The Pre-Raphaelites

Abstract

The Pre-Raphaelites Florence S. Boos (bio) The year brought more books, articles, edited letters and essay collections on the Pre-Raphaelites than can fit into a synopsis of conventional length. In what follows I will consider two volumes which offer synthetic studies of Pre-Raphaelitism as a whole, a variety of essays and book chapters focused on Christina Rossetti, Dante Rossetti and William Morris, and a comprehensive edition of the letters of Jane Morris. The Pre-Raphaelites and Rossettis The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interactive Aesthetics (Peter Lang) by Paola Spinozzi and Elisa Bizzotto approaches Pre-Raphaelitism as a whole through the narrower lens of its originary periodical, a perspective which enables its authors to reconsider the ways in which the youthful Pre-Raphaelites' Victorian romanticism shocked their contemporaries and influenced their successors. Spinozzi and Bizzotto give careful attention to the views of less-often-cited figures such as William Michael Rossetti, Frederick Stephens, Walter Deverell, John Orchard, John Tupper, and Thomas Woolner, and in particular to their conviction that practicing artists in several media should be articulate critical intellectuals, who explained and interpreted the principles of their work in ways which influenced later periodicals such as The Century Guild, The Hobby Horse, and The Yellow Book. [End Page 402] In the book's first chapter, entitled "Origins and Propagations," the authors lay out The Germ's history, founders, brief four-issue run, initially favorable reception, and emphasis on manifestos as well as essays on art. Ignoring for the most part William Holman Hunt's claim that he and John Everett Millais were the originators of a Ruskin-influenced critique of Old Masters and advocacy of more direct and authentic views of the visual arts, they focus on the uneasy coexistence of the Rossettis' attempts to ally progressive calls for "truth to nature" with romantic medievalism and mildly "gothic" psychological states. In chapter two, "A Biographical Perspective on the Germ," the authors offer brief assessments of the contributions and perspectives of each contributor, and bring into focus such figures as Robert Campbell and William Bell Scott. The section on "Ellen Alleyn," for example, argues that Christina Rossetti permitted her elder brother to provide her with a pen-name and select from among her poems those he thought fit for inclusion, but took a keen if sometimes critical interest in the project and offered advice and commentary from a distance. In chapter three, "Aesthetic Prose in The Germ: Moulding a Literary Mode," Spinozzi and Bizzotto argue that the periodical modeled forms of self-referential aesthetic prose in which "statements acquire full significance only through a specific formal structure" (p. 100). Rossetti's "Hand and Soul," for example, modeled the psychological romance and "imaginary portrait," and essays by John Tupper, John Orchard, John Frederick Stephens, and Coventry Patmore considered the roles of critics, principles of close observation, and the interrelations of verbal, visual, and other arts. In chapter four, "Germinal Poetical Imageries: From Pre-Raphaelitism to the Fin de Siècle and Modernism," the authors offer critical commentary on each of the periodical's poetic selections by John Orchard, Thomas Woolner, Walter Deverell, James Collinson, Robert Campbell, Coventry Patmore, and the three Rossettis. Arguing that these writers anticipated later Pre-Raphaelite poetic sensibilities, they endeavor to find common strands in their use of symbolism and portrayals of natural details, romantic relationships, and transcendence, and clarify ways in which common literary models and tacit common principles anticipated subsequent paradigms (Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures" later "picture poems," for example). In chapter five, "The Germ as the Prototype of the Artist's Magazine," the authors conjecture that fine art/literature magazines such as The Savoy (1896), The Idler (1892-98), and the English Review (1908-37) were influenced by the example of the Germ and adopted some of its "constitutive aspects," among them "the Romantic legacy, the presence of charismatic personalities, interart [End Page 403] osmosis, aspiration to the Gesamtkunstwerk, [and] ambivalent relationship with the public and the market" (p. 199). They also give consideration to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and assert that in a comparison, "The Germ wins" in importance (p. 196), a debatable assertion in the light...