Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel by Lucinda Hawksley

An icon of the Victorian age, thanks in no small way to the portrait of her as Ophelia by John Millais, Lizzie Siddal is the tragic heroine of the Pre-Raphaelite era, the doomed wife and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the suicide dead of an overdose at the age of thirty two.


A stunner, spotted by Walter Howell Deverell while she worked in a millinery shop near Leicester Square, Lizzie started modeling for painting at the age of nineteen. She soon caught the eye of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and quickly became her muse. Unfortunately, Dante could never quite bring himself to introduce her to his family, let alone propose marriage.

Lizzie endured poor health most of her life, and although there is no precise diagnosis of what exactly it was that ailed her, the Hawksley’s biography suggests that it may well have been an eating disorder combined with bouts of depression. It wasn’t long before she began self medicating:

Whatever the original ailment was, Lizzie began alleviating it with one of the nineteenth century’s most common drugs, laudanum. It was that which was prove her downfall… Laudanum, otherwise known as “tincture of opium”, was a mixture of opium and alcohol. It was available widely and without prescription. Laudanum was perceived as a cure-all-painkiller, much as aspirin or paracetamol are viewed today.

Laudanum, still available today under strict prescription, was available without license just about anywhere. It was a panacea:

To understand why laudanum was so widely taken, one needs to look at the vast list of disparate symptoms it was claimed to alleviate. These included symptoms of alcoholism (even though alcohol was the main ingredient of the “medicine”), bedwetting, bronchitis, chilblains, cholera, coughs and colds, depression, diarrhoea, dysentery, earache, flatulence, gout, gynaecological problems, headaches, hysteria, insanity, menopause, morning sickness, muscle fatigue, nausea, nervous tension, period pains, rheumatism, stomachache, teething in babies and toothache in adults.

By the mid 1850s, Lizzie, still hanging on for an offer of marriage from Dante Gabriel, was addicted and laudanum was a constant companion in their relationship. She was no mean artist and poet herself, although her output suffered from her intake of the noxious stuff:

Her style is erratic, sometimes drawn with clarity, at other times sketchy and rough – indicative of the amount of laudanum she had taken before starting.

As the decade wore to a close, Lizzie’s illness grew worse and more life threatening. Sojourning in Matlock to take the waters, she fell desperately ill:

The years of laudanum addiction had taken hold and her symptoms were advanced and pathetic. She was unable to ingest anything without vomiting, she was weak, terribly thin and could summon up little creative energy.

Dante Gabriel came to see her and she recovered, but when he left again, fuelling her (not unjustified) suspicions that he was fooling around with other women she grew sick once more. In Hastings in 1860 she was at death’s door, and Rossetti finally married her, convinced that she wouldn’t make it to the church. Once again, she rallied, soon falling pregnant, but tragically, the baby was still-born. Lizzie was destroyed by grief:

Her usual tendency to depression, combined with a new pressure of post-natal depression, led to a dangerously increased dependence on laudanum… Rossetti later admitted that he had known her to take up to a hundred drops of laudanum in one dose.

In February 1862, Dante Gabriel went out for supper:

When he returned home at half past eleven, Rossetti found Lizzie snoring very loudly and disconcertingly. The bottle of laudanum beside the bed, which had been half-full earlier in the day, was now empty and ominously a note addressed to him was pinned to her nightgown.

The note was burned: as a suicide she would have been denied Christian burial as well as being deemed to have broken the law. As he mourned, Dante Gabriel slipped a book of poetry into her coffin before the burial. The sad coda to this tale is that seven years later, finding himself in an artistic rut, he regretted this noble act and was persuaded to have the poems exhumed.

Hawksley’s biography is a sympathetic and touching account of the tragically short life of one of the most famous faces of the 19th century; definitely one to be filed under the ‘perils and pains’...

And what did you learn?

The fruit of one of those great ideas that I get, when I fail to bear in mind how much work the whole project is actually going to involve, A Good Old Fashioned 120 Unit Week came into existence 13 months and 99 books ago, last July. For my 100th post, I have decided to look back on the whole boozy enterprise and ask myself “...and what did you learn?” Well, what indeed...

The premise of the blog is still as it was when it started, to chronicle the pleasures, pains and perils of alcohol, in all its guises, as described by the world’s writers. These criteria are so woolly that I’ve managed to squeeze numerous biographies, a history of the Tour de France, Elizabeth David’s cookery books, and two references to the Bible into my posts, in between the usual boozy suspects such as Kingsley Amis and Jaroslav Hašek. It has kept me busy, at any rate. Oh, and before anyone asks, the most frequent references to alcohol I've found have been on wine...

I don’t think any feelings I had about the sauce have changed significantly since starting the blog. I have, however, learned the origin of the phrase “On the wagon” and have discovered a good bit about the workings of AA (I particularly liked Clarissa Dickson Wright’s line that the higher power one of her fellow members looked to was The Times Crossword).

Regarding writers and writing, I’ve introduced myself to Martina Cole and Helen Fielding, (Cole is a lot more fun...), I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably learned more about the craft of writing in three chapters of Stephen King’s The Shining that I did struggling through John Updike’s Couples, I was unexpectedly impressed by Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and sadly disappointed by the Leslie Thomas’s Tropic of Ruislip.

Favourite book? Not telling. Not because I’m trying to cultivate an air of mystery, but because I genuinely can’t decide. I’m eternally grateful for the train of thought that delivered me to Dan Farson’s autobiography, as I am also to the set of events that found me taking out Denise Hooker’s biog of Nina Hamnett. I will say though that I thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the best book I read last year...

