Modernism's Rossetti: A Mixed Inheritance

Rossetti's long-standing reputation as a flowery medieval throwback can be traced to modernism's attempt to sever itself from Victorian artistic styles. As McGann has argued, Rossetti's reputation was damaged by the critical work of T. S. Eliot, whose comments on Rossetti largely set the terms of his reception by modernist writers. In his 1929 essay on Dante, Eliot confesses that Rossetti's “Blessed Damozel” “first by…rapture and next by…revolt, held up” his appreciation of Dante's Beatrice (223), and later in the same essay, he snidely denigrates Rossetti's abilities as a translator by insisting that the Vita Nuova is not “a piece of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry” (233). Because of Eliot's prominence in articulating modernist writing and reading strategies, his response to Rossetti meant that the poet was left out of–and indeed rejected by–modernist programmatic statements. While McGann, Feldman, and others have worked to uncover connections between Rossetti and modernist writers, their approaches remain the exception in an academy often willing to take modernism at its word.³

A closer look at modernist attention to Rossetti demonstrates, however, that he provided modernism with a more complicated inheritance than Eliot's comments indicate. If Eliot sneered at Rossetti's translations, Ezra Pound's “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” an account of his artistic coming of age, demonstrates that Rossetti's experience of what might be called “moral criticism” preoccupied modernist writers. In “Yeux Glauques,” one section of “Mauberley,” Pound takes Rossetti's side against the audience that neglected and critics who disparaged him, but Pound also distances himself from Rossetti by faulting his treatment of Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's model and wife. As Christine Froula writes, “Yeux Glauques” casts Rossetti's art as both “critique and symptom” of “the moral and social malaise of mid-Victorian England” (89). Rossetti's 1870 poem “Jenny” is the only literary work Pound cites in his ambivalent assessment:

Pound's poem begins by positioning Rossetti within a culture that valued politicians such as Gladstone while “abusing” its artists. The poem then points toward a specific author of such abuse, the poet and critic Robert Buchanan, who attacked Rossetti in the infamous 1871 article “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” Buchanan is abused in turn by Pound's speaker, who disparages his “fœtid” voice (5). This speaker thus initially aligns himself with Rossetti, but he then takes up the cause of Siddal, whom he uses to condemn Rossetti's morals (6–8). Significantly, Siddal is conflated with the prostitute-object of “Jenny,” and Rossetti is conflated with a pimp (“maquero”), a strategy that censures the poet for exploiting Siddal's body and image for his own artistic productions. The tension of “Yeux Glauques” stems from this unresolved movement between defense and assault: Pound uses “Jenny” to accuse Rossetti of unethical behavior while simultaneously derogating Buchanan, who had himself criticized the poem.

Pound's poem positions Rossetti as artistic ally through his experience of cultural neglect and critical abuse even as it rejects the Victorian poet because of his purportedly immoral treatment of his wife. While “Yeux Glauques” thus positions Rossetti as a partial correlative for the experience of the modernist artist vis-à-vis the public, Pound elsewhere embraced this predecessor more wholeheartedly. Pound owed a debt to Rossetti for his translations of early Italian poetry, translations that introduced Pound to the Italians and led him to develop his own method of translation. Indeed, Pound called Rossetti “my father and my mother” in the matter of Italian translation (Cavalcanti 14). Pound's Cantos also contain references to Rossetti's salvaging of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, references which cast Rossetti as a prescient reader who saved a valuable piece of work from the literary dustbin and helped to popularize it. And most strikingly, Pound advised William Carlos Williams to read Rossetti in order to understand the history of poetry in English, placing the Pre-Raphaelite alongside other figures whom Pound admired. In a 1909 letter, Pound advised, “If you'll read Yeats, & Browning, & Francis Thomson, & Swinburne and Rosetti [sic] you'll learn something about the progress of Eng. poetry in the last century” (15). In this letter and elsewhere, Pound casts Rossetti's poetry as part of a historical progression; modernism à la Pound and Williams places itself at the end of this narrative, its manifesto of change indebted to Rossetti no less than Browning.

While it remains striking, Pound's engagement with Rossetti was not unique among modernist writers. Ford Madox Ford's works include a 1902 book entitled Rossetti. The study identifies Rossetti as “a genius” who “left a large body of original poetry of a kind that stands alone in English literature” (Hueffer 9, 77). Like Pound, Ford was drawn to Rossetti's encounter with Buchanan; he called “the whole affair…one of the most cruel and unnecessary that the history of the Arts can show, and one of the most lamentable that in life can be imagined” (74). While he found fault with some of Rossetti's work–it has “too much of sweetness, too many jewels” (77)–Ford saw in Rossetti a predecessor who had been maligned and who deserved a modernist defense. Twenty-six years later, Evelyn Waugh's first book, Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928), surveyed Rossetti's poetry and painting in a detail that implied that the Victorian artist was still a force to be reckoned with in the jazz age. Waugh, like Pound, could not entirely see past Rossetti's personal failings; when he summed up Rossetti's legacy in his conclusion, Waugh faulted his predecessor for a lack of “essential rectitude” (226). This strategy allowed Waugh to put Rossetti behind him even as it demonstrates the young writer's need to turn to biography to do so. The list of modernists who engaged Rossetti's work continues: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains a Rossettian villanelle as Stephen Dedalus's sole artistic production, H. D.'s poetry was informed by that of Swinburne and Rossetti, and William Butler Yeats's early poetry and editorial work on Blake put him into dialogue with Rossetti.⁴

The extensive modernist ink spilled over Rossetti suggests that his career shadowed many of the writers who published work decades after his death. While modernist writers often focused on Rossetti's oeuvre when they looked back at his career, Pound's “Yeux Glauques” and the biographical assessments of Ford, Waugh, and others demonstrate that twentieth-century writers were also preoccupied with Rossetti's experience of “moral criticism” and with his subsequent collapse. Rossetti's experience of writing, revision, and publication– the censorship dialectic–drew modernists back to the poet, perhaps because they saw in him a mirror of their own struggles and fears. Rossetti provided a version in small of the dynamic that modernists would experience when they wrote and published work about sexually deviant figures; modernist attention to his battles with hostile critics marks writers' desire to cast Rossetti as a heroic precursor, while his failure to emerge clearly victorious from those battles underlined the potential for failure in their own careers.

Rossetti and the Censorship Dialectic

DESPITE THE IMMIGRANT STATUS of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's family,⁵

the young writer expressed a very English awareness of audience expectations vis-à-vis purity in his teens. Indeed, in his highly religious family circle, purity was conflated with religious faith and rendered materials suspect for multiple reasons. In two 1843 letters to his mother, the fifteen-year-old Rossetti began a life-long defense of his reading and artistic productions. Within his family circle, he could respond to and thus manage the reactions of his first audience. In response to his aunt's accusation that Rossetti was reading “indecent books,” he defends the purity of his reading and asserts he intended to study Percy Shelley “on account of the splendid versification, and not from any love of his atheistical sentiments” (Letters 19). This response to the accusation of indecency sidesteps the question of Shelley's personal propriety to address the potential blasphemy of his work, displacing this concern in turn by arguing that study of form (versification) can be separated from content (sentiments).

While this letter expresses a youthful stubbornness by rationalizing the young reader's choice of Shelley, other missives indicate that Rossetti was already revising his own work to address purported indecency. In response to his family's distress with an early, no longer extant novel, Rossetti asserted “the charge of indecency can no longer be laid upon the former portion with any show of reason, since I have purged and purified it most effectually, and burnt up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Letters 19). This parodic response to the “charge” suggests that Rossetti took such accusations less seriously than did his parents, but the letter nevertheless demonstrates that he responded to his readers' moral judgments with revisions that “purified” his text.

