Miss Havisham received the letter cancelling her wedding as she was getting dressed (a letter which also revealed her intended had swindled her). She has, thereafter, worn just one shoe, as she’d only managed to put one on before the letter was delivered. All the clocks in Miss Havisham’s house are stopped at twenty-to-nine, the moment she learned of her betrayal. The blinds are kept permanently down, meaning she lives in a candlelit twilight. She’s permitted nothing to be moved since the day she was deserted. The wedding cake and the remains of the bridal banquet are still laid out – rotting, mouldering and stale – on a disintegrating tablecloth. Beetles and spiders lurk among the remnants of the aborted feast. The rooms of Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion, Satis House, are never cleaned or dusted. Grime encrusts the windows – further restricting the penetration of daylight – and dust has piled up on the furniture and floors.

Many people think of Miss Havisham as old, but according to Dickens’s notes, he envisaged her as only in her mid-thirties at the beginning of the novel she appears in, Great Expectations. Dickens, however, implies that the years without sunlight have prematurely aged her. (Dickens obviously didn’t understand the effects of UV rays.) Pip, the hero of Great Expectations – who Miss Havisham lures as a young boy to her mansion while entertaining the possibility of perhaps ruining his life – describes her as looking like ‘some ghastly waxwork at the fair’ or ‘a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress’. Miss Havisham informs Pip that she is ‘a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born.’ Dickens depicts Miss Havisham as resembling ‘the witch of the place’ while Pip sees the ‘withered bridal dress’ as like ‘grave clothes’ and ‘the long veil so like a shroud’. Miss Havisham is almost vampire-like, with Pip suspecting ‘the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust’. She does perhaps follow the timeless existence of the nosferatu. After Pip’s first visit to Satis House, ‘the rush of daylight quite confounded me and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of that strange room many hours.’

Miss Havisham looking skeletal in a 1910 illustration by Harry Furniss

Miss Havisham adopts a girl, Estella, who she at first wishes to guard from suffering a fate such as hers by warning her against the evils of the male sex. She later, however, upon noting how beautiful Estella is becoming, decides to use her protégé as an instrument of revenge against men, rearing her to be cold and manipulative. Pip is one of the unfortunate males to come under Estella’s seductive influence. He falls for her and – unsurprisingly – Miss Havisham’s machinations have dismal consequences for both these young people’s lives.

Miss Havisham is certainly a peculiar character, but it may surprise you to know that many believe she didn’t slide fully formed from the imagination of Charles Dickens. There is said to have been a prototype – a dark figure of London legend – called Jane Lewson. Jane, who died when Dickens was a boy, also lived a secluded life in a gloomy mansion. She permitted no object to be moved and allowed no cleaning to be done. Her windows grew so grimy that she lived in continual dusk. Like Miss Havisham, Jane always wore the same clothes, clothes that appeared so gothically grand that ‘Lady Lewson’ became her nickname. Moreover, it’s claimed that Lady Lewson endured her hermit-like, twilit existence until the incredible age of 116.

But who exactly was Jane Lewson and did she really inspire Charles Dickens to create Miss Havisham? How might Dickens have heard of her? Could there have been other models for Miss Havisham – jilted women who never removed their bridal gowns, who lived as recluses and who never allowed their decades-old wedding feasts to be cleared away? And how might their stories have ended up in Great Expectations?

Keep reading for tales of candles perpetually burning on ancient wedding cakes, skins plastered with generations of make-up and pig fat, macabre takes on feng shui and new teeth freakishly growing in 87-year-old mouths.

The Dusty, Cobwebby, Reclusive and Very Long Life of Lady Lewson – a Model for Miss Havisham?

Jane Lewson was – or so she claimed – born in 1700, in London. Her maiden name was Vaughan and she grew up on Essex Street, off the Strand, with parents she would always emphasise were of the utmost respectability. At 19-years-of-age, Jane married an old and extremely wealthy merchant, taking his surname of Lewson. She moved into his large opulent house in Clerkenwell, a neighbourhood on the city’s then-northern fringes. The district was considered well-to-do, despite the presence of a few undesirables and eccentrics and the looming mass of the notorious Coldbath Fields Prison (now Mount Pleasant Sorting Office). As far as eccentrics were concerned, Jane Lewson was destined to become one of the area’s most famous human oddities.

Jane gave birth to a daughter, but when she was just 26, her husband passed away, with Jane inheriting much of his fortune and his grand house. For a time, Jane and her daughter lived a relatively normal life, with the only – possibly – perplexing thing about Jane Lewson being the fact she rejected so many suitors, all of whom were eager to gain the hand of the young, attractive and very rich widow. Things changed, however, when Jane’s daughter married and she left home to live with her husband. Jane then appeared to embrace solitude. She seldom went out to socialise and welcomed few visitors.

This in itself may not seem so unusual – society has always had its loners and recluses. It was more the whispers about how Jane lived inside her massive gloomy mansion that elevated eyebrows. She allowed nothing to be changed, moved, thrown out, washed or cleaned. The windows acquired a crust of grime, making the rooms duskier, while dust settled as thick as snow on tables, chairs and picture frames. Layers of dirt obscured mirrors and tinted walls. Jane’s hatred of cleaning even extended to her own person. She wouldn’t wash as she believed the grime on her skin shielded her from illness and that exposure to water was the surest way to get sick. Added to this, she’d smear her skin with pig fat each morning – fat that never got washed off – on top of which she’d apply powder and make-up. Believing each greasy layer was further protection against disease, she maintained she had no need for drugs or doctors.

Jane wore the same style of clothes throughout her life, a style which dated back to the reign of George I (1714-27). As the years passed, she began to resemble a person from another era, a time-travelling curiosity. Her neighbours referred to her as ‘Lady Lewson’ as her manner of dress – and the gold-headed cane she clutched – seemed so archaic and grand in the rapidly modernising city. She’d wear ruffs, frills and a long silk gown. Her hair would be piled to the height of half-a-foot around a horsehair frame, with a few curls left dangling, and the whole display would be capped by a large straw bonnet. A black silk cloak trimmed with lace protected her from the elements. This was her costume every day for her last 80 years.

A depiction of Lady Lewson from The Book of Wonderful Characters (1869) – was she a model for Dickens’s Miss Havisham?

As more dirt and generations of cobwebs built up on her windows, Lady Lewson went on insisting they shouldn’t be washed. She feared this would shatter the glass and either kill the person cleaning it or permit germs to be carried in with the outside air. This added to her mansion’s gloom as the filth-coated windows, in her later years, allowed barely a sliver of light in. Lady Lewson stipulated the beds must be kept made up for visitors – visitors she never invited. Some said the same clothes stayed on the beds for years, mouldering and mildewed. Others claimed Lady Lewson had her maids prepare the beds each morning – the only things that got changed in the house – in case the non-existent visitors unexpectedly turned up.

As Jane aged, she got more and more superstitious and her obsession with staving off illness and death deepened. She’d only drink out of one cup, believing this cut the likelihood of her catching a cold. Jane had similar ideas about knives, forks and plates and would only sit on one chair. She became even more insistent that nothing in the house should be moved, believing the mystic alignment of her possessions – in a kind of macabre feng shui – was responsible for her remarkable longevity and robust health. She barely suffered an hour’s illness though she lost her sight towards her life’s end.

Though she seldom ventured outside her property, Jane Lewson did enjoy her garden. She’d sit in it and read and would occasionally invite the few acquaintances she had left alive to come and take tea with her there. They’d sit and discuss ‘old times’. She was reputed to have an excellent memory and loved relating events from the early 1700s. The only journeys out she seems to have made were occasional trips to her local grocery store.

Pip with Miss Havisham inside the gloomy Satis House

The author Edith Sitwell described Lady Lewson as a ‘strange and ancient trumpery’, stating ‘her likeness to a cobweb is produced by the fact she wears the “ruffs and cuffs and fardingales” of her youth.’ In what seemed a further defiance of the natural order, Lady Lewson ‘at the age of 87 cut two new teeth, which were a source of pride to her and of wonder to her neighbours.’

Edith Sitwell continued, ‘Her large house in Coldbath Square contains only four other beings, ghosts like herself, two lapdogs, an aged cat, and an old man whose occupation had been that of wandering from house to house in the district earning pieces of food by running errands and cleaning boots.’ This man acted as her cook, butler and – by that time – sole servant.

Death Finally Lays His Skeletal Hand on Lady Lewson’s Shoulder

Many had likely begun to think of Lady Lewson as immortal. However, the sudden passing of an – also aged – neighbour in spring 1816 led her to shiver and realise her own appointment with death must come. The shock of her neighbour’s demise caused Jane to weaken. She became bedridden, refused medical help, and on Tuesday 28th May died at what she claimed was the age of 116. On June 3rd, she was buried in the famous dissenters’ graveyard Bunhill Fields, which contains the remains of Daniel Defoe and William Blake among other luminaries.

After Jane’s death, her house was opened to the curious, who must have gaped at its ancient, dust-shrouded artefacts. One Mr Warner was astonished by the lengths Jane had gone to in order to keep out germ-bearing intruders. Warner noted that strong boards – bound together with iron bars – reinforced the ceiling of the upper storey.

Jane Lewson’s fame is attested by the fact that obituaries to her appeared in several publications, including The Observer. The obituaries stressed she’d died at the age of 116 and had lived through the reigns of five monarchs. She was taken to Bunhill Fields in a grand hearse pulled by four horses. Two other carriages accompanied it, containing her executor and a few relations, relations she’d always refused to see.

So might Jane Lewson have been Dickens’s model for Miss Havisham? Dickens was only four when Lady Lewson died, but her story was well-known in London and it’s likely Dickens heard it growing up. Jane Lewson – who today might be diagnosed as suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder or anxiety or a hoarding syndrome or some phobia – certainly resembles Miss Havisham in her reluctance to have things cleaned or rearranged, in her always wearing the same clothes (though not a wedding gown) and her reclusiveness. However, Jane did marry and was not a jilted bride. She gave birth to, rather than adopted, a daughter and there’s no evidence she raised her child to take revenge on men. Contrary to common perceptions, Lady Lewson’s advanced age also isn’t reflected in the Miss Havisham character, a woman Dickens envisaged as in her early middle years.

Could there, then, have been other models that Dickens based Miss Havisham on rather than – or at least in addition to – Jane Lewson? Let’s find out below.

Might Charles Dickens Have Based Miss Havisham on an Australian, Eliza Emily Donnithorne?

Miss Havisham with Pip and Estella in Great Expectations

One possible candidate for Miss Havisham was an Australian woman, Eliza Emily Donnithorne (1821-1886). Eliza was born in South Africa and spent much of her childhood in Calcutta, India, where her father served as master of the mint and as a judge. When Eliza was about 17, her father relocated to Sydney, Australia, where Eliza later joined him. They lived in Cambridge Hall (later Camperdown Lodge) and when Eliza’s father died in 1852, he left her most of his estate.

Though evidence for Eliza’s story is scanty, most accounts claim that – at the age of about 30 – she was jilted on her wedding day. Her fiancé – some sources identify him as George Cuthbertson, a shipping clerk – failed to turn up at Cambridge Hall for the wedding breakfast. According to local legend, the distraught Eliza commanded that the feast and decorations should not be cleared away. After the embarrassed guests had left, Eliza had the blinds pulled down. They were never raised again, meaning she’d always live in semi-darkness. She spent the remainder of her life as a recluse amidst the decaying food and tattered streamers. Eliza never took off her wedding dress.

She had the front door chained, meaning it would only open a couple of inches. Callers therefore never saw her as – if she really was forced to answer the door – she could stay out of view. She never heard from Cuthbertson again and – when she died 30 years after being jilted – those who came to collect the body found her still attired in her wedding gown. Dust lay deep on the floor and grime encrusted the windows. In the dining room were the remnants of the three-decade-old wedding banquet – heaps of mouldy crumbs.

Eliza Emily Donnithorne was buried next to her father in St Stephen’s Churchyard (now Camperdown Cemetery), in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. Since the 1890s, many Australians have maintained that she inspired the Miss Havisham character, meaning her grave is one of the most visited in the necropolis. When vandals attacked the grave in 2004, the Australian National Trust and the UK Dickens Society funded most of the restoration work.

The grave of Eliza Donnithorne and her father James in Camperdown Cemetery, Sydney (Photo: TTaylor)

As Dickens never visited Australia, we might ask how he came to know about Eliza’s story. Dickens did follow events in the Australian colonies and discussed them in his weekly magazine Household Words. One 1935 newspaper article claimed Eliza’s father was ‘a great friend of the famous writer’, but gave no evidence to back this statement up. A more likely way of Dickens hearing about Eliza was through an Australian correspondent, one Caroline Chrisholm. Chrisholm – a humanitarian and social reformer – supplied Dickens with Australian news and Dickens published some of her articles in Household Words. Chrisholm could well have been acquainted with the Donnithorne family or at least known people close to them. She ran a shelter for young female immigrants in Newtown, near the Donnithorne home, and Chrisholm and her husband seem to have been involved in the same Sydney social circle as Donnithorne’s father. Chrisholm and Eliza Donnithorne were also once patients of the same doctor.

Caroline Chrisholm herself at least partly inspired a Dickens character – Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby – a busybody and inept do-gooder – takes on a variety of social causes with obsessive enthusiasm while neglecting her family. The most preposterous of these, Dickens implies, is her insistence on campaigning for votes for women. Chrisholm’s efforts were, however, at least impressive to some as she is considered a saint in the Anglican Church and is being considered for sainthood in the Catholic Church too, a religion she converted to when she married at 22-years-of-age.

Caroline Chrisholm – did she tell Dickens the story of Eliza Emily Donnithorne, on whom he then based Miss Havisham?

The problem with the claim that Eliza Emily Donnithorne was the model for Miss Havisham is that little is known for certain about Eliza’s life. An interesting take on her legacy, expounded in Evelyn Juers’ 2012 book The Recluse, is that – rather than Eliza inspiring the Miss Havisham character – Dickens’s depiction of Miss Havisham attached itself to Eliza’s legend after her death. Eliza’s story, therefore, became increasingly embroidered with details from Great Expectations as time went on.

Other Prototypes for Miss Havisham – the ‘Wealthy Recluse’ Elizabeth Parker and Margaret Catherine Dick

Many claim that – while staying at the Bear Inn in Newport, Shropshire – Charles Dickens heard a story that would inspire the figure of Miss Havisham. It’s said that one Elizabeth Sarah Parker (1802-1884), of Chetwynd House, Newport, became a recluse after being jilted by Sir Baldwyn Leighton on her wedding day. Following this traumatic experience, Miss Parker spent the rest of her life secluded in the upper storey of Chetwynd House while the ground floor remained bare and unfurnished. Except one room, that is. This room, which never saw daylight, contained her mouldering wedding cake, on which candles were kept continuously burning. Elizabeth only came out of her retirement once. She attended a ball in Newport clad in her wedding dress – because it was wrongly rumoured Sir Baldwyn Leighton would be there. Elizabeth Sarah Parker died in June 1884 and was buried in Chetwynd Church.

This intriguing story has, however, been subjected to some significant myth-busting. Extensive research by Newport archivist Linda Fletcher, in collaboration with the Dickens Fellowship, has unearthed no evidence of either Dickens visiting Newport or of Elizabeth Sarah Parker being the model for Miss Havisham. The letters and papers of the gossipy Newport researcher T.W. Picken (1834-1919) show no mention of any visit from Charles Dickens, even though such a visit would have happened during Picken’s time. A search of all of Dickens’s diaries, letters and journals has also revealed no references to trips to Newport. In addition, Miss Parker was living in Chester or Whitchurch rather than Newport at the time Dickens was writing Great Expectations and she didn’t move to Chetwynd House until she was around 60, after Great Expectations had been published. As for Sir Baldwyn Leighton, he actually married Elizabeth’s older sister, Mary, and there’s no evidence Elizabeth abandoned public life. Perhaps – as may have been the case with Eliza Emily Donnithorne – the details of Dickens’s Miss Havisham entwined themselves around memories of Elizabeth after her death.

The ghostly remains of Miss Havisham’s wedding banquet in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

Another possible prototype for Miss Havisham was Margaret Catherine Dick (1827-78) from the village of Bonchurch, on the Isle of Wight. Dickens spent the summer of 1849 in Bonchurch, working on David Copperfield, and got to know quite a few of its inhabitants. He dined with the Dick family at their house, Uppermount, and he’s said to have based the character of the harmless madman Mr Dick on Margaret’s father Samuel (or at least used his name).

Margaret Dick was jilted at the altar in Holy Trinity Church, in the nearby settlement of Ventor, in 1860. She thereafter left the family home and lived as a recluse at a house called Madeira Hall. Another Bonchurch woman, Catherine Haviland, may have supplied the name for the Miss Havisham character. Catherine moved to the Bonchurch area in 1852, living opposite Madeira Hall. The well-to-do Miss Haviland had a coach house and stables built, a building now called Haviland Cottage. A similar structure is mentioned as the coach house of Satis House in Great Expectations. Dickens returned to Bonchurch in November/December 1860 and it’s almost certain that he would have heard from his acquaintances about both Margaret Dick’s jilting and Miss Haviland’s arrival in the village. One possible objection to this theory is that the serialisation of Great Expectations began in the magazine All Year Round on 1st December 1860. This would make the timeframe from inspiration to publication incredibly tight, but it seems Dickens did write many of the novel’s episodes during the serialisation process and he may well have heard about goings-on in Bonchurch through letters prior to his trip there. Margaret Dick died in 1878 at the age of 52 and was buried in nearby Ventor Cemetery.

So Who Did Inspire Charles Dickens to Create Miss Havisham – Lady Lewson or Some Other Reclusive Woman?

I suspect much of the input for Dickens’s depiction of Miss Havisham did indeed come from tales of Lady Lewson. Much about Jane Lewson fits the Miss Havisham narrative – the long years of solitude in a badly lit, decaying, filthy mansion; the continual wearing of the same archaic clothes; the obsessive refusal to allow anything in the house to be changed. As Lady Lewson was not, however, a jilted bride, Dickens perhaps also found inspiration elsewhere. Of the other stories detailed above, it seems most likely he would have drawn from that of Margaret Catherine Dick in Bonchurch, especially as he had knowledge of that village’s gossip. Maybe he combined Margaret’s broken-hearted retirement with the retreat of Lady Lewson into an odd world of gloom and dust and things that can never be moved or cleared away. It’s also possible – if the story of Eliza Emily Donnithorne was true, rather than being embellished with Dickens’s own imaginings after her death – that Dickens may have taken inspiration from the letters of his Australian correspondent Caroline Chrisholm.

The narrative of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations does, however, have one significant difference to the tales of all the women presented here. The women above remained in their sombre solitude until they died of natural causes – mostly at ages which, for the time, would have been considered reasonably good lifespans. And Jane Lewson, of course, is reputed to have lived to an age that would be incredible even today. This was not the case with Dickens’s fictional Miss Havisham.

The final time Pip visits Miss Havisham, she – realising what she has done to him and Estella – throws herself at his feet, hugging his legs and begging him to forgive her. A startled Pip thinks, ‘And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was in, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?’

Miss Havisham begs Pip’s forgiveness, in an 1877 edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

As he’s leaving the grounds of Satis House, Pip looks back and sees ‘her seated in the ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away, I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment, I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high.’

Sprinting up the stairs and back into her room, Pip ‘dragged the great cloth from the table … and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst.’ With the mouldering table cloth – in the process burning his own hands – he covers Miss Havisham, trying to put out the flames as ‘patches of tinder yet alight were floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded bridal dress. Then I looked around and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running away over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries.’

A surgeon is summoned and, though Miss Havisham is badly burnt, he judges her condition ‘far from hopeless’. He has her laid on the ‘great table’, the table that had so recently borne her wedding feast, ‘which happened to be well-suited to the dressing of her injuries.’

‘Though every vestige of her dress was burnt …’ Pip narrates, ‘she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and had changed was still upon her.’ Miss Havisham lingers on for a few weeks and – though for a time it seems she is improving – she relapses and dies.

It’s interesting that Dickens has Miss Havisham exit the book in this way. Though he obviously had compassion for the character, there was something about the unnaturalness of her lifestyle and her long-cherished resentments that made her seem like a ghost, a vampire or – as Dickens put it – a witch. Perhaps burning was the only way in which Dickens felt this eerie figure – and the strange mouldering world of decay and stopped time she had built up around her – could finally be exorcised.

(This article’s main image – showing Miss Havisham in her mouldering wedding dress – is courtesy of DeseretNews)

The post The Real Miss Havisham? Lady Lewson’s 116 Years amidst Cobwebs & Grime appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The coffin contained the body of Lizzie Siddal, the wife, model and muse of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Siddal, after years of poor health, drug use and psychological distress, had died on 11th February 1862, at just 32 years-of-age. As Lizzie had awaited burial, Rossetti – overcome by grief, tormented with guilt – made an impassioned gesture. He placed a book of his poems – the sole copy of his verses – in her casket. Rossetti wrapped the book in Lizzie’s long, striking, ginger hair; winding the tresses he adored, that he’d so often painted, that had drawn him to Lizzie Siddal in the first place, around and around the volume. This sacrifice enacted, the heartbroken Rossetti permitted his poetry – along with the woman he loved – to be lowered into the earth.

But seven years on, Rossetti changed his mind. Eager to publish a book of poems, and knowing some of his best work lay interred with his wife, Rossetti allowed himself to be persuaded Lizzie Siddal should be exhumed. Though Rosetti wasn’t at the disinterment – he couldn’t bear to be – his business agent Charles Augustus Howell would later describe to him the most astonishing scene.

After Lizzie’s coffin had been levered out of the grave, it was time to open the casket. A shudder likely went through the group as the ominous sound of a spade striking at the lid echoed across the night-time necropolis. But, when that lid came off, all – according to Howell – were amazed. Rather than the skeleton or rotting corpse they’d been bracing themselves to see, Lizzie Siddal was almost perfectly preserved and still beautiful. A kind of phantom glow added to her pallid charms and – most incredibly – her hair had grown during the seven years she’d been under the earth. The splendid red hair filled the coffin – yards of it glimmered in the firelight. So tightly wrapped was the book in the wonderous locks that they had to be cut before it could be freed. The book was then handed to the doctor, whose job was to disinfect it, making sure no diseases would pass from the grave to the living. (The lawyer was there so it could be clearly stated there’d been no foul play.)

I can imagine all those present – the labourers sweat-coated despite the cold night, the huddle of gentlemen – staring, for a moment, at the beauty they’d unearthed: at that pale – yet corruption-defying – face and, most of all, at the mass of fiery hair. But this morbidly serene image didn’t, apparently, last long. Thanks to the air coming into contact with Siddal’s corpse, she began to decompose and was hurriedly reinterred.

This exhumation marks a fascinatingly morbid chapter in the long and complex relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal, a relationship that would go on – in a strange way – well beyond Siddal’s death and even disinterment. It would haunt Rossetti to his own grave. It’s a tale of art and poetry; of love and neglect; of drugs and disaster; of sex and adultery and bohemian living and the manufacture of myth. It’s a story involving all kinds of strange – and often less than respectable – characters. But is this story – and even the exhumation that was perhaps its most dramatic episode – exactly what people have long perceived it to be?

Keep reading for tales of peanut-flicking prostitutes, of window-cleaning elephants and affectionate wombats, of furious attacks from morally outraged critics, of the origins of literary vampires, of bodies found with throats slit and coins in their mouths, and of some of the most tragic and talented artists the Victorian era knew.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti – the Passionate and Rebellious Young Artist Finds His Way

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (he’d later invert his name in honour of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri) was born in London on May 12th 1828. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian political refugee, who’d fled his homeland following a failed uprising in 1820. A professor of Italian at King’s College, Gabriele also wrote literary criticism and Romantic poems. Rossetti’s mother, Francis Polidori, was from an Anglo-Italian family, which also had literary connections – her brother, John William Polidori, had served as Lord Byron’s personal doctor and had penned the first vampire novel. Rossetti’s sister Christina would become a well-known poet, his brother William a critic and his sister Maria a novelist. In this artistic and intellectual ambiance, Gabriel (as his family called him) was at first home schooled, being immersed in Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Walter Scott, Arthurian legend, medieval poetry and the Bible. He’d later attended King’s College School in the Strand.

Descriptions of the young Rossetti ranged from ‘self-possessed, articulate, intelligent and charismatic’ to ‘ardent, poetic and feckless’. At first – like all his siblings – he yearned to be a poet, but also showed interest in painting and was especially obsessed with medieval art. Following four years at a drawing school, Rossetti – aged 17 – enrolled in London’s famous Royal Academy. He soon, however, found himself hating its academic and conservative approach, despising the prissy landscapes and portraits of glossy animals and pretty young women it encouraged artists to churn out. Rossetti – who was gathering a reputation as a Romantic free spirit – didn’t react well to any form of discipline and that included the ideas of rigorous training set down by Academy’s influential former president Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). Rossetti found the prospect of spending laborious years copying ancient statues simply horrifying.

