CONFERENCE BACKGROUND

The name 'Rossetti' brings to mind a substantial body of work in various media of arts and letters, the work of four siblings and their father in Victorian England. But it is also a name which, as Helen Guglielmini, a Rossetti descendant, reminds us, is commonly mispronounced: 'my family insisted on pronouncing Rossetti with the soft s as the Italians do, instead of with the hard s favoured by Anglo-Saxons.' The error is telling. The work of the Rossettis is often assessed without due recognition of their cosmopolitanism. The conference aims to draw attention to the bearings the Rossettis' unique position in English society had on the modes and media they chose for self-expression. There is particular interest in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti given the diversity and breadth of his work as painter, poet, translator, designer, etc.

Maria Francesca (1827-76), Dante Gabriel (1828-82), William Michael (1829-1919), and Christina Rossetti (1830-94) were born in London where they lived and worked all their lives. Their father Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), Professor of Italian at King's College London, was a political exile from Naples. His wife Frances Polidori was half-English half-Italian, and her father Gaetano Polidori was a political exile from Tuscany. The Rossetti family environment was multi-lingual and multi-cultural. The social and cultural anomalousness of the Rossetti family struck many of their English friends and acquaintances, among them William Holman Hunt, John Ruskin, William Sharp and Ford Madox Hueffer.

This conference aims to re-evaluate the achievement of the Rossettis' work by situating them in Victorian London, and by examining their relationships with the London literary and art world -- poets, writers, engravers, painters, sculptors, architects, photographers, patrons, colourmen, bookbinders, engravers, framemakers and publishers.