This article establishes some key points of contact between William Burges (1827–1881), called ‘the only Pre-Raphaelite architect’, and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), an intimate of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and often referred to as a Pre-Raphaelite poet for some of his verse produced during the 1860s, though later seen as a foundational literary figure for Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence. The first to examine the relationship between these major contributors to the Victorian arts, this article breaks new ground as it documents and considers their recorded meetings and indicates their shared characteristics and mutual interests. It also adds valuable context by situating both men within their wider networks and cultural circles, and indicating their links to events and trends of their time.

For those less familiar with Swinburne’s poetry and career, he was born into an aristocratic High Church family and spent his childhood on the Isle of Wight. After attending Eton he started his undergraduate studies at Balliol College, Oxford in January 1856. In the autumn of 1857 he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and other Pre-Raphaelite associates when the artists were painting their Arthurian frescoes on the walls of the Oxford Union. Writing in September 1857 to William Morris, who was away at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, Rossetti informed him that ‘we have unearthed a new poet who is charming’.¹ There was an immediate creative and personal rapport between the three artists and Swinburne, who had been writing poetry since boyhood and shared his new friends’ passion for medieval legends and classical myth. ‘Now we were four in company and not three’, declared Burne-Jones.² The relationship continued to grow and thrive when, after leaving Oxford in 1860, Swinburne, supported by an allowance from his father, settled in London in 1861 and started his writing career in earnest. 1866 saw the publication of his first and most famous verse collection Poems and Ballads which includes both classical and medieval subjects and quickly became notorious for its frank sensuality. In addition to novels, dramas, and critical prose, Swinburne would go on to produce many more volumes of poetry, including his Arthurian epic Tristram of Lyonesse, published in 1881.³

The key source for the Swinburne–Burges relationship is the diary of the painter George Price Boyce, who lived in the rooms above Burges at 15 Buckingham Street, Strand, a house overlooking the Thames. Boyce took up residence in Buckingham Street in April 1856 and Burges moved in shortly afterwards on 25 June, using his rooms both as home and office.⁴ By the end of December the two men were evidently on amicable terms, meaning that Boyce, who mixed with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, would subsequently introduce Burges to artists such as Morris, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Simeon Solomon. Boyce recorded Rossetti and Morris as members of the Committee of the Medieval Society who met in Burges’s rooms on 7 May 1858 (BP, II, p. 1022). The names of Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones also occur in Burges’s diary abstract for 1859 in the ‘Persons’ column where entry can indicate either the first meeting with a significant new acquaintance or a meaningful interaction with the named party.⁵ Not everyone whom Burges met automatically appears in the ‘Persons’ column: the names of Henry Holiday and Simeon Solomon, both painters who contributed to his Great Bookcase, do not appear until 1864 and 1867 respectively, although Boyce’s diary indicates that he introduced Solomon to Burges on 13 February 1858 (BP, II, p. 1020). George Boyce himself met Swinburne for the first time at Oxford on Sunday, 6 March 1859 when, after a trip on the river with some other men to Godstow ‘to see the future Mrs William Morris’, he commented ‘we all dined (Swinburne included) at Topsy’s (Morris’). He and Swinburne mad and deafening with excitement.’ Boyce’s first impression was not entirely favourable: ‘Swinburne, a man of great reading, memory, and intellectual cleverness and accomplishment, seemed to be wanting in human feeling’ (BP, II, p. 1029). It seems all too likely that on his return home Boyce would have shared his impressions with Burges.

