Lucy Madox Brown marked a new phase in the relationship with his dominant brother. Here is the evocative portrait of Lucy Madox Brown which Gabriel drew as his wedding present to the couple in 1874.

Six months after their marriage, Gabriel complained, ‘I never see you now’. Henceforward, William would have a regular proof-reader - Lucy - to help him with his own literary works, instead of always acting in that capacity to Gabriel. A mundane enough occupation, it was symbolic of a distinct shift in relations. From now on he would be a planet himself, instead of always a lesser moon.

However, the emotional inter-dependence between the two brothers was never severed, just subtly altered. When Gabriel plunged into further chloralized declines, William was unfailingly loyal, visiting him regularly every Monday evening. They talked about the old days but now he could share Gabriel’s intensity with Lucy - who accompanied William about once a month. She admired Gabriel immensely and enjoyed discussing art and poetry with him. But Gabriel never wanted to see William and Lucy’s children. Perhaps they recalled, too painfully, the stillborn child he and Lizzie had lost in 1861, and the fact that his lifestyle now made it unlikely he would ever become a father.

William felt no resentment about Gabriel ignoring his children. He accepted it as part of the eccentric licence he had been taught since boyhood to accord to genius. Instead, he was charmed when in February 1881, Gabriel told William that he and Lucy were ‘exactly suited to each other.’ The brothers discussed painters and poets, heroes and stunners - in a continuum of debate that had persisted since their joint childhood.

William monitored Gabriel’s state of mind with every visit - ‘better’, ‘very melancholy’ or ‘more depressed’ - with every visit. Gabriel continued to be susceptible to notions of personal persecution. When Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience opened, he felt sure he was lampooned as the ‘fleshly poet’ Bunthorne. But William found Patience light and amusing - ‘I don’t see that any individual is pointedly aimed at’. In fact, Bunthorne was a conflation of all the major figures associated with aestheticism, including Ruskin and Whistler, but he became most popularly associated with Oscar Wilde. Depression had sunk not only Gabriel’s joie de vivre, but also his old sense of humour.

In 1881, when Gabriel was turning ever further inwards, William’s horizons were expanding. Unlike any of the other Rossettis, William was a true cosmopolitan with an internationalist agenda. His lifelong cultural and intellectual commitments were English, Italian, French, Eastern European, American, Oriental, Antipodean and ultimately global.

Many of these allegiances were indicated in his 50 Democratic Sonnets, mostly written in 1881, not published until 1907, when they had lost their fiery topicality. William’s subjects ranged from the reburial of Napoleon to affairs in Ireland and in the Transvaal. He wrote in a great spate, often a sonnet a day.

However, Lucy felt a few qualms - which she did not hesitate to voice. William countered at once: ‘I don’t see why the Fenian Sonnet shd. be “dangerous”. It was true Gabriel had misgivings about those sonnets, William admitted, but told Lucy, ‘I feel that, if I do the thing at all, I must do it in my own way & not other people’s way’.

Gabriel, who had initially encouraged William’s poetic project, now realized he had ignited a potentially fatal fuse. ‘Several of William’s truest friends, no less than myself, are greatly alarmed at the tone taken in some of his Sonnets respecting ‘Tyrannicide’, ‘Fenianism’, and other incendiary subjects,’ he wrote to Lucy, ten days before the birth of her twins, ‘the very title Democratic Sonnets seems to me most objectionable when coming from one who depends on the government for his bread.’ It was one of the curious paradoxes in William’s career that he could spend every day of his working life at the Inland Revenue, while at the same time holding radical political views. So he replied to Gabriel the next day: ‘This is a country in which political and religious opinions are free, and in this very Office men of all shades of opinion are to be found. The present government is by no means a Tory or anti-democratic one. Democracy is not inconsistent with the English Monarchy: it co-exists with that at the present moment to a large extent, and is certain to advance further and further. However, I am not wedded to the mere title Democratic Sonnets, and if I see cause (which at present I don’t) I will substitute another [...] Any idea of my undertaking to write verse about the public events of my own time, and yet failing to show that I sympathize with foreign republics, and detest oppression, retrogression, and obscurantism, whether abroad or at home, must be nugatory. To set me going is to set me going on my own path’.

Gabriel retired from the fray, but not without some parting shots. ‘I have said my say, which I felt to be my duty’. His motives were complex - embarrassment perhaps about the political content of the sonnets, as well as fears that the Rossetti family might lose William’s regular income. Eventually, William’s hectic spate of poetic activity ground to a standstill. Over a quarter of a century later, in 1907, at the invitation of his ‘half-nephew’, the future novelist Ford Madox Ford, William’s sonnets were finally published in two volumes, at the democratic price of one shilling each, in ‘The Contemporary Poets Series’. If they had appeared when they were written in the early 1880s, Gabriel was right in thinking they would have caused a sensation and William’s Democratic Sonnets might have been truly contemporary. By 1907 much of their political gunfire had been defused. The world had moved on and was already arming for the Great War which was to cause William such dismay throughout the last years of his life. But the Democratic Sonnets remain his political manifesto, raging at an apathetic world, against the old orders, tyranny and oppression.