Rossetti's youthful correspondence indicates that he rebutted or laughed off charges of indecency when they related to his own writing or reading, but his letters also demonstrate that he judged work by other writers to be truly inappropriate at times. In 1845, he criticizes Langdon and Touchard's novel Les Jolies Filles for “the highest pitch of disgusting obscenity” (Letters 29). This letter suggests that there were clear limits to his understanding of the proper content of literary works. Literature, according to the young Rossetti, could be “obscene” or otherwise improper; although he parodied family moral panics, Rossetti did not so much abandon the label of “indecent” as shift the placement of the dividing line between proper and improper art, and he revised his own work to satisfy the moral qualms of his limited audience.

When he began painting and publishing, Rossetti's attitude toward purported indecency became more ambivalent as he discovered that his intentions and the artistic power of his works could not assure them an audience if his subject matter broke taboos about appropriate kinds of representations. Because Rossetti depended on the income he earned through selling paintings and, to a lesser extent, his poetry collections, finding an audience was an economic necessity as well as an artistic goal. Thus “Found,” an early painting that depicted a “fallen woman” discovered by her former country lover, remained unfinished because one potential buyer after another “funks the calf picture for the usual reason”– its scandalous subject matter (Letters 357). Although Rossetti returned to “Found” when a long-time patron proposed to buy it, he was unable to finish the work before his death.

An early poem that seemed similarly unlikely to find an audience was “Jenny.” Begun in 1847, this piece about a john's ruminations on a prostitute could easily have languished in draft, but “Jenny” underwent extensive revision instead. As Rossetti prepared his verse for a projected collection entitled Dante at Verona and Other Poems, he transformed the work so completely that he would later date the dramatic monologue to 1860 instead of 1847. The 1847 draft is not extant, but the 1860 revision survives along with the 1870 poem that was finally published. While readers of Rossetti's published version would recognize a family resemblance between it and the revised draft of 1860, as Paull F. Baum has noted, only forty-four lines of the draft were retained when Rossetti revised his poem yet again (48). In the 1860 version of “Jenny,” what most strikes a reader is the eroticism of the prostitute, who exerts a clearly sexual attraction for the speaker:

In this draft, Jenny is a seductive woman, and it seems that the speaker– like the air– swoons over her charms. Her breasts, arms, and thighs leave the young man “powerless” (124), and the speaker remains in the prostitute's room, perhaps to have intercourse, at the poem's end. Rossetti's 1860 draft expresses the sexual desire that would logically structure a young, heterosexual man's encounter with a prostitute; Jenny is “all men's” (39) and quite evidently all woman as well.

The 1860 version of “Jenny” shared the fate of “Found.” When Rossetti approached John Ruskin, his friend and mentor, for assistance in placing the poem, Ruskin refused to send “Jenny” to the Cornhill, where he had some editorial influence. In an 1860 letter,⁷

Ruskin articulates his reasons for refusing support and reveals an inability or unwillingness to “see” the poem for what it was: Ruskin's letter implies that he, as a mirror of the Cornhill readers whose behavior he was trying to predict, found the poem offensive. His word choice–“few” and “majority”–indicates that he felt that such a poem needed to be clearly acceptable to a wide audience before its publication could be pursued. This letter also suggests that the poem was peculiarly vulnerable to misreadings because of its scandalous subject matter. Ruskin seems, for example, to have missed the point that Jenny is a prostitute, not a mistress. Ruskin's mistake is not easily credited to euphemism; in the letter, the critic insists that the male speaker should love Jenny, an emotional response out of place in a john's relationship with a prostitute. Ruskin's mistake about the poem's object reveals that “right-minded” men like himself found relations with a prostitute so unspeakable that a poem about a prostitute was simply nonsensical. In other words, Ruskin could not “read” Jenny even as he ostensibly read “Jenny.”

Ruskin's comments suggest that he was most troubled by the identity of the poem's speaker, whom Rossetti cast as the prostitute's client instead of as a reformer, relative, or friend. Because the speaker is a young man who has paid for Jenny's company, the situation of the poem is explicitly sexualized: economic exchange makes the poem sexual even though intercourse never takes place within its lines. Rossetti's reaction to what must have been a disappointing response is unknown, but he did not subsequently change his poetic speaker as Ruskin's comments would seem to suggest. The poet would, however, eventually revise the ending of the monologue to make the speaker “horror-struck” at himself. Ruskin's advice thus lead to some concrete changes in the poem even as Rossetti refused to abandon his monologue in the face of his mentor's criticism and misunderstanding.

Indeed, Rossetti sought out other readers for his verse to contextualize Ruskin's response. As he sought additional criticism, Rossetti did not employ an “Art for Art's sake” defense or attempt to sidestep the moral questions that Ruskin's letter had raised. In an 1860 letter to William Allingham, Rossetti queried, “Would you tell me as regards Jenny (which I reckon the most serious thing I have written), whether there is any objection you see in the treatment, or any side of the subject left untouched which ought to be included?” (Letters 384). This letter implies that instead of being discouraged by Ruskin's response, Rossetti was beginning to claim that the poem occupied a place of importance in his corpus. At the same time, Rossetti was clearly concerned about readers' reactions and was willing to revise his poem to meet “objections” or to comment upon the topic of prostitution fully. Rossetti's early correspondence over “Jenny” thus indicates that the poet wanted to address prostitution from the tabooed perspective of a client but that he was also aware of and trying to find ways to negotiate the mores of a Victorian readership. Unwilling to abandon “Jenny,” he was willing to transform her within certain limits, not for aesthetic reasons but in order to avoid the wrath of a censorious public.

Rossetti's work on “Jenny” was interrupted in 1862 when his wife Elizabeth Siddal died. The distraught poet placed a bound manuscript of his verse in Siddal's coffin and thus lost the only complete copy of many of his poems, including “Jenny.” Work on the poem ceased until 1869, when Rossetti's friends arranged to have the body exhumed and retrieved the volume so that Rossetti could prepare poems in it for inclusion in his first collection of original verse. During the years between Siddal's death and the manuscript's retrieval, however, the legal climate in England had become hostile to works like “Jenny.” This meant that when Rossetti returned to his poem and contemplated publishing it, he worked in an environment that made it all the more crucial that he accurately position the monologue within the limits of what the public and government would tolerate.

The reason for this changed climate was the April 1868 judgment in the case of Regina v. Hicklin. This trial was conducted under the auspices of Lord Campbell's Act of 1857, which “authorized the seizure and destruction of all copies of an ‘obscene’ publication” (De Grazia 58). While Campbell insisted that the Act would not apply to serious literature, the vagueness of the Act's language all but ensured that literature would eventually fall under its purview.

Through its interpretation of this Act, the Hicklin judgment established two legal precedents that would be used against writers from Emile Zola to Radclyffe Hall: it defined obscenity and dismissed the intent of author and publisher. The case against the Protestant Electoral Union, which had been publishing inexpensive anti-Catholic tracts such as The Confessional Unmasked, raised the question of whether one could publish and sell “obscene” works to achieve a social goal, in this case, discrediting the Catholic Church. In the most famous part of the judgment, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn ruled that the Union had been guilty of obscene libel and found that “the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged…is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Regina v. Hicklin 371). This finding established a legal precedent for obscenity convictions and, in Leigh Gilmore's words, “designated obscenity as an effect” instead of as a specific kind of textual production (606). This effect was singularly easy to produce because “those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” –the young, the working class, women–were the ground on which the effect was to be measured.

The Hicklin judgment also established the precedent that an author or publisher's intention was immaterial to an obscenity conviction. Although the court acknowledged that Henry Scott, the appellant, “kept and sold the pamphlets…to expose what he deems to be errors of the Church of Rome” (Regina v. Hicklin 363), Lord Cockburn found that

In effect, Cockburn's judgment meant that a publisher, author, printer, or bookseller need not testify in an obscenity case because his intention was embodied in the text in question. This finding sidestepped the interpretive action whereby a Magistrate might determine intention. Once published, a text had to stand alone before the law, and instead of speaking for their text, writers and others in publishing had to let texts speak for them. This aspect of Hicklin has received less scholarly attention than Cockburn's definition of obscenity, but together, these two precedents made writing about sexual deviance perilous work indeed.

