The Germ
The Germ
The Germ
Elizabeth
Prettejon (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 76-88.
The Germ
Andrew Stauffer
In the late summer of 1849 in London, the seven Pre-Raphaelite Brothers and a few of
their friends began work on the first issue of a journal that would soon become The
Germ. Other names were suggested at the time – The P.R.B. Journal, Thoughts Towards
Nature, First Thoughts, The Truth-Seeker – but “The Germ” ultimately prevailed. As
these several titles suggest, the journal was animated by philosophical and cultural
ambitions. Like the PRB itself, The Germ aimed to resist the main currents of mid-
Victorian aesthetics; it was published to give voice to a new school of art. One early critic
“propagandist aim”(Noble, 569). Indeed, The Germ can be nominated as the first British
periodical dedicated to a specific artistic program. It therefore stands behind the many
avant-garde magazines, such as The Savoy and BLAST, that would come to define
aesthetic movements of later periods. In the event, The Germ had a very short run: only
four issues appeared, from January through May 1850, each selling less than 100 copies.
Yet these four issues maintained an influence over many artists and writers of the
nineteenth-century, and the journal continues to be read, imitated, and reprinted. The
It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s idea, a monthly magazine that would be a venue
September 1849, D.G.R. wrote to Stephens, “it is my opinion that we may now make a
very stunning thing indeed of this Magazine if we only like, and…it ought to be rigidly
stuck to” (Correspondence, 49.8). From the first, The Germ was meant as a collective
endeavor to bind the young men together as a true Brotherhood, which was itself the
more serious inheritor of the ‘Cyclographic’ sketching society that many of them had
cover would eventually announce) and offering poetry, fiction, prose, reviews, and a
single etching per issue, The Germ required literary output of the young painters and
sculptors in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and this too was one of D.G.R.’s goals. He plainly
wanted to foster verbal and visual cross-over work in keeping with his own propensities.
Yet this also meant that authorial contributions were often delayed or abandoned,
sometimes having to be cajoled out of artists primarily occupied in the studio. Because of
this aspect of its composition, the actual contents of The Germ are somewhat
miscellaneous. However, there is a discernable spirit to the journal, and its history and
contents help us understand this formative phase of the careers of a number of the Pre-
Raphaelites.
Ernest Radford calls The Germ “the respiratory organ of the Brethren”(227). It
contains interesting work by James Collinson, F.G. Stephens, Thomas Woolner, and
William Holman Hunt, as well as by PRB associates like Ford Madox Brown, Walter
Deverell, Coventry Patmore, and William Bell Scott. Yet it was the Rossetti family that
dominated the journal – Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina contributed
among them about half of its total contents, with William Michael serving as editor. In
this regard, The Germ looks back to the private, hand-drawn magazines produced by the
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Rossetti household: the Hodge Podge; or Weekly Efforts which they wrote sporadically in
the summer of 1843, and its short-lived successor, the Illustrated Scrapbook. WMR
reports that both “The Blessed Damozel” and an early version of “The Portrait [On
Mary’s Portrait]” were originally intended by D.G.R. for one of these “manuscript family
magazine[s],” which would mean that the family was still producing them in 1846 or
1847 (DGR as Designer and Writer, 126). Only two years later, The Germ was being
drafted, and “The Blessed Damozel” found a place there instead. “The Portrait” (then
under a different title) was considered for the third issue, but D.G.R. ultimately withdrew
it on the grounds that The Germ had already featured too many poems mourning dead
women (PR Diaries & Letters, 258-9). One of D.G.R.’s other such contributions – “My
Sister’s Sleep” – was printed under the heading, “Songs of One Household,” a seeming
allusion to the intermural quality of The Germ and its Rossettian contributions.
