(Click on your browser's Back button to return to the conference program)

Michelle Hawley
California State University

'Romantic Editions: William Michael Rossetti, Political Commitment, and the Production of Cultural Capital'

On July 9, 1871, Keningdale Robert Cook asked William Michael Rossetti if he would be interested in contributing to a republican newspaper. William Michael Rossetti replied, 'Among my personal friends, the following are all more or less decided republicans and likely to respond in one form or another - Swinburne, Morris, W.B. Scott, Allingham Huffer, Mathilde Blind, Nettleship - also (artists who write little or not at all) Madox Brown and Burnes Jones […] As for myself, I am, always have been, and am confident of always remaining a republican -an ultra republican, siding with the Paris Commune.' Rossetti's comments reveal an aesthetics that looks, perhaps surprisingly, politically committed. Recent work on the Rossettis and the so-called 'Fleshly School of Poetry' in the late sixties and early seventies has focused on the movement's aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, portraying pre-Raphaelitism as a movement largely in 'retreat' from the political public sphere. In looking at the editorial work and correspondence of William Michael Rossetti, this paper will show how the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of the pre-Raphaelites intersected with radical republicanism during the late sixties and early seventies. While Rossetti's politics had roots in a largely middle-class continental republicanism, they moved towards more radical brand of British plebeian republicanism around 1870. His editing and publication of a cheap edition of Moxon's Shelley coincided with the highpoint of the republican movement, led by demagogue Charles Bradlaugh. Moreover, Rossetti wrote letters to Bradlaugh's Republican weekly, The National Reformer and sought out correspondence with the working-class poet James Thomson in an attempt to forge direct links between aesthetic production and political action.

'W.M Rossetti, Shelleyism, and Republicanism' is part of a larger project, 'Aesthetic Citizenship' which charts the mutually constitutive formation of aesthetics and citizenship at a critical moment in the history of British political and poetic representation. Untouched by revolutionary violence and class struggle, the years immediately following the incorporation of working men within the formal politics of the British polity (1871) have appeared as a coda to pragmatic liberalism's successful resolution of its deferred democratic promise. Poetically, these years are associated with the isolated moment of proto-aestheticism embodied in Rossetti and 'The Fleshly School,' 'proto-aestheticism.' In fact, these were years of extraordinary political and aesthetic ferment. The prevailing view of the trajectory leading to modernist autonomy is expressed by Terry Eagleton: aesthetics is born at the moment of art's effective demise as a political force, flourishes on the corpse of its social relevance.' My project discloses, that behind the traces of 'aestheticist autonomy,' British poetry glimpsed and attempted to seize a new potential for social and political relevance within the expanded space of liberal citizenship.