Rossetti, like most of his contemporaries, did not record a response to the Hicklin judgment, but it is certain that Rossetti was aware of the Act and was probably aware of the Hicklin case. In a letter to Jane Morris dated May 2, 1868, he included a sketch of William Morris entitled “The Bard and Petty Tradesman.” The subtitle of the cartoon asserts “London. Published as Lord Campbell's Act forbids.” Because Rossetti produced this drawing three days after the April 29th conclusion of the Hicklin trial, it is likely that the case had drawn the poet's attention to Lord Campbell's Act. While “The Bard” directs potential obscenity charges toward Morris, the sketch indicates that Rossetti could see a connection between his artistic circle and the legal implications of Hicklin, even if he cast that connection as a jest.

The jest was partially a defensive gesture as the cultural context that had produced the Hicklin ruling disconcerted Rossetti in the 1860s and 70s. His anxieties are evident in his correspondence regarding Algernon Swinburne's work, which Rossetti knew reflected upon him because of his friendship and perceived artistic alliance with Swinburne. As early as 1864, he had joked about Swinburne's reading of Baudelaire's suppressed poems and warned his friend that “the public will not be able to digest” any variations on Baudelaire's scandalous themes (Letters 529). In 1866, he corresponded with his brother about a publisher's withdrawal of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, and in 1870, he wrote to Swinburne to advise him to withdraw two sonnets (“The Saviour of Society”) that would offend a wider public because of their “ignoble” usage of Christ (Letters 605–06, 872–73). As he looked ahead to the publication of his own poems, Rossetti became increasingly anxious about the potential response of an easily offended–and increasingly litigious– British public.

As he prepared “Jenny” for publication in 1869 and 1870, Rossetti repeatedly sought advice from his correspondents and sought to make changes that would contain any moral, and perhaps legal, backlash. In 1869, for example, he wrote that he had deleted the poem's original epigraphs, which had been from Ecclesiasticus and Shelley.⁸

A new epigraph came from Shakespeare's Mistress Quickly, a character infamous for malapropisms and for unintentionally sexualized language: “Vengeance of Jenny's case! Fie on her! Never name her, child!” Rossetti asserted that this revision was intended “to remind the virtuous reader strongly whose words they are that his own mind is echoing at the moment” (Letters 774). This comment reveals that Rossetti's use of Mistress Quickly was a preemptive attempt to anticipate and ridicule “moral” outrage. Significantly, Rossetti refers to his “virtuous reader” with a male possessive pronoun. While this choice might stem from a rote use of the universal “his,” other changes to the poem indicate that male readers are the implied audience of “Jenny.” Perhaps Rossetti hoped that a male audience would be most likely to read the poem “correctly” if threatened by an unflattering identification with the female character that supplies the epigraph.

In addition to changing his epigraphs, Rossetti made extensive alterations to the poem to help “Jenny” resist a reader backlash. To begin, the erotic, sensual object of the 1860 draft became more simply beautiful. Jenny is still attractive in the 1870 published version, but her sexual “charms” –her breasts, thighs, and “beautiful secrets”–are no longer mentioned. This revision reduced the sensual impact of the poem and also enabled Rossetti's speaker to adopt a more critical voice than he had in the draft. The young man is no longer in peril from or troubled by the prostitute's attractions; this change allows him to exercise his mind, instead of his body, on Jenny.

This removal of sexual detail enabled a more significant change. As Rossetti de-eroticized his poem, he extensively developed the book motif that occupies a mere six lines of the draft:

The 1870 version takes this comparison of Jenny's mind and a book and broadens it so that the prostitute herself becomes a volume. The second stanza of the revised poem explains that the speaker is a scholar who spends “many captive hours” reading (25) and thus spends most of his time engaged with texts. As he sits in Jenny's room, he textualizes the prostitute, who “know[s] not what a book you seem,/Half-read by lightning in a dream!” (51–52). While the speaker admits that he would be “ashamed” to tell Jenny about his attempts to read her (54), and further confesses that he can only “wonder what you're thinking of” as she drowses on his knee (58), he treats Jenny as a text that can be read and interpreted throughout the monologue.⁹

Rossetti's development of the book motif had the helpful effect of complementing his choice of a poetic speaker. For if Jenny is a book, she cannot speak for herself–her content only becomes apparent when a reader analyzes her text and communicates a reading. And Rossetti's speaker is presented as the perfect reader because he is a scholar with special interpretive skills. While other readers, such as moral reformers, religious figures, or family members, may seem more appropriate readers of the prostitute, they lack expertise in textual analysis and thus should, according to the poem's logic, listen to Rossetti's speaker. By textualizing Jenny, Rossetti found a way to insert his speaker and his poem into a social question that might otherwise have remained the province of politicians and social reformers; he also found a way to transform the potentially scandalous erotic appeal of the object of his poem.

Once Rossetti figured the prostitute as a text, he next confronted the question of who might be harmed by reading the book of “Jenny.” Such questions were in the air in the wake of the Hicklin trial. In an attempt to answer them, Rossetti produced two conjoined revisions: the introduction of a parallel between Jenny and the speaker's virtuous cousin Nell and an injunction against Nell's reading of her impure “sister.” As he thinks about his cousin, the speaker muses: “Of the same lump (it has been said)/For honour and dishonour made,/Two sister vessels. Here is one” (182–84). These lines assert that Nell and Jenny are formed from the same material, and Rossetti's poem thus makes an implied argument about the inequity of a social system that treats the two women so differently. The speaker is not, however, comfortable with this parallel and soon insists on a distinction between the “sister vessels”: a comparison of the two “makes a goblin of the sun” (206).

Because Jenny's “goblin” threatens Nell's sunny purity, the speaker states that the women must not meet. He argues that if Nell were to read the book of Jenny, as he does throughout the poem, the text would corrupt her. Jenny is

Jenny's rose is enclosed in a book hidden from the eyes of pure women, which suggests that the text is pornographic or obscene (Bristow 113). In Rossetti's model of reading, this corrupt text has agency in its encounter with a feminine subject, who is passively “controlled” and “crushed” by the work. Rossetti's simile thus figures Jenny as the victim of a social text, which imprints itself upon the helpless object of its narrative. She then becomes a potential victimizer, who must be kept from those she might harm.

Nell, like the once-innocent Jenny, cannot learn from a prostitute's experience because the obscene woman/rose/book only provides “shameful knowledge.” According to the poem, a virtuous woman remains pure though ignorance–through refusal to or prevention of contact with the “vile text.” Chaste women, unlike the poem's speaker, cannot read the prostitute. Instead, they must avoid absorbing words, pictures, and ideas that will transform them into the “crushed petals” or dead leaves of fallen womanhood (269, 257).

In this section of the poem, Rossetti's speaker foregrounds the act of reading and genders it.¹⁰

He argues that a passive female readership must not encounter the impure text, which will damage innocents by forcing inappropriate content upon them. “Jenny” does not address whether women should police their own reading or whether they require male guidance; the speaker states “only that this can never be” and dismisses the possibility of Nell's exposure to Jenny. And yet, Rossetti's word choice implies that Nell is not herself making the prohibition: she “may not look” at the book and “may” not “unclose” its pages (254, 266). The male speaker thus institutes and polices a ban on Jenny's circulation, and the prostitute becomes a figure for the dangerously impure and therefore censored text.