At the time that The Germ was conceived, D.G.R. was channeling a number of
very different literary influences, including primarily the early Italian poets, John Keats,
Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe. Many of these enthusiasms were shared by the
PRB circle and formed the basis of their association. In 1848, they even drew up a “list of
immortals” that they claimed “constitutes the whole of our Creed” (PR&PRB, 111). As
Stephen Spender has written along these lines, “The influence which the Pre-Raphaelites
shared far more than their pedantic formulae for the technique of painting were Keats’s
[poems] ‘Isabella’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’....The truest experience which they
shared was literary”(120). It is certainly the case that the majority of the names of the
PRB “immortals” are authors, not painters; and at least half of those authors can be
associated with Romanticism in some way. The resulting aesthetic program found its
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center in heroic imaginative effort, personal vision, and a devotion to truth. In this view,
medium mattered less than the springs and goals of art: paintings, sculptures, and poems
Two prose contributions to The Germ stand out as representative summaries of the
Pre-Raphaelite attitude towards art, and they are perhaps the best points of entry into an
understanding of the early Brotherhood and their journal: D.G. Rossetti’s serious hoax-
story, “Hand and Soul” (in issue one) and F.G. Stephens’s essay “The Purpose and
Tendency of Early Italian Art” (in issue two). Worth noting is the fact that both of these
productions include mention of the art historian Séroux d’Agincourt (1730-1814), whose
key sourcebook for the PRB as they developed their appreciation for medieval art.
deep interest in the art of the middle ages, offering a wealth of illustrations meant to
demonstrate art’s various stages of decay and renewal from the fourth to the sixteenth
century. An English translation of the Histoire was published by Longmans in 1847, just
as the PRB was forming; Rossetti, Stephens, and others took much of their knowledge of
early Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture from its hundreds of engraved plates. In
their focus on the culture of the 13th and 14th centuries, both “Hand and Soul” and “The
Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art” reflect d’Agincourt’s influence on the artistic
exordium, addressed to English artists. Stephens would go on to serve for several decades
as art editor for the influential journal the Athenaeum, and so became influential in
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warm-up for that process. Written in defense of medieval painting, it moves rapidly
toward general exhortations about the practice of art. Like other members of the
Brotherhood in these early days, Stephens places a heavy emphasis on “truth,” a term
used so vaguely that it evokes only a general sense of uncompromised devotion: “Truth
in every particular ought to be the aim of the artist. Admit no untruth: let the priest's
garment be clean”(2:61). The image of the artist as priest is in keeping with the religious,
vaguely Catholic, atmosphere of The Germ more generally considered, and reflects the
including J.F. Overbeck who advocated a monastic devotion to art. With the Pre-
Raphaelites, such an attitude typically turns aside from conventional Christianity in favor
of a religion of art which must be pursued through one’s own private vision. And yet this
In the essay, Stephens claims (echoing D.G.R.’s terms) that an artist’s abilities as a
draftsman need only be “maintained as a most important aid, and in that quality alone, so
that we do not forget the soul for the hand”(2.60). The “soul” here is the true source of
art. Expanding upon this view, he makes clear that “passion and feeling” are the crucial
components, while “mere technicalities of performance are but additions; and not the real
intent and end of painting, as many have considered them to be”(2.60). In Stephens’s
view, the best artists always represent “nature with more true feeling and love, with a
deeper insight into her tenderness;…it is the crying out of the man, with none of the strut
of the actor. Let us have the mind and the mind's-workings, not the remains of earnest
thought which has been frittered away by a long dreary course of preparatory study, by
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which all life has been evaporated”(2.60). One can see the outlines of the Pre-Raphaelite
program in all of this, particularly in the essay’s youthful confidence and disdain for
preparation and ‘mere’ accomplishment. Stephens closes the essay by quoting Lessing’s
remark that “the destinies of a nation depend upon its young men between nineteen and
twenty-five years of age”(2.64), referring fairly precisely to the ages of his fellow
conductors of The Germ and suggesting that the P.R.B. have come to change the world.
