Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity, by Wendy Graham (introduction)

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CR I T I CS, COT E R IES, AND P R E - R A P H A E L I T E C EL EBR IT Y

GENDER AND CULTURE A Series of Columbia University Press Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner, Series Editors Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) and Nancy K. Miller, Founding Editors For a list of titles in this series, see page 329

Critics , Coteries , and

Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity Wendy Graham

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graham, Wendy, 1957– author.

Title: Critics, coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite celebrity / Wendy Graham.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Gender and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017007514 (print) | LCCN 2017012626 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231542531 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231180207 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. | Arts and society— Great Britain—History— 19th century. | Celebrities— Great Britain. | Aesthetes— Great Britain.

Classification: LCC NX454.5.P7 (ebook) | LCC NX454.5.P7 G73 2017 (print) | DDC 701/.03— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2017007514

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of Amer ica Cover: Max Beerbohm, Rossetti in His Back Garden, 1904. Engraving. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./ Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London/Bridgeman Images.

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1. The Pre-Raphaelite Vanguard

1

2. Puff, Slash, Burn: Literary Celebrity 3. Fortune’s Weal

47

77

4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Aesthetic Celebrity 5. Anonymous Journalism: The Fleshly School Controversy

175

6. Henry James and British Aestheticism Afterword

239

Notes 247 Works Cited 289 Index 313

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209

Illustrations

Fig. 1.1, Plate 1

Fig. 1.2, Plate 2 Figure 1.3

Fig. 1.4, Plate 3 Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Fig. 3.1, Plate 4 Figure 3.2 Fig. 3.3, Plate 5 Figure 3.4

Fig. 3.5, Plate 6 Figure 3.6

Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, Mr William Bell Scott Wondering What It Is Those Fellows Seem to See in Gabriel, 1916. 19 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–1870. 22 Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, Rossetti in His Worldlier Days (Circa 1866–1868) Leaving the Arundel Club with George Augustus Sala, 1916. 24 Simeon Solomon, One Dreaming by the Sea, 1871. 31 Simeon Solomon, Love and Lust, 1865. 35 Frederick Holland Day, Study for Endymion, 1907. 43 William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts—“Strayed Sheep,” 1852. 81 Frederick Sandys, A Nightmare, 1857. 83 John Everett Millais, A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857. 83 Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, The Name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Is Heard for the First Time in the Western States of Amer ica, 1916. 101 Simeon Solomon, Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup, 1859. 106 George Du Maurier, The Mutual Admirationists, 1880. 107

Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8

Fig. 3.9, Plate 7 Figure 3.10 Figure 4.1 Fig. 4.2, Plate 8 Figure 4.3 Fig. 4.4, Plate 9 Fig. 4.5, Plate 10 Fig. 4.6, Plate 11 Fig. 4.7, Plate 12 Figure 5.1 Fig. 6.1, Plate 13 Fig. 6.2, Plate 14 Figure 6.3

Fig. 6.4, Plate 15 Fig. 6.5, Plate 16 Fig. 6.6, Plate 17

George Du Maurier, A Love Agony. Design by Maudle, 1880. 109 Ernest Howard Shepard, The Pre-Raphaelite Cocktail Party (A Thought That Came to Our Artist After Visiting the William Morris Centenary Exhibition), 1934. 121 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884. 123 Norman Mansbridge, Her First Audition, 1954. 124 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Price Boyce with Fanny Cornforth in Rossetti’s Studio, Chatham Place, 1858. 142 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864– 1868. 147 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Death of Lady Macbeth, 1875. 164 Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem, 1916. 166 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1864–1868. 169 Simeon Solomon, The Sleeping Endymion, 1887. 171 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia de’ Tolomei, 1868– 1880. 173 Simeon Solomon, The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love, 1865. 201 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870. 218 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Tree of Forgiveness, 1881–1882. 219 W. B. Richmond, “Take Me, Take My Trunk.” By E. Burne-Jones, or, “Ty-Burn Jones,” for the Deadly Liveliness of the Figures, 1882. 221 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Garden of Pan, 1876–1887. 223 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Day, 1870. 226 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris, 1873– 1875. 235

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Acknowledgments

T

he senior colleague to whom I owe the greatest debt, Susan Brisman, raised my spirits when I doubted my prospects, whether approaching tenure or streamlining a six-hundred-page manuscript. I am grateful for the support of Beth Darlington, stalwart defender of Victorian Studies at Vassar College. Brian Lukacher kept me abreast of new developments in art history. Paul Russell read an early draft of my fourth chapter and helped me focus on the Rossetti myth as a unifying thread. Dean Crawford offered imaginative solutions to the problem of addressing different audiences in the same book. Heesok Chang pushed me to refine my definition of the Victorian avant-garde. Zoltan Markus contributed to my thinking about the changing valuation of “sincerity.”