Swinburne and Burges are first recorded as meeting on 19 July 1862 when Boyce reports ‘Rossetti and Swinburne called on me. We went down and tea’d in Burges’s room’ (BP, II, p. 1064). However, their acquaintance likely predated this as Swinburne had by then been resident in London for well over a year and in constant contact with the Pre-Raphaelite set. He left Oxford in June 1860 after a riding accident prevented him taking his final exams. He joined his family, recently returned from foreign travel, in London where he received further medical treatment for his injuries, and then for the rest of the year seems to have divided his time between his London friends and his family home on the Isle of Wight, with a brief September trip to Capheaton, Northumberland, for his grandfather’s funeral.⁶ On 1 August 1860 Boyce reported seeing Swinburne when calling on Burne-Jones who was ‘at work on a figure of art for Burges’s bookcase’ (BP, II, p. 1042). This would have been Art, a seated female figure holding an orb, occupying the central panel of three in the gilded pediment of the Great Bookcase, for which Burne-Jones was paid the sum of five pounds.⁷ We can therefore assume Swinburne would have known all about Burges and his bookcase by that date.

During this period, Swinburne was among the ‘frequent and welcome visitors’ to Red House at Upton, the new home of William and Jane Morris, specially designed for them by Philip Webb.⁸ The Morrises, who had married in April 1859, took up residence in June 1860 with their friends visiting from August onwards and helping them with schemes for decoration.⁹ Swinburne also reconnected with Rossetti, who had married Elizabeth Siddal in May, with the couple settled in lodgings adjoining his studio at Chatham Place, Blackfriars, by mid-November. An early drawing of Swinburne by Rossetti now owned by the scholar and collector Mark Samuels Lasner is inscribed August 1860. The Rossettis, too, were regular visitors at Red House at this time.¹⁰ Early copies of Swinburne’s first book The Queen-Mother and Rosamond, a volume of two plays ‘Affectionately inscribed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, were available by 1 November 1860 and the book was officially out in December, though it met with little success.¹¹ Swinburne joined his family in January 1861 in the French Riviera resort of Menton (which he detested) before travelling on his own for some weeks in Italy. It is unclear whether he had already established London lodgings the previous year, but on his return from Italy in 1861 he settled in the Bloomsbury district of London at 16 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, very near to where the newly married Burne-Joneses were living at Russell Place.¹² According to Georgiana Burne-Jones, they ‘saw a great deal of him; sometimes twice or three times a day he would come in, bringing his poems hot from his heart and certain of welcome and a hearing at any hour’ (I, p. 215). Through Burne-Jones, Swinburne seems to have met Simeon Solomon, whose own contribution to Burges’s bookcase, ‘St John and the Angel Measuring the New Jerusalem’, bears the date 1860 on the panel.¹³ Boyce recorded seeing both Swinburne and Solomon at Burne-Jones’s house on 1 June 1861.¹⁴

As Charlotte Ribeyrol has speculated, Swinburne may have served as a model for one of the figures on Burges’s Great Bookcase (pp. 90–91). Striking in appearance with his copper-red hair, Swinburne had already appeared in various paintings and drawings by his artist friends by the time the bookcase was completed. He later said that following their introduction in Oxford ‘Gabriel almost instantly asked me to sit (or stand) to him — but the intended fresco was never even begun’.¹⁵ He features in early portraits by William Bell Scott (1860) and Rossetti (1860, 1861 (Fig. 1)), as a kneeling medieval lover kissed by his mistress in Rossetti’s planned frontispiece for his edition of The Early Italian Poets (1861), and as a bagpipe-holding shepherd in Burne-Jones’s Adoration of the Kings and Shepherds (1861). Along with others from Rossetti’s inner circle, he also probably appears in the nativity scene in the central panel of the triptych titled The Seed of David which the painter produced for Llandaff Cathedral between 1858 and 1864, the panel being completed in 1861.¹⁶ At Red House Swinburne almost certainly featured in some of the figurative schemes painted by Morris and his artist friends on the walls and furniture of his new home. According to Swinburne’s friend and early biographer Edmund Gosse, Swinburne liked to read his poems aloud to the artists while they were at work (p. 70). Tessa Wild identifies Swinburne as the model for an 1860 watercolour study by Burne-Jones of ‘a seated red-headed figure intently reading an illuminated manuscript’ as a preparatory work for the Red House wall painting The Wedding Feast of Sire Degrevaunt and suggests that ‘His flame-coloured hair and laurel wreath are closely allied to Melidor’s in The Wedding Procession’, a drawing-room wall painting.¹⁷ It is tempting to see Swinburne as the model for the auburn-haired winged figure of Love in Rossetti’s Dantis Amor (Tate Britain), a design for the central panel of three for the huge dining-room cabinet or ‘settle’ at Red House and painted in or after December 1860. Gosse remarks that