Like Stephen’s essay, D.G. Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul” distills Pre-Raphaelite
principles and purposes. The only piece of prose fiction to appear in The Germ, this short
story serves as a kind of Pre-Raphaelite parable and is almost certainly the most
important single contribution to the periodical. It tells the story of Chiaro dell’Erma, a
fictional late-medieval Italian painter who struggles to find his true path as an artist, first
pursuing fame for its own sake. His work becomes known and admired throughout
Tuscany, but, in his dissatisfaction, Chiaro begins to believe that he “had misinterpreted
the craving of his own spirit” and turns instead to an art of religious faith and moral
purity (1:26). However, this results in “laboured…cold and unemphatic” pictures that do
not please his former audiences (1:27). The story culminates as he witnesses a feud in
Pisa break into a street battle right in front of his allegorical paintings of Peace on the
walls of a church. Dismayed by his failure of his art and haunted by fears that he has
betrayed himself, his viewers, and painting itself, Chiaro is visited by an apparitional
woman, “clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, fashioned to that time”
(1:29). She tells him, “I am an image, Chairo, of thine own soul within thee. See me and
know me as I am” (1:30). Her message is one of comfort and direction: “What [God] hath
set in thine heart to do, that do thou; and even though thou do it without thought of Him,
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it shall be well done…..In all that thou doest, work from thine own heart, simply; for his
heart is as thine, when thine is wise and humble….Know that there is but this means
whereby thou mayst serve God with man:--Set thine hand and thy soul to serve man with
God.”(1:31). The central part of the story ends with Chairo painting a portrait of his
visitant, and “while he worked, his face grew solemn with knowledge”(1:32). Thus
fusing humility with egoism, the tale urges the painter towards a devotional mode of art
Such an allegory begins to reveal what was meant by the Pre-Raphaelite emphasis
on “truth to nature,” a mode that need have little to do with objective clarity or pictorial
realism. As Graham Hough writes of D.G.R.’s story, “This is a new kind of pre-
Raphaelite creed – not fidelity to external nature, but fidelity to one’s own inner
experience….an art carried on in this spirit is itself a worship and service of God”(53).
While some Pre-Raphaelite artists, following Ruskinian principles, did attend closely to
the minute details of the natural world, D.G.R. was constantly pushing the concept of
“nature” towards an interior, imagined land. Along these lines, Roger Fry has written that
“Rossetti…could only paint at all under the stress of some special imaginative
compulsion. The ordinary world of vision scarcely supplied any inspiration to him. It was
only through the evocation in his own mind of a special world, a world of pure romance,
that the aspects of objects began to assume aesthetic meaning” (qtd. in Doughty, 94).
Such divisions within the Brotherhood would eventually become more apparent, but
within The Germ, which was itself so much a product of D.G.R.’s influence, “truth to
nature” can be read as code for the expression of one’s imagination. Like the Romantic
poets before them, the early Pre-Raphaelites turned to the natural world as a mirror for
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their own self-projections; they hoped that the artistic mediations they enacted upon the
world’s particulars would reveal the truth of their hearts and souls.
Surrounding the tale of Chiaro is a contemporary frame narrative, set in the spring
of 1847, which describes the experience of a visitor encountering Chiaro’s painting of his
soul during a visit to the Pitti Gallery in Florence. “Hand and Soul” begins and ends in
this frame, and the whole story mixes references to real and invented sources in a way
that has led some readers to go looking for the fictional Chiaro dell’ Erma’s work or
small painting of the feminine apparition of his soul, the narrator writes, “As soon as I
saw the figure, it drew an awe upon me, like water in shadow….the most absorbing
wonder of it was its literality. You knew that figure, when painted, had been seen; yet it
was not a thing to be seen of men”(1:32). Such an evaluation nicely exemplifies the Pre-
Raphaelite desire for an art that would synthesize private vision and truth to nature.
Chiaro’s painting is both natural and supernatural, visually faithful to the details of his
model and yet thoroughly predicated on self-projection that borders on magic conjuring.