Eighteenth- century scholar Julie Park helped me improve the throughline of my argument. M. Mark and Adrienne Halper offered advice on interest ing the general reader. Special thanks are due to Linda Blum, who read several chapters with great insight. Julia Stern offered encouragement and illumination. My research assistant, Jon Roth, sang Vaughan Williams’s song cycle, The House of Life, at his senior recital. Possibly, Eloy Bleifuss Prados was less inspired double-checking facts in Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, but he was very efficient. Former student Paige Rozanski, curatorial assistant for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., secured my place at the symposium, “Pre-Raphaelitism and International Modernisms,” held in conjunction with the blockbuster

exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant- Garde (2013). Students of literary decadence Christopher Tatlock, Matthew Dowling, Shouvik Bhattacharya, Zoey Peresman, Jackson Reeves, Miciah Hussey, Ruth Bolster, Elliot Baker, Brian Evans, and Grace Sparapani waited a long time to see this book in print.

I am profoundly indebted to the anonymous readers for Columbia University Press; this would have been a less coherent book without their incisive and constructive criticisms. I am proud to be part of the Gender and Culture series, overseen by Victoria Rosner and Nancy K. Miller, who have been unflaggingly helpful. I am especially grateful to Associate Provost and Director Jennifer Crewe for her expert management of the review process and oversight of the production staff and design team, who have done a wonderful job. An earlier version of chapter six, “Henry James and British Aestheticism,” appeared in The Henry James Review 20, no. 3 (1999), 265–74, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. Thanks to the Susan Jane Turner Fund for sponsoring my travel to the United Kingdom to study pictures and locate unhackneyed images for the book; and for funding the illustrations.

Thanks also to Peggy Goldwyn, who generously permitted us to stay in her London flat and stretch the travel budget. To Matt, for his patience and companionship. It may be unwise to call attention to the fact that I have been writing Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity, on and off, for seventeen years. My daughter claims she has been involved with the project since her inception. And she has a point. She passed an AP exam in art history with flying colors, even though her school lacks any courses in the subject. Obviously, she deserves all the credit. But I like to think that the years we spent in museums conversing about art contributed to her success. My son is my partner in another form of fanat icism: Chicago Blues. This book is dedicated to my children, Ava and Graham.

[ x ] A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Introduction

P

re-Raphaelitism is a seminal but neglected chapter in the history of the avant-garde.1 This book challenges the notion that resistance to art institutions, on the one hand, and the commodification of art, on the other, sprung up suddenly circa 1900. The conditions necessary for the production of late Victorian modernity were in place in 1848, when revolutionary movements across Europe flamed, flickered, and petered out.

Founded by a spirited band of young renegades, whose close personal friendships were forged during social gatherings and at art school, the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) struck contemporaries as a vanguard in lifestyle as well as artistic expression. The PRB achieved eminence as an aesthetic counterculture; they lived and worked cooperatively, creating a subculture that privileged affective and creative bonds between men. Bohemianism and iconoclasm were twin facets of their cultural activity. Their burgeoning renown was not simply due to talent. From the founding of the PRB through to the publication of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) and Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870) to the debut of the Grosvenor Gallery (1877), Pre-Raphaelite genius and eccentricity were clubbable across disciplines. As a group of painters with strong literary interests, exemplified by the poet-painter Rossetti, they welcomed writers into the fold and together pursued a fusion of the “sister arts,” a vision of imaginative activity that transcended bourgeois industry and

enterprise. The PRB briefly professed a unified vision of what art was called on to be (in other words, natural and sincere); however, internal stylistic and philosophical differences emerged early on, splintering the original collective by 1853. Despite its heterogeneity, emerging branches of the PreRaphaelite “school” were identified with the main trunk through the 1880s. Engendering confusion and dismay, as well as fierce partisanship, Pre-Raphaelitism achieved a high profile and retained visibility throughout the evolution of its concepts and personnel.

