Lizzie Siddal

  First published in 2004 by André Deutsch

  An imprint of the Carlton Publishing Group

  20 Mortimer Street

  London W1T 3JW

  Reprinted in 2008

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Text copyright © Lucinda Hawksley 2004

  Design copyright © André Deutsch 2004

  The right of Lucinda Hawksley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the Publisher’s prior consent.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-78012-168-0

  eISBN 978-1-78012-169-7

  Every effort has been made to acknowledge correctly and contact the source and/or copyright holder of each picture, and Carlton Books Limited apologises for any unintentional errors or omissions which will be corrected in future editions of this book.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1 The Red-Haired Model

  2 A Pre-Raphaelite Muse

  3 Dante and Beatrice

  4 Painting the Dream

  5 Falling in Love with Ophelia

  6 “Why does he not marry her?”

  7 Lizzie’s Mysterious Illness

  8 Rossetti and Ruskin

  9 Meeting the Ruskins and the Rossettis

  10 Seeking a Cure

  11 “She hath no loyal Knight and true”

  12 In Sickness and In Health

  13 “So we two wore our strange estate: Familiar, unaffected, free”

  14 The Queen of Hearts

  15 “The hour which might have been”

  16 “How is it in the unknown land?”

  17 “Lord May I Come”

  18 The Coroner’s Verdict

  19 Without Her

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Dedication

  For Dominique, Laura and Vanessa, with love and thanks for the encouragement, inspiration and wonderful conversations.

  In memory of Hugh De Fonblanque, a wonderful godfather and a wonderful man.

  Acknowledgements

  With many thanks to my agent, Christopher Sinclair Stevenson, and Miranda West at André Deutsch, both of whom were superbly supportive.

  With extra special thanks to Sandra Sljivic-Georgiadis.

  Many thanks to Peter and Julie Peel; Dominique and Pam Kenway; and Louise, Paul, Natalie and Dani Ruse for being such lovely hosts while I was researching. Also to Joanna Baldwin, Clare Double, Helen Povall and Becky Sherrington-Cross for timely help with the research.

  I am indebted to the staff and facilities at various local studies libraries, in particular Southwark, Holborn, St James’s, Hastings and Sheffield; also to Denise Chantry and the Bath Library. Thank you to the staff at the British Library, the Wellcome Library and the Sheffield Archives; to Ann Price at the Hope Historical Society; to Helen Ellerton at the William Morris Society in Hammersmith; the curators of Red House, in Kent; and all those scholars and biographers who knew, or have researched the life of, Lizzie Siddal.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Red-Haired Model

  In mid-nineteenth-century London, if you wanted to buy a hat, you would have made your way to the area around Leicester Square. The narrow thoroughfares that were Cranbourne Street, Cranbourne Alley and Cranbourne Passage were the places to go, crammed with milliners, mantle-makers and dressmakers. The streets were so narrow, the shops so numerous and the roads so crowded that it was difficult to pass along them unimpeded. Any lady naïve enough to find herself in this district while wearing an unfashionable bonnet or cloak would be swamped by overwhelming offers of assistance and numerous entreaties to buy a new one, often accompanied by tussles over the potential customer by rival shops’ assistants. There were incidences of women having their clothes ripped or even being temporarily “kidnapped” by over-eager salesgirls, who would seize the witless wanderer and hurry her into their shop before any rival snapped her up. In the late 1840s, 3 Cranbourne Street was a hat shop, owned by a Mrs Mary Tozer. To help her in the business, Mrs Tozer employed several attractive girls and women, who not only made the hats and worked as shop assistants but could also model the headgear to its best advantage. One of these was a young woman named Elizabeth, or “Lizzie” Siddall (later changed to Siddal).

  In 1849, Lizzie was twenty years old and had lived an unremarkable life. She was tall and slender with large eyes and long hair the colour of pale copper. Striking, rather than beautiful, especially with those huge, heavy-lidded eyes in such a small face, Lizzie did not conform to the contemporary ideal of beauty. Her greatest considered attributes at this date were that she had perfect deportment, fine facial bone structure and was unusual looking. A woman one would look at and remember. By fashionable dictates, however, she was too tall, not womanly because she was not curvaceous and her hair was red – most definitely not considered an attribute. Superstition still deemed that red hair was unlucky and associated it with witches, black magic and a biblical reference to Judas Iscariot having red hair. Although the educated classes would have scoffed at such a notion of a hair colour being unlucky, there was a far larger number of uneducated people in Britain, who continued to believe red hair was something to be shunned and to be afraid of. The poet Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), who was to become one of Lizzie’s most devoted friends, had hair of an almost identical colour to hers. He related stories of how, when he was a child, the people in his local village had regular forays to throw stones at red squirrels, as their coppery fur was believed to be the cause of bad luck. Common folklore dictated it was unlucky if the first person you saw in the morning was a redhead, particularly a woman with red hair. Maritime superstition decreed that redheads brought bad luck to a ship (so, apparently, did flat-footed people); if a sailor could not avoid making a voyage with a redhead, he was warned he must speak to the red-haired person before that unpropitious being uttered even a syllable to him, in order to reverse the bad luck.