The painting also represents a pastiche of medieval style and nineteenth-century subject:
female saints, whereas Chiaro has rendered an image of his own soul (his “moral allegory
of Peace” frescoes are similarly Victorian in subject matter). “Hand and Soul” ends as the
group of French and Italian art students, who call it mystical, impenetrable, and
insignificant. The frame story thus serves multiple functions: it brings the story into
contemporary focus, augmenting its reality-effect and its hoaxing aspect; it allows D.G.R.
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to stage the reception of “pre-raphaelite” art as a scene of “awe” and “wonder”; and it
simultaneously casts this scene in an ironic light with the art students’ commentary. We
are left thinking that both Chiaro’s painting and “Hand and Soul” itself might be jokes or
might be deadly serious – or, like much of the work of Poe for example, -- might be both
As mentioned, Poe’s work was a major influence on the early Pre-Raphaelites and
particularly on the contents of The Germ. One of the PRB list of “immortals,” Poe had
become a preoccupation of D.G.R.’s after 1846, when The Raven and other Poems had
appeared in London. “The Blessed Damozel” and “The Portrait [On Mary’s Portrait”] are
both plainly indebted to “The Raven,” and “D.G.R. produced a series of remarkable
illustrations inspired by “The Raven,” “The Sleeper,” and “Ulalume” between 1846 and
1848, apparently intended for an edition of Poe to be sponsored by the PRB. From one
vantage, The Germ was the project that displaced that projected edition, while yet
retaining some of the animating energies behind it. Of D.G.R.’s interest in Poe, William
Michael Rossetti confirms that The Blessed Damozel” derived from his brother’s
perusal and admiration of Edgar Poe’s “Raven.” “I saw” (this is Mr. Caine’s
version of Rossetti’s statement) “that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do
with the grief of the lover on earth, and I determined to reverse the conditions, and
give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven.” Along with ‘The
Raven,” other poems by Poe – “Ulalume,” “For Annie,” “The Haunted Palace,” and
many another – were a deep well of delight to Rossetti in all these years” (Family
Other contributions to The Germ evoke Poe’s themes and language, such as Thomas
Woolner’s poem “Of My Lady in Death,” with its close attention to the hollow cheeks
and sad eyes of his dying mistress and its closing line that echoes “The Raven,” “No
more; no more; oh, never any more.” Throughout his life, Poe himself dreamed of
founding a magazine devoted to “Independence, Truth, and Originality,” and one might
even say that The Germ emerged as a curious displaced homage to this desire.
most of which tend towards images of death or death-like sleep (“Dream Land,” “An
End,” “Repining,” “Song,” “Sweet Death”) while evoking what would become her
reviews of Arnold, Browning, and Clough mark the early emergence of a contemporary
canon of Victorian poets through the eyes of the P.R.B.; these comments on Arnold’s
vignettes, “The Child Jesus: A Record Typical of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries,” William
Bell Scott’s “Morning Sleep” with its imaginative evocation of a state of reverie, and
Walter Deverell’s “A Modern Idyll,” with its quietly haunting vision of his little cousin
playing in her white dress among the dry red leaves. Most of the essays are more like
partial memoranda or rapid sketches and have little general interest, except as an index of
the subjects and attitudes of the early P.R.B. An exception is John Orchard’s
One should also consider the four etchings of The Germ as a record of
for Woolner’s “My Beautiful Lady/ My Lady in Death” is a two-panel picture showing
first the narrator awkwardly grasping his beloved’s arm as she leans towards a riverbank
to pluck a flower, and then the narrator collapsed on her grave, with a procession of
mourners in the background. Collinson’s etching to accompany his poem “The Child
Jesus” recalls early Renaissance religious groups with its placement of Jesus at the center
of a pyramid of adorers, and yet here all are strangely children. A Latin epigraph quotes
Psalm 8:2 (KJV: “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou obtained
strength”), alluding to the scene in his poem in which Jesus’s childhood friends cast their
little offerings at his feet. Ford Madox Brown’s illustration “Cordelia” (to accompany
William Michael Rossetti’s poem by that name) and Deverell’s “Viola and Olivia” (for
John Tupper’s poem) both turn to Shakespearean subjects, paying particular attention to
details of wardrobe and architecture. Worth noting is the fact that Deverell’s model for
Viola was Elizabeth Siddal, who would soon become an integral part of the PRB circle
and the wife of D.G.R. It was Deverell who discovered her, and this is the first known
result of her modeling for the PRB. Taken together, the etchings provide a minor though
driven literary and religious subjects and historical pastiche. They set forth a style of flat,
intense representation quite at odds with the current scene of Victorian painting.
