Beta plus and beta minus
Judith Flanders
WILLIAM AND LUCY by Angela Thirlwell Yale, £25, pp. 376, ISBN 0300102003 say `Rossetti' to most people, and you v, ill get back 'Dante Gabriel', or .Christina', or perhaps a description of paintings of exotically beflowered, heavy-jawed women. It is impossible to imagine that anyone will respond with, 'Of course, William Michael', much less 'Lucy
Madox'. Angela Thirlwell, in her passionately argued double biography, wants to bring Dante Gabriel's little brother and his wife out of the wings and into the spotlight.
William Michael Rossetti's main claim to fame was as aid and support to both his feckless, ultimately chloral-sodden brother and his retiring, home-loving sister. He left school at 15 to work for the Board of the Inland Revenue, initially as a correspondence clerk, for the last 25 years of his career as Assistant Secretary in the Excise Section. In the evenings he became 'Gabriel's editor, proof-reader, Italian linguistic adviser, moneylender, protector, supporter, mediator, confidant, memorialiser and general gofer'.
A shy man, William found an entrée into the world of art and artists he so admired when his brother, with Holman Hunt and Millais. founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. William was 19, and permitted to join as 'secretary'. He edited their short-lived magazine, The Germ, and kept a journal of their meetings. This introduction led to work as an art critic, first for The Spectator, then for numerous British and American papers, presenting the art of his friends to an American audience, and Oriental and the new French art to the British.
He also edited the first British edition of Whitman's poems, and wrote prolifically on his friend Swinburne, as well as on his pas sion, the Romantic poets. He helped Trelawney prepare a new edition of his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, was one of the earliest contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, produced over 50 entries for two editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and, most importantly, handed down to posterity endless works by and about Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti.
In essence, he was the perfect Victorian homme des lettres. What lifted him above the mass was his extraordinary family. In addition to his talented siblings William's father Gabriele, a political refugee, was a Dante scholar. His half-Italian mother was the sister of the Dr Polidori who was Byron's travelling doctor and a participant in the famous ghost-story session on Lake Geneva that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Their sister, Eliza, another formidable personality, nursed with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea.
William felt that he himself was not made for this kind of greatness, but was instead an enabler. One that he perhaps did not enable was his wife, Lucy Madox Brown, the child of another famous family. Her father was the painter Ford Madox Brown; her nephew, Ford Madox Hueffer, changed his name and became the novelist Ford Madox Ford. Lucy was brought up by an aunt after her mother died, and she became a painter only in her twenties. She had a modest success, which the paintings, lavishly illustrated in Thirlwell's book, indicate was about right: competent but not outstanding, they echoed the current trends without having anything particular to contribute themselves.
Thirlwell would like us to admire Lucy, but she has an uphill struggle. Lucy's was a rebarbative character, and she herself noted she had 'a capacity for inspiring dislike'. After their marriage in 1874, William took Lucy home to live with his mother and sister; mother and sister decamped down the road shortly thereafter. And her life became more purely domestic with her marriage. She now confined herself to babies (five in seven years) and painting the odd watercolour landscape or drawing a relation or servant. Despite a chapter entitled 'Artist', Thirlwell finds herself reduced to sentences like 'As wife and mother, Lucy channelled her creativity into design and dressmaking.' The sense of a lack of achievement is not simply looking back from a 21st-century viewpoint. Her daughter's friend Olive Garnett regretted 'that her gifted mind should apparently produce so little'. And the Times obituary summed up neatly:
Mrs Lucy Rossetti, wife of the author and critic Mr William Michael Rossetti, died at San Remo, Italy ... She was the eldest daughter of the late distinguished painter Mr Ford Madox Brown. Almost by accident she became herself an artist of merit.
Not, perhaps, the epitaph most of us would like.
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