A self-portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1847, aged 19

Rossetti suspected his future might – after all – lie in poetry. In a move revealing a brash self-confidence, he wrote to the famous poet and critic Leigh Hunt for advice. Hunt wrote back, saying it was easier to survive as a painter than a poet, so Rossetti decided to stay on the painterly path though he continued to write poetry. In March 1848, Rossetti contacted the artist Ford Maddox Brown, asking to become his pupil. Rossetti admired Brown’s style – preferring its vividness to the over-polished Academy paintings – but his letter gushed with so many compliments Brown assumed the young man was playing a joke on him. Grasping a club, Brown rushed to Rossetti’s home to teach the youthful jester a lesson. Reassured Rossetti’s praise was genuine, Brown took him on as a pupil that summer. But – though the two painters would remain close for years – their master-apprentice relationship was brief. Just like in the Academy, Rossetti was unable to submit his wayward nature to formal training’s demands.

The next painter Rossetti sought out was William Holman Hunt, after admiring his The Eve of St. Agnes. This picture was based a poem by John Keats, a big influence on Rossetti at that time, and Rossetti hoped Hunt might share his interests. Hunt did and he introduced Rossetti to another young like-minded artist, John Everett Millais. All three looked with distaste on the increasing materialism of Victorian society and disapproved of the pedantic Academy painters. They longed to revitalise art by returning to a style that was heartfelt and truthful, a style in which the painter would ‘observe everything and reject nothing’. They disliked what they saw as the mechanistic attitude of the Mannerist painters who’d come after Raphael and Michelangelo (hence the term Pre-Raphaelite) and wished to revive an art of intense detail and vivacious colour, taking inspiration from the clear lines of Florentine medieval frescos, the gem-like colours of early Flemish art and the complex compositions of the Italian Quattrocento painters. Naming themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they ardently set out their principles in a secret manifesto. This secrecy at first also applied to their movement’s name and they would simply initial their paintings ‘P.R.B’. Though just three young men started the Brotherhood, as time went on more artists would join or become associated with the group.

The Age of Innocence by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1785 or 1788). Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites were reacting against this approach to painting.

Like many sensitive Victorians, the Pre-Raphaelites recoiled from the polluted, mechanical and highly commercial world the Industrial Revolution was shaping around them, often preferring to retreat into vivid dreams of medieval-inspired fantasy. Paradoxically, though, their art was also ultra-realistic, striving to depict people as they were and nature as it was. An early supporter, the wealthy and influential art critic John Ruskin, wrote, ‘Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person.’

These Pre-Raphaelite characteristics, under Rossetti’s brush, would become strongly associated with one particular subject – women. Vivid, detailed, strong, Rossetti’s depictions of women have been seen as combining the sexual and demure, the angel and the woman of the street, and the seeds of this approach can be seen in the early days of the Brotherhood. Rossetti contributed a poem to the first issue of the Brotherhood’s magazine, The Germ, which came out in late 1849. Perhaps prophetically, it depicts a painter being inspired by a vision of a woman who orders him to mix the human and divine in his art.

Rossetti was soon producing oil paintings in the early Pre-Raphaelite style. His Girlhood of the Virgin Mary had his sister Christina modelling the Virgin while his mother posed as Mary’s mum St Anne. In early 1850, Rossetti started his Ecce Ancilla Domini (or Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord). This picture, which also features Christina as the Virgin, shows an anxious Mary receiving the news she’ll bear God’s son. The Angel Gabriel – posed by Rossetti’s brother William – symbolically points the stem of a lily at the girl’s womb. Mary stares at the plant with compulsion and terror. She looks ill; she shrinks back from the angel; the interior of the house is claustrophobic, painted in a sickbed white, or a white representing the virginity soon to be lost. This painting could reflect the fear of sex Rossetti seems to have had at the time, a fear that wouldn’t have been unusual for a young Victorian. Though Rossetti was idealising women in his poetry, he seems to have had problems accepting the physical aspects of his relationships. But there’s also, if we look closely at the Virgin, an anticipation too. Christina’s red hair seems to be flickering; its strands appear charged with electricity. Red hair was somewhat disapproved of in Victorian England, with its vibrancy having connotations of moral looseness, but throughout his career, red female hair would fascinate Rossetti. The flickering hair might well portray the intriguing power of sensuality as much as the pallid Virgin symbolises anxieties around it.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, featuring his sister Christina as a red-haired Virgin Mary

The Pre-Raphaelites may have felt they were revolutionising art, but when they began to show their work, the critics were hostile. One, perhaps thinking of Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, complained of ‘reproductions of saints squeezed out perfectly flat’. Charles Dickens – mocking the Brotherhood’s medievalism –  proposed a Pre-Galileo Society for those who refused to believe the earth orbited the sun. In Spring 1850, the meaning of the initials P.R.B. leaked out, intensifying antipathy to the group. In 1848, attempted revolutions had rocked Europe so – to conservative minds – secret brotherhoods suggested cabals of plotting radicals. In a strongly Protestant England, the Brotherhood’s secrecy and medievalism also hinted at Catholic conspiracies. It seems Rossetti, to the annoyance of his Brotherhood, had been the one responsible for letting slip the name. Extremely sensitive to criticism, Rossetti soon tired of the ‘increasingly hysterical critical reaction that greeted Pre-Raphaelitism’ and decided – at the age of 22 – to stop exhibiting and just sell to private collectors. Despite the critics’ spiky words, there were always those eager to purchase his paintings. After showing the Girlhood of the Virgin Mary at the Free London Exhibition, Rossetti sold it for 80 guineas (around £12,000 today).

But the Pre-Raphaelites were about to meet a person who’d have a huge influence on them all. And especially on Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Pre-Raphaelites’ Discovery of Lizzie Siddal and an Encounter with Death in a Freezing Bathtub

Though the Pre-Raphaelites disparaged many of the ideas of the art establishment, one practice they didn’t abandon was using models. Sometimes they persuaded friends or family members to pose; occasionally, when they could afford it, they hired professionals. But often they’d rove London’s streets seeking out ‘stunners’, the Pre-Raphaelite term for the strikingly beautiful – but also somewhat unusual-looking – women they knew would give their paintings an extra pizzazz. Or they just looked out for likely models while going about everyday errands.

One winter day in 1849, legend maintains, Walter Deverell – an artist and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites – went with his mother to a hat shop close to Leicester Square. He spotted a young woman working in the shop’s backroom – an apprentice, apparently – and was immediately amazed by her long red hair and statuesque, slim figure. Walter begged his mother for an introduction and discovered the young lady was named Elizabeth – or Lizzie – Siddal. Deverell would burst into the studio in which Rossetti and Holman Hunt were painting and blurt out, ‘You fellows can’t tell what a stupendously beautiful creature I have found … She’s like a queen, magnificently tall!’

Recent research, however, indicates that Lizzie didn’t just passively wait for an excitable Pre-Raphaelite to stumble upon her. Lizzie Siddal – who’d loved sketching since she was a child – had her own artistic aspirations.  She’d taken some of her drawings to show Walter’s mum, whose husband was the secretary of the London School of Design. Hearing about Lizzie, Walter rushed round to the hat shop and – upon seeing her – was determined she should sit for him

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (she’d later drop the last ‘l’ of her surname) was born in London on July 25th 1829. Her father ran a cutlery business and Lizzie was the third of eight children. One brother, Harry, appears to have had a mental impairment. Though little is known of her early life, it seems Lizzie liked to draw and read poetry. One of her favourite poets was Tennyson and it’s said she discovered his work when she spotted one of his poems on a sheet of paper that had been used to wrap butter. The family – though respectably lower-middle class – were poor. It’s not known if Lizzie attended school though she definitely learned to read and write, but when still quite young she had to go out to work to help support the family. She laboured long hours in the milliner’s shop under often tough conditions and her family fretted about her fragile health.

These circumstances – along with the fact artists’ models could earn far more than milliners’ apprentices – likely inclined Lizzie’s mother to contemplate allowing her to pose for Deverell. The Victorians, though, viewed such an occupation as disreputable, even a little like prostitution. Too frightened to approach Mrs Siddall himself, Walter sent his mother round in a grand coach. Awed by this carriage rocking up outside her modest home on the Old Kent Road, Mrs Siddall agreed to Walter’s request though the 20-year-old Lizzie continued part-time for a while at the hat shop. Walter introduced Lizzie to other artists and Rossetti said that when he met her, he felt his ‘destiny was defined’.

Deverell had Lizzie Siddal model as Viola in his Twelfth Night (1850) and she also appeared in paintings like Holman Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Priest from the Persecution of the Druids (1850) and Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850-1). She posed for Rossetti for the first time for Rossovestia (1850), one of his lesser-known paintings. The use of such a model – like much connected with Pre-Raphaelitism – was controversial. Though in the modern era Lizzie might have found work as a supermodel, her willowy limbs, gaunt face and coppery hair weren’t considered conventionally attractive in the early Victorian epoch. (One female journalist labelled red hair ‘social suicide’.) Through featuring in famous paintings, however, Lizzie helped change such perceptions.

Even the Pre-Raphaelites’ close circle didn’t quite know what to make of the delicate, reserved young woman with her tendency towards sadness and unusual brand of beauty. A female acquaintance recalled, ‘Elizabeth’s eyes were a kind of luminous golden brown agate colour, slender, elegant figure, tall for those days, beautiful deep red hair that fell in soft heavy wings … She did not talk happily, (was) excited and melancholy, though with much humour and tenderness.’ A male friend remembered Lizzie Siddal as ‘sweet, gentle and kindly, and sympathetic to art and poetry … Her pale face, abundant red hair and long thin limbs were strange and affecting, never beautiful in my eyes.’ Rossetti’s brother William felt she was ‘a most beautiful creature with an air between dignity and greatness; tall, finely formed with a lofty neck and regular though somewhat uncommon features; greenish-blue “unsparkling” eyes, brilliant complexion and a lavish heavy wealth of copper-golden hair … a modest self-respect and disdainful reserve; her talk had a sarcastic tone.’ Though impressed with her looks, William still considered Lizzie ‘not physically beautiful enough’ to represent Viola in Deverell’s Twelfth Night. It’s interesting that perceptions of Lizzie could differ markedly, with her eyes – for instance – described as both ‘agate brown’ and ‘greenish-blue’, as if people tended to project their own notions onto the quiet though striking woman.

One of the most famous pictures Lizzie posed for was John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1852). The painting depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Ophelia – sent mad by her father’s death and her rejection by Prince Hamlet – commits suicide by allowing herself to fall into a river, which she then floats down. In the obsessive Pre-Raphaelite manner, Millais wanted his picture to be as true to life as possible and this obsessiveness would mean the threat of death was not limited to his canvas. After spending hours on the banks of the River Ewell near Kingston-upon-Thames painting water, flowers and plants, Millais decided it was time to place Lizzie in his picture. In his quest for realism, he had her pose in a bathtub – filled with water from the filthy Thames – wearing a silver-embroidered antique wedding dress. It was January and the studio was freezing. Millais put candles and lamps under the bath to keep the water warm, but they kept going out. Millais relit them yet – as he became more and more absorbed in the details of his painting – he forgot to check the flames.

John Everett Millais’ famous Ophelia, for which Lizzie Siddal posed in a freezing bath

Lizzie lay in the bitterly cold bath for five hours and never complained once or asked Millais to relight the lamps. Maybe she didn’t dare – her family were poor, one brother had just died of TB and she knew she was set to earn more in that afternoon than she would in a whole year as a milliner’s apprentice. Jerking from his artistic trance, Millais realised Lizzie was shivering and looking feverish. He helped her out of the tub, but it was clear she was desperately ill, probably with pneumonia. Her family called a doctor – an enormous and unusual expense for people in their financial straits – and Lizzie’s father threatened to sue Millais, who agreed to pay the medic’s bill. The doctor probably prescribed laudanum – a tincture of opium in alcohol. Lizzie – though she recovered from her ordeal in the bath – would become addicted to this substance, a dependency which may have begun in the aftermath of that freezing episode. Her decline into addiction would lead to worsening physical and mental health.

Sketch of Lizzie Siddal painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lizzie Siddal, however, went on posing for the Pre-Raphaelites. She modelled frequently for, and became especially close to, one particular artist – Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She’d visit him – often secretly – in his new home and studio at Blackfriars in the City of London. (Located just north of Blackfriars’ Bridge, the studio’s site is now entombed below Blackfriars’ Station.) Lizzie and Rossetti became lovers. Though, after modelling for a couple of years, Lizzie had earned enough to quit the hat shop, Rossetti – perhaps jealous – would persuade Siddal to give up modelling for other artists and pose just for him. Charles Allston Collins, the younger brother of the author Wilkie, asked Lizzie to sit and remembered the ‘freezing’ refusal he received. Lizzie, at some point, moved in with Rossetti at Blackfriars –  a scandalous arrangement in Victorian times. The extreme reserve of Lizzie’s character, however, appears to have extended to sexual matters, a factor that would soon cause issues in her relationship with Rossetti. Together in Blackfriars, the couple would experience intense creativity and intense strife, struggling with the demons of drugs, frustration, infidelity, failing health, depression and death.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Life with Lizzie Siddal – Drug Addiction, Affairs and the Looming Spectre of Death

Over the next decade or so, Rossetti had Lizzie model for numerous oil paintings and watercolours, as well as sketching her obsessively. Between 1850 and 1862, he made over 60 drawings of her, drawings that were often relaxed and personal. She featured in his medievalist fantasies depicting queenlike figures and the restraints of courtly love, such as King Arthur and the Weeping Queens and the 1860 painting Regina Cordium.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Regina Cordium (1860), featuring Lizzie Siddal

Rossetti frequently sketched her drawing and painting and Lizzie had certainly not given up her artistic ambitions. She made pen drawings and painted oils and watercolours as well as writing subtle melancholy poems. Life was challenging for aspiring female artists in the Victorian era. They couldn’t study at the Royal Academy schools despite the fact that when the Academy had been established in the previous century, two of its founders had been women. Female artists were usually dependent on males for financial assistance so an artistic life would probably be impossible without a supportive husband or well-off family. In this respect, Lizzie Siddal was, for a time, luckier than most. Rossetti encouraged her to draw and paint and tutored her. John Ruskin declared her a ‘genius’ and even gave her an allowance of £150 a year to enable her to paint, a sum that compared favourably to the £24 she would have earned in the hat shop. She was the only female painter included in the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition of 1857. Though, as other Pre-Raphaelites had, she received mockery from critics, she sold a painting –  Clerk Saunders (1857) – to an American collector.

Lady Clare (1857) by Lizzie Siddal

But things were still difficult. Lizzie’s health was not improving. It’s not clear what malady Lizzie Siddal suffered from – suggestions have ranged from tuberculosis to anorexia to bulimia to a gastrointestinal ailment – but she was often weak and sick. Her laudanum addiction was becoming more severe, not helped by the fact the drug could be bought in any apothecary’s shop without a prescription. Strains were showing in her relationship with Rossetti. When, in 1855, Ford Madox Brown and his wife Emma visited the couple, the two women went out shopping, but when they got back Rossetti accused Emma of encouraging Lizzie to complain about him. The ravages of Lizzie’s illness were also becoming more apparent. Arriving at the Rossetti apartment one day, Brown – perhaps somewhat morbidly – noticed her ‘looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever, a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year.’

An ink drawing by Lizzie Siddal showing two lovers listening to music

As Lizzie grew sicker, Rossetti became more restless. Despite his gregarious personality, with Lizzie his social life was restricted. As well as the Browns, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and his wife sometimes visited their apartment. The poet Algernon Swinburne also popped round and – knowing Lizzie’s enthusiasm for poetry and literature – would read to her. Rossetti, Lizzie and Swinburne sometimes went to the theatre. Swinburne noted Lizzie was ‘quick to see and so keen to enjoy that rare and delightful fusion of wit, humour, character painting and dramatic poetry in Elizabethan drama.’

In addition to Lizzie’s illness and addiction, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was finding it increasingly hard to deal with her sexual restraint. Rossetti had begun seeking other models and sometimes his relationships with these women went well beyond the professional. On returning from a trip to France, Lizzie found out about an affair – which was probably not Gabriel’s first – with Annie Miller, a frequent model for Holman Hunt and also Hunt’s lover. Annie posed for Rossetti as Helen of Troy. Lizzie was enraged, telling Ford Maddox Brown she wanted nothing more to do with the painter. She decamped for a while to Bath, in the forlorn hope its famous spa might help her illness.

Helen of Troy by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1863), featuring Annie Miller

One night in 1856 Rossetti was walking through Central London when he became aware of someone flicking peanuts at him. The peanut flicker turned out to be a prostitute called Fanny Cornforth. Struck by her voluptuous figure and thick wavy ginger hair, Rossetti immediately asked her to model and she agreed. Unlike the restrained and semi-respectable Lizzie, Fanny was an earthy girl, a blacksmith’s daughter from Sussex with a strong lower-class country accent. Though he couldn’t resist praising Fanny’s beauty, William Rossetti wrote she had ‘no charm of breeding, education or intellect’. Fanny soon began an intimate relationship with Gabriel, exhibiting none of Lizzie’s sexual reserve. Rossetti was profoundly affected by this carnal awakening, with his poems becoming more explicit and erotic, scattered with passionate metaphors and phallic symbols.

His portraits of Fanny are far more sensual than those of Lizzie. They’re fleshy and voluptuous with little hint of moral condemnation, all fiery hair and glowing skin, taking their influence right from the lustiness of the Venetian High Renaissance. One painting, 1859’s Bocca Baciata (or The Kissed Mouth) has Fanny pouting spectacularly, a rose in her hair and an apple of temptation positioned in front of her. The picture was inspired by a legend of a Saracen princess who – despite having sex 10,000 times with eight different lovers – still managed to present herself to her intended husband as a virgin bride. Rossetti had often combined his paintings with bits of poetry and on the back of Bocca Baciata he wrote: ‘The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness, Still it renews itself as does the moon.’ 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata, featuring Fanny Cornforth

Another well-known painting Fanny posed for was Found. This picture depicts a young farmer who, bringing a lamb to market in London, meets an old sweetheart by Blackfriars’ Bridge. His sweetheart has become an urban prostitute and the farmer unsuccessfully tries to ‘rescue’ her. Rossetti considered the painting – his sole attempt at tackling a contemporary subject – to be a failure. He couldn’t finish it and soon retreated back into his medieval dream world. But, in getting Fanny to pose as the prostitute, he certainly maintained the Pre-Raphaelite preference for vivid realism.

Found, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, featuring Fanny Cornforth

It’s unclear how much Lizzie knew about Rossetti’s relationship with Fanny Cornforth, but one thing that did anger her was that Rossetti kept putting off the prospect of marriage. Though Lizzie had met Christina, she wasn’t introduced to Rossetti’s mother until 1855. His mother was against the match because of Lizzie’s lower social status, her poor health and lack of formal schooling. But, as her illness worsened, Lizzie eventually lost patience. She gave up Ruskin’s allowance and – via the spa town of Matlock – travelled to Sheffield (her father’s birthplace). There, determined to find success on her own terms, she enrolled in Sheffield School of Art. Rossetti made occasional journeys to see her, but his letters to friends from this period hint at liaisons with other women. Though not much is known about this phase of Lizzie’s life, she ended up in Hastings, a town popular with recuperating invalids.

By early 1860, Lizzie’s family had become very concerned about her health. They contacted John Ruskin, who alerted Rossetti. Ruskin wrote to Brown, ‘Lizzie is ready to die daily and more than once a day.’ Brimming with remorse, Rossetti finally promised to marry her. Their wedding took place in Hastings on May 23rd 1860 though Lizzie was so weak she had to be carried from the hotel to the church. The newly-weds enjoyed a lengthy honeymoon in Paris they could barely afford before returning with two street dogs they’d adopted. Lizzie’s health seemed to recover somewhat, she was happier and even became pregnant. Rossetti blissfully painted and drew her though ominously – while Lizzie seemed entranced at the prospect of motherhood – she was still hooked on laudanum. On 2nd May 1861, a stillborn daughter was delivered. Lizzie plummeted into depression. A friend recalled her rocking an empty cradle and saying, ‘Hush, you’ll waken it.’ She also suspected Rossetti was once again cheating on her. As for Rossetti, in later life he’d claim sounds in his house were the phantom footsteps of his stillborn daughter at the age she would have been then.

The Death of Lizzie Siddal and the Burial of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poetry Book

In the early evening, on February 10th 1862, Gabriel and Lizzie went out to dinner with Swinburne. During the meal, Lizzie seemed sleepy, but maintained she was OK. The couple returned to their apartment and Rossetti went out again at about 8.00 pm, to teach an art class at the Working Men’s College. He left his wife preparing for bed and noticed she’d taken half-a-bottle of laudanum. Coming back a few hours later, Rossetti found her comatose. The vial of laudanum on the bedside table was now empty. There were claims – never substantiated – that Lizzie had fastened a note to her nightdress reading, ‘Please take care of Harry’ (her mentally handicapped brother).

Rossetti, it’s said, slipped the note into his pocket before calling a doctor and one of Lizzie’s sisters. After they arrived, Rossetti left again, to call on Ford Maddox Brown. Brown insisted the note be burnt. This was to ensure Lizzie wouldn’t be declared a suicide and, therefore, refused Christian burial. The two then returned to Rossetti’s apartment. During the night, Rossetti summoned three more doctors but it became increasingly obvious Lizzie had no hope. She passed away in the morning, just after 7.00 am. An Inquest the next day ruled she’d died from an accidental overdose. At the time of her death, Lizzie was pregnant again. It’s possible she feared the baby had stopped moving and was unwilling to face the trauma of losing another child.

William Rossetti’s daughter Helen Rossetti Angeli would claim, ‘Lizzie’s last message, as reported, is touching and romantic, but she did not write it.’ Helen may have been attempting to suppress a rumour that Gabriel had pushed Lizzie towards suicide or even murdered her. Oscar Wilde had spread a story that Rossetti had shoved the bottle of Laudanum into Lizzie’s hands and yelled ‘Drink the lot!’ before storming out.

The idea Lizzie wrote a note may, however, be based on a misunderstanding concerning her last poem. This poem was written in an unsteady hand and William Rossetti suspected it had been composed under influence of laudanum. Rossetti may have been talking about this poem when he told his friend Hall Caine about a message Lizzie had left. The poem’s entitled O Lord May I Come:

Life and night are falling from me,

Death and day are opening on me,

Wherever my footsteps come and go,

Life is a stony way of woe.

Lord have I long to go?

Hallow hearts are ever near me,

Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:

Lord, may I come to thee?

Life and youth and summer weather

To my heart no joy can gather.

Lord lift me from life’s stony way!

Loved eyes long close in death watch for me:

Holy death is waiting for me –

Lord, may I come to-day?

My outward life feels sad and still

Like lilies in a frozen rill;

I am gazing upwards to the sun,

Lord, Lord, remembering my lost one.

O Lord, remember me!

How is it in the unknown land?

Do the dead wander hand in hand?

God, give me trust in thee.

Do we clasp dead hands and quiver

With an endless joy forever?

Do tall white angels gaze and wend

Along the banks where lilies bend?

Lord, we know not how this may be:

Good Lord we put our faith in thee –

O God, remember me.

Devastated by grief, racked with remorse, Rossetti wouldn’t let Lizzie’s coffin leave their apartment for six days. He wrapped the manuscript of his poems –  a pretty much complete book of verse, which he felt was the finest thing he’d ever produced – in her hair and let it rest next to her cheek. Lizzie ‘the beautiful wraith’ was buried in Highgate Cemetery, interred – despite their previous misgivings about her – in the Rossetti family plot. Some claimed Gabriel saw her ghost every night for the next two years.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Life after Lizzie Siddal – Drink, Drugs, Wombats and Naked Sliding down Banisters

Feeling his Blackfriars apartment contained too many agonising memories, Rossetti moved to a large Tudor house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The move didn’t, however, prevent him suffering from insomnia and nightmares, problems which would plague him for the rest of his life. Perhaps fearing loneliness, in Cheyne Walk he created a menagerie of bizarre and exotic animals. Rossetti owned a Pomeranian puppy named Punch, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, dormice, rabbits, peacocks, armadillos, a llama, a kangaroo, a zebu and parakeets. His animals often absconded, causing mayhem in his neighbours’ gardens and even attacking, killing and eating each other. Rossetti’s favourite pet was a Wombat named Top, a creature he brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep on it during meals. Rossetti even dreamed of acquiring an elephant and training it to clean his windows, in the hope passing pedestrians would be intrigued, inquire about the house’s occupant and consider purchasing a painting.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s home at 16 Cheyne Walk. (Photo courtesy of Edward X)

Rossetti opened his house to eccentric humans too. Algernon Swinburne lodged with him and there were rumours of Swinburne and the painter Simeon Solomon sliding naked down banisters during riotous parties. Rossetti also reconnected with Fanny Cornforth and moved her into Cheyne Walk as his housekeeper, lover, model and muse. Tales abounded of all-night boozing sessions, nocturnal poetry readings and passionate arguments, with Rossetti said to have once flung a cup of tea in the face of George Meredith. (A novelist who achieved immortality by posing as the doomed poet Thomas Chatterton for the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Wallis.) On a darker note, Rossetti was prescribed the powerful sedative chloral hydrate to help him sleep. To rinse the chloral’s disagreeable taste from his mouth, Rossetti – who until then had been a teetotaller – started glugging down whiskey. He became addicted to both substances.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted in the drawing room of 16 Cheyne Walk by Henry Treffy (1882)

Despite – or maybe even because of – all this chaos, Rossetti continued to paint. In fact, his works were becoming increasingly popular and selling well, perhaps something to do with their subject matter. He developed his new sensual style, painting Fanny Cornforth obsessively, focusing on her majestic head of loose hair (which to many Victorians signified loose morals). She posed – disdainfully combing her locks – for his Lady Lilith, Lilith being a dangerous and seductive female demon in Jewish mythology. In a poem he wrote to accompany the picture, Rossetti praised ‘Adam’s first wife, Lilith’ the ‘witch he loved before the gift of Eve’ whose ‘enchanted hair was the first gold, And still she sits, young while the earth is old.’

