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Andrew Stauffer
California State University

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Exhumation Proofs

In October of 1869, the body of Elizabeth Siddal was exhumed in Highgate Cemetery, London, so that a book of manuscript poems could be retrieved from the coffin. Siddal had been painter's model, lover, and wife to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and when she died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, he buried these poems with her as a gesture of renunciation and farewell: several of his best and most important longer works, of which he retained no copies, were included in the volume. Yet when he came to prepare his first major publication - the 1870 Poems - Rossetti realized that he needed the works entombed with Lizzie, and ordered the exhumation. The book was found, disinfected, dried out, and delivered to Rossetti before the end of the month.

This celebrated and macabre episode of Victorian literary history serves as background for an important discovery made by Jerome McGann and myself in the preparation of the Rossetti Archive: the Huntington library holds the world's only complete set of the Rossetti Exhumation Proofs, the first printing of the poems recovered from the grave. These are particularly important given that the manuscripts themselves are not extant, thus making the Exhumation Proofs the closest thing we have to the buried poems. Up until now, only two incomplete sets of these proofs, both part of the Troxell Collection at the Princeton University Library, had come to light. Now that the Huntington copy has been discovered, we have for the first time a full and accurate record of the poems Rossetti felt were important enough to retrieve from his wife's grave.

Working on a fellowship from the Huntington Library, I am currently preparing a print edition of the Exhumation Proofs, which contain 'A Last Confession,' 'Jenny,' and 'Dante at Verona,' 'The Portrait,' 'Saint Luke the Painter,' and 'The Sea-Limits.' The Huntington Proofs allow us to read complete early versions of these poems for the first time; I will compare them to the partial versions at Princeton in order to trace Rossetti's revisions. In this paper, I will show that by studying the Exhumation Proofs we gain insight regarding the complex creative negotiations that went into the production of the immensely influential Poems (1870), with particular reference to the poems buried with Elizabeth Siddal.

Preliminary evidence suggests a general darkening of Rossetti's view of the world, combined with an increasing reliance on sensual experience as the only path to truth. These poems in particular bear the scars of Rossetti's anxious and guilty bereavement (he felt responsible for Lizzie's death, which was probably a suicide), and articulate specifically the morbid strain common in the later-Victorian imagination. Along these lines, I will reflect on the strange episode of which the proofs are a part, showing how their content eerily prefigures their (and Lizzie's) strange fate, and reveals the pervasiveness of the Victorian obsession with beautiful dead women.