Lizzie Siddal Read online

  Barbara added, as the greatest of compliments, “although she is not a lady her mind is poetic”. Lizzie’s and Rossetti’s reinvention of her life had been broad. Her modelling for Millais could not be ignored as Ophelia had become so well known, but neither Holman Hunt’s nor Deverell’s paintings were widely recognized, so the lovers were able to cut away at the truth, revealing it only piece by piece. Lizzie was, for some reason, keen to develop a fiction about a terribly hard, unhappy childhood – related here with undertones of abuse. Rossetti had also been told this version of her early years.

  Barbara’s interest was genuine and when Rossetti required assistance in solving the problem of Lizzie’s poor health, Barbara was quick to offer hers. At last she had an opportunity of helping this interesting and tragic girl with whom she had become quite enthralled. Barbara found Lizzie suitable accommodation in Hastings town centre and explained that she would be at her own property, Scalands Farm, in the countryside outside the town, so she, Bessie and the visiting Anna Mary would be on hand to nurse Lizzie if necessary and to keep her company when she needed friendship.

  Hastings’ popularity as a health resort was due largely to its clean, clear sea water. At that date, it was not the concept of swimming in the sea that was seen as especially beneficial, but drinking the sea water.45 The town was also famed for its plentiful supply of fresh fish, perceived as ideal food for invalids, and the presence of nearby natural springs, whose water could be drunk as a cure. Hastings was equally favoured by doctors because of its mild climate, which meant not only that the weather was usually clement enough for even the most delicate of invalids to journey outside but also negated the need for constant indoor fires – the smoke from coal fires being the main contributory factor to London’s choking smog. Because of this, Hastings was often recommended for anyone suffering from respiratory problems, such as consumption or asthma.

  For the non-invalid, there was not a great deal to do in this newly popular town. The local government was strictly moral so there was no theatre or concert hall (one was finally built in 1876), although there was a bandstand. The biggest attraction, and the one that drew in day-trippers from London and elsewhere, was the beach. In 1857, an article in the Illustrated Times commented:

  [there are] visitors here of all sorts from the noble Lord to the poor London warehouseman and occasionally the great Premier comes down for a day or two to see his step-daughter, Lady Jocelyn. On Sunday, shoals of Londoners swarm upon the beach … The gentlemen do little all day long but bathe, and promenade, and lounge, and look through telescopes … You can scarcely meet a lady who is not reading a shilling volume … The most elegant and healthful recreation is riding on horseback.46

  April 1854 was a severely trying time for Rossetti. Lizzie was desperately ill and wanted him to be with her in Hastings. Barbara, Bessie and Anna Mary all wrote several times from Sussex, urging him to hurry there and see her as they were so worried about the consequences if he did not. Meanwhile, in London, Gabriele Rossetti was dying. Dante was having to come to terms not only with his father’s imminent death but also with his own new position as head of the family, ultimately making him responsible for his mother and sisters. Gabriele’s health had been very poor for the last decade. His eyesight had started to fade first, after which his general health had deteriorated humiliatingly. In 1843 he had been forced to give up work, leading to his daughters and wife needing to find employment. Maria quickly found full-time employment as a governess, but Mrs Rossetti and Christina seemed doomed not to be successful in their chosen sphere. They wanted to run a school and, over the next few years, set up two schools, the first in London and the second in Somerset, but neither were any good at making money and they ended up relying, as Dante did, on the sensible, solid salary earned by William.

  When the children had been growing up, the Rossetti family had lived at the fashionable address of 50 Charlotte Street in central London, but in 1850, seven years of Gabriele’s poor health and financial insecurity had taken their toll and the family relocated to the less salubrious and less central 38 Arlington Road, in Mornington Crescent. The following year, Gabriele, Frances and Christina left London for the Somerset countryside, partly so that Gabriele could convalesce and partly so that the two women could follow their favourite minister, who had recently moved to the Frome area and promised to help them set up their new school. They had remained in Somerset, failing miserably at making their fortune, for a year, until William was able to pay for them to move back to London in March 1852. Maria had stayed behind in London to keep house for William. She had also earned a small wage from teaching Italian to private students. Gabriele, a proud and erudite man, must have found his failing eyesight and his forced reliance on his younger son galling in equal parts. Added to this was the dilettante lifestyle of his eldest son and namesake, the one who should have been providing for the family but was instead not earning enough from his painting, refusing to work at anything else and flirting with models. Gabriele was inordinately proud of his eldest son’s painting, but he knew that it would not make enough money to support the family after his own death. His knowledge that his son was right to pursue the career he was so obviously destined for fought against Gabriele’s desire for Dante to be as reliable as William in providing for his family.