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, featuring Fanny Cornforth (1867). In a more famous version of the painting, Rossetti substituted Fanny’s face for that of another model,  Alexa Wilding.

In spite of his artistic triumphs, Rossetti suffered from doubts, fearing that – by churning out endless variations on the Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’ – he might be prostituting his art for commercial advantage. In a sombre moment, he reflected, ‘To be a painter is just the same as to be a whore.’ Perhaps such fears explain why Rossetti couldn’t finish Found – maybe he saw a little too much of himself in the picture. Some of Rossetti’s friends and supporters did suspect he was abandoning his Romantic ideals. Ruskin, for one, disapproved of his new paintings, declaring they were ‘as course as the prostitute who modelled for them’.

He also couldn’t escape memories of his wife. He made something of a return to his old preoccupations with medieval courtly love and queenly beauties admired from afar when in 1864 he began his Beata Beatrix. This picture depicts Beatrice – the great love of Dante Alighieri, who the poet adored despite only meeting twice – at the moment of her death. Beatrice – of course, modelled on Lizzie – is being mystically taken up to heaven. Her closed eyes hint at both deathly bliss and a drug-induced daze. A red dove, capped with a halo, drops a poppy – symbolising opium, sleep and death – into Lizzie’s hands. Rossetti always felt uneasy around the painting and bitterly reflected that artists often despise their best work. He knocked out numerous inferior versions of the picture for his clients, as if determined to besmirch its purity.

Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, featuring Lizzie Siddal

Fearing he’d betrayed the true spirit of his painting, Dante Gabriel Rossetti felt he had to seek artistic immortality via another means. He turned more of his attention towards his poetry and began to seriously consider putting a book of it out. This desire to grasp artistic renown was likely spurred on by the fact he knew his addictions to chloral and alcohol were worsening. There was also his belief that – despite his doctors’ reassurances – his sight was starting to fade. Rossetti, however, had a problem. Though he liked his recent verse, he felt much of the best stuff he’d ever penned was inaccessible. Much of his best work lay buried with Lizzie Siddal, deep in the earth of Highgate Cemetery.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Exhumation of Lizzie Siddal, Vampire Legends and a Tsunami of Critical Hate

Rossetti was in a delicate position. Needing the manuscript, yet hating the thought of an exhumation, he worried about a disinterment becoming a subject of public gossip and about having to explain his intentions to his family, in whose plot Lizzie lay. Rossetti’s business agent, Charles Augustus Howell – perhaps motivated by the thought of how well a book from the famous artist might sell – seems to have soothed Rossetti’s doubts and persuaded him to go ahead with having Lizzie dug up. Rossetti signed power of attorney in the matter over to Howell, who knew the home secretary and so obtained an exhumation order without much fuss and without the other Rossettis finding out.

Gravestones marking the Rossetti family plot in Highgate Cemetery, where Lizzie Siddal is buried. (Photo courtesy of The Midnight Society)

It seems much of the mythology about Lizzie being perfectly preserved also came from Howell. He likely invented this piece of macabrely Romantic folklore to ease Rossetti’s conscience. Howell may have also hoped that concocting an outlandish legend around Rossetti would boost the value of his work. None of the facts support Howell’s account of Lizzie’s pristine condition. After the manuscript was rescued from the grave, pieces of putrefaction had to be scraped off. Then – before Rossetti could start transcribing the poems – the book needed to be soaked in disinfectant for a fortnight. Rossetti found wormholes in the pages, which had obliterated some words. Despite having been thoroughly disinfected, the book gave off a revolting stench. Once he’d finished his grim undertaking, Rossetti destroyed the manuscript. Three pages, however, survived and are still held in libraries. The notion Lizzie’s hair had grown to a spectacular length is also likely to be little more than legend. The idea the hair of corpses can grow probably just results from the skin shrinking towards the skull, making the hair seem longer.

A page of the book of poetry Dante Gabriel Rossetti rescued from the grave of Lizzie Siddal. (Held in Houghton Library, Harvard University)

The claims about Lizzie’s ‘undead’ state may have, however, had quite a cultural impact. It’s thought the inspiration for the beautiful vampire Lucy Westerna in Bram Stoker’s Dracula might have come from accounts of Lizzie’s exhumation. Lucy, even more stunning in death than while alive, was laid to rest in ‘Kingstead Churchyard’, which many see as a fictional depiction of Highgate Cemetery. Stoker knew Rossetti – they were for a time neighbours – and he also knew and worked closely with Rossetti’s friend, the Manx writer Hall Caine. The exhumation of Lizzie Siddal seems a central event pulling together several strands of the Western vampire myth. Rossetti’s uncle wrote the first vampire novel while the disinterment of his wife possibly influenced Bram Stoker. And, in the 1970s, Highgate Cemetery would find itself the focus of a famous outbreak of vampire hysteria, with rumours a bloodsucking resident of the necropolis was prowling North London’s suburbs.

Despite having to deal with the gruesome manuscript and its scents of the grave, Rossetti felt his artistic resurrection might well be imminent. And, buoyed by getting his old verses back, he composed a new batch of poems, many of them – for the time – outrageously sensual. Much of the impetus for this came from a new mistress, Janey Morris. Rossetti and Burne-Jones had spotted Jane – the daughter of an Oxford stableman and laundress – in 1857 when they were painting murals at the Oxford Union Library. Amazed by her dark thick curly hair and queenly – almost haughty – features, they asked her to model. She sat for Rossetti as Guinevere and ended up marrying Rossetti’s friend William Morris in 1859. Morris – a poet, designer, socialist, free thinker, entrepreneur and crafts enthusiast – put his working-class wife through a programme of education. Due to her keen intelligence, Jane soon grew accomplished, learning several languages and becoming a skilled embroiderer. Her designs were sold through William’s interior decor firm, Morris and Co, in which Rossetti was a partner.

Rossetti’s affair with Janey seems to have begun in 1865. She’s said to have ‘consumed and obsessed him in paint, poetry and life’. He deluged her with verse and – as with his other muses – painted her constantly. While Lizzie had been the distant queen of courtly love and Fanny a symbol of sensuality, Janey was cast as a goddess. As Proserpine, she clutches a fateful pomegranate, resplendent in a loose flowing medieval gown. This goddess, however, deigned to accept Rossetti as her earthly lover. Rossetti wrote: ‘This hour be her sweet body all my song, now the same heartbeat blends her gaze with mine, One parted fire … her arms lie wide open, throbbing with their throng of confluent pulses, bare and fair and strong, and her deep freighted lips expect me now, amidst the clustering hair that shrines her brow, five kisses broad, her neck ten kisses long.’

Janey Morris poses as Proserpine, the Greek goddess of death and the underworld

Rossetti’s collection of verse – which mixed the poems salvaged from Lizzie’s casket with newer, more sensual efforts – was published in 1870. The poems, tragically, turned out to be too advanced for their epoch. Society was only just starting to become more open to the erotic. Rossetti’s verse perhaps also foreshadowed the development of a capitalist commodity culture, in which consumers are encouraged to eagerly – and greedily – look, touch, taste, feel, smell and experience. Though Rossetti may have heralded an emerging modern identity, his poetry was too much for most people in his own time. Rossetti had hoped his poems would make his name immortal, but the critics weren’t impressed.

The critic – and rival poet – Robert Buchanan was particularly disgusted. ‘There was no soul in this verse only body,’ he ranted, thundering against its ‘females who bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe, wriggle, twist, foam and in a general way slather over their lovers.’ Frothing with outrage – and perhaps a little jealousy – Buchanan accused Rossetti and his circle of encouraging ‘a morbid deviation from healthy forms of life … all the gross and vulgar conceptions of life, which are formulated into certain products of art, literature and criticism, emanate from this bohemian class … There lies the seat of the cancer, there in the bohemian fringe of society, spreading daily like all cancerous diseases, foul in itself and creating foulness.’ Buchanan was suggesting Rossetti’s ‘impure’ art and poetry had their wellspring in the life Rosetti led as an adulterer and libertine.

Rossetti was distraught. As well as launching a frenzied assault on Rossetti’s good name, Buchanan had spelled out certain fears Rossetti held about himself. He’d long fretted that his more spiritual and idealistic aspects had become just a façade and that his erotic adventures had reduced him to little more than a seedy sensualist. Rossetti expressed this anguish in a poem called Lost Days, in which a man is confronted with past versions of himself. ‘I am thyself, what has thou done to me?’ each doppelganger demands before vowing to haunt the man forever.

So Rossetti felt his efforts to establish himself as a serious poet had failed. According to Hall Caine, he’d bitterly regret the grisly disinterment, castigating himself for yielding to the pull of literary ambition. The thought of Lizzie’s exhumation tormented Rossetti for the rest of his days. And the man who’d persuaded him to do it, Charles Augustus Howell, would soon acquire a reputation as a con artist and blackmailer. For Swinburne, Howell was ‘the vilest wretch I ever came across’  while Edward Burne-Jones characterised him as ‘a base, treacherous, unscrupulous and malignant fellow’. Howell attempted to gain control of John Ruskin’s finances, persuaded a lover to create fake Rossetti drawings and was even rumoured to be enmeshed in a plot to assassinate the French emperor Napoleon III. After Swinburne had entrusted Howell with some ‘burlesque and indecent letters’, they found their way to a publisher who used them to blackmail Swinburne into given up the copyright of a poem. Howell was discovered dead near a Chelsea pub on 21st April 1890 with his throat slit and a ten shilling coin in his mouth, the traditional death meted out to a slanderer. At Howell’s home, letters from many highly placed people were found carefully filed. On hearing Howell had died, Swinburne said he hoped he was in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell, where those who flatter then exploit others are covered in ‘a coating of eternal excrement’.

The Dark Goddess Foreshadows Death – the Decline of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Devastated by the criticisms he’d received, Rossetti’s mental health declined. Increasingly paranoid, he suffered from hallucinations. But a piece of good fortune then came along from an unlikely source. As Janey and Rossetti had got closer, William Morris had developed a philosophy of free love, according to which husbands and wives shouldn’t stand in each other’s way of finding fulfilment. In early 1871, Morris even took out a joint lease with Rossetti on Kelmscott Manor, a fine Oxfordshire country house. That summer, Morris took off on a lengthy trip to Iceland, leaving the lovers behind to enjoy their affair. In bucolic surroundings and in the company of his beloved muse, Rossetti felt much better, his health improved and he again started to paint. The couple took long walks and lounged blissfully around Kelmscott’s garden, reading Shakespeare to each other. Rossetti would say it was the happiest summer of his life.

Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire, where Dante Gabriel Rossetti spent a blissful summer with his muse Jane Morris (Photo: Boerkevitz)

In Autumn 1871, Rossetti returned to London. Though his paintings were more popular than ever and were selling for ever more astronomical amounts, his problems again seemed to cloud in on him: his addictions, the traumas of his wife’s death and exhumation, and the critics’ savaging of his poetry. In June 1872, he suffered a mental breakdown. One night – as his wife had years before – he gulped down an overdose of laudanum, but unlike the luckless Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti survived. That September, he again joined Janey at Kelmscott and – though she tried to nurse him back to health – his days there were spent ‘in a haze of choral and whiskey’. By the next summer, he’d improved. He went back to Kelmscott, where Janey sat for him, but it was becoming clear their on-off relationship couldn’t continue. Janey was increasingly disturbed by his addictions, her two daughters had begun asking embarrassing questions about ‘Uncle Dante’, and Morris had restructured his firm, cutting Rossetti out. The polite charade that the two men were simply sharing the manor was becoming harder to maintain. In 1874, Janey had to banish Rossetti from Kelmscott. Rossetti would never return and he dropped into deep despondency.

Back at Cheyne Walk, Rossetti slid into an increasingly reclusive existence. Ill, addicted and depressed, he found it harder to work, but – when he did – the results could still be astounding. His paintings – which often featured Janey – took on a darker tone. In 1874, he produced the picture of her as Proserpine, the pomegranate she held symbolising death and entrapment in the underworld. An 1877 painting depicted her as the deity Astarte Syriaca. Rossetti’s take on this Near-Eastern love goddess – a more sinister counterpart of the Roman Venus – is full-lipped and prominently bossomed. Her solemn attendants, however, hold torches around which plants twine – plants that might be deadly nightshade. Though some clients were disturbed by Rossetti’s darker turn, he had no trouble selling his paintings. Astarte Syriaca went for £2,100 (over £250,000 in modern money).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca, featuring Jane Morris

One source of support was Fanny Cornforth. She stayed on at Cheyne Walk until 1877, when Rossetti’s family – more involved now in his life due to his failing health – forced her to move out. Rossetti funded a house for her nearby and gave her several of his pictures. They exchanged humorous notes about their swelling waistlines. He called her ‘My Dear Elephant’ and sent her elephant sketches. Her name for him was ‘Rhino’ and he’d sign letters to her ‘Old Rhinoceros’.

By 1878, Rossetti could no longer paint. He spent his last four years overweight, sick, depressed, addicted and abandoned by many friends. He became housebound due to paralysis of the legs and suffered from Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment. On April 9th 1882 – while staying at a friend’s house in Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, in an attempt to improve his health – he died, aged 53. He’s buried in Birchington Churchyard.

No painter before Rossetti had worked so hard to merge the personal, psychological and sexual with archetypal myths. Rossetti tackled the huge themes of sex, life and death by drawing on his own struggles, traumas and loves. His work foreshadowed a whole stream of modern art in which painters would strive to do the same, with notable examples being the Symbolists and also Picasso, who was a fan of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelites.

But through all the chaos of Rossetti’s tragedies and triumphs, he was always haunted by the death of his first love and would never shake off the influence she had over him. Shortly before he passed away, Rossetti said of Lizzie Siddal: ‘As much as in a hundred years she’s dead, yet is today the day on which she died.’

(This article’s main image – showing Lizzie Siddal in John Everett Millais’ bathtub – is courtesy of The Kissed Mouth.)

The post Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal & an Infamous Exhumation in Highgate Cemetery appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

His life story does read like a gothic novel or Romantic poem – an epic in which art and imagination launch a promethean challenge against the gods of poverty, indifference and prejudice. Chatterton spent a lonely childhood poking around his local – and extravagantly gothic – church, even learning to read from the ancient parchments and medieval manuscripts he stumbled across in there. Later Chatterton struggled to hold onto his poetic muse in the face of mistreatment from sadistic schoolmasters, the beatings and humiliations of an enervating apprenticeship, and – as he tried to make it as a professional writer – a crippling lack of cash.

But what’s more famous than Chatterton’s life is his death. It’s become a cliché of artistic demise – the despairing genius ending it all in an opium-scented attic. Much of this perception is thanks to a painting – The Death of Chatterton – by the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Wallis (shown above). Completed in 1856, this image – with its clever contrasts of light and shade – has the shockingly pallid poet slumped across his bed, his frilly shirt dramatically (and perhaps a little homoerotically) falling open. The suicide’s torn-up works scatter the room; an extinguished candle smokes spookily; the bottle of arsenic which has done the deed lies discarded on the floor. The window is ajar, indicating the flight of Chatterton’s soul or muse. Out of that window, we see the dome of St Paul’s and the spires and rooftops of a city that bustles on, indifferent to the departure of genius.

The Death of Chatterton was exhibited with a quote from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus: ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough’. The influential art critic John Ruskin praised the picture and crowds thronged into any gallery showing it. The man who bought The Death of Chatterton – one Augustus Egg – sold the rights to make engraved reproductions of the piece, meaning Wallis’s striking image was distributed widely.

Thomas Chatterton’s death, though, has overshadowed his equally dramatic life. Chatterton – while barely into his teens – pulled off a forgery of faux-medieval poems so elaborate and inventive that debate seethed about their authenticity for decades after his death. In his short life, Chatterton fooled patrons, fell out with well-known gothic authors, wrote scorching political diatribes, impressed radical MPs and lord mayors, penned caustic satires, seduced numerous women, and – ominously – tumbled into an open grave.

But do the circumstances of Chatterton’s death really match the assumptions people have made about it for centuries? And should his life be viewed as a flaming comet of Romantic genius streaking across a dull sky or as a complex construct of fraud, fantasy and bullshit? Or perhaps as both? Let’s head back to a strange, impoverished Bristol childhood as we start our attempts to find out.

Thomas Chatterton’s Strangely Gothic and Pseudo-Medieval Childhood

Born in November 1752, Chatterton was – like David Copperfield – a posthumous child. His father – also called Thomas Chatterton – had been the master of a local school as well as being a sub-chanter (an assistant singer) at Bristol Cathedral. Chatterton Senior was also a musician, poet, antiquarian and numismatist who had a fascination for the occult. His early death meant Thomas was born into a precarious and impoverished situation, with his mother starting a small girls’ school and taking in needlework to avoid financial calamity.

An immense gothic edifice loomed over the lives of the Chatterton family, as it had done for generations. Their modest home stood in the shadow of St Mary Redcliffe Church. Thomas’s father’s school had also stood near this building and his uncle served as the church’s sexton (the official responsible for the maintenance of the church and graveyard). The Chatterton family had long held the office of sexton on a hereditary basis and Thomas grew up enchanted by his uncle’s work.

The Bristol house in which the poet Thomas Chatterton was reputedly raised. The wall/façade on the right is the only surviving wall of his father’s schoolhouse. (Photo: William Avery)

St Mary Redcliffe has been a place of Christian worship for over 900 years though most of the current building was constructed between the 12th and 15th centuries. The grade-I-listed church is famous for its stunning gothic architecture and is said to be one of the largest parish churches in England, if not the largest. Dramatically sited on a red cliff overlooking the River Avon, the church was used by sailors as a landmark. Seafarers would pray in it before undertaking a journey and then give thanks in the church for their safe homecoming, facts which may have led to St Mary’s enormous popularity with wealthy Bristol merchants. These traders paid for the church to be lavishly enhanced in first the Decorated Gothic then Perpendicular Gothic styles. The elaborate funerary monuments of these merchants, as well as other local notables, further embellished the building.

Young Thomas loved to wander around the church, entranced by the massive gothic arched windows, by the sombre effigies of knights and merchants recumbent on their splendid tombs, by the forests of pillars, the decorated vaults, and the numerous carvings of gargoyles, grotesques and Green Men. His enthusiasm for history and culture embodied in stone didn’t at first, however, translate into an aptitude for learning. Thomas was actually thought to be mentally backward. He showed no interest in children’s games or in the books used to teach kids to read. Thomas was prone to slipping into dreamy dazes – he might sit for hours in a silent trance before bursting into tears for no reason. Considered an imbecile, he was expelled from the first school he attended.

The nave of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, the stunning gothic church that inspired Thomas Chatterton. (Photo: Alex Zhurakovskyi)

This began to change when Thomas became aware of the old manuscripts St Mary Redcliffe held. In the church’s muniment room – a space over the porch on the north side of the nave that contained chests of documents – he found dusty and forgotten parchments and deeds, some dating back as far as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). Fascinated, he used these ancient records as his playthings and this seemed to ignite a passion for reading. He learnt his first letters from a musical folio with illuminated capitals, one of a batch of medieval folios his father had fetched home from the church some years earlier. Despite Chatterton Senior’s antiquarian interests, he appears to have had no notion of preserving these precious documents, but had rather intended they should be used as sewing patterns or as bindings for his pupils’ books. Thomas’s mother had been about to tear up a folio for waste paper when its beautiful ornamentation captured Thomas’s gaze. According to his mother, Thomas ‘fell in love’ with the capitals so she seized on the chance to teach him the alphabet with the folio’s help. If this story is true, it indicates Thomas’s instinctive delight in medieval art as well as the meagre regard those around him had for cultural relics.

A mid-15th-century musical manuscript with an elaborate illustrated capital

After swiftly mastering his letters, Thomas learnt to read from a large bible printed in blackletter font, a gothic and archaic typeface. He haughtily informed his sister that he didn’t like reading out of small books. His choice of reading matter and his explorations of St Mary Redcliffe seem to have incited an enthusiasm for the gothic, religious and medieval as well as perhaps notions of personal grandeur. When his sister asked what design he’d like painted on a bowl he’d been given, Thomas said, ‘Paint me an angel, with wings, and a trumpet, to trumpet my name all over the world.’ This early egotism was perhaps a reaction to a growing sense his father’s death had robbed him and his family of respect and status in the local community.

By the time Thomas was six-and-a-half, his mother was realising her boy might be gifted. By the age of eight, he’d read and write all day if no one disturbed him and would devour any books he could obtain. Also at eight, Thomas was sent to Colston’s Hospital, a charitable boarding school founded by the Bristol-born merchant, Tory MP and slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721), whose statue near Bristol Harbour was controversially torn down during a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020. Colston had peevishly insisted that only the sons of Anglican and Tory-supporting families could attend the school and – perhaps unsurprisingly – it was a far from appropriate environment for the sensitive Thomas Chatterton. The curriculum was limited to practical subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, commerce and law, as well as the Anglican catechism (a document expounding the basics of the Church’s doctrine). Discipline was harsh, any boys showing the slightest tendencies towards religious non-conformity were immediately expelled, and pupils had to submit to having the tops of their heads shaved so they were tonsured like monks. Chatterton’s behaviour at the school – where he spent a miserable six years – alternated between delinquency and sulkiness. The only positive aspect of his experience there was the presence of Thomas Phillips, a talented poet employed as an assistant teacher. Phillips provided encouragement to any pupils – Chatterton included – with poetic inclinations.

Pages of a blackletter Gutenburg Bible. Thomas Chatterton learnt to read from a bible printed in this gothic script.

Thomas Chatterton began to write poetry at 10. At the age of just 11, he had his first works published – some religious poems inspired by his confirmation appeared in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. Another Chatterton poem the same journal printed concerned an act of vandalism that had taken place at St Mary Redcliffe. A beautiful cross of unusual workmanship – which had been in the church for at least three centuries – had in 1763 provoked the rage of a puritanical churchwarden who decided it was an idolatrous monument and destroyed it. On 17th January 1764, this overly pious person found himself the subject of a clever satirical poem by the precocious Thomas, which transformed him into a laughing stock across Bristol.

Despite these fleeting successes, the youthful Thomas Chatterton was realising life was tough. In addition to being poor and fatherless and being forced to attend a brutal educational establishment, he had a growing awareness that his sensitive disposition and artistic leanings were out of place in late-18th-century Bristol. A thriving seaport and mercantile centre, this busy and money-orientated metropolis appeared to have no time for poetic fancies or the appreciation of art. Unsurprisingly, Chatterton couldn’t help contrasting this abrupt and utilitarian attitude with the gothic carvings, the beautifully scripted documents and the lovingly constructed medieval church that had so enraptured his early childhood.

Vault of the Nave of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, the local church of the poet Thomas Chatterton. (Photo: NotFromUtrecht)

Chatterton retreated, both physically and mentally. He commandeered a tiny attic in his mother’s house and began to build a world more palatable to his inclinations. During holidays and whenever he could escape from school, he’d lock himself in this room with his books, which he spent his little pocket money on borrowing from a circulating library. Chatterton also filled his hideaway with drawing materials and with the treasured manuscripts and ancient parchments he’d looted from the muniments room at St Mary Redcliffe. In this attic, the impoverished boy weaved an elaborate fantasy realm, a realm that took much of its inspiration from the Middle Ages. These fantasies would result in one of the most audacious literary frauds history has ever known.

The Young Thomas Chatterton Creates an Incredible Literary Fraud

In his attic, surrounded by his books and medieval parchments, mesmerised by the gothic carvings and the romanticised images of the Middle Ages swirling in his head, Chatterton began to create not only poems but in fact a poet. He dreamt up a medieval genius, a character so powerful he’d overlap with Chatterton’s own life. Like with later artists who’d sculpt potent alter egos – David Bowie, for instance – Chatterton probably had some difficulties differentiating his own personality, worldview and creativity from those of the medieval poet he’d conjured up. Chatterton named this imaginary poet Thomas Rowley and – though imaginary – Rowley would soon be very much impinging on the ‘real world’.

