The Secret Son of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Christabel Powell

Description

The reputations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the artist and poet, together with his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, were zealously guarded by their brother Michael and the Rossetti family in general. Any whiff of scandal was to be strictly avoided, concealed or otherwise written out of history. But according to family traditions handed down to Dr Powell, the author of this book, her great-grandfather was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illegitimate son. Based on the evidence she has unearthed, Dr Powell tells the story of Rossetti’s secret love affair and the son that resulted.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528953108
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T he S ecret S on of D ante G abriel R ossetti
Christabel Powell
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-03-29
The Secret Son of Dante Gabriel Rossetti About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Foreword Preface Chapter One: Mary Osborne’s Youth Chapter Two: Apprenticed to a Milliner Chapter Three: Millinery Houses in London Chapter Four: Mary Meets Gabriel Chapter Five: Elizabeth Siddal and Mary Chapter Six: Mary Is Shamed Chapter Seven: The Rossettis Learn That Mary Has Vanished Chapter Eight: Christina Writes Poems About Gabriel’s Dilemma Chapter Nine: John Martin and Mary Chapter Ten: The Artists Rifles and Marriage to Lizzie Chapter Eleven: Lizzie’s Suicide Chapter Twelve: Death of John Martin Chapter Thirteen: The Zulu War Chapter Fourteen: Robert Browning Upsets Gabriel Chapter Fifteen: Third Burmese War Chapter Sixteen: Ten Years in Naples Chapter Seventeen: Robert in the First World War Postscript Appendix: Key Dates Bibliography
About the Author
Christabel Powell grew up in Monmouthshire, where she continued to live for most of her life. She studied architecture at Cardiff and Cheltenham and worked as an architect for various employers and subsequently as a sole practitioner in both Wales and Oxford. She held master’s degrees from both Oxford Brookes University (in Building Conservation) and the University of Oxford (in Theology), as well as a doctorate from Durham University (for her thesis on the Liturgical Vision of Augustus Pugin). In addition to two books on Pugin, she published Ring in the Old, Ring in the New (1981); The Bells and Campaniles of Campania (1988) and Walter Powell’s Gwent (1978). Up until her death at the end of 2017, she was also a Research Member of the Senior Common Room at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.
Dedication
For my grandson,
Dante Augustus Valaydon-Pillay
And to the memory of
Dora (‘Doe’) Ross and Charles Lewis
Copyright Information ©
Christabel Powell (2019)
The right of Christabel Powell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788231084 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528953108 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published 2019
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
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Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Foreword
I first met Christabel Powell in January 1993 when we were both students at what was then Manchester (and is now Harris Manchester) College, Oxford. Sadly, I had to make my final farewell to her almost exactly 25 years later, in January 2018, at her funeral service, which was held just a few miles from where she was born in Newport, South Wales. During the bulk of the intervening years she was my life partner and my best friend.
Shortly before her final illness, Christabel made me promise that, were she to fall ill, I would see this book through to publication. Doing so is the very least I can do in her memory and in very partial repayment of all the love, kindness and generosity she has shown me over the time I have been privileged to know her. I claim absolutely no expertise either in art history or in the period of which she writes – my own scholarly expertise lies in the New Testament – but we often discussed this book while she was working on it and I commented on an earlier draft, so I am as familiar as anyone with what she was trying to achieve.
This book is best understood as an imaginative exploration of the family tradition that Christabel’s great-grandfather, Robert Osborne Martin, was the illegitimate son of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Christabel recalled one of her great uncles telling her that the proof of this had been found by a solicitor. Although she herself strove for years to find it, exploring every avenue of research she could think of, she was never able to find the knock-down proof or the smoking gun that put the truth of this family tradition beyond all reasonable doubt. What she has, however, achieved is both to collect a body of family tradition from a number of her relatives before those who knew about it died out and also to assemble an impressive body of circumstantial evidence lending plausibility to the tale. Had she not more or less completed this before she died, the story told here would have been lost along with her, since scarcely anyone would have been left who knew any of the details.
