Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movementWood, Esther (of Hampstead)
Philosophy
Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement
Wood, Esther (of Hampstead)
Pre-Raphaelitism -- Great Britain; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882
But the fame of the Pre-Raphaelites as poets was already enhanced,
within an increasing circle of appreciators, by the publication, in
1856, of a journal which may, to some extent, be regarded as a successor
to the “The Germ.” “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” edited by Mr.
Godfrey Lushington, had the better fortune to survive for a year, in
monthly numbers; though all its contents were anonymous, and its issue
involved no less labour and anxiety on the part of its sponsors, if not
so much pecuniary onus as in the case of the more luxuriously printed
and illustrated “Germ.” The new publication contained several of
Rossetti’s finest poems, such as “The Staff and Scrip,” and “Nineveh,”
and a series of mediæval romances and poems by two young artists
destined henceforth to be intimately associated with the Pre-Raphaelite
movement, and to exert important influence on its later developments—
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Both were Oxford men, and had
been close friends at Exeter College, whence in 1856 came Burne-Jones to
London with the express desire of meeting and knowing Dante Rossetti,
his senior by five years; he having been born in Birmingham on the 28th
of August, 1833, and educated at King Edward’s School in that city,
proceeding to Oxford in 1853.
It was at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street that Burne-
Jones first saw Rossetti, and, through the introduction of Mr. Vernon
Lushington, entered upon the friendship which was to save him (as his
friend William Morris was similarly saved) from adopting, as had been
intended, the Church as his profession, and thus depriving, the world of
a service no less religious in the highest sense, and no less potent a
factor in the ethical awakening of to-day.
The Working Men’s College, now rich in annals of some of the most
significant intellectual movements of the mid-century, was at that time
a centre of enthusiastic work in art and literature. Rossetti and his
friends took a considerable share in the lecturing and class-teaching of
which Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice were the popular and
indefatigable leaders. Hither also came Ruskin, of whom Rossetti records
with loyal admiration how one night, being asked in an emergency to
address the drawing-class, he made, without any preparation, “the finest
speech I ever heard.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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