The parallels between the speaker's judgment of Jenny's “case” and the Hicklin ruling suggest that Rossetti shared his culture's sense of the inherent danger that obscene publications posed to particular readers. Lord Cockburn worried about “those whose minds are open to…immoral influences” (Regina v. Hicklin 371); Rossetti's poem casts Nell as vulnerable to the “leaves no chaste hand may unclose” (266). Even as he worked to depict prostitution in a new light, Rossetti was far from abandoning his culture's mores and indeed encoded them within his verse. Whereas the speaker can peruse Jenny, she is a private publication, which is intended for and restricted to a select group of male readers.

Through such revisions, Rossetti's poem was transformed from a deeply erotic celebration to a scholarly exercise preoccupied with questions of reading and interpretation. On the surface, “Jenny” emerged as a much more “appropriate” text than the 1860 draft. Rossetti even seems to have responded to Ruskin's desire that the speaker be “horror-struck for himself no less than for her” by altering the end of his poem; in the revision, the speaker contemplates his own moral culpability, perceiving “a far gleam which I may near,/A dark path I can strive to clear” (386–87). But readers have questioned whether the new passages, which “censor” Nell's reading of Jenny, did not themselves raise new doubts about the moral affect of Rossetti's poem.¹¹

As “Jenny” puts a ban on Jenny, Rossetti's poem implicitly raises the question of its own purity. Although the monologue is obviously a work of high art, it conflates itself with the dangerous book “in which pure women may not look” through its title. This revision, then, raised unsettling questions even as it attempted to lay others to rest; after its many transformations, “Jenny” still represents a wayward sexuality and implicitly presents itself as a text that requires special handling.

Rossetti scholars have seen in such transformations no more than the artist's habitual inability to leave a completed work alone. As McGann notes in reference to Rossetti's sonnets, the poet “worked and reworked both his paintings and his poems obsessively–not as if to refashion them for different audiences and occasions, though he did do this, but as if his efforts might finally achieve some ideal perfection” (Dante 39). While I do not deny that Rossetti continually strove for aesthetic perfection, “Jenny” is a different case–one in which Rossetti's abiding concern was to refashion the poem for his contemporary audience. His correspondence regarding “Jenny” differed in kind from that regarding his sonnets and other works; as the 1860 letter to Allingham indicates, Rossetti was concerned that his readers would see “any objection…in the treatment, or any side of the subject left untouched which ought to be included” (Letters 384). This query is fundamentally different from the usual questions Rossetti asked of correspondents, questions about word choice, sound qualities, and the clarity of images. The correspondence suggests that Rossetti was less concerned with aesthetic perfection than with the poem's reception. His work on “Jenny” thus needs to be read as an effort to improve the poem aesthetically and as an act of self-censorship.

Indeed, the revisions to “Jenny” demonstrate that self-censorship can be a means of achieving personal and aesthetic goals–that, as a practice, self-censorship is not necessarily repressive but can be productive. To come to such a determination, we need to ask two questions of a text: does its textual history provide us with evidence of self-censorship? And does the text that emerges from self-censorship contain aesthetic features that we can attribute–however paradoxically–to the censoring process? Editorial and psychoanalytic criticisms provide two means of theorizing an approach to a productive self-censorship. In “Self-Censorship and Textual Editing,” Donald Pizer argues that textual critics should consider several criteria when they decide whether “self-censorship has occurred” (150). These criteria include “external evidence” (such as letters, diary entries, memoirs) of self-censorship and evidence of the author's motives in making a revision (150). Rossetti's revisions to “Jenny” clearly qualify as self-censorship under such criteria: his letters ask for commentary on the purported moral impact, not the quality, of his poem, and these letters also make clear that Rossetti was reworking the monologue with an eye toward publication and the possible reactions of readers. In this case, there is both external evidence of and a concrete motive for self-censorship.

But to decide that “Jenny” is the product of self-censorship does not mean that we have then to insist on a corrective return to the initial draft in our publishing, reading, and teaching. Pizer notes that self-censorship sometimes results in a “superior work” (151), a seemingly contradictory process that has been explored by literary critics with the assistance of psychoanalysis. As Michael Levine has argued in Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis, censorship can function as “an impetus to stylistic innovation” (2), inspiring writers to adopt “strategies of dissimulation” that are protective and formally inventive. What Levine calls a “censorship effect”–the formative pressure on writers before any actual censorship occurs (31)–similarly creates an opportunity for innovative responses. The pressures of censorship and the censorship effect can result in silence and a crippling writer's block (42), but often these forces are more than simply repressive: in the shift from censorship to self-censorship (a response to the censorship effect), it becomes “harder to assign responsibility for the work of distortion…more difficult…to say exactly whose interests are being served by it” (29). The censor's interests are certainly served–he or she does not have to police or expunge prohibited material if the writer does it–but Levine's argument suggests that writers' interests are also served if they produce new kinds of work through negotiation with anticipated censorship.

We do not have to celebrate the repressive powers of government and market censorship to admit that such pressures helped to shape many of the literary works we value. We would not have “Jenny” were it not for the tension between Rossetti's fears of audience rejection and his desire to get readers to reexamine a tabooed subject. It is this dynamic–representing a taboo and trying to assure an audience for that representation–that launched Rossetti into revision and later into intensive efforts to manage his reception. The ongoing negotiations between a writer and resistant audiences exemplifies what I call the censorship dialectic. This dialectic incorporates the censorship effect in that it includes the shaping of particular works, but it moves out beyond such acts of revision to include the ways in which writers shape their public personae to provide a context –and hopefully an audience–for the self-censored work. In Rossetti's case, the censorship dialectic includes the revisions to “Jenny,” his attempts to shape how readers would approach his oeuvre, the responses of resistant readers, and his continuing struggle to defend his work.

Despite the extensive changes “Jenny” underwent through revision, Rossetti's letters expose his fear that he had not censored the poem effectively. In 1870, his correspondence obsessively returns to anticipated responses to his forthcoming collection and particularly to “Jenny.” He was concerned that specific critics, such as H. Buxton Forman, would be “frightened at Jenny” (Letters 814). He also reported that some of his friends were shocked by the poem: in one letter, he observes that Shields is “frightened of poor ‘Jenny”’ and Smetham's reaction is “galvanic alarm” (Letters 845). This “alarm” and “fear” led Rossetti to defend his decision to publish the poem, “knowing as I do how far from aggressive was the spirit in which I produced it” (837). In such letters, he began to articulate a rationale for “Jenny” that went beyond its particular merits as an individual work; in many ways, this rationale looks forward to the kinds of arguments that twentieth-century writers would make about their own scandalous productions. In an 1870 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, Rossetti described the poem as inspired by “a true impulse to deal with subjects which seem to me capable of being brought rightly within Art's province” (838). This statement, to which Rossetti would return when called upon to defend the poem, asserted that art and the “indecent” should not be divided; it articulates an artistic program of incorporating the abject, the taboo, and the low into high art. Rossetti's capitalization of “Art” implies that the tabooed subject has to be thoroughly aestheticized to make this transition, an operation that fundamentally transforms the nature of selected subjects as well as transforming Art by their inclusion. In the case of “Jenny,” the aetheticization of the prostitute changes the nature of the social problem she represents: she becomes a book to be interpreted instead of an individual with her own reading of her situation, and the poem's form brings order and beauty to a kind of labor often missing those qualities. Rossetti could only hope that he would also transform readers' reactions to the distasteful subject of prostitution.