With their collective identity and collaborative ethos, the PRB looked forward, as well as backward, to a time when art and spirituality penetrated all aspects of daily life. Sharing a faith in the social mission of art, the PRB both emulated and transcended Nazarene monasticism in favor of worldly engagement. In theory, the PRB’s oppositional stance and efforts at reform satisfy Peter Bürger’s criteria: “The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”2 Arguably, the “PRB” logo accompanying their signed work merely complicated the idea of individual creativity rather than negated it like Duchamp’s ready-mades. But only a purist would judge an antibourgeois art movement of the circa 1850s by the yardstick of Duchamp’s playful 1913 display of industrial commodities as works of art. My aim is to capture the PRB’s revolutionary provocations before the PRB became the victims of their own success. As Dianne Sachko Macleod remarks, “One of the inherent contradictions of PreRaphaelitism as an avant- garde movement” is that “its artists took an active interest in the mainstream marketplace” while claiming to be outsiders.3 Exactly. PRB members wrestled with contradictions that now seem disqualifying, as if they had access to the first avant-garde handbook (1909). They fretted that the business of art would tarnish their vaunted higher aims. Victorians who noted this inconsistency—paintings made to measure for nouveau riche clients—thought of it as a failure of sincerity.

What are the other obstacles to restoring the PRB to the avant-garde continuum, and why bother? In cultural memory and the annals of art, Pre-Raphaelitism was outpaced in novelty by the next Eu ropean style, French impressionism, and Pre-Raphaelite literary innovation paled when judged by the benchmarks of realism and modernism. By the 1890s, PreRaphaelitism had become an accepted art convention in Britain. Further, as literary painters and pictorial naturalists vested in quattrocento Italian [ xii ]

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art, the Pre-Raphaelites had little in common with a twentieth-century avant-garde wedded to the ideal of originality. Nevertheless, there is a formal case to be made for the flat picture plane, high resolution, and allover-surface pattern of PRB works, which Victorians found jarring. The PRB debuted as a “new style” of painting and artists’ organ ization in 1849.

PRB exhibits and manifestoes forced the public to grapple with new motives in art, a new art grammar, and a new vocabulary; the public was made to feel out of the loop just as art literacy seemed within its reach. PreRaphaelitism obeyed the imperatives of all revolutionary art “to demonstrate its position at the frontiers of art, in a new vanguard of expression.” 4 As an antibourgeois movement seemingly free from the trammels of Victorian sexual respectability, organized religion, and economic and cultural institutions, its affronts to the regimes of taste and official canons of propriety exceeded the culture sector.

Art historian Claire Wildsmith affirms that Victorian criticism was a hotly contested ground and “a shaping force on both the production of art and public taste, deeply embedded in the changing political, social and economic structure of the nation.”5 Yet debates over Pre-Raphaelitism would have remained internal to art and poetry circles had it not been for improvements in print technology and circulation, the development of a national audience for periodicals, and the rise of professional journalists capitalizing on the public’s fascination with culture and celebrity. Throughout the book, I stress the synergy between the aesthetic movement and the friendly journalists who helped transform Pre-Raphaelitism from a narrow coterie concern into a feature of the zeitgeist. Reviewer anonymity was the order of the day until the 1860s, at which point the question of partisan plaudits and attacks from behind a veil became fodder for media controversies and a selling point for journals advertising signed articles.

Consequently, Pre-Raphaelitism’s cultural efficacy depended on professional intimacies and jealousies and the journalistic practices of the era. Victorian print journalism was a shaping force rather than a neutral arbiter of culture. That leaves unanswered the question: How did the PreRaphaelites parlay periodical reviews into Victorian celebrity and enduring renown, and why were they able to do so, given their antagonism to the academicians and bourgeoisie?