Perhaps this whole turn of events was triggered by a pseudo-medieval poem Chatterton wrote at the age of 11, called Elinoure and Juga. When Chatterton showed the poem to Thomas Phillips, he for some reason claimed it was by a 15th-century poet. Chatterton was astounded when Phillips believed him and the success of this deception likely encouraged him to plunge deeper into his world of fantasy.

Chatterton’s Holiday Afternoon, an engraving by William Ridgway (1875) after a picture by W.B. Morris. Thomas Chatterton is shown secluded in his attic surrounded by ancient manuscripts.

Thomas Rowley – as well as being a gifted versifier – was a chronicler, priest and monk. Rowley’s poems were centred on a romanticised version of late-medieval Bristol, a town filled with citizen heroes and heroines. One of the most praiseworthy inhabitants was Rowley’s patron, William II Canynges. Unlike the mean-spirited and unimaginative bourgeoisie of Chatterton’s time, Canynges was an open-minded and munificent sponsor of literature and the arts. William II Canynges had actually been a real-life resident of Bristol. A successful merchant, he was one of the wealthiest citizens in England of his era and an occasional financier of the king. Canynges served five times as Bristol’s lord mayor and three times as an MP and dedicated a chunk of his wealth to renovating and enhancing St Mary Redcliffe. Canygnes, who died in 1474, would have been known to Chatterton as his recumbent effigy and elaborate tomb can be found in St Mary’s. His name also cropped up in the records of leases, heraldry, grants and bequests that Chatterton had purloined from the church’s muniments room.

The Rowley poems stress Bristol’s function as a strategic gateway to the West Country and the city’s admirable residents sally forth to fight against various invaders who threaten England’s liberty and independence. In Rowley’s surrealistic, dreamlike verses – and in the dramatic interludes he wrote to be performed in the grand house of his patron – his heroes and heroines speak with a passion and idealism Chatterton thought was sadly missing in the Bristol of his time. As for Canygnes, Rowley produced a poem in praise of his greatness, The Storie of William Canynge. Here we learn that Canynges – perhaps with an echo of how Chatterton saw himself – was a ‘fate-marked babe’, a child genius ‘as wise as anie of the eldermenne’. The poem then outlines a life filled with achievements, accolades and generous acts. After his wife’s death – in brave defiance of the king’s insistence he remarry – Canynges makes the noble choice to enter the Church, abandoning his worldly wealth and status and the attractions of the ‘second dames’ to become a ‘preeste for lyfe’.

The tomb of William Canynges in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. It supports the effigies of Canynges and his wife Joan. (Photo: Lobsterthermidor)

But if Chatterton wanted to pass off his own poems as those of a medieval writer, he had to employ language that sounded convincing. He strove to create a jargon of the Middle Ages, by scrutinising books from the circulating library as well as those he obtained by ingratiating himself with Bristol’s booksellers. He appears to have drawn much from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, compiled by the philologist John Kersey and published in 1708. Other elements in his fabrication were likely taken from the works of the poet and antiquarian John Weever (1576-1632) and the writings of the antiquarian and herald John William Dugdale (1605-1686), who did a great deal to establish medieval history as a subject of serious study. Other sources appear to have been the antiquarian, genealogist and historian Arthur Collins (1682-1760) – best-known for his Peerage of England – and Thomas Speight’s editions of the great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400). Chatterton would have studied the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays and likely had access to Elizabeth Cooper’s The Muses Library, a whopping 400-page tome containing the works of older English poets like Edward the Confessor (1003-1066) and the Earl of Surrey (1517-47).

Chatterton probably also plundered Thomas Percy’s three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which included Percy’s highly useful Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, a work contrasting medieval with modern ballads. Another source seems to have been Ossian – a collection of ‘ancient Scottish epics’ the poet James MacPherson claimed to have transcribed either from accounts passed down orally or from old Gaelic manuscripts he’d discovered. These epics – the publication of which began in 1760 – were both massively popular and massively controversial, with Dr Johnson, among others, denouncing them as a fraud created by MacPherson himself. Out of these diverse, centuries-spanning sources – no doubt augmented by his finds in the muniment room – Chatterton cobbled together his fake medieval argot. A sample of Chatterton’s pseudo-medieval language – from The Storie of William Canynge – is below. This passage depicts – if I’ve understood it right –  a poet reclining by the banks of a stream, musing on Bristol’s River Avon:

Anent a brooklette as I laie reclynd,

Listeynge to heare the water glyde alonge,

Myndeynge how thorowe the grene mees yt twynd,

Awhilst the cavys respons’d yts mottring songe,

At dystaunt rysyng Avonne to he sped,

Amenged wyth rysyng hylles dyd shewe yts head;

Engarlanded wyth crownes of osyer weedes

And wraytes of alders of a bercie scent,

And stickeynge out wyth clowde agested reedes,

The hoarie Avonne show’d dyre semblamente.

We might ask why Chatterton spent so much effort and time coming up with this incredible imaginary world, as well as the incredible imaginary language he used to describe it. It was partly, of course, a way of escaping from the depressing reality of his everyday existence. The psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan, however, also felt it had to do with Chatterton being fatherless. To compensate for this misfortune, Chatterton tried to ‘reconstitute the lost father in fantasy’ by developing an idealised image of the father-like, wealthy patron William Canynges. Kaplan also argued that Chatterton’s masculine identity had been challenged by the fact he’d been raised by two women, his mother Mary and sister Sarah. Chatterton, therefore, took upon himself a kind of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ narrative, in which a poor boy pursues a miraculous method of rescuing his household from poverty. Rather than using magic beans, Chatterton aimed to do this via his startling imagination and literary talents.

But to achieve his dreams Chatterton felt he’d need a patron – and finding one as wonderful as William Canynges wouldn’t be easy for a fatherless boy without connections in the materially minded Bristol of the late-1700s. Chatterton, nevertheless, was going to try.

A second effigy of William II Canynges in St Mary Redcliffe. This one was moved from the Collegiate Church of Westbury-on-Trym – where Canynges served as a canon – after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. (Photo: Lobsterthermidor)

Thomas Chatterton Tricks Patrons and Suffers a Stultifying Apprenticeship

When he was almost 15, Thomas Chatterton finally escaped the dire surroundings of Colston’s Hospital, beginning an apprenticeship in July 1767. He was to learn the duties of a legal clerk in the office of the Bristol attorney John Lambert. Chatterton wouldn’t prove a much better apprentice than he had pupil, showing little interest in his work and maintaining his sullen and insolent disposition. As for Lambert, he was enraged to find out that Chatterton wrote poetry and did all he could to stop his strange apprentice pursuing his muse. Lambert would search Chatterton’s desk and if he found any scraps of verse, would tear them up and give Chatterton a sound beating. What made this situation particularly dismal was that Chatterton, like most apprentices of his time, lived in his master’s house, meaning that – as he had at school – he could only retreat to his beloved attic during the holidays. On the positive side, Lambert was often away on business so Chatterton was left alone for long periods, which he could dedicate to his writing. Chatterton also seems to have fallen in with a crowd of young men with similar interests, a fact which no doubt spurred him on towards his goal. The interests of this group, however, also appear to have included heavy drinking and chasing girls.

In September 1768, when Chatterton was in his apprenticeship’s second year, a new bridge over the River Avon opened in Bristol, replacing a picturesque structure built in the reign of Henry II (1154-89). This event inspired Chatterton to send an article – under the penname Dunelmus Bristolienis – to Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. Chatterton’s piece was centred around ‘a description of the mayor’s first passing over the old bridge’ and Chatterton – or Dunelmus – claimed its content derived from a 15th-century manuscript he’d unearthed. Like his Rowley writings, Chatterton’s article was bursting with a sense of history, civic pride and elaborate pageantry. The article attracted the attention of William Barrett, a surgeon with antiquarian interests. Barrett, who was searching out sources for a book that would be entitled History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol, got in touch with Chatterton.

Chatterton had soon sold Barrett the ‘manuscript’ on which he’d based his article and went on to sell him a number of Rowley works, which masqueraded under such titles as the Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin (a ballad mourning the death of a Lancastrian knight); Ælla, a Tragycal Enterlude; and the ‘dramatic fragment’ Godwyn. Chatterton also offloaded onto Barrett the works The Tournament; Battle of Hastings; The Parliament of Sprites; and Ballade of Charitie; along with numerous short pieces. In addition, he managed to palm off onto the surgeon Rowley’s Memoirs and the History of Bristol, a document supposedly written by an 11th-century Prior of Durham that Rowley had ‘merely’ revised and corrected. The youthful poet claimed his father had found these manuscripts in a chest in St Mary’s muniments room and that he’d solely performed the service of transcribing the ancient documents to save them from oblivion. The credulous Barrett included these works in his book though it wouldn’t be published until 20 years after Chatterton’s death. Although History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol would be deemed a colossal failure, later judgement has been kind to Chatterton’s efforts, with many viewing them as powerful and (perhaps ironically considering they were forgeries) curiously original writings.

Chatterton’s article about the bridge also caught the interest of two men who ran a pewter business, George Catcott and Henry Burgum. Catcott was enchanted by the Rowley myth and would seek out and pay for works reputed to be from the pen of the 15th-century poet for years after Chatterton had died. For Burgum – a self-made man who’d risen from humble origins – Chatterton devised a fictitious aristocratic pedigree. He claimed to have unearthed a document showing the pewterer’s descent from the ‘de Bergham’ family, whose illustrious ancestry could be traced as far back as the Norman Conquest. Chatterton came up with a ‘de Bergham’ coat of arms, which he emblazoned on a piece of suitably aged parchment – probably a spare sheet from the muniments room – to which he added a written pedigree of noble lineage. Chatterton even enhanced the deception by including a Syrr Johan de Berghamme in one of the Rowley poems, The Tournament. Burgum paid Chatterton five shillings for the parchment – which Chatterton told him had lain undisturbed for centuries in St Mary Redcliffe – but it turned out Burgum wasn’t as naïve as his business partner. Growing suspicious, Burgum checked his alleged ancestry with the College of Heralds and discovered he’d been duped. Chatterton would satirise Burgum – and the five shillings he’d parted with – in a later poem.

We might wonder why Chatterton went to so much effort to pass off the products of his pen as the work of a 15th-century poet rather than claiming them as his own. One reason is that, if he had, he’d have likely been ridiculed for writing in an archaic style. There was also a certain amount of snobbery around at the time with regards to modern literature, with the idea that – especially if such literature included fantastical elements – it was the throwaway output of hack writers simply designed to entertain. Such fluff, it was thought, couldn’t be compared to the great works of the past. Another factor was that few people would have anyway believed a youth like Chatterton could have produced such pieces. Apparently, Chatterton did – on a few occasions – try to claim credit for the Rowley poems, but his assertions were just laughed at as he wasn’t considered intelligent enough to have written them.

During his apprenticeship, however, Chatterton made his first steps out of his medieval fantasy world. In this period, he also wrote modern poems, with his Resignation having attracted belated praise as especially enchanting. He developed his talent for satire too, writing endless pieces mocking the residents of Bristol, including his patrons Catcott, Burgum and Barrett, and the city’s mayor, bishop, dean and other notables. But reflecting on the course his life was taking, Chatterton realised something had to be done. Though triumphant at having gulled his three patrons, the sums he’d extracted from them were too small to make any significant difference to his circumstances. Chatterton knew he’d have to look further in his search for income, sponsorship and any sort of release from his apprenticeship’s drudgery. He’d have to look to London.

A Clash with a Gothic Writer and a Sardonic But Effective Suicide Note

In December 1768 – now aged 17 – Chatterton sent a letter to the London publisher James Dodsley. Chatterton offered Dodsley ‘copies of several ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a priest in Bristol, who lived in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV.’ Though he signed the letters with the initials of his pseudonym Dunelmus Bristolienis, he requested that Dodsley’s reply should be sent ‘care of Thomas Chatterton’. He, however, appears to have received no answer. He sent another letter to Dodsley enclosing an extract from Rowley’s tragedy Ælla, but either again got no response or merely words of mild encouragement.

Still determined to find a patron of the calibre of William II Canynges, Chatterton hit on the idea of writing to Horace Walpole (1717-97). Walpole – the 4th Earl of Orford and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole – was, like Chatterton, obsessed with the Middle Ages. Credited with having written the first gothic novel in English, The Castle of Otranto (1764) – a tale of ghosts, murder and family skulduggery – Walpole also spearheaded a more general gothic revival that would gather velocity in Victorian times. His palatial Twickenham mansion, Strawberry Hill, was built in a fanciful neo-gothic style and even had fireplaces modelled on tombs in Westminster Abbey.

Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds, painted 1756-7. For a time, the famous gothic writer corresponded with Thomas Chatterton.

Chatterton was clever in his approach to Walpole. In 1762, Walpole had published his Anecdotes of Painting in England so Chatterton made use of Walpole’s fascination for art. He devised a scenario in which William II Canynges had sent Thomas Rowley off around England to catalogue the country’s paintings. The result of Rowley’s artistic tour was The Rise of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wroten bei T. Rowleie, 1469 for Mastre Canygne. Chatterton posted Walpole this document – along with samples of Rowley’s poetry – and Walpole was intrigued. He eagerly wrote back, praising the poems as ‘wonderful for their harmony and spirit’ and stating, ‘Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be had. I should not be sorry to print them; or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.’

Buoyed by Walpole’s response, Chatterton wasted no time in sending him more examples of Rowley’s craft. Chatterton, however, also made a serious mistake, admitting to Walpole that he was the son of a poor widow and an apprentice clerk, but that he desired a more refined occupation. He hinted that Walpole might help him achieve this and the older man’s suspicions were inflamed. Walpole showed Rowley’s works to some friends – the poets Thomas Gray and William Mason – whose opinion was that they were modern fakes, albeit ones of admirable literary quality.

Literary fraud was a sensitive topic for Walpole. Not only had he been embarrassed by declaring his belief that Ossian was genuine, but he himself had been mocked for producing a hoax. Fearing a modern novel with supernatural elements wouldn’t be taken seriously, he’d disguised his authorship of The Castle of Otranto. The first edition had been anonymously published, with its title page stating it was a translation by ‘William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphirio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto.’ It was claimed Muralto’s manuscript had been discovered in Naples in 1529 and that this document was in turn based on a much older narrative that dated back to the era of the Crusades. William Marshal was, of course, Walpole and – though he may have been inspired to some degree by Italian legends – the ‘manuscript’ was entirely his own work. The Castle of Otranto proved immensely popular and Walpole felt obliged to add a throat-clearing explanation to the second and third editions, admitting he’d composed the story in ‘an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.’ Following this confession, critics turned on the book, dismissing it as lightweight, ridiculous, unsavoury and even immoral.

Horace Walpole’s extravagant neo-gothic mansion Strawberry Hill. (Photo: Chiswick Chap)

With Chatterton’s deception exposed, Walpole wrote back to him coldly. He advised the young poet to remain in the attorney’s office until he ‘should have made a fortune’ and could therefore finance the artistic life he craved. Though Chatterton responded with passionate arguments against Walpole’s assertions that Rowley’s harmonies sounded too modern and that his works were unlikely to have survived since the Middle Ages, it was to no avail. The problem Chatterton now had was getting his manuscripts back as he’d sent Walpole the only copies. He had to badger Walpole three times before the more established writer got round to returning them. In his final letter to Walpole, Chatterton wrote, ‘I think myself injured, sir; and, did you not know my circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus. I have sent twice for a copy of the M.S.: – No answer from you. An explanation or excuse for your silence would oblige.’ Chatterton also composed an insulting poem about Walpole, which seethed with class animosity. He’d claim the sole reason he didn’t send it was because ‘my sister persuaded me out of it’:

Scorn I will repay with Scorn, & Pride with Pride.

Still Walpole, still, thy Prosy Chapters write

And twaddling Letters to some fair indite,

Laud all above thee, – Fawn and Cringe to those

Who, for thy fame, were better Friends than Foes …

Had I the Gifts of Wealth and Luxury shar’d

Not poor & Mean – Walpole! thou hadst not dared

Thus to insult. But I shall live and stand

By Rowley’s side – when Thou are dead and damned.

Despite Walpole’s rebuff, Chatterton didn’t give up his literary aspirations. The London-based Town and Country Magazine published Rowley’s Elinoure and Juga in June 1769, but Chatterton was now moving towards writing more modern works under his own name and he produced few Rowley pieces in what remained of his life. Around this time, Chatterton’s mentor Thomas Phillips died, depriving him of another father-like figure. In mourning, Chatterton produced three elegies, poems some have seen as foreshadowing Keats’ style:

When golden Autumn, wreathed in riped’d corn,

From purple clusters prest the foamy wine,

Thy genius did his sallow brows adorn,

And made the beauties of the season thine.

Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,

His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew;

His eyes, a dusky light congeal’d and dead,

His robe, a tinge of bright ethereal blue;

His train a motley’d sanguine sable cloud,

He limps along the russet dreary moor;

Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen and loud,

Roll the white surges to the sounding shore.

The diversity of Chatterton’s output at this point – when he still had to labour at his clerk’s desk and dodge his master’s attempts to tear up his work – is astounding. From August to November 1769, he wrote burlesques, burlettas and satires and in December had another piece published in Town and Country Magazine called The Antiquity of Christmas Games, payment for which probably eased the family finances a little. He also produced an Elegy, Written at Stanton Drew bemoaning the fact a ‘Maria’ had rejected him. Chatterton does seem to have been becoming aware of his attractions to the female sex and to have started to take advantage of it – a tendency that would soon be causing him serious problems. With girls and women, he could be blunt. In 1770, he wrote a note to one Esther Saunders arranging to meet ‘in the morning for … we shant be seen a bout 6 a Clock. But we must wait with patient for there is a Time for all Things … There is a time for all things – Except Marriage my Dear. And so your hbl Servt. T. Chatterton, April 9th.’

Despite his deeply religious background, Chatterton was evolving into a free thinker, writing, ‘That God being incomprehensible, it is not required of us to know the mysteries of the Trinity … it matters not whether a man is a pagan, Turk, Jew or Christian if he acts according to the religion he professes … if a man lives a good moral life he is a Christian.’

A certain political radicalism had also entered Chatterton’s thought. He’d become a fan of the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes, who was a supporter of the freedom of the press, freedom of religion and of America’s desire to gain independence from the British Empire. Wilkes was also a libertine, being a member of the notorious Hellfire Club, a group of free-thinking aristocrats that staged riotous parties and blasphemous mock-religious rituals. Wilkes is thought to have been responsible for an outrageous stunt – he released a baboon dressed up with horns during one of the club’s ceremonies and some members were so startled they thought it was the Devil. For Chatterton, Wilkes likely represented the kind of libertarian, progressive patriotism he’d celebrated in his Rowley poems. He soon plunged into the conflict between the more radical party in British politics championed by Wilkes and the conservative faction headed by the Queen, the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Bute. Chatterton wrote polemics – under a new penname, Decimus – some of which made it into radical publications, including the Middlesex Journal and the April/May 1770 issue of The Freeholder’s Magazine.

Thomas Chatterton’s political hero John Wilkes. As well as being a famous radical MP, he was known as ‘the ugliest man in England’.

These successes must have been exhilarating, but they couldn’t disguise the fact Chatterton was still a desperately poor 17-year-old trapped in an unhappy Bristol apprenticeship. Vowing he’d earn his living by his pen – and knowing that to have even the slimmest chance of doing so he’d have to move to London – he came up with another clever scheme, one that inevitably involved his writerly talents. Having just posted off a political diatribe to the Middlesex Journal, on Easter Saturday 1770 he sat down to write what he termed his Last Will and Testament, a document containing a series of sardonic bequests. Claiming he’d end his life the next evening, he directed that his ‘grammar and prosody’ should be left to his former patron Mr Burgum, his ‘humility’ to one Reverend Mr Camplin,  and his ‘religion’ to Dean Barton. To his home city, he left ‘all his spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on its quay since the days of Canynge and Rowley’ and his ‘debts in the whole not five pounds to the payment of the charitable and generous Chamber of Bristol’.

The will, however, wasn’t completely in jest and did betray much of the angst Chatterton was suffering. A more heartfelt passage commended his friend Michael Clayfield and Chatterton stipulated his mother and sister should be placed under ‘the protection of my friends, if I have any’. When Lambert saw the testament, he seems to have either taken the threat of suicide seriously or used the will as an excuse to get rid of his troublesome charge.

Lambert terminated Chatterton’s apprenticeship and the youth was free to move to London. His friends had a whip-round so he wouldn’t be totally broke when he arrived. By April 26th, Chatterton was in the capital.

London and the Death of Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton began his life in London lodging in Shoreditch, then a disreputable district on the eastern borders of the old City. He stayed at the house of a relative, a Mr Warmsley, and had to share a room with another tenant. His roommate later remarked that Chatterton would spend much of the night writing. Indeed, Chatterton’s first weeks in London were productive. He worked on eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, as well as firing off political polemics. These political articles appeared in radical magazines though their editors paid him little and sometimes nothing. Nevertheless, intoxicated by his first scraps of London income, he bought presents for his sister and mother, posting them off with optimistic letters describing his new life. And, in a way, things were looking hopeful. The polemics written under his Decimus persona had captured the attention of his hero John Wilkes, who ‘expressed a desire to know the author’. Chatterton had also drawn the admiration of London’s liberal Lord Mayor, William Beckford, who ‘greeted him as politely as a citizen could’.

After nine weeks in Shoreditch, he moved to the neighbourhood of Holborn. Unlike in his former lodgings, he had an attic to himself so could write without worrying about disturbing fellow tenants. This attic may have recalled his old sanctuary at his mother’s house. Perhaps inspired by such memories, he worked over a Rowley poem – the Excelente Balade of Charitie – and sent it to Town and Country Magazine. It was rejected.

The move to Holborn coincided with other problems. Chatterton’s meagre income from his political writing dried up. The government was clamping down on dissent, meaning magazines had become wary of publishing polemics in the style of Decimus. On June 21st, William Beckford died, snuffing out any hopes Chatterton had of help from him, and in July the editor of Freeholder’s Magazine was jailed. Though he had some poems published in Town and Country in June and July – which, with their otherworldliness and grand mythologising, hint at themes Blake and Coleridge would explore – Chatterton was soon struggling to scrape together enough money to eat. A neighbour, Mr Cross – a pharmacist – invited the poet to share his dinner several times, but Chatterton proudly refused.

Things weren’t helped by his landlady, the perhaps ironically named Mrs Angel, raising the rent after what appear to have been some sexual shenanigans. In a letter to his old patron Catcott, Chatterton described how ‘staggering home one night from the Jellyhouse, I made bold to advance my hand under her covered way, and found her a very very woman. She is not only an angel but an arch angel; for finding I had connection with one of her assistants, she has advanced her demands from 6s to 8s 6 per week, assured that I should rather comply than leave my Dulcinea and her soft embraces.’

Chatterton’s problems seem to have tipped him into depression. Walking with a friend through the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, Chatterton – absorbed in thought – didn’t notice a newly dug grave and tumbled into it. His companion helped him out, joking he was happy to assist in the resurrection of genius. Chatterton told him, ‘My dear friend, I have been at war with the grave for some time now.’ St Pancras Old Churchyard has literary connections – Mary Shelley’s parents were laid to rest there as was Dr John Polidori, the writer of the first vampire novel. During his career as an architect, Thomas Hardy supervised the transfer of thousands of bodies from the graveyard to make way for a railway. Could Chatterton’s topple into the grave have been an attempt by the ancient necropolis to claim another literary occupant?

St Pancras Old Churchyard, where Thomas Chatterton fell into an open grave shortly before his death. The church has several literary connections.

Chatterton’s situation grew more desperate and he even seems to have been willing to abandon his literary dreams. He wrote to his old patron Barrett asking if he could find him a position as a surgeon on ship, but – as Chatterton had no medical experience – Barrett couldn’t help. On 24th August, Mrs Angel – perhaps repenting of her earlier behaviour – realised that Chatterton ‘had not eaten anything for two or three days’ and begged him to join her for dinner. Chatterton declined, saying he wasn’t hungry, but a local baker claimed that on the same day Chatterton had tried to beg a loaf.

On the night of August 24th, Thomas Chatterton died. He’s widely believed to have committed suicide, tearing up the last poem he’d been working on and throwing the pieces on the floor before gulping down opium followed by arsenic in water. The next day, Chatterton’s room was broken open and his body was discovered in a convulsed state. His pocketbook was found too – receipts in it showed how little the magazines had paid him: a shilling for an article, less than eightpence a song and payment withheld for work accepted but not yet published. An inquest would deem Chatterton had died of arsenic poisoning.

His tragedy was compounded by the fact that – unknown to Chatterton – an Oxford academic, one Dr Fry, had become interested in the Rowley poems. A few days after Chatterton’s death, Fry came to London with the intention of finding the boy and offering him support ‘whether discoverer or author merely’. Upon hearing the sad news, Fry purchased from Mrs Angel the scraps of paper she’d swept up from Chatterton’s attic on the morning of the 25th. The poem he’d ripped up was Rowley’s Ælla  – he’d probably been trying to improve the ending of that tragic interlude. Dr Fry pieced together what he could and the fragments are now kept in Bristol Public Library and Art Gallery.