His remarkable head was often recognisable in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Philip Webb used to report that when the early Morris glass was exposed at Scarborough, George Campfield, one of the best workmen of the firm, shouted out, ‘Blest if they haven’t put in little Carroty-locks.’ This was a reference to Swinburne, whose portrait he detected. (pp. 70–71)

Fig. 1: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Portrait of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1861). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Wikimedia Commons.

If Burges had not met Swinburne prior to the July 1862 tea recorded by Boyce, which seems unlikely, he must have heard him talked about and seen his likeness. Burges himself lists visiting Red House in the abstract of his 1861 diary where he must have been keen to see Morris’s medieval-inspired decorative schemes and painted furniture.¹⁸

Swinburne’s many appearances in early Pre-Raphaelite artworks add weight to Ribeyrol’s suggestion that he is a good candidate as a model for the auburn-haired boatman Phaon in the panel ‘Sappho and Phaon’ which Henry Holiday painted for Burges’s bookcase after receiving the commission early in 1861 (Fig. 2).¹⁹ This panel represents ‘Poetry’, so Swinburne as the rising young poetic star would seem a good choice. (In 1861, according to Rossetti, Swinburne’s eminent friend Richard Monckton Milnes was ‘a great admirer of him as the young poet of the day’.²⁰) While at Eton, Swinburne had conceived an intense admiration for the classical poet Sappho, whom he regarded as a poetic and spiritual sister.²¹ Interested only in her relationships with women, he nonetheless may have found it amusing to pose as the supposed male object of her affection. As can be seen from photographs and portraits, he did have a modest moustache at this time so Phaon’s unusual, pronounced, and very unclassical moustache may be a visual joke, as the name ‘Algernon’ derives from the Anglo-Norman meaning ‘with moustaches’. Ribeyrol proposes that Swinburne had also appeared with a moustache as St George on William Morris’s painted St George Cabinet of 1861–62, displayed, like Burges’s bookcase, in the London International Exhibition in South Kensington which ran from 1 May to 1 November 1862 (p. 91). That said, Phaon sports a moustache in Burges’s original design for the panel which can be seen online in the RIBA collection, dated in the accompanying catalogue note to 1859 (Fig. 3).²² (If that date is correct, then Holiday’s name, which appears just beneath the drawing, was presumably added later by Burges.) It is of course Holiday’s interpretation, his fleshing out of the design, and his use of colour — in particular Phaon’s red hair — that suggest the link with Swinburne. However, in his biography, Holiday claimed to have met Swinburne ‘occasionally about the time of his “Atalanta”’, a reference to his first successful publication, his classical verse drama Atalanta in Calydon which came out in March 1865 (p. 261). One might feel a certain scepticism about this claim because in 1861, when Holiday was working on this panel, he was great friends with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and, in particular, Simeon Solomon, all of whom were constantly in Swinburne’s company, so it seems very unlikely that the two would not have met at this point. Moreover, Holiday may well have been influenced by many other contemporary artistic images of Swinburne. He was a huge admirer of Rossetti, writing that ‘One of my greatest delights about this time was visiting Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s studio’ (p. 75). Clearly much influenced by Rossetti’s style and his fondness for red hair, it is perfectly possible that Holiday used Swinburne’s image or aspects of it without the poet formally modelling for him.

Fig. 2: Henry Holiday, Sappho and Phaon, detail of a panel on William Burges’s Great Bookcase. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Fig. 3: Image of the original design for the Sappho and Phaon panel on William Burges’s Great Bookcase. RIBA Collections.

