Moreover, she was remarkably successful. In 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, she wrote a controversial article on the newly discovered gorilla, ‘Our Nearest Relation’, comparing its skills and habits to homo sapiens. It was published in Charles Dickens’ magazine, All the Year Round. Next she wrote on Whales and Whaling’, and in the following years she produced several further young person’s guides to scientific topics: What is Electricity?’, ‘What is a Sunbeam?’, and The Indestructibility of Force’. Her ability to research, organize and explain technical subjects for the general reader was highly unusual.
Her role as Gilchrist’s amanuensis was therefore more that it might superficially appear. She seems to have become a genuine literary partner. Anne claimed the subsequent work on the biography came to her as a kind of posthumous collaboration. ‘Alex’s spirit is with me ever – presides in my home; speaks to me in every sweet scene; broods over the peaceful valleys; haunts the grand wild hill tops; shines gloriously forth in setting sun, and moon and stars.’
This may have been true, but she was also driven by other, though no less powerful emotions. Essentially, she seems to have felt guilty about Gilchrist’s death. She felt that she had never been his true wife. Nearly a decade later, in September 1871, she wrote a remarkable confession of her own. ‘I think…my sorrow was far more bitter, though not so deep, as that of a loving tender wife. As I stood by him in the coffin, I felt such remorse I had not, could not have, been more tender to him – such a conviction that if I had loved him as he deserved to be loved he would not have been taken from us. To the last my soul dwelt apart and unmated, and his soul dwelt apart and unmated.’
Her drive to complete his biography of Blake was, therefore, far more than a show of pious sentiment, a widow’s tender offering. It was more like an uneasy debt of honour, the recognition of a difficult but sacred trust. Anne already knew much of Alexander’s method of working, and his perfectionism. What she did not know was whether she could match it. She wrote to Macmillan: ‘Many things were to have been inserted – anecdotes etc. collected during the last year, which he used to say would be the best things in the book. Whether I shall be able to rightly use the rough notes of these and insert them in the fittest places I cannot yet tell. He altered chapter by chapter as he sent it to the printers…’
Three months later, in March 1862 she again wrote Macmillan that, to her surprise, she had completed sorting and arranging all of Alexander’s remaining material for the book. It would be faithfully completed. ‘You shall not find me dilatory or unreliable; least of all in this sacred trust.’ Fiercely defensive of every word of Alexander’s existing text, she carefully began to pull together the drafts of the outstanding chapters. She made regular visits to the British Museum, catching the London train up from Haslemere station. She checked his facts and polished his style. She defended him against Macmillan’s charges of sometimes writing too flamboyantly, like Carlyle.
Most crucially, she turned for help to the Rossettis. She did not want them to touch the text of Alex’s biography, but she wanted help with the companion volume: the catalogue of Blake’s pictures and an anthology of his poetry. She proposed to Macmillan that he commission a second volume, to consist of an annotated catalogue of Blake’s visual work compiled by Michael Rossetti, and a selection of Blake’s poetry edited by Dante Gabriel. This was agreed, and the whole project now advanced rapidly on its new footing.
The sudden death of Dante Gabriel’s own wife, Lizzie Siddal, that same spring of 1862, added a peculiar intensity to the work of selection. (‘I feel forcibly’, he wrote to Anne, ‘the bond of misery that exists between us.’) He moved back into bachelor lodgings, which he shared with Meredith and the young Swinburne, and they too acted as unofficial Blake readers and selectors. Even Christina Rossetti came to stay at the Shottermill cottage.
So not only had the whole Rossetti family now rallied round Anne’s ‘Herculean labour’, but the two volume work had almost become a group enterprise, a Pre-Raphaelite project to restore Blake, and to do honour to his young idealistic biographer. As Dante Gabriel wrote to Anne, ‘I would gladly have done it for Blake’s or gladly for your husband’s or gladly for your own sake, and moreover, had always had a great wish of my own to do something in this direction…’
The twin volumes were to be delivered twelve months later, in spring 1863.
4
Who, then, finally wrote Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake?
It is clear from their correspondence, that the Rossettis almost entirely confined themselves to the editorial work on the second volume alone. Dante Gabriel was asked to write a ‘Supplementary’ summary (Chapter 39, no longer included); and to fill in a missing description of Blake’s Book of Job (Chapter 32), ironically the very work that had first drawn Gilchrist to Blake. Apart from that, they touched virtually nothing in the first volume, because they were not permitted to. Anne regarded the text of the biography as a sacred to Gilchrist’s memory. She was its sole guardian. ‘I think you will not find it hard to forgive me a little reluctance,’ she wrote to William Rossetti, ‘that any living tones should blend with that voice which here speaks for the last time on earth.’
But how far she herself added new materials from Alexander’s notes, or made stylistic changes, must remain more problematic. In April 1862 she was speaking of ‘incorporating all the additional matter contained in the notes’ into a final draft, which sounds quite radical. But by the end of May, the position was almost reversed. ‘I am glad to say I find the Manuscript even more complete than I anticipated, and that a large mass of Notes which I had thought contained new matter, were merely for reference and verification.’ To the end of her days Anne insisted that she was nothing more than her husband’s ‘editor’. But since Gilchrist’s original manuscript has not survived, there is no way of knowing precisely how she understood this role.
However, it is difficult to find evidence of any large editorial additions or interventions. For example, Alexander had frequently lamented his failure to develop any proper critical commentary on the poetry (as opposed to the illuminations) of Blake’s ‘Prophetic Books’. Anne was clearly tempted to remedy this. ‘I found the only grave omission in the book – the only place where dear Alec had left an absolute blank that must be filled in – was for some account of Blake’s mystic writings, or ‘Prophetic Books’, as he called them.’
But although she consulted with Rossetti, she did not in the end attempt to add any significant commentary, writing ruefully: ‘I could heartily wish the difficult problem presented by these strange Books had been successfully grappled with, or indeed grappled with at all. Hardly anything has now been attempted beyond bringing together a few readable extracts…They are at least psychologically curious and important.’ The omission is very clear, for example in the desultory remarks on Jerusalem in Chapter 21, despite the fact that Anne had meticulously copied out the entire text by hand, from a rare copy loaned with great reluctance (‘only for a week’) by Monckton Milnes.
In fact, she seems to have conceived her main role as protecting what Alexander had written and quoted. There was some need for this. The genial Palmer was desperate to avoid anything that hinted at ‘blasphemy, while Macmillan was acutely nervous of Blake’s erotic writing; he anxiously read every line of the proofs, and questioned even single lines from the poems, especially those from The Daughters of Albion’. William Rossetti wrote: The pervading idea of “The Daughters of Albion” is one which was continually seethling in Blake’s mind, and flustering Propriety in his writings…It is the idea of the unnatural and terrible result in which, in modern society, ascetic doctrines in theology and morals have involved the relations of the sexes…in [this] cause he is never tired of uprearing the banner of heresy and non-conformity.’
Anne replied on 3 October 1862: ‘I am afraid you will
