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...

Couples by John Updike

I’ve enjoyed Updike in the past, but for some reason struggled with this one, his 1968 novel about the adulterous affairs between a set of ten families living in a small Massachusetts town in the mid 1960s. Apparently, it’s frank depictions of the sexual act and the post-pill paradise garnered it some notoriety; maybe I’m jaded, but I found it overwritten and below the author’s usual standard.


Anyway, this is a booze blog, not a sex blog, so on to the drinking. Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book, which describes the far too long a cocktail time before lunch. Foxy Whitman is a newcomer to the town of Tarbox, having just arrived there from Cambridge with her husband Ken:

To put herself at ease she had drunk too much. Under the mechanical urging of her inflexibly frowning host she had accepted two martinis and then, with such stupid false girlishness, a third; feeling a squirm of nausea, she had gone to the kitchen seeking a dilution of vermouth and had whispered her secret to her hostess, a drunken girlish thing to do that would have outraged Ken, yet the kind of thing she felt was desired of her in this company.

Ah, diluted vermouth. Perfect for morning sickness... All manner of social convention can be observed when alcohol is produced:

Frank Appleby was given two bottles to uncork, local-liquor-store Bordeaux, and went around the table twice, pouring once for the ladies, and then for the men. In Cambridge the Chianti was passed from hand to hand without ceremony.

Well, we’re not in Cambridge anymore...

A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

I was first introduced to Doyle’s work on stage, in Dublin with my father back in 1994 when we saw his fantastic play Brown Bread. A Star Called Henry similarly uses comedy to take on big themes, and there’s little bigger than the birth of his country and the Easter Rising which forms the main part of the first half of the novel.


Henry is a fourteen year old youth, six foot two, handy with his fists, and already a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. His father was a doorman at a brothel, a one legged bruiser who would swing his wooden prosthetic with skull-cracking dexterity, the bane of rozzers and drunken punters.

Henry Senior’s first meeting with Henry’s mother is hardly auspicous. Twenty two, one legged and dead drunk, he stumbles straight in front of the lovely Melody Nash as she walks back from early mass on Sunday:

She walked right into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg.

At first, she not unreasonably concludes that he’s dead. She checks for life and gets little more than monosyllables:

The man groaned again. He drew his arms in and braced himself. Then he crawled one kneed off the road, over the gutter. Melody picked up the shovel. He groaned again and vomited. A day and half’s drinking poured out of him like black pump water.

And yet Henry Senior is also an absolute charmer and whisks young Melody off her feet. Soon enough they’re getting hitched, and the wedding is in full swing. Melody is getting ‘the talk’ about babies from all the older women in the room. Fortunately, there’s a distraction and she can escape:

She was saved by the fight that broke out when a couple of moochers that nobody knew were caught helping themselves to the bottles of stout. – Yer dirty lousers! Granny Nash jumped onto one of them and bit him on the cheek... The man was trying to save his face but his arms were stiffened by all the bottles and sandwiches stuffed up his sleeves.

For some reason, Melody thinks that this is unsuitable conduct for her wedding:

Melody had had enough. – You’re ruining my day! she screamed. Granda Nash dropped the leg. – Sure Jaysis, love, he said. –The day would’ve been ruined altogether if they’d got away with the rest of the bottles.

And so on to Henry Junior, who abandoned to the streets at the age of nine, finds himself manning the barricades at the GPO in Easter 1916...

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

"He had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," said Christopher Robin Milne of his father, author of Winnie the Pooh, which is a good point of reference for the poisonous legacy of the Hayseed Chronicles featuring Mr Toppit, the book within a book in Charles Elton’s debut.

Arthur Hayman has published five books in the Chronicles but is killed (run over by a cement truck in Soho) just as the sinister presence in the books, Mr Toppit – a sort of diabolical counterpart to Enid Blyton’s Mr Pink Whistle – emerges from the Darkwood in their final paragraph.

His son, Luke, immortalised as Luke Hayseed both in print and the ridiculous illustrations by the family German teacher, Lila, narrates most of the book with an icy detachment, his way of coping with the sudden fame incurred by the books becoming a posthumous publishing phenomenon thanks to Laurie Clow, a DJ on a hospital radio station in California.

Five years after his father’s death, Luke is at a party the night before he goes to America to visit Laurie, now a chat show host in LA. The books have bought the family great wealth, but it’s a tainted legacy. His sister Rachel, who invites him round, is drug addled and neurotic. Still, the rest of the guests are an entertaining mix of foreigners, actors and a priest:

Although it was summer and still light outside, the curtains were drawn and the room was lit by candles. There was a peculiar smell that Claude said was church incense. “The best, the very best,” he said. “I nicked it from All Saints, Margaret Street.” The priest laughed so much that he knocked over the jug that contained the special cocktail Claude had made with vodka and blue Curaçao.

Rachel flees the party and Luke finds her downstairs:

She handed me a bottle of clear liquid. “What is it?” “Grappa. It’s made from all the grape crap left behind after they’ve done the wine. Claude loves it. It’s Italian. Don’t’ drink it all.” The grappa seemed to avoid my stomach and go straight to my head so when Rachel came back I was feeling a bit dizzy.

The party carries on into street and finishes with a police caution for all involved. Still, it’s a fairly abstemious evening compared to a night out in California when Luke ends up visiting Travis, one of Laurie’s staff, late at night. He’s with Merry, the daughter of Laurie’s friends. She’s also cutting up lines of coke and knocking back the tequila:

She showed me how they had been drinking the tequila. You put some salt on the back of your hand, licked it off, took a big swig, then sucked a lime quarter. Its sharpness made me shiver as the tequila went down.

And then the toot kicks in:

I was trying to concentrate. Of course, nothing happened instantly. I’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner and then there had been the tequila so I knew I was a bit drunk, but the odd thing was that gradually my head cleared. When you’re drunk you get a bit sluggish but suddenly the blood was moving round my body more efficiently. In a while I could feel every pulse inside me working in unison, like those oilfields you see with the pumps going up and down like crazy. The next time we combined it with tequila. Slug of drink, lick of salt, suck lime, snort line.

Needless to say, all this hellraising is going to come to bad end and Luke finds himself compromised, to say the least. But then again, the misfortune is spread around equally. As the Chronicles themselves say:

And out of the Darkwood Mr Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us.