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The Germ

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“The Germ,” The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed.

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

calls it the “only official manifesto or apologia of Pre-Raphaelitism” with a distinct

“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

Germ thus became a self-consciously foundational part of the Pre-Raphaelite legacy.

It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s idea, a monthly magazine that would be a venue

for the Pre-Raphaelites’s general aesthetic principles and early enthusiasms. In


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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

belonged to the previous year. As a periodical “conducted principally by artists” (its

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

were all possible, equally valid expressions of an artist’s thought.

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

multi-volume, massively-illustrated Histoire de l’art par les monumens (1810-23) was a

key sourcebook for the PRB as they developed their appreciation for medieval art.

D’Agincourt is remembered now as one of the first modern historians to demonstrate a

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

attitudes of the Brotherhood.

F.G. Stephens’s brief essay on early Italian art is an explicitly “pre-Raphaelite”

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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communicating Pre-Raphaelite principles to a wider audience; the Germ essay is an early

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

influence of the Nazarenes, a group of early nineteenth-century German painters

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

is a project to be conducted with “humility,” “simplicity” and “faith.”

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

in which his own soul serves as both inspiration and subject.

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

commentaries on it by the equally spurious “Dr. Aemmster.” Coming across Chairo’s

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:

thirteenth-century Italian paintings of women were almost exclusively of the Virgin or

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

narrator’s reverie is interrupted by the dismissive remarks on Chairo’s painting by a

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

at the same time.

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

Letters, vol. 1.107).


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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.

Other important contributions to The Germ include Christina Rossetti’s poems,

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

characteristic posture of self-abnegation and Anglican faith. William Michael Rossetti’s

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

self-consciousness or the extravagance of Browning’s style show a perceptive critic at

work. In addition, a number of poems by lesser-known figures are worth special

attention, especially James Collinson’s sentimental but weirdly harrowing series of

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

posthumously-published “Dialogue on Art,” which, like Stephens’ essay on Early Italian


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Art, offers a philosophical conversation about art’s relation to nature, to thought, to

spirituality, and to purity, in ways that illuminate the terms of Pre-Raphaelitism.

One should also consider the four etchings of The Germ as a record of

collaboration among members of the Brotherhood. William Holman Hunt’s illustration

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

evocative indication of Pre-Raphaelite artistic practice and interests, including character-

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

friend of Hancock's. They seemed perfectly willing to publish for us…”(Correspondence

49.11). He went on to claim optimistically, “I am certain that as soon as the prospectus is

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,

found “some (uncultivated) ability and freshness, or at least strangeness, in the

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

discussed and demonstrated.

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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APPENDIX. Contributions to The Germ by author/artist:

Brown, Ford Madox: “The Love of Beauty: Sonnet,” “On the Mechanism of a Historical

Picture” (essay), etching to accompany WMR’s “Cordelia”

Calder Campbell: Sonnet (“When midst the summer roses the warm bees”)

Collinson: “The Child Jesus” (poem), and accompanying etching

Deverell, Walter: “The Light Beyond” (poem) “A Modern Idyll” (poem), etching to

accompany Tupper’s “Viola and Olivia”

Hunt, William Holman: etching to accompany Woolner’s “My Beautiful Lady”/ “My

Lady in Death”

Orchard: “A Dialogue on Art. I. In the House of Kalon” (essay, with introduction by

D.G.R.), “On a Whit-Sunday Morn in the Month of May” (poem)

Patmore, Coventry: “The Seasons,” (poem) “Stars and Moon,” (poem), “Essay on

Macbeth”

Rossetti, Christina: “Dream Land,” “An End,” “A Pause of Thought,” “A Song,” “A

Testimony,” “Repining,” “Sweet Death” (poems)


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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.

John at Bruges. 3. A Dance of Nymphs, by Andrea Mantegna; in the Louvre. 4. A

Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione; in the Louvre. 5. ‘Angelica rescued from the Sea-

monster,’ by Ingres; in the Luxembourg. 6.

The same.” (poems)

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.

Sea-Freshness, V. The Fire Smouldering” (poems); review of Arnold’s The Strayed

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);

“‘Jesus Wept’” (poem); “The Evil under the Sun: Sonnet”

Scott, William Bell: “Morning Sleep,” “Early Aspirations” (poems)

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”

(prose); “Viola and Olivia” (poem)

Woolner, Thomas: “My Beautiful Lady,” “Of My Lady in Death,” “O When and Where,”

“Emblems” (poems)
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Works Cited / Further Reading

Oswald Doughty, “Rossetti’s Conception of the ‘Poetic’” Essays by Divers Hands, n.s.

26 (London: Royal Society of Literature, 1953), 89-102.

Fredeman, William, review of "The Germ: A Pre-Raphaelite Little Magazine" Victorian

Poetry 10 (1972): 87-94.

The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art…1850. facsimile

reprint, with an introduction by William Michael Rossetti. London: Eliot Stock, 1901.

Hough, Graham. The Last Romantics. London: Metheun, 2007.

Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols.

London: E.P. Dutton, 1914.

McGann, Jerome, ed. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A

Hypermedia Archive. http://www.rossettiarchive.org

Noble, J. Ashcroft, “A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine.” Fraser’s Magazine (May 1882), 568-

80.
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“A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine: The Germ” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading

(May 9, 1868), 618-22.

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