What follows is not a census or enumeration or in any way complete. Materials relevant to this edition are widely scattered, and I have not examined them all. Some have doubtless escaped my attention entirely. However, all the repositories or collectors I have visited or contacted (private owners identified by permission only) are in the list below, where their holdings are briefly sketched. The Text and Notes section of this volume identifies all MSS where possible by a source abbreviation from this list and special collection name with box and folder, folio or page numbers. It also cites printed books, catalogues or articles describing these collections. I have provided these details not to be pedantic but rather to help the reader find sources, e.g., there are Rossetti MSS in eight discrete collections in different rooms on different floors in the Library of Congress.

The sources are divided into major and minor. An abbreviation for each source, used throughout the text, precedes its full name.

Date of Publication: 1881, B&S

Date of Composition: 1871, Works

MS Sources:

1. Ashley Notebooks 1410 (BL)

Notebook No. 1, p. 3

‘And passionate youth

he dreams of love with some stray

golden hair

Still to his shoulder clinging’

[lines 5–6]

Notebook No. 1, p. 15

‘And Youth, with one bright spray

of golden hair

Still to his shoulder clinging since

the last

Embrace wherein his sweet love

held him fast’

[lines 5–7]

Manuscripts:

(1) (2) Princeton HL fols 2a, 9a (3) Bodleian Eng. poet. d. 43 fol. 4

(4) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 4a: (2) is a fair copy of (1) and (3) is a fair copy of (2).

Revisions/Variants:

1. All MSS/B&S

2 <proud>/ awed Prin.(1) 3 past/Past [thus on all MSS, evidently revised in proof]

4 <fires that dull> <fires of strength,>/ signal- fires, Prin.(1)

4 <can scare>/to scare Prin.(1)

5 <some bright spray of woman's hair> / still some single golden hair Fitz.

6 <Yet to>/ Unto Fitz.

7 <sweet> <kind> <fond>/ sweet Prin.(1)

11 <dreamed>/ dream Fitz

First Edition:

POEMS / by / Dante Gabriel Rossetti. / London: / F. S. Ellis, 33 King Street, Covent Garden. / 1870. Crown 8vo. [A]6 B–I8 K–S8 T4 U2 pp. [i–vii] viii–xi [xii] [1] 2–282; 1 leaf noting Strangeways imprint. Two additional leaves at the end advertise ‘F. S. Ellis Publications’. This material is followed by a blank gathering to fill out the binding which had been cut wrong.

1000 copies were issued 26 April, the edition selling out rapidly;

on 30 April, DGR wrote Ellis:

On 3 May, DGR reported to F. M. Brown:

By 22 May, the first edition was sold out, and the second issue of 1000 (second, third and fourth editions) was in print. DGR was finally satisfied with the binding on the new issue (WEF 70.163–64 & 166–67).

Variants:

WMR noted that ‘a few copies, preceding the completed binding, were issued in a quite plain cloth binding’ (Bibliography 19). This first bound state of the book is a pre-publication issue of 14 April in plain blue cloth necessitated by delays in the decorated binding designed by DGR, who wanted bound copies in the hands of the reviewers well before official publication. A copy of this state in the Sterling Library at Yale has plain grayish-white endpapers, but some copies of it exist stamped with the woodcut decorations used on the endpapers through editions 1–6. The text and pagination of this state is identical with the first edition, but there are no advertising leaves tipped in.

First Edition:

Ballads and Sonnets/ by / Dante Gabriel Rossetti. / London: /Ellis and White, / 29, New Bond Street, W. / 1881. Crown 8vo. [A6+1] B–I8 K–L8 M8+1 N–U8 X Y8 pp. [i–iv] [2] [v]–xii [1–3] 4–159 [160] [2] [161–63] 164–335 [336] 1 leaf at the end advertises, recto, DGR's Poems: New and Dante and His Circle [EIP reissued] The dedication to TWD, tipped in after the title-page, and the divisional title for HL, tipped in before Sig. M, are both unnumbered cancel leaves. Pp. 185–86 are also a cancel-leaf but do not disrupt numbering sequence.

Binding was the same as that for Poems, again signed ‘De Lacy’. Lettering on the spine reads:

Ballads and Sonnets D. G. Rossetti

Variants:

WMR states that thirty copies were printed on large paper (Bibliography No. 24) but the Certificate of Issue in these copies, which appears centered on the verso of the half-title (blank in regular copies), reads: ‘Twenty-five Copies printed on large paper for Subscribers only.’ This issue is printed on Whatman's hand-made paper, demy octavo, bound in blue-grey paper-covered boards backed with white, with white paper back-label, lettered ‘Ballads / and / Sonnets / By / D. G. Rossetti’. Some copies have the goldstamped De Lacy binding but plain white endpapers. The Ellis advertisement appears at the end. Page 238 is misprinted 38; in regular copies this page is correctly numbered. On p. 180, line 14 of Sonnet 18, Genius in Beauty, has the fourth edition reading. Collation details otherwise agree with the first edition.

DGR worked on the various printed stages of Poems over a period of nine months, from the galleys he first received in July 1869 to the final addition of two sonnets 26 March 1870 (the first edition appeared on 25/26 April). They are set forth below as sixteen discrete proof states, each number being assigned a date derived from DGR's letters and the proofs themselves. Earlier attempts to sort out this textual and bibliographical tangle, as John Carter called it (Carter 1972), involved arbitrary categorizations of the material into Trial Books, private issues, unique bifolia and proof sets with names such as Penkill or Exhumation or numbered series such as A1 through A4 (for details, see Lewis 102–51). The following entries provide approximate dates for each proof state and locate copies of the proofs, giving designations assigned to them by the repository holding them. The Troxell Collection at Princeton has all sixteen states, numbered and fully annotated by Robert S. Fraser in Fraser 1972: 146–75. For each state, the following tabulation provides a Fraser (F) number, but F6 has been divided into two states, the second being a revise of the first, and F12 has been omitted since it describes a mixed set of proofs from other states in the Troxell Collection rather than a discrete proof state.

