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John Holmes
Lincoln College, Oxford

'Pursuing the Well-Beloved: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jocelyn Pearston, and the Victorian Sonneteers'

Dante Gabriel Rossetti has always been acknowledged as a central figure in the literary culture of the 1850s and 1860s, but his still more dominant influence in the decades which followed the publication of 'Poems' in 1870 has been strangely neglected. In this paper I will show that Rossetti, as the leader of a substantial but forgotten school of writers identified with him, is the primary source for Hardy's characterization of Jocelyn Pearston, the hero of his novel The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved of 1892. Focussing on the topicality of Hardy's critique, I will demonstrate the central cultural position that Rossetti still occupied a decade after his death.

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, Dante Gabriel Rossetti had given rise to a biographical industry. Both Thomas Gordon Hake and William Bell Scott cashed in on their friendships with him in memoirs published in 1892. The biographical parallels between Pearston and Rossetti, including his relationships with women and his attempt at suicide, draw on and allude to this body of writing. Likewise the similarities between the two men as artists, their approach to their models and their tendency towards the replication of a single ideal, owe much to the same source.

Pearston's quest for manifestations of the same ideal woman, his 'well-beloved', draw both directly and indirectly on Rossetti's poetry too, and particularly on his sonnet-sequence, 'The House of Life'. Michael Ryan notes the parallels between this quest and that of Robert Trewe, the poet in Hardy's short story 'An Imaginative Woman', whom Joan Rees correctly identifies as modeled on Rossetti. Trewe writes ballads and, notably, 'sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion'. This identification of Trewe as a sonneteer associates him not only with Rossetti himself but also with a school of sonneteers who followed his lead in the 1870s and 1880s, creating a new fashion for the sonnet-sequence which has been largely forgotten.

With examples from 'The House of Life', along with sequences by John Addington Symonds, Robert Bridges, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and others, including Christina Rossetti, who uses the phrase 'well-beloved' herself in her sequence 'Later Life', I will demonstrate both how prominent this school of writers was in the years preceding the publication of Hardy's novel, and how the idea of a quest after the romantic ideal, akin to Pearston's in the details as well as the principle, was central to their work. In doing so, I will show how vital the example of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was both for poets and for the satiric novelist in the decades before and after his death.