A HIGHGATE RESURRECTION, A CHELSEA DECLINE

See Also: CEMETERIES Highgate Cemetery; WOMBATS

Lizzie Siddal (n e Siddall) was the daughter of a Holborn cutler. She went to work in a hat shop that was located in Cranborne Alley. There she was noticed by the poet William Allingham who realised that her looks might make her an appropriate model for a painting of Twelfth Night that his friend Walter Deverell was working on.

In 1851-2 John Everett Millais painted the artists model Elizabeth Siddall as the drowned Ophelia. Soon afterwards she started posing exclusively for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whom she developed a deeply dysfunctional relationship. He was unwilling to commit himself to her and was repeatedly unfaithful. She, for her part, experimented with laudanum. The situation was compounded by his being from a higher social class than she was. This made him disinclined to introduce her to his family, with whom his relationship was troubled.

The pair married in 1860. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn child. She almost certainly developed post-natal depression. In 1862, in their rooms at No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars, she committed suicide with a large dose of her preferred narcotic. Rossetti deposited a number of his manuscript poems in her coffin. This was placed in a Highgate Cemetery vault with the remains of other members of the Rossetti family.

In 1863 Rossetti rented Tudor House on Cheyne Walk. It proved to be a Bohemian household. Its members included the poet Algernon Swinburne. In the years that followed, the artist's mind became preoccupied with the memory of his late wife. He collected items that he associated with her and held a series of s ances during which he tried to contact her spirit.

As the decade progressed, he developed problems with his eyesight. The medical advice he received about his eyes was that there was nothing physically wrong with them. Adding to the emotional and psychological melange, Rossetti and Jane Morris, the wife of the artist's friend William Morris, started some form of close relationship in 1868. It is not possible to ascertain the nature of the liaison, however, whatever it was it had a strong impact upon Rossetti.

The artist wrote the poem Secret Parting (1869) for Mrs Morris. This re-awakened his literary muse. He determined to publish a book of verse. However, he had interred much of his earlier output with his wife's corpse. As a result of having painted the triptych The Seed of David (1860-6) for the altar of Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, he had come to know the politician Henry Bruce, who had been the treasurer of the associated fund-raising committee. The fellow had been appointed to the Home Secretaryship in 1868.

The minister gave permission for Elizabeth Rossetti's coffin to be opened and the verses retrieved. The task was performed by Charles Howell.¹ In 1870 Rossetti's Poems was published. He found himself to be the subject of an excoriating series of reviews by the journalist Robert Buchanan, who four years earlier had attacked Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. Rossetti had a nervous breakdown. For the rest of his life he abused alcohol and chloral hydrate.

Location: Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk, SW3 5RA (orange, purple)

Highgate Cemetery, Swains Lane, N6 6PJ

¹. Howell was notorious for his lies and tall-tales. He claimed that upon one occasion he had encountered his doppelg nger, who had handed him his own business card. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventures of Charles Augustus Milverton (1904), Conan Doyle referred to him as being the worst man in London .

David Backhouse 2024