  Gabriele died on April 26, 1854, after a demeaningly lingering illness. There is scant mention of his death in Rossetti’s remaining letters and he seemed reluctant to grieve, preferring instead to concentrate on his plans to visit Lizzie as soon as the funeral was over. In later years, Rossetti’s grief over the death of his father would resurface and contribute to his very poor mental health at the end of his life. In 1854, however, he was determined to cope and to do the right thing both for his family and for the woman with whom he was in love.

  On May 1, Barbara Leigh Smith sent him an urgent letter, requesting he come and see Lizzie as she was so dangerously ill and enclosing a similar missive from Bessie Parkes, which made him “very uneasy”. For once Lizzie was moved to let him know that she was not as ill as their friends feared, but he was too distracted to know what to believe. He replied to Barbara on May 2, letting her know he would set off as soon as possible:

  My dear Miss Smith,

  I shall try and come to Hastings tomorrow evening or the next day to see Miss Siddal. Thanks most sincerely for your letter, the kindest you could have written. If possible, I shall take the liberty of calling on you at the address you give. Perhaps you know that since I saw you, we have lost my father. I think I should start for Hastings to-day, only that his funeral is fixed for tomorrow.

  With kindest regards to Miss Howitt and Miss Parkes, to whom I shall ever feel grateful for her kindness to Miss Siddal at Hastings.

  True to his word, Rossetti left for Hastings as soon as the funeral was over, barely staying to comfort his family, convinced he was about to lose Lizzie as well as his father.

  By the mid-1850s, Hastings was the fourth largest health resort in the country.47 The train service from London was regular and efficient, with the direct journey taking just over two hours. Rossetti arrived in the town to find that Lizzie was, as she had declared, not dangerously ill, but simply her usual delicate self. In many ways her health was much improved, not least because she was in good spirits. Her frailty, charm and elegant manners had won her the affection of many of the other residents at her boarding house and a great number of sympathetic ladies had become her willing attendants. She was also being regularly visited by Bessie Parkes, who nursed her selflessly.

  Rossetti wrote again to Barbara, thanking her, Bessie and Anna for their attentiveness and recognizing that the fear they had entertained arose from their not knowing how ill Lizzie habitually looked: “I have known her for several years,” he wrote, “and always in a state hardly less variable than now; and I can understand that those who have not had so long a knowledge of her will naturally be more liable to alarm on her account than I am. Nevertheless I am quite a
ware that she is in a most delicate state.”

  Before his arrival, Barbara had been busy trying to persuade Lizzie that she should be admitted to the Sussex Infirmary, a ghastly thought as hospital hygiene was so appalling that many patients ended their time in hospital in a far worse state than when they had arrived. Lizzie was determined not to go into hospital – apart from the fact that hospitals were such dreaded places, she wanted to be cared for by Rossetti. If she went into hospital, he would be allowed in only at strictly regulated times and they would never be alone together, which also meant she would not know what he was doing in the numerous hours he would be apart from her. There was also the fear that in hospital she would not be able to dose herself with laudanum whenever she craved it. Dr Wilkinson backed up Rossetti in his refusal to admit her, but Barbara continued to suggest hospitalization for Lizzie for the next few years, including the suggestion that Lizzie attend Barbara’s cousin’s new hospital for women in London – her cousin being Florence Nightingale, currently on the brink of national fame for her mission to the Crimea.48

