The Romantics in Rome, and a Review of Whitman, From the Rossetti Library
MARIO, Jessie White.
Sepolcri inglesi in Roma. Rome, Tipografia Barbèra, 1879.
[bound with:]
[WHITMAN.] GILCHRIST, Anne. ‘A Confession of Faith’ from To-Day, June 1885.
[and with:]
MERRIMAN, Helen Bigelow. ‘The English Pre-Raphaelite and poetical school of painters’ from The Andover Review, Boston 1884.
[and twelve other works in English, German and French.]
Fifteen works, 8vo, Mario: pp. [4], 21, [1], with two albumen photographs (of the tombs of Keats and Shelley) laid down and captioned in pen; title-page (or wrapper) on blue paper; presentation inscription in purple pen to blank leaf at front; Merriman: pp. iv, 593–612; Gilchrist: pp. 269–284; bound together in late nineteenth-century half green roan marbled paper sides, edges rubbed; ownership inscriptions and manuscript index to front endpaper of William Michael Rossetti, ownership inscription of his daughter Mary Elizabeth Madox Rossetti (dated 1919).
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Sepolcri inglesi in Roma.
A presentation copy of this very rare essay (first printed in Nuova Antologia earlier in 1879) on the English Romantic poets buried in Rome, inscribed ‘To William Michael Rossetti with gratitude for the joy derived from the perusal of his beautiful editions of Shelley … JWMario Rome 25th June 1879’. The photographic illustrations appear only in this separate edition.
Jessie White Mario (also known as ‘Hurricane Jessie’) had started working with Mazzini in London in the cause of Italian unification, and was arrested in Genoa after accompanying him there in 1857. She was a nurse to Garibaldi’s forces in the 1860s, and devoted herself to social issues and journalism in the ’70s. William Michael Rossetti had first met ‘this true heroine’ just before her departure for Italy in 1857 (Some Reminiscences). BL only in Library Hub.
Anne Gilchrist’s ‘A Confession of Faith’ (from To-Day, June 1885), summarises her views on Walt Whitman. Gilchrist had been introduced to Whitman’s work by William Michael Rossetti and wrote the first important critical appreciation of the poet in 1870, later moving to America and establishing a close friendship with him. Whitman asked Gilchrist to send ten copies of the present article to him, and given her close connection to Rossetti, it is likely she also sent a copy to him. Rossetti called her ‘a woman who has read and thought much, and whom to know is to respect and esteem in every relation, whether of character, intellect, or culture’.
Other works in the volume include a ‘superficial’ article on the Pre-Raphaelites by Helen Merriman (Fredeman 78.3); a group of six satirical, illustrated German magazines on Napoleon III (O. Humburg’s Humoristica etc., bought by WMR in Nuremberg and Munich in October 1870); an undated edition of Washington Irving’s The History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty … by Diederich Knickerbocker; and the libretto of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (Mainz, 1877).