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The Pre-Raphaelites innovated many of the phenomena associated with the fin-de-siècle and the publicity-mad Oscar Wilde. These include the canny marketing of the PRB, who turned themselves into a cause célèbre supported by a phalanx of freelance journalists. Scholars have begun to realize that the PRB found their niche because members shared a group identity and enjoyed unprecedented access to media outlets, through which they disseminated their ideals and brand. In 1850, the PRB founded The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art to express the group’s pictorial principles. Although The Germ failed financially within the year, after four numbers had been published, its Gothic typeface, illustrative etchings on literary and devotional subjects, and original prose and verse attracted a following. Mystifying its first audience with daring work yet antique trappings, Pre-Raphaelitism encouraged a cottage industry in explanatory lectures and articles. Slighting the anonymous “minor theorists” who wrote for The Germ, journalists cited John Ruskin’s authoritative pronouncements on Pre-Raphaelitism in The Times (1851–1854).

Catalyzed by shared admiration and vision, a network of fellow travelers, acolytes, and intimates defended in print all things PRB. This “fraternity for championship,” so named by enraged competitors, produced reams of life writing, publicizing the magical private lives (and community) of artistwriters. Stimulated by the tension among the visibility of their works, the remoteness of their persons, and the obscurity of their objectives, Victorian journalists outside the circle pandered to the public’s mass attraction to (and revulsion from) Pre-Raphaelitism. In the context of the exhibition or lecture hall, and in conversations generated by shared patronage of art magazines, the explosion of interest in Pre-Raphaelitism was a mass phenomenon. Wilde was the culmination of this trend, not its instigator.

Press surrogates saved my protagonists from the imputation of careerism, pushing behav ior, and unmanly ostentation, until the coterie relations that fostered individual renown came under fire. While literacy, capital, and suffrage contributed to the democratization of the bourgeois public sphere, the coterie remained a privileged space, at once prized and reviled for its exclusivity and special interests. Pre-Raphaelitism’s inner circle had the hallmarks of a clique, engendering ad hominem attacks on the principals and their lackeys. Working as journalists, infiltrating the command centers of public opinion, they diffused the perfume of their adulation for masculine genius. The “mutual admiration society” is an untapped resource for discussion across the disciplinary bound aries of art, media, celebrity, [ xiv ]

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and gender studies. To date, there is no book-length monograph on the phenomenon. Tim Barringer and Michaela Giebelhausen’s Writing the PreRaphaelites is an anthology of essays, written by art historians, explaining how Pre-Raphaelite artists were “written into prominence.”6 There is no corresponding treatment of Pre-Raphaelite writers or investigation of the sexual dynamics of the collective. Comprehensively reviewing twentyfirst-century books on Victorian art and literature, Richard Kaye complains of “a scholarly hesitancy to respond seriously to the insights, models, and achievements of Gender and Queer Studies critics.” 7 My book offers for the first time a thick description of the combination of the literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding within cliques, and the homoerotic frisson among the reviewers and creators of Pre-Raphaelite literature and art that made William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Rossetti exemplary figures of aesthetic modernity in the 1850s; Swinburne and Simeon Solomon, in the 1860s; and Walter Pater and Edward Burne-Jones, in the 1870s. Sexualized and romantic male friendship, and aesthetic collaboration and coteries, held the Victorian avant-garde and its audience in thrall. I want to press home the point that homoerotic investments among the members of this early clique have not received adequate attention, and the possibility of such investments has been neglected in favor of the “gay” 1890s and the Wilde trials.8

The backlash against the homosexual Wilde’s association with the aesthetic movement has obscured Pre-Raphaelitism’s complex history of male bonding. As I show in my first chapter, the demarcation of early / late, good / bad, healthy / sick phases of Pre-Raphaelitism was retrofitted to the movement in the wake of the Grosvenor exhibition, when the term “aestheticism” acquired a distinct connotation. At this time, PRB enthusiasts began rehabilitating the original members of the PRB by expunging sexual dubiety from their résumés. This strategy succeeded. Pre-Raphaelitism has not figured much in gay historiography, despite the various skeletons in its closet.9 Revising a history of homosexuality that others have viewed as originating in later decades, my book exhumes the collaboration among a practicing homosexual, Simeon Solomon, and the Pre-Raphaelites who befriended him and who, belatedly as well as disingenuously, expressed shock at finding a sodomite in their midst.