  When Rossetti arrived in Hastings he took a room in an inn on East Parade, but within days he had moved into the same lodgings as Lizzie, at 5 High Street (now in the Old Town), run by a Mrs Elphick. He wrote to his mother, in a letter quite tactlessly happy in tone: “No one thinks it at all odd my going into the Gug’s room to sit there; and Barbara Smith said to the landlady how inadvisable it would be for her to sit with me in a room without fire.” He raved about the weather, the views, the perfect countryside then, almost as an aside, added that of course he had not been the merriest of companions, mourning his father as he was. Lizzie, he added, had been sketching and her health was vastly improved; she had even been able to take bracing walks with him across the Downs, as well as being able to journey several miles to nearby Robertsbridge to visit Barbara at Scalands Farm. That Dante, at this mournful time, instead of being with his mother, would rather be with a woman they barely knew – and who was brazen enough to allow him to visit her alone in her room – was galling in the extreme.

  Rossetti had not intended to stay in Hastings for more than a week, but on May 12 (his birthday) he wrote a somewhat melancholy letter to William Allingham explaining that his plans for returning to town had been thwarted by Lizzie taking a turn for the worse. He was missing his studio and his social life, and finding the daily sight of an increasingly ailing Lizzie an unwelcome addition to the breakfast table. Having come to Hastings without expectations of spending so much money on food and board, he was soon out of cash, finding he did not even have enough to pay for a train ticket home, had he been allowed to leave Lizzie’s side. Yet as soon as his uncelebrated birthday was past, and Lizzie started to regain some of her vitality, Rossetti’s mood improved. His other correspondence suggests that their time in Hastings and Robertsbridge was one of liberation and fun. On May 23 Rossetti wrote to Madox Brown in high spirits:

  Lizzy … is looking lovelier than ever, but is very weak, though not so much as one might expect. She has walked a good deal till the last day or two, when we have been working. She has spent two very pleasant days at Barbara Smith’s farm, some miles from here, and just while I write a letter reaches me asking us to go down again to-day, but I do not suppose we shall, as it is wet. Everyone adores and reveres Lizzy. Barbara Smith, Miss Howitt, and I, made sketches of her dear head with iris stuck in her dear hair the other day … There are most wonderful things to paint there, and here and everywhere.

  Despite the recent death of Gabriele – or because his father’s death had made Rossetti reassess the value of life – this two-month sojourn in Hastings appears to have been one of the happiest times in their life together. They walked contentedly along the cliffs and the beach, noting perfect spots for painting backgrounds. They sat at Lovers’ Seat, a resting place for ramblers with views to inspire even the ailing Lizzie. While out walking one day, they met a young girl who was looking after her even younger sister. She had exotic looks, like a gypsy, which Lizzie ached to sketch. The girl came to sit for her a few days later. Rossetti wrote to Allingham that he had been “disgracefully idle” while in Hastings, but his idleness failed to disconcert him. He was rejoicing in this deliciously romantic repose.

  It has been claimed that it was during this spring, while walking in the grounds at Scalands Farm, that Rossetti proposed to Lizzie. Barbara added weight to this theory by revealing that Rossetti carved his and Lizzie’s initials into the wood of one of the window-frames (although it seems this was something of a tradition with guests and probably held little extra significance). He may well have proposed – there were several instances in their relationship when he suggested marriage – but any spontaneous proposal was certainly not made official and a wedding remained resolutely unplanned. May 1854 would have been a strategically cunning time for Rossetti to suggest marriage: following the death of his father, a year of mourning would be expected to be observed before a wedding could take place, so he would have been able to make Lizzie happy by proposing but also please himself by knowing he need not marry her yet.

  At the end of May, Rossetti postponed his plans to return to London yet again, due to another relapse of Lizzie’s health. This time he wrote to his brother, explaining he dared not leave her. These sudden relapses and the constant need to have Rossetti near her may not only have been attributable to Lizzie herself: it is apparent in his letters that Rossetti felt proud about her desperate need for him. It ensured their relationship remained on the footing both of them felt happiest with – Lizzie playing the part of his unchaperoned lover in need of protection and Rossetti assuming the role of her chivalric knight, willing to leave friends and family behind in order to be with her.

