INTRODUCTION.

Through the agency of various persons, myself not the least active, a considerable bulk of materials about the Præraphaelite Brotherhood, or P.R.B., has by this time been published. Some of these materials are in the nature of narratives or essays; others, of documents of old date—letters, diaries, and so on. I now offer to the public a further instalment of materials of the second class.

This instalment, as the reader will readily perceive, consists of three several things, not directly connected the one with the other, but all bearing upon the Præraphaelite movement. There is:—1. An early correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, beginning (for curiosity’s sake) in April 1835, when he was not quite seven years of age, and going on to March or April 1854, just before the date when my compilation entitled Ruskin, Rossetti, Præraphaelitism (1899) begins; and with this are included two letters from our Father. 2. Some letters from Ford Madox Brown to his first Wife, Elizabeth (Bromley), December 1844 to May 1845, followed by a much longer item, extracts from his Diary from 4th September 1847 to 6th January 1856: some passages from this Diary, relating to Dante Rossetti and his surroundings, were given in my compilation above-named, and these are, of course, omitted here. 3. Extracts from the P.R.B. Journal, which I, as a member of the Brotherhood acting as its Secretary, kept from 15th May 1849 to 29th January 1853. Thus the entire range of dates in this volume is from April 1835 to January 1856; and from 1847 to 1856 it is tolerably detailed and copious.

It will be seen that the three constituent parts of this book overlap to a large extent. The most important of the three is—as I think most readers will say—the writing of Madox Brown. I have given the precedence to the Rossetti correspondence simply because it begins at the earlier date.

It seems superfluous for me to write any more here. My object in the present volume (as in one or more that have preceded it) is not to give any continuous narrative or dissertation of my own, but to set forth original documents, with such introductory or annotating matter as may make them plain. Matter of this sort is furnished in connexion with each of the three items which make up the book: and so I leave it in the reader’s hands. He may perchance find it informing in some parts, and amusing in at any rate as many.

Wm. M. Rossetti.

London.

July 1899.

PRÆRAPHAELITE DIARIES AND LETTERS.