his aunt’s house in Camberwell. This was 10 Addison Place, a quiet narrowly plain brick house near St Giles’s church, due, at the time of writing, to be pulled down.
Ned was encouraged in his undertaking by a kind letter from Ruskin, acknowledging a copy of the January issue of the Magazine, which he had ventured to send him. A letter from Ruskin seemed to bring him to the approaches of the world he must enter. He set out on foot from Camberwell to Great Ormond Street. He had been told that Rossetti taught in the Working Men’s College there.
The Working Men’s College was a new venture – it was established in its final form in 1854, when it incorporated the earlier People’s College and took over their hall under the workshops of the Tailors’ Association. It represented the highest ideals of its founder, F. Denison Maurice, whose aim was not to improve the skill of craftsmen – that was the job of the Government schools at South Kensington – but to give working people the same education as the better-off, in an institution which they could run themselves.
‘We are meeting you all as men’, he wrote, ‘to enable you to work together as men.’2 But by a sad and familiar process, the majority of the students were not the workers whom Maurice wanted to reach, but mainly ‘clericals’, followed by a high proportion of jewellers and cabinet-makers. Furthermore, the admission of women soon led to social functions, teas for the poor and, as the older members complained, ‘overmuch dressing’.
Admission was one shilling, four shillings for the term, and the instructors gave their services free. Ruskin, of course, had been the inspiration of the place, taught there and wrote his Elements of Drawing for them; at this point Rossetti, at his own request, was helping him with his Thursday night drawing class. This seems to have been open to the public, but Burne-Jones went instead to the monthly council meeting, also public, in Great Titchfield Street at which, he was told Rossetti might appear.
The atmosphere on all occasions seems to have been much like a school, with elected monitors ‘to stop people loitering round the fire’ and a small charge for tea. Ned sat at a table, he told Mackail, and had thick bread and butter, ‘knowing no one’. He had no idea of speaking to Rossetti: he simply wanted to look at him. But the atmosphere was one of comradeship, and the pale, thin, ingenuous appearance of Burne-Jones aroused, as it usually did, a desire to help. A stranger spoke to him across the table, and another one, Vernon Lushington, offered to tell him when Rossetti entered the room. Lushington was a most interesting person, who had been three years at sea as a midshipman before coming up to Cambridge, and was now just starting his career as a lawyer and philanthropist. As a matter of fact, Ned probably knew him already – he had contributed to the magazine – but he was certainly thankful to see him at that moment.
After an hour of speeches, Rossetti did come, ‘and so I saw him for the first time, his face satisfying all my worship, and I listened to addresses no more, but had my fill of looking, only I would not be introduced to him’. The introduction came a few nights later in Vernon Lushington’s rooms, where Rossetti (with his brother William Michael quietly in the background) was apparently established as hero and tyrant: someone criticised Browning’s Men and Women and was ‘rent to pieces’. Ned was presented, and with rapid generosity Rossetti told him to come to his studio the next day. This was at Chatham Place, at the north-west corner of Blackfriars Bridge, where Rossetti, ignoring the strong river smells, looked out on three sides at the moving lights and small craft of the Thames. The rooms were full of piles of drawings and books; something about Ned’s face made Rossetti want to exaggerate, and he told him that books were only of use to prop things up. This was a great deal for the follower of King Arthur, Clive Newcome and the Broadstone to swallow. The picture on the easel (later the Fra Pace), was a watercolour of a monk drawing a mouse in the margin of an illuminated manuscript. Ned felt that he had been ‘received very courteously’, and since no one came he stayed ‘long hours’ watching Rossetti at work, not guessing that he particularly hated this. Mrs Virginia Surtees, in her Catalogue Raisonné of Rossetti, mentions a tradition that Burne-Jones was allowed to put in the mouse, but it can hardly have been on this occasion. In the small hours he walked back again from Blackfriars to Camberwell.
