The Buried and Unburied Manuscripts of Dante Gabriel Rosetti.…  Day’s appo

The Buried and Unburied Manuscripts of Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

…  Day’s appointed sway
Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place
Without her? Tears, ah me! For love’s good grace,
And cold forgetfulness of night or day.

- From ‘Without Her’ by Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

When poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s wife and muse, Lizzie Siddal, died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, Rosetti fell into a deep despair and, feeling he would never be able to write poetry again, buried his final manuscripts with her. A friend described how Rosetti had placed the book beside Siddal’s cheek, curling locks of her famous red curls around it.

Then, seven years later, Rosetti changed his mind. 

Blaming himself for Lizzie’s death (he had been a bit of a scoundrel during their marriage) only worsened Rosetti’s emotional state. Concerned, his agent encouraged him to retrieve and publish the buried works as a way reviving both his mental state and his financial situation. Rosetti was convinced.

The exhumation took place in the dead of night on October 5th 1869. The manuscript was retrieved, though it was quite sodden and needed to be taken away for disinfecting; allegedly, there were large worm holes obscuring some of the text and, unsurprisingly, the thing reeked of decay. 

Rosetti destroyed the book as soon as he had made copies of his poems, which were published in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti in 1870.

Interestingly, Lizzie Siddal was also the model for this famous image of Ophelia. Her Wikipedia is an interesting read in it’s own right and she was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London, in the Rosetti family plot.