Chatterton’s death would become immortalised in Romantic lore as the despairing suicide of a precocious genius rejected by an uncaring and philistine world. The praises of later generations of poets and – especially – Wallis’s highly dramatic painting have ensured this notion of Chatterton’s end has stayed wedged in the public consciousness. Chatterton may well have committed suicide: he was desperate, depressed and had – at least half-seriously – contemplated such an act before. But several modern scholars suggest a different explanation for Chatterton’s demise – accidental overdose.

This theory asserts that Chatterton had been taking arsenic to treat venereal disease. Arsenic was, in Chatterton’s era, considered a remedy for such illnesses and the poet’s chemist neighbour, Mr Cross, stated that Chatterton had been undergoing treatment for a sexually transmitted condition (probably gonorrhoea). Chatterton may have confused his dose of arsenic or unwittingly created a lethal cocktail by mixing it with opium, a drug he was known to use.

As befitted his penniless state, Thomas Chatterton was interred in the cemetery of Holborn’s Shoe Lane Workhouse. There’s a story Chatterton’s body was secretly transported to Bristol so his uncle the sexton could bury him in the grounds of his beloved St Mary Redcliffe, but there’s no evidence to support this rumour. A memorial was, however, later erected outside the church, engraved with lines from Chatterton’s poem Will:

Reader! Judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a

Superior power. To that power alone he is now answerable.

A Doomed Romantic? A Martyr to Art? The Peculiar Gothic Afterlife of Thomas Chatterton

As Chatterton was a little-known poet – and because those who did know of him tended to view him as merely a transcriber of Rowley – his death at first attracted little comment. A book appeared in 1777 – Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century – edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt, an expert on Chaucer who believed the poems genuinely medieval. The book’s second edition – published the next year – did, however, admit they were probably Chatterton’s own work. Debate, though, about the authenticity of the Rowley poems raged on into the 1800s, a fact which would no doubt have amused their true author. Most scholars would eventually view the poems as ingenious forgeries.

As Chatterton did gain a little fame, one who suffered was his old nemesis Horace Walpole. Walpole spent the last 20 years of his life battling the stain on his reputation caused by the perception that a rich privileged writer had mistreated a tragic, poverty-stricken talent. Walpole did regret his disdain of Chatterton, stating ‘I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius.’

The Romantic Poets, however, would seize on Chatterton as a paragon of the doomed, tormented yet brilliant artist. They admired his radical politics, his dogged commitment to his vision and his martyrdom to his muse. Shelley commemorated Chatterton in Adonis, Wordsworth paid him homage in Resolution and Independence, and Coleridge praised him in Monody on the Death of Chatterton. For Wordsworth, Chatterton was ‘the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride’; for Shelley, he was an inheritor ‘of unfulfilled renown’ scorned by an ungrateful public who ‘hooted him from the stage of life’. Byron contrasted him favourably with Wordsworth and Burns while Keats dedicated his Endymion – beginning with the line ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ – to ‘the memory of Thomas Chatterton’. Keats felt Chatterton was ‘the purest writer in the English language … tis genuine English idiom in English words’ and William Blake proclaimed, ‘I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient, is so.’

Chatterton’s posthumous influence was by no means confined to England. The early French Romantic Alfred de Vigny came up with a play – Chatterton – in which the disparaging words of Lord Mayor William Beckford trigger the young man’s suicide. A darker side of Chatterton’s foreshadowing of the Romantic movement could possibly be seen in the early deaths of several of its leading members, but the ages at which the later poets passed on – Keats at 25, Shelley at 29, Byron at 36 – make them seem positively mature compared to Chatterton.

When the Pre-Raphaelites got hold of the Chatterton myth, his immortalisation as a dark-fated genius was complete. Henry Wallis produced his famous picture of Chatterton’s suicide, getting the young novelist and poet George Meredith to pose in the chamber of a lawyer friend in Gray’s Inn, a room whose view of the London skyline was likely similar to the one from Chatterton’s attic. The Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Chatterton fan, helping prepare an edition of his poems and declaiming, ‘Not to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the true day-spring of modern Romantic poetry.’ Later writers also found themselves influenced by the weird aura of Chatterton’s work, life and death. Oscar Wilde would campaign unsuccessfully to have a plaque to him put up at Colston’s School.

Thomas Chatterton has left a strange legacy of genius and deception, of tragedy, triumphant fraud and astonishingly precocious achievement. His life – and maybe even more so his death – for a long time shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a poet, a writer, an artist, perceptions that have proved so strong that – even in our cynical age – we have not completely eluded their shadow.

The post Thomas Chatterton – Doomed Poet, Gothic Hero or Cynical Forger? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The Devil asked Tartini to give him a music lesson, which the maestro did, demonstrating to the Evil One the magnificent skill he’d built up through years of learning, practice and performance. Tartini then passed the Devil his violin to see if the Fiend could reproduce any of what he’d been taught.

The Devil confidently took up the instrument and Tartini was astounded when he began to play with incredible virtuosity, delivering a performance which was powerful and intense, but exquisitely tasteful and executed with the most breath-taking precision. The Devil’s playing easily surpassed even Tartini’s brilliance. Tartini stared at the Fiend, his mouth dropped open, time seemed to halt as the most amazing music poured from the violin.

The story is recounted in Giuseppe Tartini’s own words in Jerome Lalande’s book Voyage d’un François en Italie (1769):

‘One night I dreamed I had made a pact with the Devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play.

How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported: my breath failed me and I awoke.’

But how did this nocturnal vision affect Giuseppe Tartini? Was his experience of soul selling merely a bizarre dream or did it spill over into his waking life, adding a sulphurous tinge to his music? And is there any evidence Tartini genuinely entered into a diabolical pact, bartering his soul for success, fame and musical mastery?

Giuseppe Tartini Tries to Recreate the Devil’s Fiendishly Good Composition

The moment he woke up, Tartini reached for the violin lying by his bed, eager to recreate the Devil’s tune. Tartini was probably in that state in which the worlds of wakefulness and dream mingle, in which sleep’s fantastical logic floats above the solid and prosaic. With the Devil’s notes echoing faintly in his head, Tartini’s drowsy fingers fumbled on the strings as he strove to delve back into his dream.

However, as Tartini put it, his attempts were ‘in vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best I ever wrote … but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.’

Out of his efforts to remember the diabolically brilliant tune, Tartini did produce an impressive – and technically demanding – piece of music: his Violin Sonata in G Minor, otherwise known as the Devil’s Trill Sonata. But while – from the hundreds of compositions he wrote in his lifetime – this piece would remain Tartini’s favourite, he felt it was ‘so inferior to what I heard that, if I could have subsisted by other means, I would have broken my violin and abandoned music forever.’

Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata was apparently just a pale reflection of the music Satan played in the violinist’s dream.

The Devil’s Trill Sonata (Violin Sonata in G Minor)

Lasting around 16-and-a-half minutes, the Devil’s Trill Sonata contains three movements and boasts haunting and expressive melodies.

The sonata is below so – if you dare – you can have a listen. As someone relatively unschooled in classical music – and knowing next to nothing about the violin – I’m going to try to describe how this piece strikes me on a simply emotional level.

The Devil’s Trill Sonata starts off gently, with sombre tones evoking a beautiful desolation. Sweeping chords – mournful yet bewitching – resonate soulfully. There’s something heart-breaking here, a sweetly bitter nostalgia. But now there’s fast high-spirited playing, like notes are springing, jumping, twisting in the air. We hear a certain hope, a lightness, the joy of expectation as notes skip and dance around one another. Yet darker shades creep in, perhaps there’s some foreboding or fear of failure amongst the longing and glee.

As the Devil’s Trill Sonata goes on, emotions conflict. Dark tones intrude upon wistful memories; sinister surges overwhelm sweet recollections. The despondency’s getting deeper, as if there’s – sometimes – an acceptance of some dolorous fate, as if the violin’s sobbing. But an echo of thunder now grows. Something’s gathering energy, mounting chaotically to a discordant peak before taking a plunge into melancholy. It’s heart-rending, as if you know something wonderful has been lost and can never be recovered.

The violin continues with its dirge then things briefly liven up – is some hope rising? – before the sonata dips back into gloom. The violin laments darkly before cheerier notes once more leap – perhaps joyful memories are again being revived. These memories – these hopes – quiver before tumbling into a pit of anguished emotions: emotions that jar, that strive against one another. These quarrelling impulses grow quieter – as if they’re dropping deeper into darkness – before they struggle up to be heard more loudly again. Finally, the Devil’s Trill Sonata reaches a state of resignation, a resolution from which dolefulness overflows.

I can’t help feeling this sonata tells the story of the Devil himself. Satan was the highest, the most luminous, the most glorious angel in Heaven and was also – intriguingly – the angel in charge of music. But, according to the Bible and Christian folklore, Satan became swollen up with pride. He mustered an army of a third of Heaven’s angels and rebelled against God’s rule. God dealt swiftly the upstart and his minions, driving them out of Heaven with the help of his loyal angels, with the Archangel Michael brandishing a sword and chasing the Devil and his followers down to Hell. Banished forever to this infernal prison, cut off from all hope, severed from God’s love, the rebels face a bleak and tormented eternity.

Satan falls after he is cast from Heaven, depicted by Paul Gustave Dore.

Maybe the melancholy at the start of the Devil’s Trill Sonata shows Satan lamenting his fallen state while the happier notes recall the joys of his magnificent old home in Paradise. Perhaps the leaping, athletic notes then take us back to the giddy hopes of Satan’s planned rebellion. Such notes, however, mingle with sombre tones, which could betray the dread of the revolt not working out. Then we have the thunderous fall – representing the driving of Satan and his supporters from Heaven – followed by more lamentations for what’s been lost, lamentations spiked with upsurges of misplaced hope. We experience the Devil’s inner strife – a struggling of anger, arrogance, self-pity and regret – before a tortured acceptance, brimming with sadness, ends the piece.

That’s my take on it, anyway. I apologise for any errors caused by my musical ignorance.

The Devil, to his horror, wakes up in Hell in an illustration by Paul Gustave Dore for John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The ‘Suspiciously Successful’ Career of Giuseppe Tartini

As well as penning the Devil’s Trill Sonata – by any judgement an incredible piece of music – Tartini had a very successful life and career.

Giuseppe Tartini was born in 1692, in the town of Pirano, in the Republic of Venice. After moving around between several Italian cities, he withdrew for a number of years of solitary study devoted to the violin, emerging with new thoughts on strings, the bow and bowing techniques, ideas which would have an enormous influence on generations of violinists.

Tartini’s playing emphasised both technical mastery and poetic, emotional nuances. It was claimed Tartini produced a magical impression on his audiences, helping his fame spread across Europe.

At just 29, Tartini was appointed director of the orchestra at the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua, a position he retained for the rest of his working life. He played for emperors and nobles, composed for the Pope, and set up a violin school which drew students from many countries.

Proclaimed by the Italians as ‘the finest musician in the world’, he was referred to by the French as ‘the lawgiver of the bow’, and it was said ‘he doesn’t play, he sings on the violin’. In addition to his musical achievements, Tartini seems to have burned with a Faustian desire for knowledge – he owned an impressive library containing books on many subjects, and was intensely curious about philosophy, religion, harmonics, acoustics and mathematics. Giuseppe Tartini died in 1770.

Giuseppe Tartini, depicted with his violin and books

So, Giuseppe Tartini enjoyed a life enchanted by a dazzling talent. His was a life animated by an almost demonic thirst for learning, a life garlanded by praise and crowned with the most astonishing success. A superstitious person – hearing about Tartini’s dream – might be tempted to think the Devil did appear to him that night and that Tartini really did agree to exchange his soul for such gifts.

Tartini is far from the only musician suspected of making a diabolical transaction of this type. To examine whether Tartini’s triumphs might have been granted by the creature that manifested in his bedroom, let’s compare his story with the legends of some other musical soul sellers.

How Might Giuseppe Tartini Fit into the History of Devil-inspired Musicians and Soul Sellers?

Other characters in musical history have been linked with soul-swapping legends. One individual alleged to have struck a demonic deal was the virtuoso violinist Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840). Reports of Paganini – a gaunt pallid figure who often dressed in black – speak of his flaming eyes and of devils appearing onstage at his concerts. It was claimed he could play on broken strings or play 12 notes a second. During one performance, apparently, the Devil made lightning strike Paganini’s bow. Following Paganini’s death, it took the Church 36 years to allow him burial in consecrated ground.

The violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini was rumoured – like Tartini – to have sold the Devil his soul.

Another famous soul seller was the American bluesman Robert Johnson (1911-38), who – according to legend – walked to a Mississippi crossroads with his guitar on his back to meet the Devil at midnight. Standing in the darkness, Johnson played a tune. A finger tapped his shoulder and he handed his guitar to the Evil One, who also gave a brief – and no doubt brilliant – performance. The Devil handed the instrument back and the pact for Johnson’s soul was sealed. Modern musicians – like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page – have also been accused of participating in diabolical bargains.

Maybe people suspect incredible talent or virtuosity must have superhuman origins. Perhaps this is especially so in music, given the Devil’s longstanding connection with this area of the arts. Such tales may also reflect a longing on the part of creative people themselves to overcome the sheer hard work, the frustrations, the wrong turns, the inevitable imperfections that bedevil (pun intended) the creative process, to overcome them and produce that elusive work of shimmering excellence.

Another supposed soul seller was the brilliant bluesman Robert Johnson.

But Tartini’s story doesn’t fit neatly into this narrative. With the musicians mentioned above, rumours of their devilish pacts were circulating while they were at the summit of their careers. There’s evidence Robert Johnson even encouraged the gossip about his demonic deal to boost his emerging fame. As we’ll see below, it was different with Tartini.

It Took Tartini Years to Confess to His Diabolical Dream

Tartini – a reserved and serious-minded person – kept his encounter with the Devil secret for a long time. He didn’t tell anyone about his dream until he gave an interview to the French astronomer Jerome Lalande a few years before he passed away. Lalande included it in his book Voyage d’un François en Italie, published in 1769. Also, the sheet music for the Devil’s Trill Sonata wasn’t published during Tartini’s lifetime. It only appeared in 1798, almost three decades after his death. It’s said to have been discovered in Rome by the French violinist Pierre Baillot, who brought it to Paris in 1791.

So Tartini didn’t reveal the story of his dream until shortly before he died and didn’t seem to want to publicise the Devil’s Trill Sonata. This is despite believing it was the best piece he’d ever composed. Tartini wrote at least 200 sonatas and concertos, many of which he had no hesitation about putting into print.

Tartini may have wished to keep his strange experience secret from his employers at St Anthony’s, churchmen who would have disapproved of him interacting with the Devil, even in a dream. He may also have feared ridicule, religious scandal and the resulting loss of reputation or livelihood. But, perhaps, recognising his life was approaching its end and having retired from St Anthony’s, he didn’t want the story to be lost.

It’s interesting that Tartini chose an astronomer to confide in about the Devil’s Trill Sonata. He’d been corresponding with scientists from a number of fields for several years and he might have preferred to narrate his incredible tale to a level-headed man of science rather than an overly romantic artist or dogmatic priest. There was also the advantage that – since Lalande was French – the book would be published in a foreign country and language, delaying the impact of any controversy.

Did Giuseppe Tartini Really Sell the Devil His Soul in Exchange for Musical Brilliance?

It’s unlikely that Tartini believed he’d sold his soul. By his own admission, his Devil’s Trill Sonata was just a pallid copy of the jaw-dropping music Satan had played. This suggests that – even if one were to believe in such possibilities – the soul-trading ceremony just took place in Tartini’s dream and wasn’t enacted in the waking world. There’s no indication of Faustian contracts signed in blood and – while Tartini considered breaking his violin in frustration – there’s no evidence he thought of summoning Satan back to trade in his soul.

In addition, although Lalande claimed Tartini composed the Devil’s Trill Sonata in 1713, musical historians feel that – due to its stylistic innovations – it couldn’t have been written before about 1745, years after Tartini began to enjoy success. This would remove any need for Giuseppe Tartini to make a career-boosting pact with Satan. (Unless, of course, we assume the Devil enabled Tartini to make a musical leap many years ahead of his time.)

There is, nevertheless, something uncanny about the piece that emerged from Tartini’s dream – the wrenching depths of emotion that it enables a wooden box and four strings to convey, the way it transports you somewhere a little different, the unsettled feeling you have after hearing it. There’s something unusual, perhaps creepy there, as Tartini himself recognised.

Interestingly, a curious annotation appeared in the earliest printing of the Devil’s Trill Sonata. At the place in the third movement where the Devil’s Trill itself begins, there’s a note that states: ‘The Devil at the foot of the bed’.

The Devil’s Trill Sonata with the note ‘the Devil at the foot of the bed’. Did Tartini write this comment?

This note evokes images of Satan appearing to a nightcapped Tartini, perhaps in a cloud of sulphur-tainted smoke. While it’s not certain that Tartini wrote this comment, we know Tartini did annotate his manuscripts. He tended to do so in code, scribbling bits of secular poetry in their margins. The fact he wrote in code shows both his concern for privacy and perhaps a worry that his ecclesiastical employers might disapprove of some of his sentiments. The statement about the Devil, however, is not encoded. Could Tartini – if it was indeed him who wrote it – have never intended this chilling note to be glimpsed by anyone else? Could it be an acknowledgement – at least – of how much he was both shaken and inspired by his dream?

Whatever the truth might be, the Devil’s Trill Sonata has been influential in the history of music. The piece formed the basis for Chopin’s Prelude No. 27 and had a decidedly diabolical influence on Cesare Pugni’s 1849 ballet Le Violin du Diable (The Devil’s Violin).

Giuseppe Tartini may not have felt he did true justice to what he heard in his dream, but what he did manage to put together has been appreciated ever since and has left a whiff of brimstone wafting down the centuries.

(This article’s main image shows Tartini meeting the Devil in his dream and receiving the inspiration for his Devil’s Trill Sonata.)

The post Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata – Soul Selling, a Violin Genius & a Diabolical Dream appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Despite being more than 175-years-of-age, the raven’s feathers still gleam, his head is still held in a position of half-amused arrogance, and his eye – though presumably made of glass – still shines mischievously.

It may surprise you to know that this raven was once named Grip and was kept as a pet by none other than Charles Dickens. It may come as a surprise too that this raven’s intelligence and personality were so forceful that the bird not only helped inspire Dickens’s 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty’, but also one of the most famous poems ever penned – The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

Ravens are ominous birds in folklore. Their habit of feasting on carrion, their funereal black plumage, their death rattle of a croak, and their tendency to haunt gibbets and battlefields have linked them with death and slaughter. Yet their playfulness, intelligence and ability to mimic human speech have also seen them associated with prophecy, wisdom and witchcraft.

But how did Grip and his antics inspire Dickens to write one of his darkest novels, a novel in which the shadow of the gallows lies over the book? And what was the strange connection between Charles Dickens, Grip the raven, Edgar Allan Poe and Poe’s best-known poem?

Keep reading for tales of the Devil, black magic, gods of wisdom, sinister letter openers, and the talkative and rascally ravens that harassed Dickens’s children and even managed to dominate his dogs.

The stuffed body of Charles Dickens’s pet Grip the raven, in the Free Library of Philadelphia

Charles Dickens, His Pet Grip the Raven and Grip’s Successors

As a writer with a tendency towards the gothic and macabre, it’s perhaps not surprising that Charles Dickens acquired a raven as a pet. In the preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens described how a friend gave him a young raven, who ended up sleeping in Dickens’s stable ‘generally on horseback’. Dickens named the bird ‘Grip’ and was soon impressed by ‘the superiority of his genius.’

Grip – who Dickens’s daughter Mamie characterised as ‘mischievous and impudent’ – may have been banished to the stable because of his habit of biting the ankles of Dickens’s children. Once installed in the carriage house, the bird’s cleverness soon enabled him to dominate an unfortunate Newfoundland dog. Grip would even ‘walk off unmolested with the dog’s dinner right before his face.’

Grip was also keen on attacking the trousers of a local butcher and a carpenter indignantly accused the bird of stealing one of his tools, a clasp knife or hammer. Grip soon became adept at copying various expressions of human speech, boasting ‘an impressive vocabulary.’

Dickens grew increasingly fond of the raven, admiring how he was ‘rising rapidly in acquirements and virtues, when, in an evil hour, his stable was newly painted.’

With his natural curiosity, Grip the raven ‘observed the workmen closely, and saw they were careful of the paint and immediately burned to possess it. On their going to dinner, he ate up all they had left behind, consisting of a pound or two of white lead; and this youthful indiscretion terminated in death.’

Dickens consoled himself by getting two new birds, an eagle and another raven, who he also named Grip. The second Grip was ‘an older and more gifted raven’, who a friend of the writer had discovered at a Yorkshire village pub. The first task of this bird, Dickens wrote, was to dig up ‘all the cheese and halfpence’ that the first Grip had buried in the garden, ‘a work of immense labour and research, to which he devoted all the energies of his mind.’

Like the first Grip, this bird was talented at repeating various phrases, and he also had an accomplishment for imitating different sounds. Dickens wrote that he would ‘perch outside my window and drive imaginary horses with great skill all day’. Grip could also replicate the noise made by corks popping out of champagne bottles. The author once met the second Grip ‘about half-a-mile from my house, walking down a public street, attended by a pretty large crowd, and spontaneously exhibiting the whole of his accomplishments.’

This raven also amused itself by digging out mortar from the garden walls and by breaking windows by chipping away at the putty holding the glass in the frames. In addition, Grip ‘tore up and swallowed in splinters, the greater part of a wooden staircase.’

Dickens feared this raven was ‘too bright a genius to live long’ and, after Dickens had owned Grip for about three years, he died ‘before the kitchen fire’, turning ‘over on his back with a sepulchral cry of “cuckoo!”’

In the preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens complained, ‘I have since then been ravenless’, but he would go on to get a third such bird, who he’d also call Grip.

This third raven had an even more forceful character than his two predecessors. He also dominated the family dog, now a large bullmastiff. The Bullmastiff would sit patiently while Grip helped himself to the best slices of meat from the dog’s bowl.

So How Did Grip the Raven End up Stuffed?

When the first Grip died, Charles Dickens seems to have been genuinely upset. He wrote a letter to his friend, the illustrator Daniel Maclise, in which his grief is mixed with a certain dark humour.

In the letter, Dickens stated that when Grip became ill, the vet ‘administered a powerful dose of castor oil.’ This restored the bird to the extent that he bit the coachman and Grip was able eat ‘some warm gruel’ the next day.

Grip, alas, soon suffered a relapse: ‘On the clock striking 12 he appeared slightly agitated, but soon recovered, walking twice or thrice along the coach-house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed “Halloa old girl” (his favourite expression) and died. He behaved throughout with a decent fortitude, equanimity, and self-possession, which cannot be too much admired … The children seem rather glad of it. He bit their ankles. But that was play.’

Dickens sent his letter in an envelope that bore a huge black seal. Upon reading it, Maclise was saddened – or amused – enough to decorate the letter with a sketch of Grip’s spirit ascending to heaven.

The letter Dickens sent to Daniel Maclise on the death of Grip the raven, and the sketch Maclise added to it

Dickens also paid tribute to the bird by asking a taxidermist to stuff and mount it. He then placed the glass case containing Grip over his desk so his beloved raven could look down on him as he wrote. The raven seems to have been a fruitful – if somewhat morbid – muse. Dickens would produce 16 novels – as well as short stories and numerous articles – under Grip’s dark gaze.

The second Grip avoided such a destiny, being laid to rest beneath a tree in Dickens’s garden. But Dickens did have a habit of creating macabre memorials to his pets. Dickens’s cat Bob, according to Mamie, ‘was always with him, and used to follow him about the garden like a dog, and sit with him while he wrote.’ Bob, who was ‘profoundly deaf’, liked to snuff out Dickens’s candle as he was reading – in the hope the writer would then pay attention to him instead of his books.

When Bob died, Dickens had one of his paws stuffed and attached to the ivory blade of a letter opener. The blade is inscribed ‘C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862’. It’s thought Dickens had Bob’s paw converted into the letter opener’s handle so he could still enjoy fondling the soft fur of his adored cat.

How Charles Dickens’s Pet Ravens Inspired Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge is set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, England’s worst ever civil disturbances. Though ostensibly a Protestant reaction against plans by the British Establishment to remove some of the legal disadvantages and restrictions facing Catholics, the riots are now seen more as an explosion of the pent-up frustration and rage of London’s poor and underclass. In Barnaby Rudge, the rioters converge on Parliament, roughing up MPs and members of the House of Lords. They plunder and pull down Catholic churches, storm and set fire to London’s jails, and attack, loot and burn the houses of Catholic citizens.

The book’s main character Barnaby – a good-natured simpleton who gets caught up in the disturbances – is accompanied almost everywhere by his pet raven, Grip.