The courteous reception of ‘a certain youthful Jones … the nicest young fellow in – dreamland’, as he described him to Allingham, was due to real gratification on Rossetti’s part. The Pre-Raphaelites had fallen apart, he had for the time being almost given up his struggle to paint in oils, was defeated by his attempt at a contemporary subject in Found; if he had turned to ‘Froissartian’ subjects this was very probably because he had read some of Morris’s early poems in the magazine and felt a new source of inspiration. ‘He asked much about Morris … and seemed much interested in him.’ Although he was not without patrons, and was still encouraged by Ruskin, he was often in a state of ‘tinlessness’, borrowing small sums from his family. He was no longer the leader he had been to Hunt and Millais, and his fine illustrations to the Moxon Tennyson were still in the future. In his emotional life he was feeling the combination of anguish and convenience in the mid-Victorian double standard. The conveniences were Fanny Cornforth and Annie Miller, the young barmaid from the Cross Keys who was supposedly the property of Holman Hunt; the anguish was Elizabeth Siddal, who had been sent abroad on doctor’s advice during the winter of 1855–6 and whose ‘arm chair that suits her size’ stood in the corner of the studio.
The image of Lizzie Siddal recalls Rossetti’s preoccupation with illness – illness and its remedies, even the most unlikely – and the fact that he could only really warm to those who were unsuccessful, ‘seedy’ or even ‘dreadfully ill’. The death of his friend Walter Deverell in 1854 after months of poverty and sickness had shocked him deeply, and certainly the delicate appearance of Burne-Jones would only recommend him to Rossetti; it was almost as though he had been sent in Deverell’s place. It may be said then that in the January of 1856 Rossetti’s generosity, morbidity and princely powers of encouragement were waiting to expand, and that this was a meeting fortunate on both sides.
Ned became acutely restless; he wrote a long account to Morris at Walthamstow, rushed up to Oxford for a noisy meeting with the Brotherhood and the long-suffering Maclaren, on to Birmingham and, probably at his father’s suggestion, back again to Exeter for the Easter Term. The effect of his wild exaltation upon Morris, returned to his room in St Giles’s and his articles with Street, was unsettling. Their friendship was not enough to hold Ned to Oxford, and at the beginning of May he was back in London for the Academy. Morris, who joined him there for the day, was struck by Arthur Hughes’s April Love, and commissioned Ned to buy it; Ned went round to Hughes’s lodgings in Pimlico, and more than thirty years later he could recall his expression when he came in with the cheque.
Burne-Jones never returned to Oxford as a student again, neither did he intend to go on living in Camberwell. Aunt Catherwood found him changed. Both Morris and he had let their hair grow, and wore soft hats. But in any case, it was not possible to launch out into a new life from the Camberwell house where, as the Memorials put it, ‘to write a letter on Sunday was a marked thing, [and] to sit on one chair rather than another was to arouse the anxiety of its owner’. Much though Ned loved his aunt, Camberwell was, as he put it later, ‘a seemingly needless neighbourhood’.
His intention was to live with William Fulford, who was said to ‘have grown very serious’, and had moved to London on the £100 per annum which Morris was now giving him to edit the magazine. Ned, on the other hand, had at the moment no income at all, and together they quartered the cheaper streets. One of these – in 1856 – was Sloane Street, then a cobbled road bespattered with dung and deafening with the noise of horse traffic. They took lodgings with one of the less frightening landladies at 13 Sloane Terrace. Fulford, however, had to return to Oxford for a few weeks, and Burne-Jones, who had never lived by himself before, concentrated the whole force of his nature on his worship of Rossetti.
Of this, one of the happiest years of his life, Burne-Jones’s first memories were of weeks of light-headedness, largely the result of hunger. On leaving Exeter he was, he told Rooke, almost penniless. ‘When I came away in the fourth year [sic] there was a lot of money (about £20) owing to me but I never claimed it. Neither did I ask my father for any, for I was much too proud; I had barely half-a-crown