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Solomon’s transient appearance in the annals of Pre-Raphaelitism has direct bearing on his place in narrative history and scholarship. He was written out of history. Within literary studies, artist-prose poet Solomon is a missing or minor figure in the landscape of influential books on Victorian culture and gender.10 Solomon’s precedence in aestheticizing samesex desire strikes art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn as an “impor tant entailment” of the conventional wisdom that Wilde forged the first link between overt homoeroticism and aestheticism in the minds of the Victorian public. Yet for Prettejohn, Solomon represents “new practices in painting,” practices that distance him from his peer group.11 Allen Staley also focuses on the formal differences between early and late aestheticism.12 In fact, Victorians identified Solomon and Burne-Jones as Rossetti’s “junior allies” and lambasted the trio for belonging to the “Swinburne school of artists.” Reviewers greeted Burne-Jones’s breakthrough at the Grosvenor as a triumph of “Pre-Raphaelite” art.

In offering a psychosocial model of reception, I focus on the PreRaphaelites when they were considered avant-garde rather than regarded nostalgically. My book explores the print politics of scandal and the erotic discourse of masculinity (and effeminacy) that emerged in relation to the aesthetic celebrity’s bohemian self-presentation before a shocked (or smitten) community. It was not until the debut of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads that Pre-Raphaelite poetry excited the rancor associated with its art by achieving a succès de scandale. Condemned for blasphemy and obscenity in the leading periodicals, Swinburne’s rescinded volume sold like hotcakes, and at high prices. Bizarrely, Swinburne’s critical antagonists, men who posed as models of rectitude, carefully unpacked—if need be translated— Swinburne’s obscure allusions to Greek, Latin, and French erotic texts to highlight their offensiveness. By reading avant-garde poetry in England through the prism of the scandalous modernity of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, the Victorian press underscored the connection between perverse French and contemporary English culture. While vilifying Swinburne as an enfant terrible of poetry, critics unintentionally promulgated Pre-Raphaelitism’s avant-garde qualities. Demonstrating the salience of negative publicity, Swinburne’s acid retorts to his detractors caused a publishing sensation in their own right. Media controversies over exhibits and publications dramatized new styles of self- expression, new ways of being and seeing developing on the horizon.

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Gabriel Rossetti clearly relished his bohemian self-presentation. Habitually attired in a loose, plum-colored dress coat rather than the jacket or frock coat worn by men of his class, he sported shoulder-length hair and other eccentricities of personal appearance. His promiscuity (signaling the abrogation of conventional masculinity and professional and domestic aspirations) was published abroad by William Rossetti, assiduous chronicler of the life of the family prodigy, as well as by gossips. Gabriel’s attitude, “I never do anything I don’t like,” marked him as a fascinating new type of personality.13 Though famed for his heterosexual potency, Rossetti inspired in his male admirers a longing for intimacy and a cultic devotion that was markedly erotic. Excited by sexual avant-gardism in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites, male coteries locked horns with the censor morum of the press in defense of their idols. A corollary to literary fame underwritten by friendship, Rossetti’s press contacts praised studio work withheld from public view. Rossetti’s withdrawal from the exhibition scene after 1850 fueled the legend that he “never sought public fame”—a fact ascribed to the “indifference of high genius to popu lar opinion.”14 My book explores the paradox of a recluse gaining an international reputation through the agency of friendly critics. Noting Rossetti’s “power ful individuality” and “retired mode of life,” another reviewer emphasized the contrarian character of the avant-garde artist and his isolation.15 The notion that Rossetti “stood alone” supports Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that the artist’s apparent abstention from the marketplace increases the cultural and economic cachet of his creations. However, after the dissolution of the PRB, Rossetti was isolated by temperament, not exhibition politics.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Rossetti’s “display of absence” anticipates (and contributes to) the iconic view of the modern artist, living, writing, and painting offstage.16 In lieu of personal appearances, photographs, exhibits, and regular publications, Rossetti soared into prominence on the wings of vicarious verbal representations of his transcendent powers and personality: “Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti at once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so magnetic a presence.”17 Hence the foundational myth of bohemian artistic celebrity was connected with the rise of a professional class of journalists and men of letters whose bread and butter was unique access to reticent celebrities. At the same time, Rossetti’s celebrity mystique depended on

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the relations obtaining between the purveyors of the print culture and its consumers. While some trafficked in sober judgments, Victorian journalists were at liberty to flaunt their prejudices, sling sarcasms, and distribute accolades under the cover of critical anonymity. In an unsigned review of Poems and Ballads, the future editor of the Fortnightly Review, John Morley, apostrophized Swinburne as “the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs.” 18 Morley was not even Swinburne’s chief detractor. A media diet of this kind whet the audience’s appetite for sensation, for vivid writing capable of stirring the imagination in an era when print was still king.