Much of this book is an imaginative reconstruction of what, in the nature of things, can perhaps never be proved, based on nuggets of solid evidence that nevertheless stand in need of explanation. But this is just how human memory works: memory is not an accurate copy of past events stored on the neural equivalent of a hard disk, but rather an imaginative reconstruction based on a scattering of memory traces and the ways in which we typically tell stories to make sense of our past. In a very real sense, the interlinked stories of Mary Osborne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and their illegitimate son Robert Osborne Martin explored in this book constitute a work of memory, committed to writing almost at the very limits of what Jan Assmann has called communicative memory , personal memory handed down by word of mouth. Although Christabel may often appear to resort to speculation, as she goes on to explain in her Preface, this was necessary in order to fill in the gaps and tell a coherent tale. Far from being pure fiction, her speculations should be viewed as the controlled use of historical imagination to extrapolate from the surviving evidence.
Christabel’s typescript was essentially complete and was already with her publisher before she became too ill to do any further work on it. My role has been merely to edit the earlier proofs sent back by the publisher in line with the publisher’s instructions and my own perception of a few things that needed tweaking (such as removing obviously unnecessary repetition and correcting a few obvious errors). In retrospect, her final battle with cancer must have considerably sapped her strength even before it became fully apparent just how ill she was, and this will have hampered her efforts on the final stages of this book. In particular, the references in her footnotes needed quite a bit of sorting out. I have done my best with them with the resources readily available to me, and I believe I have correctly identified the bulk of the references that were unclear, leaving only a handful that defeated me (and which I have therefore had to leave much as I found them). I have not, however, attempted to fill in information that was totally absent (such as precise page references where Christabel had not supplied them). Beyond these basic editing tasks I have deliberately left Christabel’s book as she wrote it: this is very much her book in her voice, not mine. Where I have, very occasionally, added an explanatory or corrective comment on my own initiative, I have marked it with my initials (ECSE). The initials CJP in such notes refer to her.
One further task Christabel was unable to complete before she died was sorting out the illustrations she wished to include in this book. Several have made it into the text, but many more (especially of the Rossetti paintings she discusses) were in need of copyright permissions and better-quality graphics files to print from, neither of which either I or the publisher were in a position to pursue. I did consider supplying URLs to websites where images of the paintings Christabel discusses could be viewed on line, but since URLs on the pages of a printed book would not be clickable hyperlinks, I quickly came to the view that this would probably not be worthwhile. It is, for example, no harder, and probably rather easier, for the interested reader to type “Rossetti Paolo and Francesca” into a search engine than to enter the URL “https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-paolo-and-francesca-da-rimini-n03056” into the address bar of a web browser. Readers may nevertheless wish to take advantage of the internet to view images of the paintings under discussion.
Christabel retained an association with Harris Manchester College up until the day she died (for many years she had been a Research Member of the Senior Common Room, a category initially created especially for her). I, too, have been greatly privileged to enjoy a long association with Harris Manchester, where I am now a Fellow (and Tutor in Theology). It has proved a wonderfully friendly and supportive environment in which to work, and I am enormously appreciative of all the help, sympathy and support I have received from friends, students and colleagues at the college during Christabel’s final illness and the bereavement that followed. Here I should particularly like to acknowledge the encouragement the college has given me to see this book through to the final stages of publication, along with that of Christabel’s daughter, Frances Valaydon-Pillay, and the staff at her publisher, Austin Macauley.
Eric Eve
Harris Manchester College, Oxford
February 2019
Preface
“Come here, Chrissie, there’s something I want to show you,” called my grandmother. I was about four years old, I remember. My toys were duly put down and I curiously followed her up the stairs and into her bedroom. She took my small hand and we walked over to the bedroom wall. “Look at this picture,” she instructed. I looked up and could see a brown frame, but I was too little to see the picture. My grandmother picked me up in her plump arms so that I co