Biography of Walter Deverell 1827-1854

Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham. III. Monday, ½ past 6 o'clock. [April, 1854.]

Dear Allingham,

I suppose you are gone to bask in the Southon [sic] ray. I should follow, but feel very sick, and moreover have lunched late to-day with Ruskin. We read half the Day and Night Songs together, and I crave him the book. He was most delighted, and said some of it was heavenly.

I took Miss S (age 24). to Hastings, and Bessie P. behaved like a brick. I have told Ruskin of my pupil, and he yearneth. Perhaps I may come down on Anna Mary to-night, as I believe she leaves on Wednesday with Barbara S. I am going now to my family, and if you feel inclined to come down to 45, Upper A. St., we will go to the Hermitage together. Otherwise I am not sure of going.

Your G. D. R.

Note. On April 14th [1854] of this year, a few days before the date of this letter. Rossetti wrote to Madox Brown: "Mac Cracken sent my drawing [Dante drawing an Angel in Memory of Beatrice] to Ruskin, who the other day wrote me an incredible letter about it, remaining mine respectfully (!), and wanting to call. I of course stroked him down in my answer, and yesterday he called. His manner was more agreeable than I had always expected. ... He seems in a mood to make my fortune."

A few months later Ruskin wrote to Rossetti: "I forgot to say also that I really do covet your drawings as much as I covet Turner's; only it is useless self-indulgence to buy Turner's, and useful self-indulgence to buy yours. Only I won't have them after they have been more than nine times rubbed entirely out — remember that."

Miss S. was Miss Siddal, with whom Rossetti had fallen in love so early as 1850. though it was not till 1860 that he married her. His brother has told us how her striking face and "coppery-golden hair" were discovered, as it were, by Deverell (age 23) in a bonnet-shop. She sat to him, to Holman Hunt, and to Millais, but most of all to Rossetti. The following account was given me one day as I sat in the studio of Mr. Arthur Hughes, surrounded by some beautiful sketches he had lately taken on the coast of Cornwall:—

"Deverell accompanied his mother one day to a milliner's. Through an open door he saw a girl working with her needle; he got his mother to ask her to sit to him. She was the future Mrs. Rossetti. Millais painted her for his Ophelia— wonderfully like her. She was tall and slender, with red coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion, though in these early years she had no striking signs of ill health. She was exceedingly quiet, speaking very little. She had read Tennyson, having first come to know something about him by finding one or two of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother wrapped round a pat of butter. Rossetti taught her to draw. She used to be drawing while sitting to him. Her drawings were beautiful, but without force. They were feminine likenesses of his own."

Rossetti's pet names for her were Guggum, Guggums. or Gug. A child one day overheard him as he stood before his easel, utter to himself over and over again the words. "Guggum, Guggum." "All the Ruskins were most delighted with Guggum." he wrote. "John Ruskin said she was a noble, curious creature, and his father said by her look and manner she might have been a countess." Ruskin used to call her Ida.

Anna Mary was Miss Howitt (atterwards Mrs. Howitt-Watts). The Hermitage (Highgate Rise), her father's house, was swept away long ago.

Barbara S. was Barbara Leigh Smith (afterwards Madame Bodichon). by whose munificence was laid the foundation of Girton College. Cambridge, the first institution in which a university education was criven to women. Rossetti wrote to his sister on November 8, 1853: — "Ah, if you were only like Miss Barbara Smith! a young lady I meet at the Howitts', blessed with large rations of tin, fat, enthusiasm, and golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in breeches, or wading through a stream in none, in the sacred name of pigment." "She was a most admirable woman," adds Mr. W. M. Rossetti, "full of noble zeal in every good cause, and endowed with a fine pictorial capacity."

Bessie P. was Miss Bessie Rayner Parkes. daughter of "Joe" Parkes, whom Carlyle hits off in his Reminiscences (vol. i. p. 254). afterwards Madame Belloc. In A Passing World she writes:—, 'Barbara Smith suggested the conception of Romola to George Eliot, who has thus sketched an immortal [?] portrait of her face and bearing in early youth.'

Speaking of Rossetti at the time of his visit to Hastings, she says:— "There was about him in his youth a singular good breeding, enforced and cherished by all the women of his family. ... I did not think his wife in the least like 'a countess,'" she adds; "but she had an unworldly simplicity and purity of aspect which Rossetti has recorded in his pencil drawings of her face. Millais has also given this look in his Ophelia, for which she was the model. The expression of Beatrice [Beata Beatrix, now in the National Gallery] was not hers. ... She had the look of one who read her Bible and said her prayers every night, which she probably did."

In 45, Upper Albany Street (now 166, Albany Street), Rossetti's father died. Here the painter, on the death of his wife, sought refuge for a time.