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Part of the reason for the relative dearth of illustration in The Germ has to do with
production costs: from the beginning, the journal was barely funded out of the pockets of
its young contributors. The Germ was published by Aylott and Jones of Paternoster Row,
who produced mostly ecclesiastical titles but who also had, in 1846, brought out the
poems of “Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell” – that is, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.
The decision to take on The Germ seems to have followed closely on Aylott and Jones’s
relatively encouraging experiment with the Brontës. D.G.R. wrote to his brother in
September 1849, “I believe we have found a publisher for the Magazine: viz: Aylott and
Jones, 8 Paternoster Row. I was introduced to them about a week back by a printer, a
printed, we shall be able among the lot of us, to secure at least 250 subscribers before the
thing is out at all, and this will be something” (49.11). These expectations were not met,
however, and The Germ struggled to find subscribers and purchasers: the first issue sold
70 copies, and the second only 40. Publishing arrangements were changed as was the
title, and the next two issues came out as Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature,
Conducted Principally by Artists, with the publishing firm of Dickinson and Company
subjoined. This change was the result of financial interventions by George Tupper and his
bothers John and Alexander, members of the PRB circle and the printers of The Germ.
The only palpable result was an increase in items in the journal written by the Tupper
family, and it was soon clear that The Germ must fold. In June, D.G.R. wrote, “that
unfortunate ‘star of the morning’ [has] returned for ever into its natural firmament”
(Fredeman, 50.9).
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Yet the critics were kinder to The Germ than were purchasers, and it managed to
get fairly widely noticed and praised in the reviews. The Spectator for January 12, 1850,
publication,” and the February 4 Morning Chronicle remarked on the “many original and
beautiful thoughts in these pages” while yet hoping that the writers would get “rid of
those ghosts of medieval art which now haunt” their work. Reflecting on The Germ after
its demise, The Critic (June 1, 1850) judged that “It was too good--that is to say, too
refined and of too lofty a class, both in its art and in its poetry--to be sufficiently popular
to pay even the printer’s bill.” The reviewer went on to say, “we cannot contemplate this
young and rising school in art and literature without the most ardent anticipations of
something great to grow from it, something new and worthy of our age, and we bid them
God speed upon the path they have adventured.” Much did grow from the Pre-Raphaelite
Germ, not only as the individual careers of its members and wider circle progressed, but
as Pre-Raphaelitism in art spread and evolved through the course of the century. Other
literary periodicals in the nineteenth century emerged as part of this legacy as well,
notably The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) and the American journals The
Crayon (1855-61) and The New Path (1863-65), all of which pledged allegiance more or
less explicitly to the example of The Germ and the Pre-Raphaelite themes and methods it
Looking back on The Germ at the turn of the twentieth century, an elderly
William Michael Rossetti wrote, “I am quite aware that some of the articles…though
good in essentials, are to a certain extent juvenile; but juvenility is anything but
uninteresting when it is that of such men as Coventry Patmore and Dante Rossetti” (27).