Despite the preemptive defense of his monologue, Rossetti remained concerned that even his most sympathetic readers would reject the poem. The aunt most interested in his career, Charlotte Lydia Polidori, had to order a copy of her nephew's Poems after he purposely neglected to give her an inscribed volume. In a letter of apology, Rossetti explained that he feared that “Jenny” “might startle you somewhat.” While he assured Polidori that “I would never have written it if I thought it unfit to be read with good results” and further told her that “Jenny” had become his mother's favorite poem “after some consideration,” the fact remained that he had decided not to send Polidori–who had financially supported Rossetti's artistic training–his book because of “Jenny” (Letters 879–80). This uncertainty implies that Rossetti, in parallel with his poetic speaker, feared the reaction of respectable women to his textualized prostitute. Although his mother apparently accepted the poem, she only did so after “some consideration,” a response that suggests that even the most kindly female reader would not quickly warm to the verse.¹²

Despite these familial negotiations and hesitations, Rossetti continued to assert that “Jenny” was one of the poems “I would wish to be known by” (Letters 850).

As the publication date of Rossetti's Poems neared, the poet organized friends to write supportive reviews of the volume. In letters that arrange reviews and suggest possible critics, Rossetti attempted to manipulate the terms of his reception by encouraging friendly assessments and suggesting revisions (Letters 838). This strategy was not anomalous, but Rossetti would later be accused of finessing his public reception to an unacceptable degree.¹³

Rossetti also had a hand in the advertising of the book: he sent frequent missives to his publisher, Frederick Ellis, concerning the reviews to quote in advertisements, when and where to place them, and how each edition of the book should be numbered. In an 1870 letter to Ellis, Rossetti admitted that he had “a passion for managing my own affairs” (Letters 844), and his correspondence demonstrates that he saw the reviews as his “own affairs” rather than an opportunity for a wider public to respond to his work. Throughout these letters, Rossetti displays a quite modern sense of his work as a commodity as well as the conviction that he was responsible for marketing it. While he created “Art,” Rossetti never placed himself above the material fray that produced, advertised, and circulated his verse. In this respect, he looks forward to the experiences of modernist writers, who were often extensively involved in locating and selling to particular audiences.

Rossetti's attempts to finesse the terms of his reception were initially successful. Friendly reviewers raved about the book, and they uniformly addressed “Jenny” in the context of this praise. Algernon Swinburne's assessment in the Fortnightly Review acclaimed the volume in the highest terms and was especially laudatory in regard to “Jenny,” which he proclaimed “worthy to fill its place for ever as one of the most perfect and memorable poems of an age or generation” (572). Sidney Colvin's review in the Pall Mall Gazette similarly placed Rossetti's book “in the front rank of contemporary poetry.” Colvin was, however, more ambivalent about “Jenny” than Swinburne, noting that the piece “may endanger the reception of Mr. Rossetti's volume.” According to Colvin, “Jenny” was “unfit for the drawing-room table,” although he admitted that “the day of drawing-room decencies in literature is nearly done” and approved of dealing with a “mournful contemporary problem…in this poetico-practical way” (7).¹⁴

William Morris's review in The Academy picked up this thread after favorably comparing Rossetti's sonnets to those of Shakespeare. He rationalized “Jenny” as a necessary response by the poet to a current social problem: “the subject is difficult for a modern poet to deal with, but necessary for a man to think of; it is thought of here with the utmost depths of feeling, pity, and insight, with no mawkishness on the one hand, no coarseness on the other” (199, emphasis added). And W. J. Stillman's review in the New Monthly Magazine continued to praise “Jenny” by asserting that the speaker is crucial to the poem's success: “the great art in this piece consists in placing the student in a situation where an invisible providence keeps him safe and unstained, while he…pours out his beneficent reflections” (695). Stillman insisted that the work was moral and preemptively chastised those who might be scandalized by it: “let those who have not the courage…read it in solitude and at least speak the truth within themselves” (695).

Rossetti's friends thus touted his work and prepared readers to engage “properly” with “Jenny.” And yet, these reviews demonstrate that Rossetti's closest associates saw the poem as different from the rest of his work and as the site of possible trouble. With the exception of Swinburne, all of these reviews acknowledge the apparent impropriety of “Jenny.” It does not belong on the drawing-room table, it covers a difficult subject for modern poets, and it will shock the less courageous among Rossetti's readers. While these reviews all rationalize the poem as the artist's response to a pressing social issue, Rossetti's friends clearly felt the need to defend it. This reviewing strategy indicates that they, like Rossetti, anticipated and tried to redirect reader rejection. Morris and Stillman's reviews go the furthest in this regard by shaming potential male readers into acquiescence through appeals to their sense of courage and manliness. Like Rossetti's epigraph and poem, Rossetti's reviewers attempted to coax and cajole readers to reject feminine (and feminizing) fear, ignorance, and prudery.

As time went by, more impartial critics made similar arguments. H. Buxton Forman, whom Rossetti initially feared might shy away from “Jenny,” supported the poet's work in a March article in Tinsley's Magazine, which Forman then reprinted in his May 1871 collection Our Living Poets. Forman seems to have been aware of Rossetti's extensive revision process; he called the volume of poetry “a laboured book,” signaling the poet's careful construction of his verse (204). Forman then identified “Jenny” as one of the “principal poems” (221) in the collection and asserted that Rossetti approached his subject matter with “utter cleanliness and manliness”:

According to Forman, the “near position” of the poem's speaker gave the work an authority that politicians, scientists, and feminists lacked. The poem's (and poet's) masculinity was reified; while a wide range of reformers come in for criticism in Forman's comments, only women are “half-instructed” in contrast to the poem's manly knowledge. Although Forman insisted that “Jenny” was not “weakened or disfigured by any direct moral or didactic intention,” he spelled out the work's implicit moral stance: “no wrong-doer or set of wrong-doers can ever be influenced for good by such treatment as is usually given to lepers and such-like” (223–24). But as Forman asserted the difficulty of “speak[ing] worthily” about “Jenny” (222), as he echoed the masculinist presumptions of other reviewers, he also unwittingly signaled the poem's stormy future when he observed that “no voice has [yet] been lifted against the situation taken for treatment” (223).

Forman was incorrect in his assessment of the poem's reception to that date. In October 1870, the North American Review, an American serial that had enjoyed some success in Europe, criticized the Pre-Raphaelites and accused “Jenny” in particular of “morbidly gratified sexual sensuousness.” This review also sounded a note of moral caution about the poem's effect on readers: “it may be doubted if the inherent indelicacy is not what he just has not avoided; and whether all writers who practice this sort of morbid anatomy do not do something towards debauching the minds of a certain number of their readers” (“Poems” 478). This concern about “debauching” readers indicates that the reviewer viewed Rossetti's work as more than simply a “bad” poem–it was potentially harmful to those who came into contact with it. Because the North American Review was not a major presence in Rossetti's circle, this assessment appears to have escaped Forman and Rossetti's notice. It was, however, a sign of things to come.

While Rossetti's friends and supporters helped to assure his Poems a public, they unwittingly encouraged critical backlash. In the fall of 1871, the Contemporary Review published the now infamous response by Robert Buchanan: “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti.” Buchanan had long opposed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and had already exchanged public salvos with Swinburne and William Rossetti, but “The Fleshly School” was his first published response to Dante Gabriel's work.¹⁵

Buchanan's general charge was that Rossetti's work implied “that the body is greater than the soul,” but he was clearly irritated by the chorus of praise from Rossetti's friends. He called the group the “Mutual Admiration School” (“Fleshly” 335), a reaction against Rossetti's heavy-handed attempt to manage his reception. Others would echo Buchanan's charge of what we might call literary insider trading, which demonstrated that Rossetti's involvement in the construction of his reception had gone too far. Twentieth-century writers who looked back at Rossetti could have drawn only one conclusion: if a writer wanted to attempt to manage his or her reception, he or she had better do so covertly.

