Victorian Poetry

William Fredeman's monumental edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's letters has been long awaited by afficianadoes of Pre-Raphaelitism and by students of Victorian art and poetry. The edition is an appropriate capstone to two decades in which Pre-Raphaelite studies have flourished in ways that Fredeman himself could not have envisioned when his Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study was published by Harvard in 1965. Since the early 1980s the academic and popular publications that owe a profound debt to his extraordinary scholarship include a large number of important books and essay collections on Pre-Raphaelitism as an artistic movement, as well as a breathtaking array of critical books, articles, and biographies of individual poets and painters associated with it. These include several groundbreaking studies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as a major biography; the immensely innovative and significant Dante Gabriel Rossetti Hypermedia Archive created by Jerome McGann; the variorum edition of Christina Rossetti's poetry edited by Rebecca Crump, and a now completed four-volume edition of her letters. Substantial work on Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt as well as other painters in the Pre-Raphaelite orbit, such as James Smetham, has also appeared.

Thus, long before Dick Fredeman died in 1999, he might well have looked back upon his scholarly achievement (and the extensive work founded upon it) with immense satisfaction as well as with justifiably positive expectations for the future of Pre-Raphaelite studies. At the same time, all who knew him well would understand his profound disappointment at not having completed work on all nine planned volumes of the DGR letters. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is to appear (as Fredeman projected) in three sets of volumes, "each terminating in a crisis year, or turning point, in Rossetti's life" (p. xviii): volumes 1 and 2, The Formative Years: Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk (1835-1862); volumes 3-5, The Chelsea Years: Prelude to Crisis (1863-1882); and volumes 6-9, TheLast Decade: Kelmscott to Birchington (1873-1882). Together, the volumes will print nearly 5,800 letters to some 330 recipients. These are reproduced from 125 manuscript collections, and they constitute twice the number of [End Page 201] letters contained in the sadly flawed and inadequate four-volume Doughty-Wahl edition published without an index by Oxford between 1965 and 1967. Fredeman's edition will print some 2,000 letters never before published. Also projected is a Companion to the Correspondence in which about 300 letters with "virtually no relevant content" (p. xxiii) will be calendared.

Since Fredeman's death, work to complete his ambitious project has been taken over by a group of respected scholars in Pre-Raphaelite studies, and we can look forward to the timely appearance of the seven remaining volumes of DGR's letters. The first two volumes, however, are entirely Fredeman's work, and they constitute, in every respect, a model of traditional epistolary editing. The apparatus is extensive, and the often lengthy annotations to the letters reflect Fredeman's vast, unequaled knowledge of all matters Pre-Raphaelite. Immensely useful as these annotations are, they sometimes overwhelm the texts of the letters they are meant to elucidate. Occasionally, a single annotation becomes in itself a brief essay designed to recuperate information about long neglected (or virtually forgotten) individuals, places, or events. (See, for instance, note 2 to letter 48.3 on the minor artist and student of Henry Fuseli, Theodore von Holst [1810-44]; note 1 to 49.16 on DGR's verse epistle inspired by his 1849 continental tour with William Holman Hunt; and note 1 to 50.13 on DGR's acquaintance with the American poet and painter Thomas Buchanan Read [1822-72].)

The useful and efficient apparatus includes an "Introduction" that explains the origins of this edition and a commentary on the deficiencies...