George Boyce records that on 16 August 1862, he, Rossetti, and Swinburne went to the International Exhibition, a show all three almost certainly attended more than once.²³ There, they would have visited the spectacular displays of painted furniture by Morris, Burges, and others in the Medieval Court where Burges’s Great Bookcase was the stand-out attraction. Swinburne defended the medieval work of his Pre-Raphaelite friends in the conclusion of a now little-known satirical article originally written for The Spectator titled ‘M. Prudhomme on Art and Science at the International Exhibition’, unpublished in his lifetime. This piece mocks conservative or philistine critics in the form of Prudhomme, a figure of fun created by the caricaturist Henri Monnier and which was the French bourgeois equivalent of the British Mrs Grundy.²⁴

William Burges himself refers to Swinburne twice in the yearly abstracts of his now sadly missing diaries. The first occasion is 5 October 1862 when he recorded that he breakfasted with Swinburne. This would have been at Swinburne’s lodgings at 77 Newman Street which he had moved into in July. This was to be a stop-gap arrangement until Tudor House, Cheyne Walk, the house Swinburne was to share with the recently bereaved Rossetti, became available in late October. Despite his short stay there, Swinburne had already hosted an earlier housewarming on 11 July that Burges may also have attended (BP, II, p. 1064). Burges would have known Newman Street well as, just a few doors away at No. 79 was Leigh’s Art School, later the Heatherley School of Art, which he, Rossetti, and many other notable artists of the day had attended. ‘Breakfasting’ sounds an informal kind of affair so one assumes that Burges and Swinburne must have been comfortable in each other’s company.

Short of stature, highly idiosyncratic, and driven by their passions and obsessions, both men have been described in various ways as ‘childlike’ and, socially, both were full of irrepressible high spirits, Swinburne’s often intensified by alcohol, which was his demon, as opium was Burges’s.²⁵ Neither married, though both appear to have nursed long-standing feelings for unobtainable women.²⁶ Both were smitten with a love of beauty, admired Tennyson, delighted in Dickens, were interested in classical and medieval literature, medieval and Renaissance art, and Italy. Burges had travelled extensively, especially in Italy, so Swinburne, who had made his first major trip in February 1861, probably enjoyed discussing it with him. Both loved rare books and manuscripts — Burges was a major collector of medieval manuscripts, while Swinburne had enjoyed access to the famous collection of his maternal uncle, Bertram, Lord Ashburnham, and over the course of his life would amass his own collection of rare books.²⁷

At their breakfast Swinburne undoubtedly would have recited some of his own recent poetry as was his usual habit when in company. Early poems that Burges might have heard and enjoyed are ‘A Ballad of Life’ and ‘A Ballad of Death’, which celebrate Lucrezia Borgia and replicate Italian medieval canzoni, a form recently highlighted by Rossetti’s masterly translations in his collection The Early Italian Poets (1861). Swinburne had apparently recited these two poems to George Boyce when he breakfasted with him the previous year in June 1861. Boyce was an appropriate auditor for such works as, from 1852, he had been the owner of a Rossetti watercolour (1851) originally depicting a Shakespearean subject though reworked by the artist and known as ‘Borgia’.²⁸ Rossetti may have reconceived the subject matter of his painting under Swinburne’s influence as the poet was fascinated by Lucrezia Borgia, whom he regarded as an iconic femme fatale, making her the heroine of his unfinished prose romance The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei, which he was working on in 1860.²⁹ However, the influence was possibly reciprocal as it has been suggested that the Rossetti painting owned by Boyce in which Lucrezia plays a small lute in the company of two leering men may have sparked Swinburne’s more dreamlike ‘Ballad of Life’ in which Lucrezia plays ‘a little cithern’ (cittern) accompanied by the three allegorical male figures of Lust, Shame, and Fear.³⁰ As Boyce was his near neighbour, Burges must have been very familiar with Rossetti’s watercolour and its history.