Theater historian Joseph Roach enumerates the qualities that have distinguished candidates for fame since the late seventeenth century, citing the obvious (self- confidence and personal magnetism), as well as the incongruous (virtue combined with vice; strength, with weakness; singularity, with typicality). Enduring in cultural memory, afterimages of the “It- effect” suggest that the paradoxical union of charisma and stigma, strength and vulnerability, embodied in the actor’s mercurial persona and mortal flesh, constituted a fascinating eccentricity for audiences.19 For this reason, Roach places the notorious on a continuum with virtuous celebrity role-icons (145). Roach argues that distance from the masses, secured by the king’s station and throne, the actor’s proscenium, and the rake’s misbehavior, enhanced their allure. Anticipating the age of mass media, where proximity is assisted by technology, effigies as well as one-of-akind portraits of notables circulated, according to Roach, as the “mesmerizing image of unattainable yet wholly portable celebrity” (76). Roach’s emphasis on image-based celebrity leads him to slight the contributions of scribes and tastemakers in the facture of renown, even though they were vital to the star’s ascent.

In contrast to performing role-icons, my protagonists entered the public sphere via their work, without revealing their private lives or even showing their faces; personality had to be surmised from their highly original productions and press reports. According to Richard Sennett, the shocking or pleasing affect conveyed by the highly skilled performer gave way in the nineteenth century to the alarm or charm of expressive personality: “Being expressive and having extraordinary talent—that was the formula on which personality entered the public realm.”20 Sennett’s formulation is [ xviii ]

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an apt description of Rossetti, though it leaves out his characteristic bohemianism. Rossetti’s “robustious” youth suggested to memoirist Hall Caine “a person in deliberate revolt against nearly all the conventions of society, and delighting, if only out of perversity or for devilish amusement, in every opportunity to startle well-ordered people out of their propriety by championing the worst view of Neronian Rome.”21 Sennett explicitly excludes the poet or painter, working offstage, from the transfiguration of the creative individual into a dominant personality, a new and special person.22 I do not accept Sennett’s verdict that writers and painters lacked this kind of star power. Rossetti’s pursuit of “direct and intense modes for the expression of highly intellectualized passion” in the arts shocked his contemporaries out of their propriety.23 Formally and thematically, Pre-Raphaelitism burst upon the Victorian public as a revolt against conventionality and sentimentality.

Can verbal representations of celebrity charisma constitute a vicarious experience of intimacy for readers? Does the activity of novel reading fire the imagination and fret the ner vous system, as Victorian attacks on the novel of sensation claimed? Eminent theorists of modern celebrity would deny it. The stage actor is the invariable template. In her essay for Public Culture, Sharon Marcus acknowledges celebrity’s dependence on visual and verbal media but maintains that physical presence is requisite: “Celebrity combines presence and representation.”24 I am wholly on board with the notion of the “oxymoronic structure of celebrity,” which means that celebrities repel and attract, conform and defy, and crave attention and evade it, among other contradictions.25 My divergence from Marcus is a matter of historical perspective. We agree that Wilde was not the first literary celebrity to use mass media to heighten his fame. Marcus ascribes Wilde’s “impudent celebrity” to his impersonation of the actress Sarah Bernhardt; touring Amer ica, he copied her itinerary, hotel reservations, and relations with photog raphers and the press.26 This is a dazzling argument. However, Wilde’s American tour was meant to publicize Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience by acquainting American philistines with the aesthetic canon preached by Ruskin, Pater, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Arnold, whom the operetta mocks. In my view, Wilde emulated his early idols, Swinburne and Rossetti, who perfected the mode of claiming attention by defying public opinion before Bernhardt became an international star. In 1889, Wilde himself exclaimed: “Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry.”27 I N T RO D U C T I O N

