William Michael Rossetti

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William Michael Rossetti (25 September 1829 – 5 February 1919) was an English writer and critic from London. He came from a talented family: his father was Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and his brothers and sisters included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti. In 1848 he helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, served as its unofficial organizer and bibliographer, and edited its literary magazine The Germ, which ran four issues in 1850. He also wrote poetry reviews for The Germ and recorded the group’s aims at their founding meeting.

Though Rossetti worked full-time as a civil servant, he produced a large amount of criticism and biography. He edited the diaries of his maternal uncle John William Polidori, wrote a biography of his brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and edited the collected works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. He also produced the first British edition of Walt Whitman’s poetry in 1868, which was censored in parts. He helped start a correspondence between Whitman and Anne Gilchrist. He contributed to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on art topics, though his writings were later seen as less up-to-date by some scholars.

In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of painter Ford Madox Brown. They had several children: Olivia (1875), Gabriel Arthur (1877), Helen (1879), and twins Mary Elizabeth and Michael Ford (1881). The children were educated at home, and they did not have them baptized. Michael died in infancy. Olivia later married Antonio Agresti and lived in Italy; she became a translator and writer and corresponded with Ezra Pound. Arthur became a scientist and married Dora Lewis; Helen became a painter and married Gastone Angeli, with a daughter Imogen Lucy born in 1904.

William Michael Rossetti died on 5 February 1919, aged 89, and is buried in the Rossetti family grave at Highgate Cemetery, alongside his parents, his sister Christina, and Elizabeth Siddal. The grave later received the ashes of his son Gabriel Arthur Maddox and other Rossetti family members.