The Pre-Raphaelites (Guide to the Year's Work) (Victorian Poetry) (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rosetti and William Morris) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The past year has brought us The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Chelsea Years, 1863.1872, III. 1871-72, the fifth volume of a series originally to be prepared by the late William Fredeman, and completed after his death in 1999 by a consortium of editors listed as Roger C. Lewis, Jane Cowan, Roger W. Peattie, Allan Life, and Page Life. Fredeman's hand may be seen in the work's voluminous appendices, bibliography, and "Biographical and Analytical Index" (pp. 379-676), and one of the nine appendices reproduces his Prelude to the Last Decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Summer of 1872 (1971), a reconstruction of the period of Rossetti's mental breakdown that Fredeman based on his research in the Penkill and Angeli papers. The work's "Biographical and Analytical Index," in particular, recapitulates prior entries in the indexes to the first five volumes (1835-72), and Fredeman (presumably) explained his rationale for such care as follows: "Among the many deficiencies of the Doughty-Wahl edition of Rossetti's letters, perhaps the most serious--certainly the most inconvenient--was the absence of an index. While some users may feel that this editor has erred in the opposite direction, the ultimate test will be in the reliability and usefulness of the index to scholars, students, and readers who consult it" (p. 487).