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I want to obtain a hearing for a history of Victorian celebrity that is asymmetric and does not mirror the postmodern condition quite so seamlessly. As I said, I do not accept the premise that literary celebrities enjoyed only minor renown until Hugo, Dickens, and Emerson “achieved fame as heroes and sages.” Marcus claims that Wilde was the first writer to personify the “new type: the author as feminized celebrity personality.”28 I disagree. In staging the PRB’s reception, the Victorian press took advantage of literary and fine art criteria, honed by the romantic poets and their critics, based on charismatic personality (good) and personal eccentricity (the jury was deadlocked). Dating from the Cockney School of Poetry (1817–1825), a row between Blackwood’s and The Examiner circle of romantic poets, effeminacy, sexual impropriety, and emotionalism were already perceived as coextensive with the desire for fame and the unmanly ostentation that accompanied it. In 1821, the critic William Hazlitt castigated poets of “inordinate vanity” and “habitual effeminacy,” whose absurd passion for notoriety was their defining feature. Hazlitt fulminated against their posturing and insincerity for the sake of “dramatic effect,” excitement, and attention.29 Drawing on Hazlitt, whom he styles the first great theorist of fame, Leo Braudy explains that the romantic poet became emblematic of the misunderstood genius through his figurative dismemberment, in absentia, in a hostile print culture. To different degrees, Shelley (“the Hermit of Marlow”) and Byron (an expatriate) staged a “drama of ennobling neglect.”30 Yet not even the reclusive Shelley despised fame. Rather than seek fame openly, Byron and Shelley engaged in a paradoxical social per for mance, inciting public outrage over indecent verse and then pretending to ignore the hue and cry. Tracking the evolution of celebrity renown, I argue that the Pre-Raphaelites consciously emulated Byron and Shelley’s combination of reclusive genius and dissipated virtuosity. Rossetti favored the former; Swinburne, the latter. With regard to Rossetti, the subject of chapter 4, it is essential to understand that a recluse could engage in enigmatic reputation building from behind the scenes, in the fashion just described, or by enlisting aid.

The Cockney School fracas was a case of literary sniping productive of great reputations. It demonstrated the efficacy of negative publicity in securing an audience for the journal, the critic, and the critic’s targets. Though John [ xx ]

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Gibson Lockhart maintained his alias, his attacks on the Cockney School were good for Blackwood’s bottom line and in tune with its Tory politics.

The row publicized the romantic poet’s combative individuality (a combination of poetic invention, social marginality, sexual nonconformity, and political radicalism), shifting attention from the work to the author. Being talked about became a crucial element in the bid for renown, leading to the paradoxical discovery that blame was as useful as praise in securing an audience. Media controversy figures centrally in my discussion of the PRB’s reception in chapter 1, the Cockney School of Poetry and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in chapter 2, and critical consternation over Pater’s The Renaissance in chapter 3. I discuss Rossetti’s reliance on friendly reviewers in chapter 4, the Fleshly School controversy in chapter 5, and the reception of the Grosvenor exhibition in chapter 6. My argument tracks PreRaphaelitism’s influence on industry and cultural trends promoting signed review articles31 and calumniating reviewer anonymity, puffery, and slander, all the while capitalizing on scandal and negative publicity to sell papers.

The acrimony surrounding puffery and its converse came to a head over Robert Buchanan’s use of the Maitland alias for “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti” (1871), a rehashed “Cockney School of Poetry”: “Buchanan sharpens literary criticism, on the whetstone of Blackwood’s, into a weapon for the culture wars.”32 Priggish, didactic, and partisan, Buchanan’s diatribe upheld retrograde Victorian attitudes to sexuality and art. In keeping with the axiom “No publicity is bad publicity,” Buchanan succeeded in enlarging the Pre-Raphaelites’ fame, an unintended consequence of singling them out for censure in the press.

The many pitched battles over Pre-Raphaelitism foregrounded concerns about sincerity, manly reticence, impartiality, and anonymity, concerns that were central to the evolution of the signed article.33 In the 1870s, the PreRaphaelites and their cohort became staunch advocates of signature and journals that favored attribution, such as the Fortnightly Review, publisher of Buchanan, Morley, Lewes, Arnold, Swinburne, Colvin, Gosse, Pater, and Wilde. Signature was also the foundation for the accruing of cultural authority to the professional writers on the clique’s periphery. As Deborah Cherry avers, the critical literature on Pre-Raphaelitism demonstrates that “signature was vitally impor tant for a growing contingent of professional art writers who, through their writings, created art history and criticism as a specialized form of cultural knowledge.”34 Ruskin’s imprimatur was crucial to the PRB’s early success. Pater certified the literary Pre-Raphaelites’ I N T RO D U C T I O N

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ascendancy. This demonstration of critical clout anticipated by forty years The Criterion’s use of imprimatur to ensure the modernists’ commercial success. In Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Aaron Jaffe describes the “secondary literary labors” of reviewers, editors, and promoters, who acted as middlemen between the high modernists and the popu lar readership they allegedly despised.35 Covert reputation building appears to have been the default strategy of the avant-garde when faced with the temptations of fame, and was not unique to the Pre-Raphaelites.