Towards the end of 1881, vomiting and drinking champagne, Gabriel told William he was very ill. He had been used to turning night into day, never retiring until 5.00 a.m. Now he went to bed early at 9.00 p.m., had a nurse and was ‘much dejected and unstrung’ in William’s foreboding view. He increased his evening visits to Gabriel to twice a week, and applied for promotion to the Secretaryship at the office, his logical career goal. His concerns about Gabriel were deepening. Then he recorded tersely: ‘My candidature for the Secretaryship has failed … Pazienza.’ Pazienza was the Italian exhortation he had heard at home throughout his childhood, which had governed his strictly controlled temperament thereafter, and especially his relationship with his dynamic elder brother.

The medical crisis came in mid-December 1881. A ‘paralytic numbness’ seized Gabriel’s left side and he had to be carried to bed. Doctors and friends debated Gabriel’s whiskey and chloral addiction. Dr. Marshall proposed injecting morphia as a substitute. Dr. Maudsley was called in, chloral discontinued, and spirits reduced to a wineglass a day. Gabriel’s sleep was punctuated by opium-dreams and weird hallucinations, ‘seeing writings & printed sheets where none existed’ and replying to questions that had never been asked. On 20 December Gabriel did not recognise his friend Frederic Shields when he visited, but babbled a mixture of French, English and Italian. William called the next day to hear better reports from Dr. Maudsley - but decided not to risk being un-recognised himself.

At New Year 1882, Gabriel rallied a little, although his left hand was useless and his spirits low. William briefly took heart when he found Gabriel painting a small replica of his - PROSERPINE - based on Janey’s iconic features. But the artist was fretful and listless. On William’s suggestion, it was decided to move him from Chelsea to the new marine resort of Birchington-on-Sea. Here he settled at Westcliff Bungalow, within sight of the sea. Installed with a relay of paid companions, concerned friends, medical advisers and a nurse, Gabriel began to read and write again, but was beset with his old furies and feared his sight was failing. In March, old Frances Rossetti and Christina arrived to help care for him.

On 1 April 1882, William arrived in Birchington for the weekend and found Gabriel ‘in a very prostrate condition physically, barely capable of tottering a few steps, half blind, & suffering a good deal of pain’. On Sunday, Dr. Harris, a local Birchington doctor examined Gabriel and gave William the prognosis he dreaded - that Gabriel’s brain was likely to be permanently affected by his long-term chloral abuse. William was cast into gloom but returned to London to seek more medical advice. On 7 April, William went back to Birchington. The doctor told him Gabriel’s illness was uraemia, a form of kidney-disease. About 5.00 p.m., on 9 April, Easter Sunday, William helped Mrs. Abrey the nurse ‘to put on his loins a large linseed-and-mustard poultice, and his drawers were put on at the same time - both processes much against his will, as he disliked and dreaded the heat in bed’. After supper at 7.00 p.m. William dozed briefly on the drawing-room sofa until Frederic Shields ran in for him at 9.20. While Frances was rubbing her son’s back, 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. Shields flew round for Dr. Harris who pronounced ‘he still lived - then said he was dead’. 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’.

The following day, William asked Gabriel’s devoted friend, Frederic Shields, to make a drawing of him in death.

Being ‘the most high-strung and susceptible of men’ this was a ‘a truly self-sacrificing act of Shields’. The artist inscribed the drawing ‘in anguish of heart’. William kept the drawing. After three weeks leave, William returned to the office. Three months later he began writing his diary again. But it was not until a dozen years later, in the aftermath of Lucy’s death, that William galvanised himself to write Gabriel’s biography. Initially he had held back, afraid he would be accused of the partiality of a brother, but ultimately he turned what might have been disadvantage into a special strength. Imbued with natural authenticity, William’s account knits autobiography with biography, to achieve a unique texture. When Gabriel wailed indulgently, or tragically: ‘What I ought to do is what I can’t do’, he implicitly underlined how William’s life, the converse of his own, was perennially governed by moral imperatives.

As biographer, William presents facts that only he could know, marshalling anecdotes, quotations, letters and reviews. He uses extended quotations from Holman Hunt and F.G. Stephens to evoke Gabriel’s physical presence, and to give the biography a three-dimensional objectivity.

William justly estimated his brother’s vital contribution to nineteenth century British art, inspired by ‘the pure loveliness and self-withdrawn suavity’ of Lizzie Siddal, and Janey Morris’s ‘face of arcane and inexhaustible meaning.’ He agreed with Gabriel’s own opinion that his finer achievement was in poetry rather than in painting - an assessment that probably would be reversed today. For William, Gabriel was a tragic and divided Hamlet figure, who had ‘that within which passeth show’, a man ‘of astonishing genius, ardent initiative, vigorous and fascinating personality, abundant loveableness, many defects, and in late years overclouded temperament and bedimmed outlook on the world, whom it was once my privilege to call brother.’ Although Gabriel could be ‘imperative, dominant, self-sustained, and stiff-necked,’ William affirmed if ‘his work was great; the man was greater.’ His personal tragedy was that though Gabriel’s work was done ‘it did not prove to be its own exceeding great reward.’ If Gabriel was Hamlet, then William was his devoted Horatio, left alone in this harsh world after the deaths of brother, mother, sisters, wife, to tell his story, ‘a faithful biographer’ who had ‘no wish to thrust [him]self constantly forward.’ His mission was simply to ensure the lasting reputation of the brother he considered a genius.

William Michael Rossetti

Although he called himself a brother ‘of very minor pretensions’, William judged his biography of Gabriel to be ‘certainly the most considerable performance of my lifetime’. It was, and his relationship with his brother, a masterpiece of selfless love.

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