The five Fitzwilliam Trial Books of Poems have now been reclassified as four sets of proofs designated A-D, although in his catalogue description of this material the librarian refers the reader to Thomas J. Wise's categorization of it as issues and fragments of Trial Books. Wise describes both the Fitzwilliam holdings and his own collection of proofs in ALC: IV: 124–26, 129–31; VIII: 171–76. Wise's copies are in the Ashley Collection of the BL, catalogued according to his own names and numbers, although finally corrected in Burnett 1999.

Rossetti worked on a few sonnets that may have been intended for eventual inclusion in HL but that for some reason of his own remained unfinished or suppressed. Two untitled love sonnets written in Italian and sent to JM during the period of the ‘Kelmscott love sonnets’ are too personal and too ‘fleshly’ for the sequence, even if they had been translated. In addition, they are neither polished nor idiomatic examples of Italian poetic diction of any era. They are offered below (in translation) because of their obvious affinity with other HL sonnets of the 1868–71 period that Oswald Doughty labelled ‘regenerate rapture’. The same may be said of English May (1869), written out of DGR's concern for JM's health as a sort of private verse epistle, not published until 1886 in CW and there misleadingly dated 1854 by WMR.

Some have argued that the bouts-rimés sonnets written between 1847–49 anticipate at times the style, diction, imagery and themes of HL. Such anticipation as may be found is too general to repay study, except in the case of Idle Blessedness (Works 267), which anticipates Autumn Idleness (HL 69). These poems are games, at most exercises in technique and convention, often mere verbal display in the manner of the Italian improvisatore. I have not included them: they may be found in PFB): 1) 14–16, 56–65 and Works 263–67. Another problem with reading anything into them is that it is not always possible to determine whether they were written by DGR, WMR or CGR: see WMR's accounts in SR 79–80 and Works 673–74, Baum's in PFB): 1) 14–15 and Frances Winwar's, cited in PRISM 27.86.

The Building of The House of Life

In 1909, Wilfred S. Blunt, author of the sonnet sequence Esther, asserted to Sir Sydney Cockerell that he considered Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 103-sonnet poem The House of Life ‘the greatest of all the great Victorian poems’. This image of its loftiness has been popular among the poem's would-be interpreters, who regard it as an unscaled, perhaps unscalable, pinnacle among Victorian peaks. Certainly, its textual complexities are formidable, and it is impossible to attempt an authoritative interpretation of the House without the benefit of a proper critical edition. The final version, which appeared in Ballads and Sonnets (1881), contained sonnets written as early as 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and as late as 1880. The individual ‘sonnet-stanzas’ of the House were thus composed over a period of thirty-four years, twice the time it took Alfred Tennyson to compose all the individual lyrics of In Memoriam.

The sequence itself appeared in three different states: 16 sonnets in 1869, published in the Fortnightly Review with the title ‘Of Life, Love, and Death’; 50 sonnets and 11 lyrics published in Poems (1870) with the title ‘Sonnets and Songs, towards a Work to Be Called The House of Life’; 102 sonnets (including an unnumbered proem-sonnet but no songs) published in Ballads and Sonnets (1881) as The House of Life in a two-part sequence with the subtitles ‘Youth and Change’ (59 sonnets) and ‘Change and Fate’ (42 sonnets). Jerome McGann identifies a fourth state (McGann 2003: 386), the Bodleian Library MSS of 30 sonnets and songs that J. R. Wahl published as The Kelmscott Love Sonnets of D. G. Rossetti, but McGann's claim that these documents form ‘a relatively coherent’ version of the sequence is difficult to support. They form no entity and have no unity beyond being a collection of fair copies that Rossetti included in letters to Jane Morris. Some of these poems were never part of any version of the House. Nevertheless, McGann's emphasis on the instability of this long poem is critically sound: it is a house built upon ever-shifting sands.

Some poems added to the final House in 1881 originally appeared in the ‘Sonnets for Pictures and Other Sonnets’ section of Poems (1870).

I

Rossetti's reluctance to date his sonnets is well known but imperfectly understood. His biographers usually assume that he was anxious to conceal the personal references in The House of Life, but that is only one of his reasons for not including dates. When he began to ready his poems for publication in August 1869, he wrote simply to his brother, ‘I don't think dating throughout would do’ (WEF 69.144). Shortly after Poems appeared in April 1870, he dealt with the subject more fully in a letter to Dr T. G. Hake:

One thing in your last letter gratified me particularly. The three poems to which you gave the preference … are the only three new ones in the first section though much has been done quite lately to several others and something to nearly all. Much the greater proportion of the sonnets in the House of Life are also written lately. … I daresay you will agree with me that it is not desirable to mention in print what I say above of the dates of composition. I have thought it better to omit dates in the book. (WEF 70.124)

Whatever his reasons were, Rossetti clearly assumes that Dr Hake would comprehend and endorse them on reading this letter. It is improbable that Hake was aware of any guilty secrets at this time, for he was as yet only a literary correspondent rather than the close friend he became later. The fact that Rossetti took such pleasure in Hake's preference for his most recent work is significant. Since he had been composing and revising at white heat to fill out his volume, he feared that this undignified haste would be apparent to reviewers. Late in 1869, he even proposed the desperate stratagem of including his early short story Hand and Soul in Poems ‘as it is really more a sort of poem than anything else’, but he finally decided that ‘it looked awkward there’ (WEF 69.207).