After identifying the “mutual admiration school's” reviews as inappropriate, Buchanan then charged that “the fleshly school of verse-writers are, so to speak, public offenders, because they are diligently spreading the seeds of disease broadcast wherever they are read and understood. Their complaint too is catching, and carries off many young persons” (336). This disease metaphor was a popular means of figuring the action of indecent literature because it justified the actions of government officials in protecting the public “health” through quarantine–through censorship. By casting Rossetti and his friends as “public offenders” who victimized the young, Buchanan may have been hoping to remind his readers of the Hicklin standard: “the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged…is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Regina v. Hicklin 371). Because they “carried off many young persons,” the Fleshly School–in the terms of Buchanan's review–clearly fell under this legal rubric. While Buchanan never explicitly called for the censorship of Rossetti's Poems, his arguments placed the poet's verse in parallel with texts that legal authorities were starting to remove from circulation.

Buchanan then accused specific poems, such as the sonnet “Nuptial Sleep,” of “naughtiness” (“Fleshly” 337). But it was “Jenny” that Buchanan cast as “best indicative of the true quality of the writer's humanity” (343). Like Rossetti's admirers, Buchanan singled the poem out as important within the writer's oeuvre. Unlike those admirers, Buchanan conflated Rossetti with his poetic speaker, describing “Jenny” as “Mr. Rossetti soliloquizing over Jenny in her London lodging” (339). This rhetorical move implied that to write about the sexually marginal was to experience it personally. Buchanan's review thus went beyond an assessment of the propriety of “Jenny” to assess the propriety of the poet.

Buchanan next claimed that he did not object to the subject of prostitution in itself. In his eyes, Rossetti's rendering of Jenny's profession was not vicious or “more than usually coarse” (344). The rest of the review, however, belied this suggestion. Buchanan said that readers of the poem “detect its fleshliness at a glance; we perceive that the scene was fascinating less through its human tenderness than because it, like all the others, possessed an inherent quality of animalism” (344). Buchanan's words suggest that he read the body of the prostitute as inherently sexual; although Jenny only sleeps on the young man's knee as he speaks, her body codes a base sexuality–an “animalism”–that Buchanan found troubling. He located this “scene” as especially problematic because of the presence of the male client and speaker, whose interaction with the prostitute takes her from the realm of social reform (where she can be safely analyzed, discussed, and pitied) to that of sexual exchange and intercourse.

Buchanan ended his discussion of “Jenny” by rejecting the subject position into which Rossetti's epigraph tried to direct male readers: “‘Vengeance of Jenny's case,’ indeed!–when such a poet as this comes fawning over her, with tender compassion in one eye and aesthetic enjoyment in the other!” (345). According to Buchanan, the epigraph–and Rossetti's poem– failed because social commentary could not be accompanied by sexual and aesthetic appreciation without distorting the purported moral meaning of the work. Although Rossetti had revised his poem to diminish Jenny's erotic appeal, Buchanan argued that the published poem “fawned” as a male gaze read a woman's text, an interchange that was too ambivalent and appropriative to make the poem anything but sexual.¹⁶

Although Buchanan's response to Rossetti's Poems has been dismissed as a petulant attack by a minor poet, his reaction–and its continuing evolution–demonstrates the inability of a writer to “manage [his] own affairs” whilst simultaneously exploring the limits of appropriate representation. Buchanan's reading of “Jenny” indicates that some readers could perceive the poem's attempt to manipulate them into a “masculine” and acquiescent subject position and would reject that position by feminizing the “fawning” poet. More important, Buchanan's review directs our attention to the location of “Jenny” within a wider cultural context–a context that included Hicklin and budding moral reform movements–that limited Rossetti's ability to mediate his reception or to respond to negative reviews like Buchanan's.

Rossetti's reaction to “The Fleshly School of Poetry” went through several stages as the poet tried to address the very type of reading his revisions had worked to circumvent. He initially laughed off the piece, telling a friend “for once abuse comes in a form that even a bard can manage to grin at without grimacing” (Letters 1017). But as time passed, Rossetti became increasingly exercised over “The Fleshly School,” partly because of ethical questions the review raised. Buchanan had used a pen name in a journal that did not usually permit them, and when his authorship was later revealed, he unconvincingly claimed that the pseudonym was the result of a printer's error.¹⁷

As Rossetti's anger mounted, his brother, William, and many friends encouraged him to ignore the piece (Letters 1034), but the poet began to prepare rejoinders: he drafted one response that had to be abandoned after a lawyer pronounced it “actionable” (Letters 1019, 42), and he tried to get his publisher to send a letter Rossetti had written in his name to the Athenaeum (Letters 1039). The letters of 1871 thus show that Rossetti could not stop “managing [his] own affairs”–the poet remained preoccupied with his public image. He was also, however, taking up a difficult task in trying to combat what was ostensibly just a negative review. After all, if the work did not speak for itself, what right had Rossetti to speak for it? As Lord Cockburn's ruling had signaled in a different context, many Victorian readers were coming to the conclusion that the intentions manifest in a work were more important than those professed by the individual who presented that work to the public (Regina v. Hicklin 373). In order to combat Buchanan, Rossetti needed to prove that his critic had misread “Jenny” and the Poems; the easiest way to make this case would be to appeal to his intentions, but his historical moment was finding such intentions irrelevant.

Rossetti's final rejoinder, “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” was published in the Athenaeum on 16 December 1871. In this piece, Rossetti did not–indeed, could not– address Buchanan's specific complaint about friendly reviews because the poet in fact had coordinated assessments from friends whom he knew might exaggerate his merits. Instead, he claimed that Buchanan had taken individual poems out of their contexts and that his work as a whole did not ignore or overshadow “spiritual beauty” (Collected 333). This part of Rossetti's defense looked forward to twentieth-century censorship debates, which often hinged on whether judges should assess selected passages of a text or the entire work. Rossetti further asserted that he had anticipated “charges of recklessness and aggressiveness” in regard to “Jenny” (332); this admission framed Buchanan's response to the poem as predictable and thus somewhat negligible as the critic had done no more than the expected.

“The Stealthy School” did more than accuse Buchanan of misreading, however. The piece allowed Rossetti to articulate his artistic program in terms that went beyond intention to a new theory of Art. In some respects, “The Stealthy School” is a manifesto, albeit a manifesto couched in a defensive posture. As Janet Lyon's work on manifestoes indicates, this genre works by “defining and enacting the identities of radical groups, individuals, and parties” (1) and by helping to “script…identity in opposition” to others (16). This is precisely what Rossetti's argument accomplishes through a retrospective construction of the poet (and his poetry) as distinct from his contemporaries. Whatever one thinks of Buchanan's arguments or his motives for publishing them, his “Fleshly School” had the effect of forcing Rossetti to formulate a rationale for his approach. The text he produced enabled him to “define and enact” an identity that scholars still rely upon in their analyses of his life and work.

Rossetti's “manifesto” theorized two specific features of “Jenny”: the choice of poetic speaker and the purview of subject matter available to Art. In a sentence that has since become famous as a representation of his general artistic practice, Rossetti asserted that “the motive powers of art reverse the requirement of science, and demand first of all an inner standing-point” (Collected 332). In other words, art requires subjectivity and leaves purported objectivity to science. Following this logic, an “objective” poem is not really a poem; a work with such pretenses is not bad art–it is not art at all. According to this formulation, the poetic speaker of “Jenny” could not take up the perspective of a moral reformer or government official. Instead, the speaker needed to be positioned within “the heart of such a mystery” (332). Because he addresses the reader from this “inner standing-point,” the speaker also expresses the “aesthetic enjoyment” that so disturbed Buchanan: “to such a speaker, many half-cynical revulsions of feeling and reverie, and a recurrent presence of the impressions of beauty (however artificial) which first brought him within such a circle of influence, would be inevitable features of the dramatic relations portrayed” (332–33). In this section of his response, Rossetti asserted that art demands a subjective perspective that includes openness to beauty and attraction such as Jenny's. Through such arguments, Rossetti framed Buchanan's response as a preference for the neatness and moral certainties of science instead of the messy inside view that art offers to readers.