In constructing the first reception history of the aesthetic movement, I have dispensed with the practice of favoring named contributors and famous persons over the anonymous reviewers who produced the bulk of criticism before 1880.36 Though I share Rachel Teukolsky’s interest in Victorian art writing, my study differs from hers in impor tant respects. The Literate Eye gives Pre-Raphaelite innovation short shrift by postponing the debut of an “incipient Victorian avant-garde” until the advent of Pater’s The Renaissance.37 In fact, coterie propaganda, collective activity, and disdain for academies were PRB hallmarks in the 1850s. I suspect that the modernist suppression of Victorian forebears contributed to this oversight.

In Bloomsbury Rooms, Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, Christopher Reed remarks on the exclusion from the modernist canon of the ceramics, textiles, and interior designs produced by Bloomsbury’s artistic collectives, which he deems a rejection of a subculture perceived as deviant, effeminate, and amateur. Conversely, Bloomsbury’s shared sense of alienation from traditional domesticity, and its revaluation of love and lifestyle, forged a power ful minority identity. Reed’s insight into what he calls Bloomsbury’s “groupiness” was a defining feature of Pre-Raphaelite subcultures as well.38 Reed only touches on Bloomsbury’s indebtedness to aestheticism and the arts and crafts movement. A period in for mant with an axe to grind against “pretty” domesticated modernism, Wyndham Lewis paid a backhanded compliment to the Pre-Raphaelites in 1930, disparaging Bloomsbury in The Apes of God as “monied middleclass descendants of victorian literary splendor.”39 Positing a revamped lineage for avant-garde aesthetics, my book provides fresh insight into Pre-Raphaelitism’s avant-garde qualities and intentions because it takes the long view afforded by twentieth-century exhibits, scholarship, and critique. Hans Robert Jauss contends that the “virtual significance” of a work or movement can be missed at the time of its advent, and must await an aesthetic evolution “that now for the first time allows [ xxii ]

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one to find access to the understanding of the misunderstood older form.” 40 By relating British aestheticism to the social organ ization of Victorian Britain, taking period snapshots of the institutional and class interests supporting or resisting aestheticism’s move from the margins (alternative culture) to inside the “selective tradition,” 41 we can observe what happens to the text, canon, or tradition during the dialogic conversation between a literate public, its press and print culture, and posterity.

Between 1848 and 1910, period in for mants variously clarified or deformed the history of the aesthetic movement by filling the archive with heavi ly partisan yet presumptively authoritative firsthand accounts. Virtually none of the critics writing about Pre-Raphaelitism had a neutral or objective stance. Rather than exclude all works with an obvious bias, I provide thick description of the personal contacts and investments of people who had “skin in the game.” This book will document the Pre-Raphaelites’ transformation of the Victorian public sphere through highly publicized media campaigns (both for and against) the aesthetic innovations (or anachronisms) and bohemian lifestyles of Pre-Raphaelite luminaries.

Exceptional personalities appear to enjoy (or endure) a mythic afterlife secured by memoirs, biographies, posthumous publications, and career retrospectives. Straddling the worlds of high and popu lar art, making a virtue of art’s commercial properties, Andy Warhol donned dark glasses, spoke to the public through an interpreter, surrounded himself with a clique of adoring eccentrics (a.k.a. the factory), and adhered to a strategy of enigmatic reputation building. Just as Warhol’s influence was felt in the 1960s and beyond, the interplay between the new style in art and poetry, its erotic topicality, and teamwork transfigured Victorian culture. The Pre-Raphaelites modernized Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality. They were foundational for Victorians trying to forge an artistic and personal identity within an imagined community of brother-lovers. Wilde had models. This book is about them.

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