The raven’s darkly amusing antics add a tone of black comedy to a book filled with fire, murder, destruction, and the threat of the gibbet that looms over the rioters. Grip hovers over and struts through the novel like a burlesque herald of doom, a carnivalesque spirit predicting death and calamity. In folklore, the raven is associated with death, carnage, prophecy, the Devil and witchcraft, and Dickens drew on such ideas when sculpting the character of Grip.

A scene from Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, showing Grip the raven

In one particularly gothic passage, Grip hops through a graveyard, in which ‘sometimes, after a long inspection of an epitaph, he would strop his beak upon the grave to which it referred and cry in his hoarse tones “I’m a devil! I’m a devil!”’

Another scene has Grip strutting around some characters ‘round and round, as if enclosing them in a magic circle, invoking all the powers of mischief.’

In the preface to Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens stated, ‘The raven in this story is a compound of two great originals, of whom I was, at different times, the proud possessor.’ These originals, of course, were Dickens’s first two pet ravens.

In a letter to his friend George Cattermole, dated 28th January 1841, Dickens wrote, ‘My notion is to have Barnaby always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him.’

The influence of Dickens’s two Grips can clearly be seen in Barnaby Rudge. There’s the fictional raven’s loquaciousness, his repertoire of phrases and his fondness for imitating various sounds, including the popping of champagne corks.

‘A devil! A devil! A devil!’ Grip cries. ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Keep up your spirits! Never say die! Bow, wow, wow!’

‘Grip! Grip! Grip!’ the bird croaks on another occasion. ‘Grip the clever! Grip the wicked! Grip the knowing! Grip! Grip! Grip! Grip! I’m a devil! I’m a devil! I’m a devil! Never say die! Hurrah! Bow wow wow!  Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea!’

Following this particular outburst, Grip – for the entertainment of an onlooking gentleman – ‘drew fifty corks at least and then began to dance.’ The raven is also capable of barking ‘like a lusty housedog.’

Later Grip even incorporates the Protestant obsessions and anti-Catholic slogans of the rioters into his vocabulary: ‘I’m a devil, I’m a polly, I’m a kettle, I’m a Protestant, No popery … Never say die, bow wow wow, keep up your spirits, Grip, Grip, Grip, Holloa! We’ll all have tea! I’m a Protestant kettle, no popery!’

Other antics of Dickens’s pets can be found in the character of Grip. The raven spends portions of the book banished to stables and like Dickens’s raven, Grip can draw a crowd: ‘His conversational powers and surprising performances’ had ‘rendered him famous for miles around … and many persons came to see the wonderful raven.’

Dickens also has Grip ‘biting the ankles of vagabond boys (an exercise in which he much delighted) … and swallowing the dinners of various neighbouring dogs, of whom the boldest held him in great awe and dread.’

There can be little doubt, then, that Dickens’s mischievous and talkative pet ravens helped inspire his Grip character. Though Barnaby Rudge wasn’t one of Charles Dickens’s most successful novels, it was serialised in his magazine Master Humphrey’s Clock and – as we shall see below – some of Grip’s catchphrases entered popular culture. And Grip would go on to inspire an even more famous literary work.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven

Dickens wasn’t the only Victorian writer who utilised the raven’s literary power. In January 1845, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven was published. This dark poem has a young student, who is grieving for a dead lover (‘The lost Lenore’), being disturbed late at night by ‘a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.’ Realising the sound is coming from the window, the student opens the shutters and is surprised to see a raven step haughtily into his room. The poem is in the video below – read by the English horror actor Christopher Lee – if you’d like to hear it.

The poem draws on many of the sinister associations ravens have in myth and folklore. There are nods to black magic. The raven taps at the window ‘upon a midnight dreary’ (the witching hour) ‘in the bleak December’ (the darkest month and therefore the one most closely linked to evil) as the student is reading ‘many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore’ (black magic books?). The narrator also calls the raven ‘a devil’.

The Raven is mainly written in trochaic octameter, a rhythmic pattern in which one stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one, repeated eight times per line. This gives the poem a hypnotic, bewitching quality. Trochaic metre is quite unusual in English verse and is more often used in songs, chants and magic spells. Poe adds to this darkly captivating effect with alliteration: ‘grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore’.

Poe also stresses the raven’s mythological links to death. The student asks the bird ‘what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore?’ Pluto is the god of the Roman underworld and king of the dead. The narrator frequently asks the raven about the possibility of meeting his lost Lenore in some sort of afterlife. The raven has just one answer, the only word he speaks in the poem: ‘Nevermore’. The bird’s continual repetition of ‘nevermore’ mocks the student’s attempts to establish whether there is any hereafter, any meaning to existence or point to his sufferings. The ‘nevermore’ serves as a cynical refrain to the verses filled with the student’s agonised questions and ramblings.

An illustration by Paul Gustave Dore for Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven

We might ask why the student sees the bird as some sort of oracle. Folklore and myth link ravens – probably due to their ability to speak and high intelligence – to prophecy, wisdom and cunning. When the raven comes into the student’s room, he perches ‘upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door’. Pallas Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom. An old Irish proverb states ‘there is wisdom in a raven’s head’, in the Hebrides children would be encouraged to drink from a raven’s skull to gain the gifts of prophecy and wisdom, and the Native American Kwakiutl people exposed their sons’ placentas to ravens in the hope this would give them second sight. Such notions can be seen in Poe’s poem: ‘Prophet! Thing of evil! – Prophet still, if bird or devil!’

The Raven was soon published in magazines across the United States and had an immediate impact. The editor of the Evening Mirror praised it as ‘unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift … It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it.’

The poet Elizabeth Barret wrote to Poe: ‘Your Raven has produced a sensation, a fit o’ horror, here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music. I hear of persons haunted by “Nevermore”.’ The New World declared, ‘Everyone reads the Poem and praises it … justly, we think, for it seems to us full of originality and power.’

The raven – an intelligent and playful bird – is linked with prophecy, death and witchcraft in folklore. (Photo: Visit Heritage)

Not everybody was impressed. William Butler Yeats felt the poem was ‘insincere and vulgar … its execution a rhythmical trick’ while Ralph Waldo Emerson stated dismissively, ‘I see nothing in it.’ Parodies were published: The Craven, The Gazelle, The Whipporrwill, The Turkey and The Polecat. But, if anything, this ridicule added to Poe’s fame and that of his sinister poem.

Poe himself came to be nicknamed ‘The Raven’. He received many invitations to lecture and to recite his celebrated poem, both publicly and at private events. A guest at one such gathering wrote Poe would ‘turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark, then standing in the centre of the apartment he would recite … in the most melodious of voices … So marvellous was his power as a reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken.’

But What’s the Connection between Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Grip the Raven?

Though Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is widely known, many people don’t realise that at least some of its inspiration came from Dickens’s work. Poe reviewed the first four serialised chapters of Barnaby Rudge for Graham’s Magazine. He predicted how the novel would end and when – on reviewing the complete book – Poe found his ideas were somewhat askew, he blamed Dickens’s plotting skills rather than his own foresight.

Poe was, however, mostly positive about Barnaby Rudge and especially fond of the character of Grip. He described the raven as ‘intensely amusing’ though he was disappointed by the fact Grip was only a minor character.

Poe argued that Grip’s ‘croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama. Its character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air.’

When Poe found out Dickens was planning a reading and promotional tour of the States, he sent the novelist a letter – along with a book of his short stories – and the two men corresponded. Dickens set out for America accompanied by his wife Catherine and also by a portrait – by Daniel Maclise – of the Dickens children and Grip. Meeting Dickens – in March 1842, in a Philadelphia hotel – Poe saw the portrait and was intrigued. Poe was even more amazed to discover that the raven in the painting had not only been Dickens’s pet, but had served as a model for the fictional Grip.

The portrait of Charles Dickens’s children with Grip the raven, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe

During their meeting, Poe attempted to impress Dickens with his abilities as a poet, storyteller and critic in the hope that Dickens might use his contacts in England to help Poe establish his literary reputation there. It did seem that Dickens was taken with Poe and he said he’d try to find the American author an English publisher.

But to what extent did Barnaby Rudge influence The Raven? There’s a scene in Dickens’s novel where the character Gabriel Varden overhears Grip and says, ‘What was that? Him tapping at the door? Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter. Who can it be?’

Poe depicts his raven as having an aristocratic arrogance: ‘with mien of lord or lady perched above my chamber door’. Dickens gives Grip a similar attitude, having him strutting ‘not in a hop, or walk, or run, but in a pace like that of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles.’

A sketch of a young, energetic Charles Dickens in 1842 – the year he met Edgar Allan Poe on his first American reading tour.

Though Poe drew from folklore and myth to create his poetic raven, he cannot have failed to have noticed the references in Barnaby Rudge to the bird’s devilish intelligence and cunning. Characters refer to Grip as a ‘knowing imp’, ‘a dreadful fellow’ and ‘a devil’, with one saying ‘the Devil’s loose in London somewhere.’

Poe’s raven’s refrain of ‘Nevermore’ – with its spookily long vowel sound – may also have been inspired by Barnaby Rudge. When Grip is put in prison with Barnaby towards the novel’s end, he loses his loquaciousness and repeatedly croaks the mournful word, ‘Nobody’.

The similarities between Poe’s and Dickens’s literary ravens didn’t escape the critics of the time. In 1848, the poet James Russell Lowell wrote, ‘There comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.’

Poe and Dickens’s friendly relationship wouldn’t last. Poe was disappointed by Dickens’s failure to find him a publisher in England. He also seems to have believed – probably wrongly – that Dickens was the author of a review dismissing Poe as an imitator of Tennyson. Plagiarism was a sensitive subject for Poe – he accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of this crime while Poe himself was accused of plagiarising The Raven from an anonymous poem called The Bird of the Dream. The correspondence between Poe and Dickens ceased though Poe remained largely supportive of Dickens’s writing.

Edgar Allan Poe in 1849

Despite the fame The Raven brought Poe, he made little money from it, having sold the rights to The American Review for $9. The poet bitterly remarked, ‘I am as poor now as I ever was in my life – except in hope, which is by no means bankable.’ Poe died in poverty on October 7th, 1849. His wife was already dead, but his mother-in-law – to whom Poe had been close – was left destitute. In 1868, during Dickens’s second visit to America, he looked Poe’s mother-in-law up and ‘generously entreated her acceptance of $150 with the assurance of his sympathy.’

Just as Grip the raven linked the life and work of Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens, he would link them in death. In April 1869, Dickens – exhausted by his extensive and theatrical reading tours; worn out by workaholism and health problems – suffered a stroke. He didn’t, however, give up his punishing writing regime. He pressed on with his 20th novel – The Mystery of Edwin Drood – labouring in his study, as always, under Grip’s gaze. It was there, beneath the raven’s eye, on 8th June 1870, that he had another stroke following a full day’s work. Dickens never recovered consciousness and died the next day. He was 58.

A much older and more haggard-looking Charles Dickens on his second American reading tour

Poe died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore at the age of just 40 and was buried in the same city. A simple, numbered sandstone block at first marked his grave – a train had destroyed his intended tombstone by smashing through a mason’s yard. In the early 1870s, people began to complain about the state of Poe’s grave and money was raised for a more dignified memorial. An impressive monument was built and Poe’s remains were exhumed and placed beneath it, later being joined by those of his mother-in-law and wife. This memorial features – perhaps surprisingly – no homage to the raven that brought Poe such fame. In 1913, however, a commemorative stone was set up to mark the plot where Poe lay before his reburial. A raven is carved on the stone’s top with ‘Quoth the Raven Nevermore’ inscribed around it. Thus, not only Poe is honoured, but so is the lively and devious raven from across the Atlantic that inspired two of the Victorian era’s darkest and most influential writers.

The stone marking the original burial place of Edgar Allan Poe – inscribed with a famous line from The Raven. (Photo: Wanderlust on a Budget)

But what of Grip himself? How did the stuffed body of this very English bird end up in – of all places – Philadelphia? Via his mischievous and eventful life, Grip forged connections between the literature of America and Britain. It’s maybe, then, fitting that in death the raven would embark on a strange continent-hopping odyssey.

Grip the Raven’s Strange and Gothic Afterlife

Following Charles Dickens’s death, a number of his possessions – Grip included – were auctioned at Christie’s, London. The audience was made up of collectors, speculators, Dickens fans, and a group of fashionable personages who’d levered themselves away from the Eton versus Harrow cricket game taking place at Lord’s.

As the auction progressed, the crowd became more excitable and when Grip was brought out, he was greeted with yells of ‘I’m a devil! I’m a devil!’ and other catchphrases from Barnaby Rudge.

Just as the hammer was about to fall at 62 guineas, there was a shout of ‘Never say die!’ and the price almost doubled to 120. Grip ended up being sold to a George Swan Nottage.

Born to a Cripplegate butcher, Nottage would eventually go on to become London Lord Mayor. Nottage ran a stereoscopic photo company and it’s thought he bought Grip so he could produce stereoscopic images of the well-known bird. When Nottage died in 1885, Grip was inherited by his widow. After she died, Grip became the prize attraction in the auction of her possessions, held in 1916. His value had, however, fallen – The Times reported Grip sold for just 78 guineas.

Grip was bought by Walter Thomas Spencer, the proprietor of a second-hand bookshop on New Oxford Street. Here, according to the writer Thomas Malt, amongst the shop’s ‘dusty, cosy quietude’ Grip remained half-hidden in ‘the tarnished shadows of a London winter.’ The raven’s next owner was the wealthy collector Ralph Tennyson Jupp, a pioneer of the film industry, who wanted to set up a Dickens museum.

In 1921, however, Jupp died after being kicked by a horse. Jupp’s impressive collection of Dickens artefacts – which included the author’s eyeglasses and penknives – was sold at the Anderson Galleries in New York. Grip – lauded by the catalogue as ‘probably the most famous bird in the world’ – went for $310.

Grip ended up back in London, where he was displayed in the window of a bookshop belonging to Charles John Sawyer, also in New Oxford Street. The raven was later purchased by one Charles Sessler, who kept him in his bookshop in Walnut Street, Philadelphia. Grip was then acquired by Colonel Richard Gimbel, a collector of rare books and manuscripts who had a passion for the work of Edgar Allan Poe. When he died, Gimbel left his collection to the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Grip’s plaque in the Free Library of Philadelphia – acknowledging his influence on Poe’s The Raven and Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Grip still perches there today. Perhaps the raven feels at home, as the library houses plenty of Dickens memorabilia, including dozens of the author’s letters, first editions of his books, and original artworks for his novels. The library also contains the desk at which Dickens worked on his final novel, the very desk Grip looked down on as his master strove – and failed – to complete his last book.

(This article’s main image shows Grip the raven in the Free Library of Philadelphia)

The post Dickens, Poe & the Pet Raven that Inspired their Darkest Works appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Covered with gothic carvings; isolated high on a gloomy moor; lashed by wind, snow, sleet and rain; the house of Wuthering Heights sets the harsh, claustrophobic tone that permeates the book. Stronghold-like, it repels outsiders and traps its inmates in a prison of intense passions, deadly jealousies and murderous resentments.

Emily Brontë first shows us the house through the eyes of Heathcliff’s southern tenant Lockwood. Used to a kinder landscape and gentler social codes, the soon-shaken Lockwood struggles to comprehend Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants.

‘Wuthering’, Lockwood tells us, ‘is a provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times.’

As he approaches Wuthering Heights on his first visit to his landlord, Lockwood notices ‘the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way; as if craving the alms of the sun.’

He remarks on the house’s fortress-like qualities: ‘the architect had the foresight to build it strong; the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, the corners defended with large jutting stones.’

Arriving at the Heights, Lockwood states, ‘Before passing the threshold I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front and especially about the principal door, above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date 1500 and the name Hareton Earnshaw.’

Inside Lockwood finds a basic and cheerless dwelling and far-from-welcoming residents. He also discovers Wuthering Heights has its ghosts. During Lockwood’s second visit, the weather turns hostile: ‘on that bleak hilltop, the earth was hard with a black frost and the air made me shiver through every limb.’

A snowstorm starts up and – as Lockwood would likely die trying to navigate through the drifts back to the house he has rented – Heathcliff reluctantly allows him to stay the night. A servant leads Lockwood upstairs to a chamber, telling him it’s a room her ‘master had an odd notion about … and never let anybody lodge there willingly.’

Lockwood settles himself in an ‘old-fashioned boxbed’, which – built around a small window – ‘formed a little closet’. After bizarre and violent dreams, Lockwood is woken – or thinks he is woken – by what he assumes is a fir branch tapping the window with its cones.

He finds himself ‘knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me. I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in! Let me in!”’

‘Who are you?’ Lockwood asks.

‘“Catherine Linton,” it replied shiveringly … “I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor.”’

‘It is twenty years …’ the ghost moans, ‘I’ve been a waif twenty years!’

So far, so very gothic. But was the house of Wuthering Heights simply formed in the turmoil of Emily Brontë’s imagination? Or – during the wanderings she loved to take over the wild moors around Haworth – might Emily have been inspired by any real-life dwellings, dwellings that could have prompted her to create a house that has ever since haunted literary history?

Any such houses would need a suitably dramatic and lonely location, as well as a good bit of grotesque gothic carving and perhaps some wind-crippled trees nearby. They’d have to be stoutly built, strong enough to repulse both the moorland weather and the intrusions of curious outsiders. A history of human misery and struggle and the odd ghost story wouldn’t go amiss. We’d also need to know how such houses were entangled with the lives of Emily and the other Brontës and whether the histories and relationships of the families who lived in them were strange and tortured enough to make them models for the characters in Emily’s novel.

Three houses are acknowledged as candidates for Wuthering Heights:

• High Sunderland Hall, a now demolished gothic manor house on a hill above Halifax
• Ponden Hall, below the village of Stanbury, also seen as a model for the novel’s other dwelling, Thrushcross Grange
• Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse on the moors near Haworth

Read on as we compare their competing claims and along the way explore accounts of ghostly disembodied hands, phantom white horses, weird mottos, obscene carvings, lightning blasts, libraries of black magic books, priceless first editions of Shakespeare, the beginnings of Brontë mythmaking, and tough lives on the moors of Yorkshire.

Did Emily Brontë Base Wuthering Heights on High Sunderland Hall? Rude Carvings, Spectral Hands and a Haunted Hilltop

A photo of High Sunderland Hall taken in 1913 – a model for Wuthering Heights?

Now sadly demolished, High Sunderland Hall was a wonderfully gothic monstrosity that loomed lonely and high above Halifax. Robustly built, gloomy and battlemented, this house might well have inspired Emily Brontë’s descriptions of a fortress-like abode.

The age of the house was uncertain. High Sunderland Hall may have been constructed for either for Richard Sunderland in 1587 or for his grandson Abraham Sunderland in 1629.

There is, however, evidence of a structure on the site dating back to 1274. Rather than a new building being erected, an existing timber farmhouse may have been encased in stone, perhaps marking the success of the Sunderlands in the local wool trade. In a northern-gothic version of nouveaux-riche extravagance, High Sunderland Hall was covered in the most curious carvings and weirdest mottos.

Surviving photos show strange figures above the Roman-style columns of the main doorway. Winged, muscular and naked; twisting as if trying to avoid harsh winds and whipping rain; these figures look like giants to me, but might the ‘shameless little boys’ of Wuthering Heights be based on them?

The doorway of High Sunderland Hall – did its carvings inspire the ‘shameless little boys’ of Wuthering Heights?

Over the same doorway was a pagan-looking carving of the sun. The house’s decoration also included griffins, Green Men, a trumpet-blowing angel, coats of arms and various mythological creatures.

In 1838, Emily Brontë started teaching at Law Hill School in Southowram, around a mile (1.6 kilometres) from High Sunderland Hall. Though unhappy at the school – she apparently told her pupils she preferred the housedog to them – she loved the local landscape and tried to forget her misery by walking and riding around it. She would have certainly noticed the castellated edifice of High Sunderland Hall glaring down from its hilltop. She may have even been a guest at the house as its floorplan was apparently similar to the layout she gave Wuthering Heights.

High Sunderland Hall had its ghost stories. According to one, a master of the Hall wrongly suspected his wife of infidelity. In a jealous rage, he chopped off her hand and thereafter a ghostly disembodied hand haunted High Sunderland Hall. Guests sleeping in a certain room would sometimes awake to hear footsteps in the passageway, followed by a fumbling at the door and a rattling of its handle. If the spook failed to gain admittance – presumably guests were advised to lock the door against it – a few moments later there’d be a tap on the window. If the guest was brave enough to pull the curtains back, they’d see a disembodied hand rapping against the pane before terrifying laughter resounded.

Could this story have inspired Lockwood’s dream of grasping Cathy’s freezing fingers through the window? Might Emily Brontë herself have stayed in that room?

Strange carvings above a gateway at High Sunderland Hall

A sinister gothic mansion like High Sunderland Hall would, of course, collect tales of ghosts. In addition to the legend of the disembodied hand, a spectral white horse was rumoured to haunt the Hall’s surroundings. This equine phantom could apparently be glimpsed dashing through nearby fields and lanes at midnight. A local newspaper article of 1973 mentioned this apparition, though it stated no one had seen it in living memory. This prompted a letter to the paper from a man who claimed a white horse had galloped past him when he’d been walking home one night. Fearing the riderless horse might cause a traffic accident, the man called the police. Despite a thorough search of the area, no such horse was found.

The strangeness of High Sunderland Hall was perhaps emphasised by the mottos the Sunderlands carved upon it. This oddly poetic inscription was written in Latin on the house’s front wall: ‘May the Almighty grant that the race of Sunderland may quietly inhabit this seat, and maintain the rights of their ancestors free from strife, until an ant drink up the waters of the sea, and a tortoise walk around the whole world.’

Beneath the trumpet-blowing angel – also in Latin – was written: ‘The fame of virtue is an eternal trump.’

Another, Gospel-inspired, inscription stated: ‘He that loves lands and houses more than me is unworthy of me.’ Yet another carving admonished: ‘This place hates negligence, loves peace, punishes crimes, observes laws, honours virtuous persons.’

The inside gateway of High Sunderland Hall – note the two ‘crumbling griffins’ that may have inspired Wuthering Heights.

Unfortunately for the Sunderlands, they didn’t have to wait for a tortoise to walk around the world or for an ant to drink up the sea before they lost their house. During the English Civil War (1642-9), the family head Langdale Sunderland – contrary to most of his fellow West Riding wool merchants – backed the King rather than Parliament. Langdale fought for his monarch as captain of a troop of horse under the Earl of Newcastle and was traumatised by his experiences of battle. With Parliament becoming the stronger party, Langdale received a heavy fine in 1646 and had to sell High Sunderland Hall.

The house passed through a variety of owners. By the beginning of the 20th century, High Sunderland Hall had been divided into tenements. It gradually fell into disrepair and mining works weakened the house’s foundations, leaving it teetering and dangerously unstable. Photos of the Hall shortly before its demolition in 1951 show its walls and pillars bulging outwards.

As High Sunderland Hall became increasingly decrepit, its owner – obviously aware of its resemblances to Wuthering Heights – attempted to sell the building, both to the Brontë Society and Halifax Corporation. But, as the cost of repairs was estimated to be greater than the house’s value, the structure was demolished.

A sketch of High Sunderland Hall made in 1818, the year of Emily Brontë’s birth

One of the Hall’s gothic doorways is said to grace a building in the nearby town of Brighouse. Some of High Sunderland’s carvings were salvaged and are kept at Shibden Hall Museum, near Halifax, in a courtyard. This ensemble of masonry includes strange faces, monsters’ heads, helmet-topped coats of arms and the leaf-covered face of a Green Man.

There are also carvings that can only be described as ‘graphic’ – bare bottoms, naked bodies complete with male genitals. A couple of figures resemble the female ‘fertility symbol’ the Sheela-na-gig, which can sometimes be spotted in churches. Like the Sheela-na-gig, these figures seem to be pulling open their vulvas, but their faces look more male than female. Could all these indelicate carvings have helped inspire Wuthering Heights’ ‘shameless little boys’?

The site on which High Sunderland Hall stood is bleak, wind-blasted, almost treeless. No trace of the Hall is left, but this stark haunted hilltop would be a close match for the setting Emily Brontë gave Wuthering Heights.

Did Ponden Hall Inspire Wuthering Heights? Boxbeds, ‘Bog Bursts’ and Black Magic Books

Did Ponden Hall inspire Emily Brontë to create Wuthering Heights? (Photo: brontecountry)

In an account published in 1896, one William Davies described a visit he made to Haworth in 1858. William met Emily Brontë’s clergyman father Patrick – ‘a dignified gentleman of the old school’ – and together they went on a tour of the area:

‘On leaving the house we were taken across the moors to visit a waterfall which was a favourite haunt of the sisters … We then went on to an old manorial farm called “Heaton’s of Ponden”, which we were told was the original model of Wuthering Heights, which indeed corresponded in some measure to the description given in Emily Brontë’s romance.’

