Accounts of the Pre-Raphaelites usually begin in London in 1848 with the circumstances of the group's formation by those art students at the Royal Academy. But I want to begin now twentyone years subsequent to that, on the evening of 5 October 1869. That night a small group of men gathered in Highgate Cemetery in north London to exhume the body of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal the wife of the painter, poet and foremost Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The purpose of the disinterment was to retrieve a manuscript book of D. G. Rossetti's poems that he had buried with his wife in a gesture of self-sacrifice following her death in 1862. The proposed collection had been advertised for publication as Dante at Verona and Other Poems at the end of 1861. Charles Augustus Howell, a notorious ‘dealer’ and former secretary of Ruskin, H. V. Tebbs, a lawyer friend of the poet (whose role was to witness items taken from the grave), and Dr Llewellyn Williams ‘engaged by Howell to disinfect the manuscript’, comprised the macabre vignette that was to impact considerably upon Rossetti's poetic reputation. The team, whose work was lit by lantern and a fire burning at the edge of the grave, so the story goes, had little trouble accessing the contents of the coffin that, according to Rossetti's later account, were in ‘perfect’ condition. This was not the case, however, with the book of poems itself. William Michael Rossetti tells us, for example, that the pages of the poem ‘Jenny’ ‘had a great wormhole right through’ them ‘so that only the ends of the lines were intact’ (DW 886). And, writing shortly afterwards to his friend the painter Ford Madox Brown, D. G. Rossetti declared ‘a sad wreck’ what he simply termed ‘those papers’(DW 886).

It is certain that Rossetti deliberated before performing this reversal of his gesture of self-sacrifice, of manifesting his second thoughts about the poems. As Marsh reminds us, ‘exhumation was strictly regulated to prevent grave-robbing’ and permission had to be sought from the Secretary of State ‘with the graveowner's knowledge and consent’ (Marsh 377). The fact that Rossetti's mother owned the grave, and he didn't want to disclose his intentions to her, posed a problem for him that he was able to sidestep, because the new Home Secretary, ‘his old friend Henry Bruce departed from strict rules for [him]’ (Marsh 374).