Victorian Poetry

Pre-Raphaelitism

Critical approaches to artistic and literary Pre-Raphaelitism have long emphasized its attention to precise visual detail, but in “‘Art of the Future’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Poetry, Photography and Pre-Raphaelism” (Victorian Studies 61, no. 2 [Winter 2019]: 204–215), Heather Bozant Witcher suggests an alternate approach. She reproduces Cameron’s poem, “On a Portrait,” which celebrates the fusion of “genius and love” in creating an ideal portrait, and argues that it is the blend of ambiguity and mystery with realism that make her photographs, and by implication, Pre-Raphaelite literary works, so distinctive. Witcher illustrates her point with Cameron’s portrait of Robert Browning, in which the strong features of his face are clearly delineated and the image itself is marked by small dots or stars created in the photographic process. She concludes that “the tension between exactness and uncertainty in these photographs invokes Pre-Raphaelite uncertainty or confessional self-revelation” (p. 214), a description that likewise applies to the poetry of Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites.

In “Naturally Artificial: The Pre-Raphaelite Garden Enclosed” (VP 57, no. 1 [Spring 2019]: 131–53), Dinah Roe explores the ramified psychological associations of the Victorian poetic motif of the walled garden. Eighteenth-century planners had preferred “natural gardens” that blended into the wider landscape; by contrast, nineteenth-century gardens were designed to “celebrate interiority, subjectivity, and generative consciousness, privileging the mind over nature” (p. 132). Roe notes that enclosure focuses attention inward, but it also defines what lies within its boundaries against an outer, often hostile, reality. The paradoxical polarities of the garden—natural/artificial, free/constrained, finite/infinite—encourage a “transgressive hybridity” (Isobel Armstrong) especially prominent in Pre-Raphaelite art. Roe finds examples of these encoded tensions in Charles Collins’s painting “Convent Thoughts,” which presents a pensive novice contemplating a flower within the limited space of her garden, and William Morris’s “The Defence of Guenevere” in which Guenevere reen-acts a previous ecstatic moment within a walled garden. Here the walled garden is a site of unconventional sexuality and rhetorical experimentation, as the queen objectifies herself “in order to suggest her own subjectivity,” a risky strategy which is also “a plea for empathy, the ultimate act of imagination that would allow her jury to ‘see’ not only through the body whose destruction they are contemplating but also through her eyes, to perceive things the way she does” (p. 146). Roe concludes that “Pre-Raphaelite portrayals of these naturally artificial spaces both affirm the power of boundaries and create the conditions for their transgression” (p. 148). [End Page 362]

In “George Meredith (and Margaret Oliphant) among the Pre-Raphaelites,” (Yearbook of English Studies 49 [2019]: 82–102), Rebecca N. Mitchell considers the ways in which Meredith consistently manifested Pre-Raphaelite literary and aesthetic ideals. She documents his early admiration for Pre-Raphaelite artists and the extent to which his early poetry shares a devotion to sensuous beauty, delight in nature, and indebtedness to Keats, Tennyson, and other poets included in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood “list of Immortals.” Meredith’s attitudes contrast with those of his contemporaries Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot, who, although both well-informed on contemporary Pre-Raphaelite art and ideals, took care to distance themselves from the movement. Oliphant resented Ruskin’s claims to authority, and in later years criticized Pre-Raphaelite artists for having failed to fulfill an original promise; Eliot disliked Meredith’s Westminster Review articles on “Belles Lettres” and disagreed with his favorable notice of such paintings as Holman Hunt’s “The Hireling Shepherd,” which she found lacking in “the raw material of moral sentiment” (p. 99). By contrast, Mitchell suggests that Meredith’s grasp of the interrelationship between naturalistic and imagistic representation central to Pre-Raphaelite art enabled him to render visual aesthetic...