The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vols. 1-2: the Formative Years: Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk (1835-1862) (Book Review‪)‬

The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vols. 1-2: The Formative Years: Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk (1835-1862), ed. William E. Fredeman. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. $165.00 each vol. 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.