The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics

Abstract

The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics Mary Arseneau (bio) Phyllis Weliver's Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon breaks new ground in describing the political, intellectual, aesthetic, and social history of the important semipublic space of the Victorian salon. As Weliver's book illustrates, Mary Gladstone's influential weekly gatherings assembled political, intellectual, musical, artistic, and religious leaders and facilitated a network of liberal thought and activity. I believe that this very convincing approach and argument can be expanded to include another circle—the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Whereas in the Gladstone home illustrious and prominent statesmen, Anglican clergy, Oxbridge intellectuals, and artistic geniuses gathered,1 the Fitzroy Square set was decidedly more bohemian and unofficial: as Justin McCarthy describes in his Reminiscences, during the period contemporaneous with the Gladstones' salons, an artistic London Bohemia developed around Fitzroy Square, "the home of many painters and sculptors, authors and actors, journalists and politicians."2 As we shall see, Pre-Raphaelite associate and painter Ford Madox Brown was hosting regular gatherings at his Fitzroy Square home, "brilliant parties"3 that were held "[f]ortnightly from 1866 for about 8 years"4 and were regularly attended by the core group of the Pre-Raphaelite circle including Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Rossetti; William Holman Hunt; Algernon Charles Swinburne; William Morris; and many more. In Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, Madox Brown's grandson Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Madox Hueffer) goes on to say that "Music was represented by Theo Marzials and Dr. Hueffer, who championed the music of the future in those past days."5 In addition, there were a substantial number of social and artistic events that involved music—many of which have been largely overlooked in Pre-Raphaelite records and scholarship—events that gathered key figures in the Pre-Raphaelite circle as well as a broader network. It must be acknowledged that there is a pattern of omissions that resulted in a failure to record and include musical events in the Pre-Raphaelite [End Page 215] history; also ready to be acknowledged is a synergy between the Gladstone and Fitzroy Square salon circles, the individuals who moved between both these sets, and the important cultural outcomes fostered by both. Indeed, there were many intersecting salon circles in the 1870s, and many of these included music in their gatherings. There were certainly religious, aesthetic, poetic, and musical areas of convergence between the interests of these sets, such as, for instance, a July 6, 1887, concert of music based on Shelley's poetry, hosted in William Michael Rossetti's home for the Shelley Society, organized by his wife Lucy Rossetti and her friend, composer and professional musician Mary Grant Carmichael (who also set poems by Christina Rossetti and Oliver Madox Brown),6 and featuring an instrumental ensemble under the direction of Sir C. Hubert H. Parry performing his choral cantata, Scenes from Prometheus Unbound, among other works. Parry, in addition to being a regular and significant presence in the Gladstone salon, was a leading composer and later head of the Royal College of Music, who also set poetry by Christina Rossetti. Parry's composition Scenes from Prometheus Unbound (a work in which Shelley, music, and political circles and ideals coalesced in fascinating ways, as Weliver has demonstrated7) has been identified as the inaugural moment of the English Musical Renaissance.8 The English Musical Renaissance and the Royal College of Music, significant developments that were instrumentally supported by the Gladstone set, had enormous impact on the immediate and long-term presence and visibility of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, owing to the English Musical Renaissance goal of setting excellent English poetry to music and the Royal College of Music's mission to train excellent native musicians and composers. Pre-Raphaelite poetry enjoyed serious and continued attention, participating in this wave of musical development. There is a significant overlap too between the two salon circles' involvement in the English folk music revival. The Pre-Raphaelites also continued the vision shared by the Gladstone set of music as instrumental in civic and spiritual health—a movement that began in the 1840s as the rational recreation movement and blossomed...