This ‘Heaton’s of Ponden’ was actually Ponden Hall. Sturdily built of dark stone, Ponden Hall sits on the slopes of a hill and boasts stunning views over the Worth Valley. A sizeable – though not enormous – house, with mullioned windows, beamed ceilings and stone-flagged floors, Ponden Hall occupies an area of 5,000 feet and has four acres of grounds. The house overlooks Ponden Reservoir (created in the early 1870s), formerly a smaller lake called Ponden Water. The Hall does have some similarities to Wuthering Heights – it’s robust, it’s of around the right dimensions and its floorplan roughly corresponds to that of Emily Brontë’s fictional dwelling. Ponden Hall’s homely interior might also recall the modest interior of the Heights though its fittings are probably cheerier than those of that sombre farmstead.

But there’s another feature of Ponden Hall, a feature that conjures up one of the most dramatic and eerie scenes from Wuthering Heights. A bedroom – now called the Earnshaw Room – has a small window inside ‘an old-fashioned boxbed’, similar to the window through which Lockwood feels the dead Cathy’s hand. Though the current boxbed is a replica, the aged original apparently lasted until the 1940s. Another window in the same room – a mullioned one in the east end gable – also has a Wuthering Heights connection. Emily Brontë sketched this window when she was ten and some see it as the model for the notorious window of Wuthering Heights.

The boxbed and its window in Ponden Hall, inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights? (Photo: Julie Akhurst  annebronte.org)

Ponden Hall, however, lacks the grotesque gothic carvings of High Sunderland Hall and – as far as I know – cannot claim any ghosts. But the factor most against Ponden Hall as an inspiration for Wuthering Heights is its location. Rather than commanding an exposed moortop position, Ponden Hall sits snug and sheltered on a slope near the valley floor. Ponden Hall is indeed thought by some to be a more likely model for Thrushcross Grange, the civilised and luxurious home of Cathy’s husband Edgar Linton (see below). Emily Brontë also makes no mention of Wuthering Heights being close to a lake.

Perhaps Ponden Hall – rather than being a close model for Wuthering Heights – had more of an influence on the Brontës’ general development as writers. The Brontës were friends of the Heatons – the wealthy landowners and industrialists who owned Ponden Hall – and were frequent visitors to the house.

A dramatic demonstration of the friendship between the Heatons and Brontës occurred on 2nd September 1824. A young Emily was walking on the moors with her sister Anne, her wayward brother Branwell and two servants after days of unrelenting rain had cooped them up in Haworth Parsonage. The group were enjoying the fresh post-deluge air and the weak rays of the sun, when the sky suddenly darkened and an ominous rumble came from the earth.

It grew darker still, hailstones pelted down and the ground began to shake. Ponden Hall was in the distance and the group instinctively sprinted towards it as shouts from the Hall urged them on. Panting, hearts pounding, the group reached the Hall, taking shelter in a building called the Peat Loft. Seconds later, an enormous explosion erupted. A torrent of mud and water surged across the landscape they’d just been walking over – a torrent so forceful it picked up large boulders, carried them along and even hurled them into the sky. Patrick ran from Haworth Parsonage, believing his children were victims of an earthquake. He later preached a sermon about their deliverance, which went on to be published. The explosion was heard as far away as Leeds and you can still see the scars and craters this huge landslide – known as the Crowhill Bog Burst – left on the moors.

Ponden Hall had a grand library, said to be the finest in West Yorkshire. This library was frequented by the Brontë sisters, Branwell and Patrick. A catalogue of the library shows that – as well as a precious Shakespeare First Folio – it contained many gothic novels and books on necromancy and black magic. Perhaps such dark literature helped inspire the gothic tinges in the Brontës’ novels. Shortly after Lockwood’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, the younger Cathy scandalises the pious old servant Joseph by taking ‘a long, dark book from a shelf’ and saying, ‘I’ll show you how far I’ve progressed in the Black Art … I’ll have you all modelled in wax and clay.’ ‘Oh, wicked! Wicked!’ Joseph mumbles, ‘May the Lord deliver us from evil!’ Ponden Hall’s library also held volumes on law and local history, and knowledge of these subjects – especially the complexities of inheritance law – would have helped Emily Brontë write Wuthering Heights.

There was also the influence of the Heatons themselves, a notable local family who served as Justices of the Peace and as churchwardens at Haworth, where Patrick was perpetual curate. Behind Ponden Hall stands a withered pear tree, supposedly a present to an unimpressed Emily from a teenage Heaton who had a crush on her. Another story states that Emily was one day taking tea at the Hall when a dog gave birth to puppies at her feet. Robert Heaton was embarrassed, but Emily merely laughed. (In Wuthering Heights, Lockwood remarks that under a dresser there ‘reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies, and other dogs haunted other recesses.’) The men from Ponden Hall may have inspired the character of Edgar Linton, the master of Thrushcross Grange and Cathy’s loving, civilised but overdelicate husband. Then again, some have noticed the similarity between the names ‘Heaton’ and ‘Hareton’ – as in Hareton Earnshaw, the eventual heir to Wuthering Heights.

Might Ponden Hall have been a model for Thrushcross Grange? Like the Grange, Ponden Hall had a long tree-lined drive. (Most of the drive has now been swallowed by the reservoir). Also, like Thrushcross Grange, Ponden Hall has a large upstairs room with a window at either end. But Ponden Hall isn’t large enough to be a blueprint for the palatial Grange and it doesn’t have enough grounds. In Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange’s park is so vast one has to walk two miles to get from the keeper’s lodge to the house and the younger Cathy rarely leaves it during her first 13 years. The nearby – and grander – Shibden Hall might be a closer model for the Grange while the size, style and details of Ponden Hall are more similar to Wuthering Heights. Emily might have visited Shibden Hall (now the museum which houses the relics from High Sunderland) when teaching at Law Hill. But Ponden Hall may still have seemed grand to the Brontë sisters, who were used to the much plainer Haworth Parsonage. The tree-lined drive may have also made Ponden Hall seem more imposing than it actually was.

Another Brontë whose writing felt the influence of Ponden Hall and the Heatons was Branwell. Branwell wrote a ghost story about a Gytrash, a type of a shape-shifting Yorkshire spirit which usually manifests as a black dog. Branwell’s Gytrash frequently took on the form of ‘an old dwarfish and hideous man, as often seen without a head as with one’. His story was originally called Heatons at Ponden and based around Ponden Hall. He later changed the title to Thurstons of Darkwall, probably to avoid libelling the Heatons. Branwell also once sketched a hunting party in front of Ponden Hall’s fireplace and was often a guest at pre-hunt gatherings there.

The story of the Heatons and Ponden Hall is, however, ultimately a sad one. Though they owned land stretching to the Lancashire border, the Heatons earned most of their money from Ponden Mill, situated below Ponden Hall at the hill’s bottom. The Heatons did especially well making uniforms for the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). They showed off their wealth by embarking on extensive renovations to Ponden Hall. Though most of the house was built in 1634 and parts date back to 1541, the Heatons in 1801 started a massive rebuilding programme.

A grand new entrance and the impressive library were constructed and the Peat Loft (built in 1680) was joined to the rest of the house. (The Peat Loft was once a separate two-storey structure, designed to store peat upstairs and shelter cattle downstairs, with the heat from the cows rising to dry the peat.) A plaque above Ponden Hall’s entrance dates the rebuilt house to 1801, the year in which Wuthering Heights starts.

The friendship between the Heatons and Brontës, however, ended when Robert Heaton – who served as churchwarden at Haworth – fell out with Patrick. The quarrel’s cause is unknown, but it was bitter enough for Patrick to refuse to bury him. As far as business was concerned, cheap cloth imports from India forced the Heatons to sell Ponden Mill and saw the family’s wealth much reduced. By the end of the 19th century, just three Heaton brothers were left. One had lost his wife and children in one of the great cholera epidemics Haworth was infamous for; the other two were childless bachelors. In 1898, the last Heaton died. Ponden Hall and its lands were sold off, the furniture was auctioned and – perhaps most tragically – the library was broken up.

The library books found their way to nearby Keighley Market, where any unsold books were ripped apart and used to wrap vegetables. During all this upheaval, the Shakespeare First Folio – a copy from the 1623 print run of what’s considered the first reliable edition of Shakespeare’s plays – disappeared. Only 228 First Folios are known to have survived and are each worth around £3.5 million today. Perhaps the lost Folio is mouldering in some Yorkshire cellar after being used to wrap cabbage.

Ponden Hall was heavily restored around the year 2000 and is now a Bed and Breakfast. Guests can sleep in and wander through the rooms in which the Brontës studied and socialised.

(A significant amount of the research about Ponden Hall and its Bronte connections mentioned in this article was originally conducted by Julie Akhurst, who spent 23 years living at the house.)

Did Emily Brontë Model Wuthering Heights on Top Withens? Lightning Blasts, Moorland Tragedies and the Beginnings of the Brontë Mythos

Did the lonely farmhouse of Top Withens inspire Emily Brontë? (Photo: Sean Martell)

Top Withens is a ruined farmhouse on an isolated, wind-battered moor about five kilometres (3.1 miles) south-west of Haworth. Two weather-misshapen trees stand next to the house, recalling the ‘gaunt thorns, stretching their limbs one way’ Lockwood noticed.

Originally called Top of th’ Withens, the house was probably built by the Bentley family in the late 1500s. In the Brontë era, it was occupied by Jonas Sunderland and his wife (from 1813) and then their son Jonas from 1833.

The setting of Top Withens matches the remote moortop location of Wuthering Heights. The house probably, however, became associated with Brontë legend due to an endorsement from Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of Charlotte Brontë. Ellen seems to have suggested to Edmund Morison Wimperis, an artist commissioned to illustrate the Brontë novels in 1872, that Top Withens had inspired Wuthering Heights.

But there’s no mention of Top Withens in any of the Brontës’ writing or correspondence and no evidence they ever visited the place. Its ruins seem far too small and modest to be those of a substantial farmhouse like Wuthering Heights. Top Withens’ internal layout was also nothing like that of the house described in Emily’s novel. The Brontës would, however, have probably been aware of Top Withens and passed it on their walks. The farm’s inhabitants and the Brontës may have known each other, at least by sight.

A well-tramped tourist path – signposted in English and Japanese – runs to Top Withens from Haworth. This path would seem to take visitors on a journey through the Brontë mythos, as it passes the Brontë Waterfall then goes over the Brontë Bridge and past the Brontë Chair, a seat-like chunk of rock the sisters supposedly took turns to sit in to compose their early stories.  But anyone expecting to find Wuthering Heights at the end of their trek might be disappointed. A plaque fixed to the ruins of Top Withens states:

This farmhouse has been associated with “Wuthering Heights”, the Earnshaw home in Emily Brontë’s novel. The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.

— Brontë Society 1964. This plaque has been placed here in response to many inquiries.

Top Withens may, nevertheless, have had something else in common with Wuthering Heights: the difficult lives of its residents and their struggles against the moorland weather.

Things seem to have been tough from the start. In 1591, William Bentley split his Withens estate between his three sons, creating three smaller farms at Lower, Middle and Top Withens. The dividing up of inheritances was common in the South Pennines, but it had the unfortunate result that each generation was left with less land. This led to greater hardship and many moorland farmers relied on quarrying and weaving to top up their meagre incomes. The Worth Valley surrounding Top Withens is scarred by worked-out quarries. As Lockwood stumbles home in deep snow following his traumatic night at Wuthering Heights, he speaks of ‘entire ranges of mounds, the refuse of quarries’ that the snowfalls have ‘blotted from the chart which my yesterday’s walk left pictured in my mind.’

By the late 1880s, the area around Top Withens had been christened Brontë Country and had begun to appear in guidebooks. This didn’t, however, make life easier for locals. In 1888, Top Withens passed to Anne Sharpe (née Sunderland) and her husband Samuel. A report on May 18th 1893 in the Todmorden and District News about a thunderstorm showed what they were up against. A lightning bolt had struck the farm – blasting holes in the wall and tearing part of the roof off, with the wind then flinging the slates down into the valley. The bolt smashed the flags paving Top Withens’ floor and shattered around 30 windows. In the kitchen, the heat melted a knife blade and Anne’s dough bowl was destroyed. Howling and screeching, the dog and cat ran from the house.

By 1895, Anne was dead, leaving Samuel to raise their daughter Mary. But life at Top Withens proved too tough. In 1896, Samuel and Mary fled to a farm down in the valley named Sheep Holes.

Did Top Withens’ isolated moorland setting influence the location of Wuthering Heights? (Photo: Dave Dunford)

There were people willing to step into their place. Top Withens appears to have been occupied until around 1890. In 1903-4, however, Keighley Corporation bought the now-decaying Withens farms. Top Withens seems to have stayed vacant until the early 1920s, when an invalided ex-solider called Ernest Roddie moved in. Ernest lived in his hilltop retreat with just his dogs and chickens, and – intrigued – the Yorkshire Post sent a reporter up to interview him.

Ernest said, ‘I think Top Withens is the place for me, alright. We have some rough weather up here … it’s been fearful cold since Christmas and there are days when the snow’s been so thick I couldn’t get the cart down to Stanbury.’

‘But,’ Ernest continued, perhaps referencing the tourists who found their way up there, ‘a man can’t be lonely at Wuthering Heights.’

The interview took place after Ernest had only endured one winter. By 1926, the weather had beaten him too and he moved down to Haworth. In 1930, the buildings at Lower and Middle Withens were demolished and the doors and windows of Top Withens were sealed to discourage vandals.

Top Withens received a grade-II listing in the 1950s, but this was revoked in 1991 as the dubiousness of its Brontë connections became increasingly apparent. Some ill-judged repairs with concrete have done little to enhance any notion of historical authenticity.

But still the Brontë fans, the literary tourists, the merely curious hike out of Haworth to examine the ruins of what’s still widely credited as ‘Wuthering Heights’. Perhaps that moortop, those twisted trees, that lingering sense of tragedy and hardship all make Top Withens just too good a relic to lose its Wuthering Heights tag.

So What House Inspired Emily Brontë to Create Wuthering Heights – High Sunderland Hall, Ponden Hall or Top Withens?

If I had to pick a house as the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, I’d choose High Sunderland Hall. Its dimensions and layout were about right. It had a suitably stark moortop setting, plenty of gothic ornamentation and even a window-tapping ghost.

But it’s also possible that, on her moorland tramps, Emily was taken with the lonely location of Top Withens. In addition, Ponden Hall may have provided Lockwood’s boxbed and window, Catherine’s black magic books, the models for some characters, and maybe some of the interior details of Wuthering Heights.

Perhaps in Emily Brontë’s mind, all three houses became fused with elements drawn from her potent imagination, leading her to conjure one of the most ominous houses to have ever haunted a book.

As the enduring popularity of Wuthering Heights suggests, there is something about that house and its moorland surroundings that will always fascinate readers and keep drawing them back. As Emily Brontë wrote: ‘Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.’

(This article’s main image shows Top Withens, a building widely credited as ‘Wuthering Heights’. Photo: Steve Calcott)

The post Wuthering Heights: 3 Spooky Real-life Houses That Inspired Emily Brontë appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The house’s name was the Villa Diodati and those sheltering in it were no ordinary young people. As well as Lord Byron – the most successful, charismatic and infamous poet of the age – there was the equally talented poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his soon-to-be-wife Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. As thunder rumbled and lightning crackled outside, the atmosphere within the Villa Diodati was also somewhat charged. Shelley had recently abandoned his wife to elope with Mary, but – just to intensify the sexual and romantic complications – Claire may have been Shelley’s mistress. Claire was also Byron’s paramour and – though Byron had been reluctant to take on Claire as a lover – she was now pregnant with his child.

There was another figure at that gathering. I imagine him – a black-haired, moodily handsome man – sitting sulkily in a corner as the dark room flashed with lightning and flickered with feeble candlelight. That young man was John William Polidori. Though officially employed as the personal doctor of the hypochondriac Lord Byron, Polidori harboured literary ambitions of his own. Arrogant and oversensitive, tortured – even in that forward-thinking group – by the difference in class between himself and his aristocratic companions, Polidori smarted and fumed at every perceived slight or put-down.

Polidori – though his relationship was Byron was fraught and complex – did view his employer as a model of literary achievement he could emulate. Polidori’s literary yearnings would – in a strange way – be fulfilled, but hardly in the manner he would have hoped for. There was also – to add to the passionate tensions in the Villa Diodati – the fact that John William Polidori was probably bi- or homosexual and very likely in love with his famous, though much resented, boss.

John William Polidori, the author of the first vampire novel

Mixed into all this volatile alchemy were the heady effects of the pipes of opium being passed around, the vials of laudanum on the tables, and the carafes of red wine that glinted in the candlelight. Looking back, it seems inevitable that something of significance – something horrifying, even, something that would shake generations of readers – would come out of that combination of that claustrophobic cooping-up of genius, that narcotically-fuelled swirl of envy and sexual longing, and those dark symphonies of nature thundering outside.

The cold and storms of 1816 – known as ‘the year without a summer’ – were due to the eruption of an Indonesian volcano called Mount Tambora. The volcano had spewed masses of sulphurous fog into the atmosphere, fog which went on to encircle the earth, dimming sunlight, perverting weather patterns and causing frost and ice well into summer. These gloomy conditions inspired Lord Byron’s excellent poem Darkness:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless and pathless and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air …

The summer at the Villa Diodati also resulted in the birth of the two most important – and unsettling – modern gothic archetypes: Frankenstein’s Monster and the aristocratic literary vampire. This latter character would go on to inspire Dracula author Bram Stoker, among others.

Both Frankenstein’s Monster and the vampire manifested out of what would be innocent attempts to pass the time as black clouds shrouded the sun, as lightning sparked, and as John William Polidori struggled with jealousy, bitterness and rage.

Was Lord Byron the model for the literary vampire?

The Modern Vampire Arises out of a Ghost Story Contest at the Villa Diodati

To lessen the boredom of their confinement, the group took to reading out spooky stories in the evenings, such as those from the Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of translated German horror tales. Near midnight, on 18th June, Byron was reading from Christabel, a gothic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As Byron recited the poem in a hypnotic voice, Shelley leapt up and ran shrieking from the room. He’d later say he’d seen a terrifying vision of Mary – who’d been in the corner nursing their child – with staring eyes instead of nipples on her breasts.

Byron soon suggested that each person in the Villa Diodati should write a ghost story of their own. I imagine the little group, heads bent, faces frowning in concentration as rain pounded the roof, as wind moaned and thunder quaked around the Villa’s walls. It would not, however, be the two great poets who’d be responsible for unleashing the most enduring visions on the world. Shelley produced little while Lord Byron only managed to write what would later be called The Burial: A Fragment (or Fragment of a Novel), a few pages of an unfinished story about an English aristocrat getting sucked into vampiric goings-on in Turkey.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was also at the Villa Diodati, though he didn’t manage to write much of a ghost story.

Polidori’s initial effort provoked ridicule. He conjured up a tale about a peeping tom, who was horrified to realise the woman he was gawping at had a bare skull for a head. Mary Shelley later commented, ‘Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole, what to see I forget.’

Mary would soon jerk bolt upright in her bed, waking screaming from a nightmare – or vision – in which, she asserted, ‘I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out.’ The idea for Frankenstein had been sparked into life.

Polidori – though the proud doctor snarled and bristled against the laughter and mockery his story generated – would, when he calmed down, re-examine the Fragment Byron had penned.

Polidori would take Byron’s casually tossed-off, unfinished vampire tale and work it over. Unknown to Byron, Polidori began escaping the Villa Diodati’s brooding atmosphere by rowing across the lake to light-hearted social gatherings organised by one Countess Breuss. Here John met a Madame Brelaz, who was soon captivated by his charms. With their encouragement, he would create a literary archetype that has flourished right up to the present day. The story Polidori produced would become a novella entitled The Vampyre.

The Villa Diodati, where both Frankenstein and the aristocratic literary vampire were born

Lord Byron and John William Polidori between Them Invent the Aristocratic Literary Vampire

Our modern image of the vampire is usually of a being who – while indulging in brutal acts to sate his need for blood – is suave, educated, sexually compelling and from the aristocratic layer of society.

This darkly charismatic figure seems puzzling when you consider how vampires were originally depicted in the folklore of Central and Eastern European, the Balkans and Turkey. The vampires of peasant legend were hideous shuffling corpses more akin to zombies than to the charmingly evil, well-travelled and sophisticated bloodsuckers of later literature and film.

Claire Clairmont, lover of Lord Byron and guest at the Villa Diodati

The folkloric vampire could not rest, thanks to the fact it had died by suicide or been murdered or improperly buried. At night, these stinking cadavers would totter from their tombs, searching for relatives and ex-neighbours in order to suck their blood and so prolong their miserably undead existence. A simple and parochial figure, the vampire couldn’t travel far from its native soil and rarely harassed anyone outside its former village. When the vampire’s neighbours realised what was going on, they would end the nosferatu’s wanderings by hammering a stake through its heart – pinning the creature to the earth, thereby encouraging decomposition to proceed more naturally.

Byron had heard about such legends on his journeys through Turkey and South East Europe, both heartlands of the traditional vampire myth. A vampire of this type crops up in Byron’s poem The Giaour (1813), set in the Ottoman Empire:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce,

Must feed thy living livid corse.

This vampire is still the creature of rural legend – an animated carcass that stumbles around its former environs, desperate to feed on its relatives’ blood. In the Fragment of a Novel, however, Byron introduced a radically different vampiric archetype – a character that would be further elaborated in Polidori’s The Vampyre.

Mary Shelley in 1840. Her experiences in the Villa Diodati helped inspire Frankenstein.

Lord Byron’s The Burial: A Fragment

The vampire in A Fragment is one Augustus Darvell. Educated in aristocratic British schools, Darvell is well-travelled and ‘a man of considerable fortune and ancient family’. Though moody and enigmatic, he appears human and socialises with London’s elite. Nothing about him suggests the stench or decay of a corpse.

The narrator is an ex-schoolmate of Darvell’s, who – fascinated by his strange manner – succeeds in befriending him. The two visit Turkey, where – with a local guide – they make an excursion to the ruins of Ephesus. But, on the way, Darvell – who for some time has been growing ‘daily more enfeebled’ – suddenly becomes much weaker. To allow him to rest, the group pause in a Turkish graveyard.

Reclining against a tombstone in the shadow of a cypress tree, Darvell tells his friend he is dying and makes an odd request. He asks his friend to take an elaborate ring from his finger and hurl it into some salt springs ‘on the ninth day of the month at noon precisely’. On the following day, Darvell says, his friend should go to a ruined Temple of Sirius and wait one hour, though he doesn’t reveal what for. Darvell also makes his friend and the guide swear an oath that for one year they will ‘conceal my death from every human being’.

In the cemetery, the narrator notices a stork ‘with a serpent writhing in its beak’ that it – mysteriously – makes no attempt to devour. Darvell tells his companions to dig his grave exactly where the stork is standing. As the bird flies away, Darvell slumps against his friend and dies. The friend watches in horror as Darvell’s ‘countenance in a few minutes became nearly black’. Darvell’s body then starts to decompose at an unnatural speed and the narrator and guide bury him.

Though his companions in the Villa Diodati urged him to go on with his tale, Byron refused. He seemed to have a distaste for writing about vampires, stating in a letter of 1819, ‘I have a personal dislike to “vampires”, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.’

Lord Byron in 1813 – was much of our modern archetype of the vampire based on him?

Byron did, however, let slip to Polidori how his story would have continued. Darvell would have risen from the dead – and sustained himself by feeding on the blood of the upper classes. Darvell would have also tried to seduce the narrator’s sister.

And Then John William Polidori Was Inspired to Write The Vampyre

Intrigued by Lord Byron’s story – and by the plot arc the poet had planned – Polidori got to work. He’d later claim he wrote his novella The Vampyre in just ‘two or three idle mornings’.

In The Vampyre, Aubrey – a naïve young gentleman – befriends Lord Ruthven, a mysterious and charismatic aristocrat who has entered London society. The two set off on a grand tour of Europe, but Aubrey – though originally enthralled by Ruthven – becomes disgusted by his behaviour, especially his habit of seducing then discarding women. Aubrey leaves Ruthven in Rome and travels alone to Greece, where he falls for Ianthe, an innkeeper’s daughter. Ianthe shows Aubrey around and schools him in the local vampire lore, but his ‘fair conductress’ is soon discovered murdered:

‘Upon her neck and breast were blood and upon her throat were marks of teeth having opened the vein:- to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously, struck with horror, “A Vampyre! A Vampyre!”’

This ‘vampyre’ turns out to be Ruthven. Aubrey, however, unaware of this fact, re-joins Ruthven and they travel through Greece. The pair are attacked by robbers and Ruthven is mortally wounded. He makes Aubrey swear not to tell anyone of his death for a year and a day. Ruthven also demands that his body be carried to ‘the pinnacle of a neighbouring mount’ where ‘it should be exposed to the first cold ray of the moon that rose after his death.’

