William Michael Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti kept the minutes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and spent sixty years editing everyone else's work. He was the younger brother of Dante Gabriel and the elder of Christina, and the only one of the four Rossetti children with a salary - a clerk in the Excise Office from fifteen, rising through it for forty-nine years while supporting the household. He was one of the seven founders of the Brotherhood in 1848 although he did not paint, and was made its secretary and the editor of its magazine, The Germ, which ran to four issues. His diary of the movement is the primary source for it, and he wrote art criticism for the Spectator for decades - one of the earliest to defend Whistler and to take Blake seriously. The editing is the life's work: Shelley, Blake, Whitman - whose first English selection he produced in 1868, bowdlerised, to Whitman's annoyance and advantage - and then the collected works, letters and memoirs of his brother and sister after they died. He married Lucy Madox Brown in 1874 and had five children; she painted until the marriage and not much after. He was a freethinker and a republican, which he kept quiet at the Excise, and an early enthusiast for Italian unification. He died in 1919 at eighty-nine, the last of the founders. He had catalogued a movement he was the least remembered member of, and the catalogue is why the others are remembered accurately. The one thing he did not preserve with the same care was his wife's work, which is a fair criticism of an otherwise scrupulous man.

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