  These superstitions sound ridiculous today, but they were long lived and deep seated. The belief that red hair is unlucky dates back to the Egyptians, who burned redheaded women alive in an attempt to wipe them all out. Queen Elizabeth I finally made red hair popular in England, and stopped the English persecution of redheads for being witches or warlocks, but even three hundred years after Elizabeth’s reign other prejudices against red hair remained among the ignorant. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Lizzie often suffered teasing for the hair that was destined to become her greatest feature.1

  Mrs Tozer’s employees worked long hours and in tiring conditions. Although the shop itself had a large display window so potential customers could see the hats, the working area where these were created was badly lit, with just one small window that looked out to the back of the building on a scrubby patch of mud and grass. The girls would start work early in the morning and usually continue until 8 p.m. During especially busy times, such as the London Season, their hours would be extended and they could sometimes work all night. Lizzie, who lived in Southwark, often walked home from work with a colleague named Jeanette, who also lived south of the river. The girls were not particularly close friends, but it was not safe to be on one’s own in the dark, so the company of someone else was necessary as well as welcome on such a long walk.

  Little is known of Jeanette except that she had a host of admirers, including the Irish poet William Allingham (1824–89).2 At the end of 1849 Allingham was
working as a customs officer, but had finished his first volume of poetry, had had it accepted and was waiting for it to be published. He did not live in London but made frequent visits there, both on business and to see friends. These friends included the recently formed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle – in particular, the promising young artist Walter Howell Deverell (1827–54). When Allingham made his visit to London in the winter of 1849–50, he found his friend struggling with a painting he wanted to exhibit at the Royal Academy. It was of a scene from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Deverell was desperately seeking a model for Viola. In the end, it was Allingham who found the solution to his friend’s problem, and that was quite by chance. Being in London, he decided to visit Jeanette and offer to walk her home from work. They were accompanied by a tall, silent workmate, Lizzie Siddall.

  Allingham was not initially overly impressed by the redheaded girl, finding her “stuck up” and dull; although he was presumably somewhat prejudiced against her for her unintentional intrusion on his intended romantic walk. Despite this unpropitious start, Lizzie and Allingham went on to become good friends. After her death, Allingham wrote that “She was sweet, gentle and kindly, and sympathetic to art and poetry … Her pale face, abundant red hair and long, thin limbs were strange and affecting, never beautiful in my eyes.” At this first meeting, however, he did know she would be perfect as Deverell’s model, not least because she was so slim. Deverell wanted to paint Viola in boy’s clothing and was despairing of finding a woman without prominent curves; he had also hoped to find a red-haired model.3 He was painting the episode when Viola disguises herself as Cesario, Duke Orsino’s page-boy, and he needed a woman who would look plausible in a pair of breeches.

  After being told about Lizzie, Deverell made a visit to Cranbourne Street – one hopes he had the foresight to wear a fashionable hat – to observe Lizzie through the display window. He was thrilled by her and agreed wholeheartedly that Allingham had discovered a genuine “Stunner” (the Rossettian word for any beautiful woman and a term quickly adopted by all the Pre-Raphaelites). It was out of the question for Deverell to approach an unknown young woman himself, so he asked his indulgent mother to talk to Lizzie on his behalf.

  Mrs Deverell visited Mrs Tozer’s shop, accompanied by her son, and promptly introduced herself and Walter to Lizzie, voicing his request in the most tactful manner possible. It was a shock to this previously unfêted young woman to be singled out and offered quite bluntly such a very unusual proposition. Although deeply flattered, Lizzie was wary of the offer and uncertain of exactly what it entailed – in the 1840s modelling for an artist was perceived as being synonymous with prostitution and Lizzie’s upbringing had been strictly religious. Modelling was not something any respectable woman thought of doing, unless either related to the artist or sitting for one’s elegant portrait, yet Walter’s mother carried her audience beyond this very understandable prejudice and into an entirely favourable frame of mind; she seemed, indeed, unaware that there could be even the vaguest of reasons to demur, so, in the end, they did not. Mrs Deverell’s very obvious respectability and her reassurances of propriety at all times allowed her to convince both Lizzie and the more worldly-wise Mrs Tozer to agree to the proposition. Walter’s indomitable mother then set out for an entirely different part of London from the one she inhabited – to visit Lizzie’s equally formidable mother in the Old Kent Road.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Pre-Raphaelite Muse

  Elizabeth Eleanor Evans, although of Welsh extraction, was brought up in Hornsey, Middlesex. It was here that she married Charles Siddall, a cutler from Sheffield, on December 13, 1824. They lived for a while in London after their marriage, before returning to Sheffield for an unspecified period. By 1828 they had moved back to London, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Charles was not a rich man, but he had a rich heritage, of which he was extremely proud. In a tale reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles he spent the greater part of his life – and any profits from his business – attempting to prove he was the rightful owner of the Crossdaggers, a family business, in the Derbyshire village of Hope.4 The Crossdaggers, which was still referred to by locals by its former name of Hope Hall, was a coaching inn set within its own seventy acres of farmland. It would have provided Charles with a good, steady income and was considerably grander than anything he could hope to aspire to while working as a cutler. From 1720 until 1756, the property was owned and run by a James Siddall, who passed it on to Thomas Siddall (presumably his son).Thomas ran it from 1757 until 1807, when the direct family line died out and it was taken over by George Bentley.5