Arriving back in London, Aubrey is amazed to meet Lord Ruthven, apparently alive and in good health. Ruthven insists that Aubrey keeps his oath and Aubrey – traumatised by his experiences abroad and startled by Ruthven’s reappearance – has a nervous breakdown.

Ruthven seduces Aubrey’s sister and it is announced they will marry soon. Aubrey – who has now realised Ruthven’s true nature – tries to alert his family, but his warnings are dismissed as the rantings of a madman. On her wedding night, Aubrey’s sister is found dead, having – according to the book’s last line – ‘glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’ Aubrey also dies – of a broken blood vessel brought on by all the anguish.

Byron and Polidori’s tales have obvious similarities – the fascinating aristocratic vampire, the Continental travel, the naïve friend who tags along, the seduced sister, the strange death that is not a death and the weird rituals the vampire insists should be followed (presumably to ensure his ‘resurrection’).

But an examination of the lives of Byron and Polidori suggests that both their stories have more than a ring of reality about them. The genesis of the aristocratic vampire can be found in the bizarre histories of these two men and in the tormented relationship they shared.

The Strange and Tragic Life of John William Polidori

John William Polidori was born in London in 1795. His father, Gaetano, was an Italian political refugee, his mother an English governess. Polidori’s sister Frances would marry the exiled Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, making John the uncle of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his poet sister Christina.

John attended the Catholic school Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, then a remote, draughty, ramshackle establishment very different to the posh boarding school it would later become. From there, Polidori went on to study medicine in Edinburgh. Much of what he learnt – appropriately for one who would write about vampires – focused on purging the body, especially by using leeches to drain the blood. Polidori – also rather vampirically (think Lucy Westerna in Dracula) – wrote his thesis on sleepwalking. He became the youngest ever person to obtain a medical degree, graduating in 1815 at just 19 years of age.

Polidori, however, disliked studying medicine. A moody loner, he described his classmates as ‘automatons’. His passion was, instead, for literature. Like many young men, he longed to follow Byron’s example, perhaps imagining a literary career that would gift him riches, fame and sexual success. In The Vampyre, Polidori reflects with bitterness on his youthful yearnings, describing Aubrey as having ‘cultivated more his imagination than his judgement … he thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life.’

In early 1816, however, Polidori must have felt the most incredible blessing had descended, a piece of luck that brought him closer to his treasured literary aspirations. He was offered the job of personal physician to Lord Byron. Polidori’s father – who’d once been the secretary of the flamboyant dramatist and author Vittorio Alfieri and understood the dangers of working for a vain and famous man – urged his son not to accept the post. But John was unable to resist the magnetic draw of Byron’s talent and charisma. And, anyway, because of his youth, Polidori was forbidden to work as a public doctor. (In London, one couldn’t practise medicine until the age of 26.) Those close to Polidori weren’t the only ones to sense foreboding over the appointment. Byron’s faithful friend John Cam Hobhouse warned the poet not to employ the arrogant, volatile young man.

Byron – due to his good looks, dangerous charms and undeniable literary gifts – had proved a popular figure on London’s social scene, an accomplishment emphasised in both Polidori’s and Byron’s work. In The Vampyre, Ruthven’s ‘peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house, all wished to see him and … were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention … many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions …’ In the Fragment, Darvell is an object ‘of attention, of interest and even of regard … a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he may take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable.’

But just before Polidori entered Byron’s employment, society’s attitude towards the poet changed from admiration to outraged disgust. Thanks to the dramatic collapse of Byron’s marriage to Annabella Milbanke, lurid rumours were swirling through London and the rest of the country: that Byron had been having an incestuous affair with his half-sister, that he’d sodomised his wife, that he’d been enmeshed in sordid liaisons with numerous actresses and prostitutes. He was even accused – Byron today would be thought of as bisexual – of corrupting his page boy.

To escape all this scandal, as well as the increasing debts his spendthrift nature had racked up, Byron fled London for the Continent on St George’s Day (23rd April) 1816, taking Polidori with him. The pair exited Byron’s home with difficulty. A hostile crowd had gathered around it – a mob Byron feared might lynch him.

At first, the two men got on, but Byron soon became irritated with Polidori’s strange mix of puppy-like idol worship, immaturity and over-sensitive arrogance. Byron gave him the effeminate nickname Pollydolly, an insult which – considering Polidori was likely in love with him – must have stung.

Even before they left England, Byron began to humiliate his physician. Some of the poet’s friends came to see him off at Dover. As they ate dinner, Byron – to howls of laughter – lampooned a play Polidori had written. John stormed off and furiously paced the town’s streets. Upon reaching Belgium, Polidori was still able to write to his sister claiming, ‘I am with him on the footing of an equal’. But – as they journeyed across Europe – Byron would grow more and more exasperated with Polidori’s travel sickness, tantrums, back answers and sulks.

‘Pray, what is there excepting writing that I cannot do better than you?’ Polidori asked Byron in an inn overlooking the Rhine.

‘There are three things,’ Byron replied. ‘First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damn good thrashing.’

Polidori also felt Byron outshone him. John observed Byron’s charisma sucking people into the poet’s orbit while he remained ‘like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.’ Polidori’s own sense of self was being overshadowed by Byron. He would increasingly keep his distance from the poet and in June he half-heartedly attempted suicide.

Others had complained of Byron draining the life from them, eclipsing their personalities with his almost supernatural magnetism. Amelia Opie, a woman Byron had charmed, accused him of having ‘such a voice as the Devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it.’ The critic Thomas Jones de Powis claimed Byron had ‘the facility of … bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.’

At the Villa Diodati, things deteriorated further. Polidori was thrown into jealous rages by Claire’s flirtations with his employer. He was also envious of the intense friendship Byron struck up with Shelley. After Polidori lost a boat race to Shelley, he challenged him to a duel. Shelley just laughed in the doctor’s face while Byron offered to fight the duel on his friend’s behalf.

The tensions in the Villa Diodati spelled the end of Byron and Polidori’s relationship and Polidori was soon sacked. As he began to write The Vampyre, Polidori is likely to have been brimming with rage, hatred, disillusionment and the pain of rejection. The temptation must have been great to satirise his famous employer and The Vampyre is – at least in part – a work of revenge. While it’s difficult to be sure how much Polidori knew about Byron, parts of the poet’s life and personality do appear to have influenced the reprehensible character of Lord Ruthven. By extension, these aspects of Byron’s history and temperament have formed much of our modern image of the vampire.

The Transgressive, Gothic and Vampiric Life of Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron was born in London in 1788. He emerged into the world shrouded by a caul. According to the folklore of many countries, those born in the caul – a phenomenon which affects less than one in 80,000 babies – are lucky and destined for greatness. The caul’s superstitious associations are, however, not always positive – in Romania those born in the caul become vampires after death.

Byron was also born with a club foot – a deformity that would make him walk with a slight limp, make physical activity difficult and perhaps give him an urge to prove himself.

For one upon whom much of the modern archetype of the vampire would be based, Byron had a suitably gothic childhood. When Byron’s great uncle – the ‘Wicked’ Lord Byron – died in 1798, Byron inherited his title along with the ancestral home of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire: a dark draughty mansion with a ruined gothic monastery incorporated into its structure. Byron’s nurse, May Gray, gave him savage beatings and locked him in the dark after delivering terrifying lectures on religion and hellfire. Gray also led Byron to believe Newstead was haunted and she may have sexually abused him.

Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s ancestral home

Byron’s education was sporadic and eclectic, but he was eventually sent to school at Harrow. Byron – frequently in trouble with the teachers and alienated from most pupils – at first hated the place. He’d sneak out and spend hours lying dreamily on a flat gravestone, known as the Peachey Tomb, in nearby St Mary’s Churchyard. Though Byron never really settled at Harrow, his time there wasn’t completely wasted as he’d occupy himself by reading books of history, biography, philosophy – and poetry. He’d often recite their contents for his friends. In addition, Byron had a more unusual way of entertaining his schoolmates. Having discovered a human skull in the depths of Newstead Abbey, he’d drink from it in front of friends who visited him at home before urging them to do the same. At Harrow, Byron also made early forays into composing verse.

Lord Byron’s skull cup (Photo: devonlive)

After leaving school, Byron studied at Cambridge. Unimpressed, he wrote, ‘It is the Devil or at least his principle residence. They call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it better.’

He also stated, ‘Since I have left Harrow, I have become idle and conceited, from scribbling rhyme to making love to women.’

Vampires are often seen as destroyers of boundaries and upsetters of the social order – transgressing the borders between life and death, callously smashing all rules of civilised behaviour and violating vows of marriage and betrothal (think of Dracula’s attentions towards Lucy Westerna and Mina Harker). The most ‘vampiric’ facet of Byron’s character was perhaps his tendency to blatantly disregard the conventions and restrictions of ordinary life and to even view them with contempt.

An amusing example of this attitude occurred during Byron’s time at Cambridge. When told he couldn’t keep a dog in his room, his response was to acquire a different pet – a bear. As the regulations made no mention of bears, the university had to accept Byron’s unusual roommate. Byron even threatened to apply for a college fellowship for the creature. Visiting Byron in Italy, Shelley remarked on his fondness for keeping an eccentric array of animals:

‘Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels … [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … I have just met on the staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane.’

The Peachey Tomb, in St Mary’s Churchyard, Harrow, upon which Byron would lie as a schoolboy. Maybe the railings are to stop others following his example.

But it was for his defiance of sexual mores that Byron became most infamous. He almost certainly indulged in same-sex activity when at Harrow, something that appears to have been quite common despite the horror with which society at that time regarded such relations. Byron seems to have had an affair with a boy at Harrow called John Thomas Claridge and a liaison at Cambridge with one John Edleston, memories of whom would inspire several poems.

Byron went on to have numerous liaisons with married women, perhaps most notoriously with Lady Caroline Lamb. An Anglo-Irish aristocrat and wife of the future prime minister Viscount Melbourne, Lady Caroline claimed to have coined the famous description of Byron as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. When Byron ended their relationship, Caroline suffered a mental derangement, stalking Byron and once even sneaking into his home disguised as a page boy, a scandalous move that could have meant the social ruin of them both. Caroline lost so much weight during her distress that Byron complained he was ‘haunted by a skeleton’.

Lady Caroline got her revenge by satirising Byron in a ‘kiss and tell’ or – as the poet put it – ‘fuck and publish’ novel called Glenarvon. The novel’s brooding anti-hero – who roams ruined priories, howls at the moon and dresses as a monk – betrays every person close to him. Aided by his demonic charisma, on a grand tour of Europe he ruins every woman he meets, some of whom end up dead. He is eventually confronted on a ship by the ghosts of all the women he’s destroyed. Overcome with remorse, he leaps into the sea.

Byron had many other liaisons: with female admirers, as well as with an assortment of actresses, servant girls and prostitutes. Typical of Byron’s attitude was a note he wrote casually to his publisher: ‘Last night I had Angelina, the daughter of my physician and a married woman.’

In 1812, the first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published. This semi-autobiographical travelogue-poem – suffused with sex, danger and adventure and based on a two-year trip Byron had made around Europe – brought Byron unimaginable attention and fame. At just 24 – in a society with little experience of stardom – he became the first modern celebrity. Byron was invited to dazzling parties and elected to exclusive social clubs, becoming – as the Fragment puts it – ‘deeply initiated into what is called the world’. He frequented the most fashionable drawing rooms of Regency London and fans mobbed him in the streets.

Despite this success, Byron projected a sullen image, making him seem similar to Childe Harold, the world-weary and melancholic hero of his poem. This may have been partly due to Byron’s club foot making him reluctant to dance. But standing sulkily on the edge of the dancefloor only enhanced Byron’s appeal. He was inundated by hundreds of letters from women eager to meet him. At one point, it even became too much for Byron’s gargantuan sexual appetite and he pleaded with his publisher to protect him from women’s advances. In a preface to The Vampyre, Polidori mentions a woman fainting just because Lord Byron entered the room. (The Vampyre is, in part, a satire on the vampiric nature of the new phenomenon of fame.)

Byron struggled with the blurring of his ‘real self’, his public personality and his creation Childe Harold. Acquaintances recalled Byron laughing and joking before abruptly switching to his moody persona if there were people around who expected it. ‘Why don’t you just be more natural?’ they’d ask him. ‘This is natural,’ he’d reply. As well as Byron’s persona overwhelming others, it seems to have sometimes oppressed and confused him. This powerful archetype – the aloof, prickly, enigmatic, inwardly tortured ‘Byronic hero’ – would influence future literary characters such as Heathcliff, Mr Rochester and Count Dracula as well as perceptions of rock stars like Jim Morrison.

After a while, however, there was a sense that Byron was going too far in his outraging of public decorum. This was in part because the laid-back Regency world was starting its transition towards a stricter, Victorian-style morality, but it was also due to Byron’s determination to go well beyond the flirtations and aristocratic affairs common in his milieu.

In January 1815, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a sober serious person who happened to be Lady Caroline’s cousin. The marriage appears to have been doomed from the start – waking with a horrendous hangover in a carriage after the wedding reception, Byron saw light flickering through the dark red curtains and thought he was in Hell. It seems Byron had proposed to Annabella in the hope her wealth could pay off the debts he’d accumulated through extravagant living though it later turned out she was less wealthy than he’d assumed.

Byron’s marriage was marked by black violent moods, heavy drinking and affairs. Though unhappy marriages and adulterous liaisons weren’t considered unusual or especially shocking at the time, it was the way Byron went about undermining his union that appalled society. Rumours were soon flying around that he was having an incestuous affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, an affair that may have been going on for a year before Byron’s marriage began. Byron does seem to have been obsessed with Augusta, writing of her: ‘I am much afraid that that perverse passion is my deepest.’ Byron might well have been the father of (the already married) Augusta’s third daughter Elizabeth Medora Leigh.

Gossip was also going round accusing Byron of sodomy, with both men and women. Sodomy was seen as an atrocious crime and those found guilty of it were hung on separate gallows so they wouldn’t ‘pollute’ the other convicts. As the rumours about Byron became more and more extreme, the press compared him to the decadent Roman emperors Nero and Caligula and alleged he’d seduced three boys while at Harrow. Byron felt he had no option but to flee England. He would never return alive.

The trauma of scandal didn’t encourage Byron to amend his behaviour. Upon reaching the Continent, he claimed he ‘fell like a thunderbolt upon a chambermaid’ in Ostend and he sent back to England for ‘more cundums’ while travelling along the Rhine. When news got round that Byron had hired out the Villa Diodati, the nearby Hotel Angleterre rented binoculars to English tourists so they could spy on the escapades of the notorious poet and his circle.

After leaving the Villa, Byron headed for Milan then moved on to Venice, where he is said to have seduced 200 women. Settling in that decadent decaying city, he had affairs with married aristocrats. Shelly visited him in Venice and what Shelley witnessed would prove too much even for that outspoken advocate of free love. Shelley stated that Byron ‘associated with wretches that seem to have almost lost the gait and physiognomy of man … he was familiar with the lowest sort of woman, the people his gondoliers pick up in the street. He allows fathers and mothers to barter with him for their daughters.’

So How Did The Vampyre Reflect Byron’s ‘Debauchery’, ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Baleful Influence’ upon Others?

Polidori’s character of Ruthven is, of course, based on Byron. Ruthven is aristocratic and seems wealthy, though Aubrey would gradually learn ‘that Lord Ruthven’s affairs were embarrassed’ and that, because of this, ‘he was about to travel’. Ruthven is charismatic and good-looking: ‘In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint … it’s form and outline were beautiful.’ Ruthven, like Byron, is a part of society but also a stranger in it. He’s cold, aloof, sexually alluring, and often violent and remorseless in the quest to fulfil his desires.

Travelling with Ruthven, Aubrey soon notices he seeks out ‘the centres of all fashionable vice’. Aubrey receives letters from his guardians in England warning him that ‘there was an evil power resident in his companion … that his character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society.’ The letters tell Aubrey of a Dracula-style contagion of evil: ‘all those females who he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.’

Lord Byron would influence the portrayal of vampires in literature and film.

Indeed, Byron’s aristocratic antics seem to have – at times – outraged the bourgeois morals of the middle-class Polidori. (In Dracula, Bram Stoker would favourably contrast the sober values of the middle-class characters with those of the flightier, more decadent – and, in the Count’s case, downright evil – aristocrats.) The Vampyre seems saturated by the bitterness that a famous aristocratic man can – at least for a while – get away with behaviour that his ‘social inferiors’ would have been unable to.

Polidori also underlined how dangerous Ruthven (or Byron) could be. While Ruthven would not give any charity to the virtuous who ‘were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers … when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity.’ But ‘all those upon whom it was bestowed, inevitably found there was a curse on it, for they were all either led to the scaffold or sunk to the lowest and most abject misery.’

Byron himself felt he was cursed, noting that many of his friends, lovers and acquaintances suffered misfortune or died tragic and early deaths. Lady Caroline Lamb, for instance, never recovered from her liaison with Byron. Following struggles with mental instability, health problems and addictions to laudanum and alcohol, she passed away at just 42. Caroline has her anti-hero in Glenarvon proclaim, ‘Weep! I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforth, you shall weep no more … My love is death!’

Lord Byron’s ‘vampiric curse’ – it might seem – also worked its influence on those who’d been with him in the Villa Diodati. All of them would experience tragedy or in some way be afflicted by premature death. Byron’s ‘curse’ would – especially – overshadow what remained of the life of John William Polidori.

The Publication of The Vampyre and the Final Tragedy of John William Polidori

After his sacking by Byron, Polidori travelled around Italy before returning to London. It was there, while living in Soho, that he was shocked to learn The Vampyre had been published. The work appeared – without Polidori’s permission – on April Fools’ Day (1st April) 1819 in The New Monthly Magazine. A far worse insult was that it was entitled: The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.

Polidori scrambled to assert his rights to the novella. Despite repeated denials by Byron and Polidori, the idea of Byron’s authorship prevailed for quite a while and – when Polidori succeeded in making enough noise to draw attention to himself – he was accused of plagiarism or piggybacking on Byron’s fame. Later the same year, The Vampyre came out in book form and was also attributed to Byron though later editions did exchange his name for Polidori’s. Byron’s Fragment got published too in an attempt to clear up the confusion, but The Vampyre continued to be viewed by many as the creation of Polidori’s ex-boss.

Polidori had left his manuscript at the home of his friend Countess Bruess, where it had lain around for three years before the Countess passed it to a Madame Gatelier. Madame Gatelier forwarded the novella to the disreputable journalist and publisher Henry Colburn, who had put out Glenarvon and would publish Frankenstein. Colburn had the story printed up in The New Monthly Magazine. In a typically offhand manner, Byron dissociated himself from Polidori’s work: ‘If the book is clever, it would be base to deprive the real writer, whoever he may be, of his honours; and if stupid, I desire the responsibility of nobody’s dullness but my own.’

The Vamprye, however, proved an immediate hit, partly because of the attribution to Lord Byron, partly because it fitted the public’s enthusiasm for gothic horror tales. The book went through numerous editions and translations. A play based upon it – Le Vampire, which premiered in Paris in June 1820 – was immensely popular and ignited a vampire craze across Europe. Operatic adaptations were made of Polidori’s story and Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas and Aleksey Tolstoy would all produce vampire tales. The modern archetype of the vampire had been born.

An early edition of The Vampyre, credited to Lord Byron rather than Polidori

Little of the praise or money The Vampyre generated found their way to Polidori. Though he wrote other novellas, plays, non-fiction books and poems – including a long theological poem called The Fall of the Angels – none of these works gained success and Polidori became more and more disgusted with the literary world. Searching around for a new purpose, Polidori even sought to return to Ampleforth College to train as a monk. Polidori’s request was refused, with the prior telling him this was due to ‘certain publications which I have seen and of which I must tell you as a friend I wish you had not been the author.’ Even though Polidori had abandoned his literary dreams, he couldn’t free himself from Byron’s spectre. Polidori enrolled to study law – using his mother’s maiden name – but could muster no enthusiasm for it. He fell into depression and gambling addiction, amassing large debts.

Polidori died in London on 24th August 1821, two weeks short of his 26th birthday. While he almost certainly committed suicide – by ingesting prussic acid – the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes, probably out of consideration for Polidori’s family.

‘Poor Polidori,’ Byron wrote upon hearing the news, ‘it seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.’

Even in death ‘poor Polidori’ was unable to summon the respect he had craved. He was buried in Old St Pancras Churchyard, London, but his grave was one of 7000 interments dug up to make space for a railway in the 1860s. The architect put in charge of this gruesome job was the young Thomas Hardy. While Hardy had the human remains carted offsite and buried in a pit, he came up with a novel solution about what to do with the hundreds of redundant gravestones. He massed the tombstones together in a circle and planted an ash tree in the centre of that macabre ring. As the ash – known as The Hardy Tree – grew, it absorbed many of the gravestones: forming an interesting tableau demonstrating the complex intermixture of life and death. An appropriate memorial, perhaps, to one who added so much to the myth of the vampire.

The Hardy Tree, in Old St Pancras Churchyard. Is Polidori’s gravestone one of those massed around it? (Photo: theprogressiveaspect)

The ‘Curse’ of the Vampiric Lord Byron

Polidori wouldn’t be the only one from the Villa Diodati affected by Byron’s ‘curse’. In July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident off the Italian coast, less than a month before he turned 30. Shelley had named his boat – a ‘perfect plaything for the summer’ – the Don Juan as a tribute to one of Byron’s best-known poems. When Shelley washed up on a beach near Viareggio, his body – in keeping with quarantine regulations – had to be burnt there.

Byron, along with Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, carried out the grim task of building the pyre and setting the fire going. But, as the flames began to consume Shelley, Byron – bizarrely – stripped off and swam out to sea, thereby missing most of the cremation. He may not have been able to bear the scene for long as parts of Shelley’s corpse had been fleshless when the ocean gave him up. A book of Keats’ poems was found in Shelley’s pocket and Trelawny is said to have snatched his heart from the blaze. Years later, after Mary Shelley’s death, her son discovered the remnants of a charred heart in a drawer.

A 1889 painting of the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley. This romanticised depiction, by Louis Edouard Fournier, contains a number of historical inaccuracies.

Mary Shelley died at 53. Though Frankenstein was well-received, she doesn’t seem to have garnered much money from it. During her financially precarious life, she would – however – write many more books and put a great deal of energy into editing her husband’s work and promoting his reputation as a great poet.

Claire Clairmont – mostly working as a governess – lived in several European countries, eventually dying in Italy at 80 years of age. Her daughter Allegra – who she’d been carrying at the Villa Diodati – was taken from her by Byron. Placed in an Italian convent against Claire’s wishes, Allegra died at five. Her body was brought back to England and buried in St Mary’s Churchyard, Harrow, close to the Peachey Tomb upon which Byron had dreamed away so many adolescent hours. Claire blamed Byron for Allegra’s death and hated him for the rest of her life. She’d say her relationship with the poet had given her just a few moments of pleasure but a lifetime of trouble.

Byron himself travelled to Greece, where he joined that country’s armed struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Now balding and white-haired, Byron fell in love with a Greek youth called Lukas Chalandritsanos. Byron’s legendary charms, however, were on the ebb – despite writing poems for Chalandritsanos and spending large sums upon him, the poet’s affections went unreciprocated.

Byron died from a fever on 19th April 1824, aged 36. Some say his heart was cut out and kept in Greece – where he was, and still is, a national hero – but his body was embalmed and returned to England. Byron was to have been buried in Westminster Abbey, but the clergy challenged this plan on the grounds of his ‘questionable morality’. Death had not, however, diminished Byron’s fame and huge crowds viewed his coffin as he lay in state for two days in London. Byron was interred in his family vault in St Mary Magdalen’s Church, Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.

Lord Byron on his Deathbed, painted in 1826. Note the sheet covering Byron’s club foot.

There is, though, an interesting postscript to Byron’s story, a postscript suggesting that even death and the passing of more than a century couldn’t extinguish his vampiric sexual charisma. In 1938, the vicar of Hucknall – because of persistent rumours that Byron’s coffin was empty – agreed to have his casket opened. Inside was Byron’s well-preserved – and naked – corpse. The vicar stated:

‘Reverently, very reverently, I raised the lid and before my eyes lay the embalmed body of Byron in as perfect condition as when it had been placed in the coffin … his features and hair easily recognisable from the portraits with which I was so familiar. The serene, almost happy expression on his face made a profound impression on me … I gently lowered the lid of his coffin – and as I did so, breathed a prayer for the peace of his soul.’

The coffins of Lord Byron and his only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace. The crowns show their status as barons.

The vicar’s churchwarden, however, couldn’t help remarking that Byron’s ‘sexual organ showed quite abnormal development’. One of the workmen who’d helped them lever open the coffin was far blunter. He said Byron was:

‘Just like in the portraits … a good-looking man putting on a bit of weight, he’d gone quite bald. He was quite naked, you know … look, I’ve been in bathhouses, I’ve been in the army, I’ve seen men. But I never saw nothing like him. He was built like a pony.’

(The article’s main image shows an 1813 portrait of Lord Byron in traditional Albanian dress.)

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