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Indeed, a great part of the continuing appeal and historical importance of The Germ rests
precisely in the view it allows of the earliest chapter of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and
the initial works and writings of its founding members. In addition, it occupies a signal
position in the history of English periodical culture as the first avant garde magazine
devoted to a set of aesthetic commitments. In their attempt to bring art to bear upon
spiritual truth, and in their devotional attention to nature and to their inner selves, the
early Pre-Raphaelites shifted the terms and practice of Victorian art. In producing The
Germ, they made a record of their early collaborative efforts to these ends. We can
glimpse now in the juxtaposition of subjects and styles some of the energetically various
conversations that were shared by these young people as they began their careers. J.
Ashcroft Noble tells the story that, soon after the publication of the first issue, one of the
PRB overheard a young man in a bookseller’s shop reading the title as “The Gurm” with
a hard G; this was found so humorous that this name stuck, and members of the circle
often called their journal by that name (569); D.G.R. spells it that way, for example, in a
letter to his brother of September 3, 1850 (Correspondence, 50.15). It seems fitting that
this note of mockery came to nominate a project that might, in other hands, have been
overburdened with earnest self-importance. At its best moments, The Germ (or Gurm)
seems to give us access to those early enthusiasms and high-spirited negotiations that lay
behind the work of this extraordinary group of English artists and writers.
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Brown, Ford Madox: “The Love of Beauty: Sonnet,” “On the Mechanism of a Historical
Calder Campbell: Sonnet (“When midst the summer roses the warm bees”)
Deverell, Walter: “The Light Beyond” (poem) “A Modern Idyll” (poem), etching to
Hunt, William Holman: etching to accompany Woolner’s “My Beautiful Lady”/ “My
Lady in Death”
Patmore, Coventry: “The Seasons,” (poem) “Stars and Moon,” (poem), “Essay on
Macbeth”
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: “The Blessed Damozel” (poem), “Hand and Soul” (prose), “My
Sister’s Sleep” “The Carillon, Antwerp and Bruges,” “From the Cliffs: Noon,” “Pax
Vobis,” “Sonnets for Pictures: 1. A Virgin and Child, by Hans Memmeling; in the
Academy of Bruges. 2. A Marriage of St. Katharine, by the same; in the Hospital of St.
Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione; in the Louvre. 5. ‘Angelica rescued from the Sea-
Rossetti, William Michael: Sonnet (“When whoso merely hath a little thought”) printed
on each issue’s cover; review of Clough’s Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich; “Her First Season:
sonnet”; “Fancies at Leisure: I. In Spring, II. In Summer, III. In Breadth of Noon, IV.
Reveller and other poems; “Cordelia” (poem); review of Browning’s Christmas Eve and
Easter Day, review of Cayley’s Sir Reginald Mohun, “To the Castle Ramparts” (poem);
Stephens, F.G.: “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” “Modern Giants”
(essays)
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Tupper, Alexander: “Papers of the MS. Society: II: Swift’s Dunces” (prose)
Tupper, George: “Papers of the MS. Society: “III: Mental Scales” (prose)
Tupper, John: “The Subject in Art” (essay, in two parts); “A Sketch from Nature”(poem);
“Papers of the MS. Society: I. An Incident in the Siege of Troy, IV. Smoke, V. Rain”
Woolner, Thomas: “My Beautiful Lady,” “Of My Lady in Death,” “O When and Where,”
“Emblems” (poems)
18
Oswald Doughty, “Rossetti’s Conception of the ‘Poetic’” Essays by Divers Hands, n.s.
The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art…1850. facsimile
reprint, with an introduction by William Michael Rossetti. London: Eliot Stock, 1901.
McGann, Jerome, ed. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A
80.
19
Propas, Sharon W. “William Michael Rossetti and The Germ.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite
Radford, Ernest. “The Life and Death of ‘The Germ.’” Idler 13 (1898), 227-33.
Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer. London:
Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters and a Memoir. 2
Rossetti, William Michael. Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters. London: Ellis, 1900.
Stock, 1901.
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James Sambrook. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1974. 118-25