After using the theory of an “inner standing-point” to defend his poetic speaker, Rossetti's “manifesto” went on to theorize his choice of subject matter. In a few decades, other artists would use the adjective “modern” to designate the approach that Rossetti articulated in 1871:

Rossetti's “wider view” positions the poet as innovative through his use of poetry to attack difficult “material conditions,” such as social and moral problems. While his form is quite traditional and clearly located in the realm of “Art,” his content takes poetry into new directions. This strategy helps to explain or justify “Jenny,” a poem that is not “base or trivial” (333) but simply working to extend Art to represent prostitution differently. By claiming the “wider view,” Rossetti was able to position his work as extending the frontiers of poetry; this theoretical position shifted the attention from individual poems like “Jenny” to a discussion of the appropriate “limits of Art.”

Rossetti's “manifesto” thus articulated a philosophical defense that went beyond the specific points of Buchanan's arguments. More important, the “Stealthy School” positioned Rossetti as bolder and more transgressive than his revision process suggests he was. This revision process makes it clear that Rossetti's “wider view” was not infinite; his self-censorship of the 1860 draft demonstrates that he was himself unwilling to publicize more erotic materials. When juxtaposed with the “inner standing-point” and “wider view,” then, Rossetti's revisions suggest that his theoretical statement was highly calculated: the private processes that lead to the transformation of “Jenny” are cloaked by the public pronouncements made in “The Stealthy School of Criticism.”

Despite Rossetti's careful defense of his poetry and position, he was reminded that Buchanan's perspective was not anomalous. The Quarterly Review of January 1872 aligned itself with Buchanan when W. J. Courthope pronounced that “Jenny” “reveals characteristically the incapacity of the literary poet to deal with contemporary themes in an effective and straightforward manner.” The reviewer opined, “the majority of poets have, as we think wisely, avoided subjects of this sort” (38) and dismissed the poem as “affected sentiment and impotent philosophy” (39), once again challenging Rossetti's masculinity. Such reviews kept Buchanan's “Fleshly School” from appearing to be an ill-tempered anomaly.

In many ways, Rossetti's treatment by such reviewers was a historical warm up for the twentieth-century shouting match between writers, moralists, and government officials that would preoccupy Shaw, Woolf, Joyce, and Rhys. Rossetti's self-presentation strategies also signal what lay ahead for those artists: the poet revised and publicly positioned himself in order to help his work circulate, and yet he still received the kinds of responses that he had most feared. But Rossetti, unlike the modernist writers who came after him, was at a distinct disadvantage when his work was publicly called into question because the ideological disagreement undergirding the “Fleshly School” controversy was not a broad-based debate in 1871. Although Rossetti's “Stealthy School” tried to move the terms of the conversation in a philosophical direction, Buchanan's piece and the concurring assessments remained “bad reviews” rather than facets of a public discussion of what might be treated in literature, what should be censored, and why. Because they confounded their moral judgments with aesthetic critiques, negative reviewers remained obstinately on the poet's horizon, and the poet felt a victim of ill-will rather than a participant in a conversation about the impact of reading works that represented transgressive figures.

Buchanan remained particularly troublesome to Rossetti because he would not retreat from public view. In 1872, he published a revised and expanded version of his initial essay entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry and other Phenomena of the Day. Buchanan had been encouraged in this course by the support of a range of public figures, including Alfred Tennyson, Cardinal Manning, Lord Houghton, and Lord de Tabley (Waugh 167). In this version, the critic developed his original argument that Rossetti's work endangered readers. Buchanan opened his pamphlet by mocking female readers who saw “no harm” in Rossetti's verses (Fleshly School viii) and later drew a striking picture of the text as threatening female virtue: “it lies on the drawing room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne's tale” (Fleshly School 2). While Christopher Murray argues that such lines were a joke and Buchanan was simply “mocking the sexual preoccupations of anyone posing as a moralist” (“Fleshly II” 194), few perceived the purported joke and most readers then and now have assumed that Buchanan meant what he wrote. Through this addition, Rossetti's work was presented as a threat to young and pure female readers; indeed, The Fleshly School took “Jenny” quite literally and presented Rossetti's poems as threats to the “Nell's” of Victorian England. Buchanan's 1872 essay transformed the poem's self-reflexive meditation on vice, poetry, and readership into an indictment of Rossetti's oeuvre.

In addition to accusing Rossetti's poetry of endangering female readers, Buchanan expanded his original criticism of “Jenny.” The critic called the poem's subject “repulsive” and “deplorable” and further conflated Rossetti with his speaker by describing Jenny as “the street-walker…serenaded by the poet in a brothel” (Fleshly School 68). Buchanan also reprinted the negative responses published in the Quarterly Review and Saturday Review, providing additional context for his own evaluation (Fleshly School 92–95). During this extended screed, the critic made approving references to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which was working to suppress purportedly indecent publications (Fleshly School 2, 83). The Society, one of the forerunners of the social purity movement, dances on the periphery of Buchanan's work and signals the growth of an articulate and powerful opposition to work such as that of Rossetti.¹⁸

In 1872, however, such groups were only beginning to stir themselves against serious literature, which meant that the poet could not position his treatment at the hands of Buchanan within a wider cultural context.¹⁹

Shortly after Buchanan issued his pamphlet, Rossetti suffered a mental and physical breakdown, in part due to the poet's increasing use of chloral to fight insomnia. The onset of his illness in May 1872, as well as his subsequent suicide attempt on June 8, has long been recognized as precipitated by his horror and dismay with Buchanan's attack. His friend Hall Caine attributed Rossetti's decline to chloral, remorse over exhuming his manuscript from Siddal's grave, and “the hostile article of a jealous fellow-poet” (58), but only one of these factors peaked in 1872, and Rossetti's increasing use of chloral cannot be separated from his anguish over the “Fleshly School” incident. Rossetti's decision to publish “Jenny,” his treatment at the hands of Buchanan, and his subsequent breakdown demonstrate that artistic transgression had concrete psychological and physical costs. Perhaps Rossetti might have avoided his breakdown if he had cared less about making his tabooed subject appropriate for middlebrow British readers. But Rossetti's revisions to “Jenny” demonstrate his intense desire to render his prostitute as unobjectionable as possible; Buchanan's reaction implied that he had failed to make a section of the public listen to or respect his “wider view” of Art.

After 1872, Rossetti attempted to protect himself from reviews, publicity, and all contact with readers beyond those in his immediate cohort. In 1873, he instructed the publisher of the Tauchnitz edition of his poems to withhold all reviews: “don't send me any notices of the book when it appears, good or bad, if any come to you. To get one's work into the world is all one's business with it” (Letters 1240). This letter expresses a complete retreat from Rossetti's interest in “managing [his] own affairs,” limiting his role as artist to writing and publishing. That same year, he refused to enter into a publicized discussion about the editing of Blake's poetry, a response that indicates that he was also retreating from the public role as critic he had gained through his previous work on Blake and his Italian translations (1314).²⁰

In 1880, Rossetti privately returned to Buchanan's argument in interchanges with Jane Morris and Hall Caine. In a March 10 letter, Rossetti informed Morris of a “curious” discovery: “Buchanan's attacks on me years ago were greatly plagiarized from 2 sources” in Cottle's reminiscences of Coleridge (Rossetti and Morris 148). Rossetti's defensive laughter reveals that the poet had achieved some distance from the original incident, but his comment also demonstrates that Buchanan's piece still rankled a decade after its original publication. How much it rankled emerged during an autumn conversation with Caine: the now-reclusive Rossetti badgered the younger man with questions about criticism of “Jenny” and asserted “that an organized conspiracy existed, having for its object to annoy and injure him, and to hold him up to the public execration as an evil influence on his time” (Caine 94–95). Rossetti never developed an ability to face his critics calmly. When his second volume of poems was published in 1881, he refused to read negative reviews and instead had them sent to his brother, William (Letters 1926). While he avidly read good notices, he repeated the charge that there was a “conspiracy” against his work (Letters 1932). Rossetti died in 1882, still marked by the critical controversy that had greeted his original verse despite his efforts to publish “unobjectionable” poems.