Back to normal next week – I’m now posting weekly now, in an effort to getting something done in my spare time other than scouring books for references to electric soup. In the meantime, please feel free to comment on your own favourites, or on anything that you feel ought to be covered in the next year of 120 Units. Chin chin until then...

The Shining by Stephen King

A bit like Jaws (qv) I came to The Shining having originally seen the film with its iconic performance by Jack Nicholson (“Here’s Johnny!”) and direction by Stanley Kubrick. A step back to the original source material is well worth the effort; The Shining is easily one of King’s best novels.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Disgraced English teacher and retired alcoholic Jack Torrance is hired to looked after The Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies during the closed winter season. Isolated there with his wife and son, whose telepathic abilities are dubbed shining, he succumbs to cabin fever and tries to kill his family, aided and abetted in no small way by the supernatural forces in the hotel itself. King sets this up in a few chapters, and then spends the next four hundred pages scaring heck out of the reader...

It’s certainly a drinker’s book. By all accounts King was shifting it a bit around the time of writing, and Jack’s struggles with the sauce are heartfelt and visceral. Sober for over a year since he broke his son’s arm, Jack has ‘white knuckled’ his withdrawal from the drink with no AA meetings or medical assistance, no help whatsoever, just his ever weakening resolve:

...a bitterly powerful wave of nostalgia swept over him, and the physical craving for a drink seemed to work itself up from his belly to his throat to his mouth and nose, shrivelling and wrinkling the tissues as it went, making them cry out for something wet and long and cold.

Having just been accused of trying to strangle his son, he has left his terrified wife locked in the staff quarters upstairs in the hotel and wandered into the deserted Colorado Lounge. Peering into the dark, he sees bottles on the empty shelves.

The shelves were totally bare. But now, lit only murkily by the light which filtered through from the dining room (which was itself only dimly lit because of the snow blocking the windows), he thought he saw ranks and ranks of bottles twinkling mutedly behind the bar, and siphons, and even beer dripping from the spigots of all three highly polished taps.

Hallucinating, play acting, reminiscing, Jack approaches the bar:

“Hi Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?” Lloyd said it was. Lloyd asked him what it would be. “Now, I’m really glad you asked me that,” Jack said, “Really glad. Because I happen to have two twenties and two tens in my wallet and I was afraid they’d be sitting right there until sometime next April. There isn’t a Seven-Eleven around here, would you believe it? And I thought they had Seven-Elevens on the fucking moon.” Lloyd sympathized. “So here’s what,” Jack said. “You set me up an even twenty martinis. An even twenty, just like that, kazang. One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on. You can do that, can’t you? You aren’t too busy?”

And somewhere in Jacks mind it’s very real indeed:

Jack contemplated the twenty imaginary drinks, the martini glasses blushing droplets of condensation, each with a swizzle poked through a plump green olive. He could almost smell gin on the air.

As Jack starts his inexorable descent into madness and violence, The Shining shows itself to be a masterpiece of psychological terror.

My Soviet Kitchen by Amy Spurling

“Let’s start from the fact... that beer isn’t alcohol.” An observation that suggests it is in fact a palette cleanser between shots of vodka. But then again, we are in the land of Homo sovieticus, the collection of countries that formerly made up the USSR.

Ivy Stone is a shy Ph.D. student, ostensibly in Russia for a few weeks to research The Colorado Potato Beetle Phenomenon and Reduction Consequences for the Ovcharskii Oblast post-Soviet Collectivization. That’s the plan at least, but pretty soon she runs into old friends and wakes up with a crashing hangover and proposal of marriage to someone she can’t remember. Still, this is the place for it:

But I’m now in the country of maximalism and white spirit suitable for human consumption (‘drinkable’ is written on the label with a sort of black and white Kwik-Save ‘No Frills’ stamp). It’s so strong, practically 100 percent, that you have to dilute it with water... Once drunk, this liquid refreshes parts of your personality that other spirits cannot reach.

Of course, the sensible thing to do when faced with a mystery fiancé is to get involved with someone else, so neglecting her studies, Ivy starts a whirlwind romance with K.K., physicist and shady businessman, who takes her off to Tashkent and Tallinn where she encounters the local firewater:

I took a sip from my shot glass of Vana Original and my mouth immediately felt fiery. The next sip burned and soothed the back of my throat in equal measure... A wonderful warming sensation was emanating from my cheeks to my neck glands. After a few glasses of this stuff I wouldn’t mind betting you’re ready to start a really good family row.

The problem with whirlwind romances though is that they have a habit of going awry and Ivy finds herself alone with a bottle of vodka in her Moscow flat on New Year’s Eve when she’d expected to spend it with a now incommunicado K.K. These are the moments that you need your friends and an impromptu party is convened on the first day of the New Year. It’s quite a hooley. Eighteen seems-like-eighty guests turn up with drink, snacks and a starting pistol:

It appears that during a drunken argument or bet – something drunken anyway – Sportsman fired his pistol... “Give me that,” I say. It is the vodka that grabs a shiny weapon off a pumped-up male. To keep it out of sight I temporarily put it in the fridge.

There’s an acknowledged debt to Bridget Jones, but Fielding’s book doesn’t come with a companion guide of recipes and anecdotes. And neither does she produce little gems like the following:

“In a survey which asked, ‘How much can you drink?’ 40 percent of the nation said, ‘Can’t remember, the evening began early’; 40 percent said, ‘Don’t know, the evening finished late’; 15 percent said, ‘Can’t say, we’re still drinking’. And the rest didn’t understand the question.”

All you ever needed to know, really...