Sheffield Academic Press, UK
16 Chayne Walk as it was when Rossetti lived there. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
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Dear Mr. RossettiThe Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Hall Caine 1878~1881 The letters that passed between a young unknown provincial journalist and a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet give a fascinating sidelight on 1880s literary life.
Why I wrote Dear Mr. RossettiI wrote Dear Mr. Rossetti because I had seen the almost complete correspondence between him and Hall Caine while researching Caine's biography. There was a considerable quantity of interesting material which could not be fitted into that book. When commissioned for this book by my publishers, I thought that it would be relatively easy to blend together the letters by their dates. How wrong I was! In those days, letters were hand delivered and usually the same day, so many of them were headed "10 o'clock today" and nothing else! This meant having to analyse every sentence of every letter to find the sequence and writing many bridging notes. It was a jigsaw with some of the pieces not having any picture on them. From the Dust CoverThe letters that passed between a young unknown provincial journalist and a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet over a period of two years give a fascinating sidelight on 1880’s literary life. They illuminate the last years of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the start of a career that was to make Hall Caine the most popular and best-selling, romantic novelist of his lime. The value and interest of this book lie in the fact that both sides of a correspondence are printed here together for the first time. It should appeal both to specialists and the general reader.
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