Modernism and Rossetti's Legacy

AS I NOTED EARLIER, modernists from Pound to Waugh saw in Rossetti a Victorian patrimony that they claimed and derided as they charted out different paths toward “making it new.” “Yeux Glauques” and critical studies by Ford and others gesture toward Rossetti's most ambivalent legacy to modernist writers. Rossetti's desire to pursue the “inner standing-point” and “wider view” of Art led him to represent sexual experience and the sexed body in “Jenny”; his desire to find a sympathetic audience for such work also led him to self-censor his initial production until he produced the version of “Jenny” that we know today. But Rossetti had misjudged the fury with which his production would be greeted by a small but vocal number of his contemporaries. Although he defended his artistic program in “The Stealthy School of Criticism” through a theoretical justification of his forward-thinking work, he was permanently marked by his bid to publish a poem like “Jenny” during a period when literature's potential moral impact on readers was beginning to propel governmental policy and private initiatives.

The dialectic among artistic transgression, self-censorship, and self-fashioning I have traced in Rossetti's experience is amplified in the careers of modernist writers. Modernists, like Rossetti, would present themselves as part of a movement that took a “wider view” of what should be addressed in literature; despite holding and defending this wider view, many engaged in self-censorship. Modernist writers who chose to represent sexual deviance had to face public criticism of some kind for publishing their work; most chose to respond to that negative reaction through published assertions about their artistic programs. Their experience differed from Rossetti's in that many chose to respond through subsequent literary works in addition to or instead of the kind of polemic that Rossetti produced. Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf turned to subtle satire to mock their “Fœtid Buchanans” in plays and novels, James Joyce multiplied the sexual excesses of his texts to draw attention to the desires and knowledges repressed by the purity movement, and Jean Rhys thematized questions of reading and sexual danger to both acknowledge and undermine readers' objections to “sordid” work. All four writers could and did cast moralists as figures of fun because they were assured of a readership that would agree with them and would find their irony amusing.²¹

These writers' experiences also departed from Rossetti's due to the historical evolution of social purity organizations and government policy toward “obscene” literature. In contrast to Rossetti, modernist writers had a shared rhetorical strategy available to them for self-defense: it became possible–indeed necessary–for writers to depict themselves as advocates of free artistic expression because of increased obscenity prosecutions. Whereas the 1868 Hicklin judgment signaled an extended purview for obscenity law, no serious literature was indicted until 1888; during Rossetti's lifetime, charges of impurity seemed less ideological or legal– less matters of public import–than aesthetic and moral.²²

For the writers who followed Rossetti, public opposition in the form of social purity movements crystallized the battle. After 1885, there was an ideology and specific personalities (William T. Stead, Chartres Biron, “Jix”) that modernists could criticize and parody in their work. Writers from Shaw to Rhys had an obvious enemy that was open to attack.

These writers benefited from an increased sense of mission in the face of opposition, but it would be a mistake to assume that Rossetti's inheritors were necessarily more comfortable in breaking taboos in their literary works than was their Victorian precursor. Despite their opposition to censorship and desire to write about deviance, many of these writers were reticent about publishing sexually explicit material. This reticence stemmed from a variety of personal circumstances, but it also came from one shared quality: Shaw, Woolf, Joyce, and Rhys came out of the same class as purity workers, a class with a clear cultural sense of what should not be spoken.²³

In other words, these writers were all children of the nineteenth-century middle class, and with the apparent exception of Joyce, they found taboos hard to break. Rossetti's censorship dialectic is therefore often paralleled in the evolution of modernist works: a bold draft, an anticipation or experience of public reaction, and self-censorship that results in part in the work we have today. This dialectic has, however, largely escaped scholarly attention because it is concealed behind the public pronouncements issued by individual writers just as Rossetti's “Stealthy School” concealed his self-censorship. Thus, the public personae of canonical modernists are often in tension with their writing and revision processes, which reveal distinctly ambivalent attitudes toward purportedly indecent material and the potential for reader rejection.

In the work of Shaw, Woolf, Joyce, and Rhys, prostitutes in particular function as shorthand for the experience of the sexed body and for the larger issue of speech and repression.²⁴

These writers were not alone in intertwining prostitution and censorship: the social purity movement framed obscene literature and prostitution as overlapping issues based in similar causes and requiring parallel types of intervention. In 1910, for example, purity groups sent representatives to “International Conferences on Obscene Publications and the ‘White Slave Traffic’ [involuntary prostitution].” The agreement on obscene literature that emerged from the conference followed “closely the lines of the Agreement of 1904 in regard to the ‘White Slave Traffic’,” and as the British government agreed to abide by both conventions, the parallels between prostitution and obscene literature became coded into government practice (Correspondence 4). In the minds of reformers, officials, and writers, then, prostitution and “obscenity” were inextricable concerns.

In addition to reflecting a socio-political context that twinned taboo literature and public women, modernist writers were, like Rossetti, interested in the prostitute because this figure codes wayward sexuality. An individual prostitute embodies sex outside of normalizing institutions such as the family or heterosexual couple. Because a prostitute's body “speaks” deviant sex regardless of her actual behavior at a given moment, this figure provided modernists with a wide range of representative possibilities as they worked through the impulses to challenge audiences and to self-censor. Shaw and Woolf put the prostitute “on stage” and trusted that the figure would signal sex; in their published plays and novels, the prostitute as subject is transgressive because she points toward an unrepresented–but unforgettable–deviance. In contrast, Joyce and Rhys chose to examine the prostitute's sexual behavior as well as her social marginalization. Their prostitutes have sex as well as figure it through their bodies; this artistic choice had concrete effects on the audiences both writers were able to reach with their initial publications as well as on their subsequent (albeit different) literary reputations.

These four writers shared a great deal with Rossetti and with each other: they represented the same kind of deviant sexuality, they were concerned with censorship by officials and audiences, and their works engage the social purity movement in some detail. Their differences stem from artistic choices and personal factors, such as the dates of their publications and their positions vis-à-vis the English public sphere. As women (Woolf, Rhys) and as colonial subjects (Shaw, Joyce, Rhys), they found themselves located outside the conventional centers of government and social power, which perhaps explains their interest in the marginal figure of the prostitute. The engagement of these four figures with deviant sexuality positioned them in a direct dialogue with contemporary moralists, who were similarly preoccupied with prostitution and representation.²⁵

They negotiated with social purity and censorship even when they were not themselves censored–it is the shared experience of the censorship dialectic that aligns them with Rossetti and with each other.

“Jenny” would be a different poem if Rossetti had not been preoccupied with anticipating and heading off the moral responses of readers. The poet would have a different legacy if that same poem had not drawn him into one of the most infamous scandals of modern literary criticism, a scandal that forced him to articulate his artistic program. The social purity movement and government censorship similarly shaped some of the canonical works of British high modernism. The public personae of these modernists were fashioned in part through their need to oppose the forces that were simultaneously exerting a shaping pressure on their literary works. And while the censorship of the early twentieth century was regressive, the decline of the social purity movement and the decrease in official censorship transformed the way modernism saw itself and was seen. As Tacitus noted, “Genius chastised grows in authority”; it is equally true that toleration can function as an effective form of repression, as Herbert Marcuse has argued.²⁶

The loss of the “necessary evils” of social purity and government censorship corresponded with the end of one kind of high modernist production. We have yet to understand the implications of a literary movement deformed and transformed by those it most seemed to oppose.