  The Siddall family was, by a convoluted route, descended from a wealthy and influential Derbyshire family, the Eyres.6 Hope Hall was, at one time, the property of the Eyre family and, although there were a great many branches of both families, Charles Siddall did have a legal right to claim ownership of the property. He was, however, to be frustrated at every turn and died without securing the home and recognition he wanted so desperately for his children and grandchildren. The legal battle placed an enormous strain on the family and drained them financially. Charles’s children dreaded every new development in the lawsuit, knowing it would lead to yet more legal bills and place even more stress on their father’s health. Eventually, Lizzie’s sister, Clara, decided to spare her father – and the rest of the family – any more worry and expense from the distressing legal case and threw all the relevant documents and papers on the fire. Charles’s reaction to this has not been recorded.7

  The Siddalls’ two eldest children, Annie and Charles, were born before their parents decided to make a permanent home for their family in London. In the early years of their marriage, Eleanor and Charles deliberated between London and Sheffield, trying to decide which was the better location to start up a business and raise their children.8 By the time Lizzie was born, they had made the decision to leave Sheffield for good and were living in the London borough of Holborn. Named Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, after her mother, Lizzie came into the world on July 25, 1829 at the family’s home at 7 Charles Street, Hatton Garden.

  It is popular in biographies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) (who later became Lizzie’s husband) for Lizzie to be described as growing up in a “slum” and for their class differences to be greatly magnified. In reality, however, the social gulf between them was not so enormous. Rossetti’s parents had come to London as political refugees from Italy; they later married and raised a family, never returning to their native country. His father, Gabriele, attained a position as a university lecturer, which afforded him social status, but not a particularly large salary. The family struggled to keep up with the strict requirements of the society into which they had moved, such as the need to have servants and to maintain a rigidly particular way of life. When Gabriele’s health began to deteriorate, Dante Rossetti’s sisters and mother felt the need to work – albeit at more genteel pursuits than millinery – and it was his younger brother, William, who kept the family finances afloat by securing a good salary while still a teenager and taking over from his father as the breadwinner.

  Lizzie Siddall’s parents arrived in London as reluctant refugees from the middle class to the lower, but with great aspirations of one day owning their own home and employing a servant. It was this dream that led to a relentlessly downward spiral in their finances, caused by the extravagant burden of legal fees and Charles Siddall’s refusal to accept defeat in the lawsuit. If he had been able to give up the dream of Hope Hall and had invested his profits more wisely, Charles’s family might have ended up in quite different financial circumstances. They would never have been wealthy, but they could have been more comfortable, financially.

  At the time of Lizzie’s birth, her parents were not poverty stricken, as popular belief would have it. Her father had his own cutlery-making business, run from home in Charles Street. He also had an interest in another cutlery business at 13 Cecil Street, the Strand, run by
a Mr J. F. Taylor.9 Over the years, Charles Siddall is described variably in official directories as being a “cutler”, an “optician” and an “ironmonger”. At one time, he is described as owning a “Sheffield Warehouse”, though as this was run from his home premises, it was obviously the same business and not a larger concern. Despite this inconsistency, the main business was the making and selling of cutlery, sharpening knives and scissors and, in later years, running a general ironmongery shop.

  When the Siddalls lived in Hatton Garden, it was most definitely not a slum. It was not yet renowned for the jewellery and diamond shops which make it famous today – they didn’t start arriving until after the Australian gold rush in the early 1850s – but it was certainly not one of London’s worst areas. The area has a rich history and was a fascinating place to live. In the twenty-first century, Hatton Garden is mainly an area of retailers, but in the 1820s and 1830s it was a varied mixture of teeming commercial premises and family homes with people of several social classes and brackets of income intermingling. Charles Street (now called Cross Street) ran perpendicular to Hatton Garden itself. Part way along it was Bleeding Heart Yard, immortalized by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit. Dickens was very fond of setting his plots around this historic area of London: just up the road from the Siddalls’ home is the police station to which Oliver Twist was taken after being caught stealing Mr Brownlow’s handkerchief; the area is also mentioned in Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House.

  There were, however, some definite slum areas around Holborn and several very undesirable streets within easy reach of Lizzie’s home. Not far away was an area known as Coldbath Fields, named for the presence of a “healing” spring which had been discovered in the 1700s, although by the 1830s the spring had been all but forgotten. By this time, the fields housed a prison and the toddler Lizzie and her older siblings would have regularly seen prisoners being marched (or dragged) along nearby roads to incarceration. At the other end of the scale, Hatton Garden was also home to some eminent and prosperous inhabitants, including one of the Siddalls’ near neighbours, Sir Moses Montefiore, business partner of the great financier Baron M. N. Rothschild.