  It was not only Lizzie’s physical health that improved in Sussex. Her mental state also blossomed, not only from the change of air and food but from the knowledge that she did not have to share Dante with anyone. She had no need to feel jealous of the three women at Scalands, all of whom fretted over and petted her as much as Rossetti did.49 There were no predatory models, no tiresome and confining family and no high-spirited friends tempting him out to the theatre or to the pleasure gardens. Lizzie was able to keep her lover with her for two glorious months, returning with him triumphantly to London at the start of July.

  Back in London, Barbara was still agitating for Lizzie to go into hospital but, as Rossetti confided to Allingham, he thought the atmosphere of so much disease and illness would depress her dangerously. After their two months in Hastings the lovers were used to spending all their time together and Lizzie settled down quite happily to work at her art in the studio in Chatham Place. Her desire to paint provided Rossetti with another excuse for not allowing her to be admitted into hospital, saying, quite truthfully, that she was at her most healthy when occupied in painting and his studio was therefore the most obvious and safe place for her to be. Her time at Hastings had been a wonderfully creative period and this continued after their return. Lizzie had also begun to write poetry though, as none of her poems is dated, it is difficult to tell which date from this period, or indeed if her earliest works even survive.

  During their time in Hastings, the two artists had been occupied by sketching or painting. Initially, while she was too ill to work, Rossetti made endless sketches of Lizzie reclining in an invalid chair while she designed in her head all the pictures she would paint when she was better. As her health improved, she started work on Clerk Saunders, the first of several intended designs to accompany a book of ballads – Lizzie’s favourite poetic form – that Allingham was planning to edit. She also drew illustrations for the old Scottish ballads, “The Lass of Lochroyan” and “The Gay Goss Hawk”, both of which tell the story of cruel parents using their powers to prevent – or to attempt to prevent – two young lovers from being together. The countryside around Hastings provided the inspiration for her backgrounds.

  Clerk Saunders, now one of Lizzie’s best-known paintings, comes from a seventeenth-cen
tury ballad about two of Lizzie’s most popular themes, those of doomed love between different social classes and untimely death. In the ballad, Clerk Saunders is in love with May Margaret, whom he hopes to marry. When her seven brothers find him innocently asleep beside May Margaret, they are convinced the pair are lovers and murder him as he sleeps. When she wakes it is to the horror that she is lying beside his corpse. On the night after his funeral, his ghost comes back to her; she pleads with it to enter the room and kiss her, but he knows if he kisses her she will die. So he asks her to kiss the branch of a tree amd to lay it on his grave so that the kiss will reach him. Then he tells her she must marry another man, but asks her never to love her husband as much as she loves him. Lizzie painted the scene where Clerk Saunders’s ghost has entered May Margaret’s room. It is an emaciated figure with a gaunt face and hands outstretched as though pleading with her. She is kneeling on the bed, gazing up at him and kissing the branch she will later lay on his grave. The colours are rich and well chosen, but the most impressive aspect of Clerk Saunders is the way Lizzie recreated the differing shades of dawn light. The town outside May Margaret’s window is bright in a chilly early morning sun, but the limited amount of light that is able to reach in through her sole window makes the room glow as with the edge of the sunrise. Both faces are illuminated in ghastly white, Clerk Saunders’s ghostly, May Margaret’s wan with grief, but the other colours in the room reflect the sunlight and give back rich hues of green, blue and red, making the misery of the two figures’ faces even more apparent.

  Hastings had inspired Lizzie with an artistry she found liberating; when back in Chatham Place, she was determined to feed this flow of creative energy. She began work on an illustration to accompany a macabre poem of Rossetti’s, “Sister Helen”. The poem tells the story of a woman who wants revenge on her faithless lover, so she makes a wax effigy of him. When he dies, she is executed for murder. In a stark contrast of subject, Lizzie also began an ambitious Nativity scene. The Nativity was a familiar subject for the Pre-Raphaelites and it is likely Lizzie’s choice was influenced by Rossetti, as the Virgin Mary was a favourite subject of his.