In addition to his two ‘Ballads’, Swinburne very likely also recited ‘August’, recently published in The Spectator in September 1862, a poem reminiscent of French troubadour poetry that alludes to a fragment by Sappho and Baudelaire’s synaesthetic verse.³¹ Sappho, immortalized on his bookcase, was apparently another interest Burges shared with Swinburne; a second image of the poet with her lyre can be found inside one of the drawers of his personal escritoire created in 1867–68.³² Alongside this classical reference, the medieval themes and allusions of all three poems would have appealed to Burges and all are full of the vibrant Pre-Raphaelite colours, especially red and gold, that he relished.

Burges and Swinburne also belonged to several of the same clubs and organizations — a detail which gives us insight into artistic social networks of the day. The Hogarth Club, originally conceived by Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and other members of their circle as a place independent of the Royal Academy where they might show their artworks, was formed in April 1858.³³ Swinburne was made a member by the end of the year; Burges by 1860. In a letter to William Michael Rossetti (24 October 1858), the painter William Bell Scott writes, ‘I met Algernon Swinburne that other day at Wallington, who tells me he is a member [of the Hogarth Club], whose name I find entered in the little printed list as C. Swinburn.’³⁴ Writing to Bell Scott on 16 December 1859, Swinburne mentions a ‘jolly fortnight’ spent in London after failing his exams for the Oxford Classics Pass School in mid-November. Declaring that he ‘left the Hogarth very flourishing, — and saw D. G. R.’s new poems and pictures’, he expresses admiration for Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata, his sensual painting of Fanny Cornforth then on display at the club: ‘She is more stunning than can decently be expressed.’³⁵ In the summer the club moved to 6 Waterloo Place where there was a good-sized room for displaying artworks. In March 1861 Boyce reported Burges as keen to ‘discuss the advisability of making the Hogarth Club a regular London Club for Artists’ (BP, II, p. 1051). Apart from exhibitions, the club offered a place to meet, exchange views about art, and socialize — ‘a club where we could chatter’, as Burne-Jones put it, although Ruskin resigned when a billiard table was installed.³⁶ There were weekly soirées on Fridays at 8pm, monthly general meetings, and open days during exhibitions for members and their guests. However, the club was short-lived, closing in December 1861.

The next and somewhat surprising group to which both Burges and Swinburne belonged was the Artists’ Rifles, a volunteer military corps of painters, sculptors, engravers, musicians, architects, and actors, first conceived in 1859 in the face of national anxiety about French invasion, and then formally established in early 1860 at the studio of the painter Henry Wyndham Phillips who became its first commander.³⁷ Its official headquarters was at Burlington House, shortly to be the new home of the Royal Academy, where drill was performed in the gardens at the rear. After the gardens were needed for more galleries, the corps moved to the Arts Club in Hanover Square in 1868. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais, Burne-Jones, Morris, Henry Holiday, Simeon Solomon, Boyce, and a host of other famous names signed up, with Swinburne noting in his letter to Scott of 16 December 1859: ‘D. G. R. and Ned Jones have entered [the] rifle-corps. Isn’t that a lark?’³⁸

Presumably, Swinburne must have followed suit as both he and Burges are listed as members.³⁹ Swinburne seems an odd recruit on account of his wild behaviour and intemperance, but he was fearless and a good horseman; aged 17 and inspired by the Balaclava charge of October 1854, he had yearned to be a cavalry officer though his wish had been refused by his family.⁴⁰ Burges is an even odder recruit as he was extremely short-sighted so presumably would have been unable to aim a rifle accurately.⁴¹ However, I have found no accounts of the active participation of either, so it may be, as was possible, they both were honorary rather than active members. When Swinburne writes to his Oxford friend John Nichol on 18 September 1860 about an impending trip to Menton on the French Riviera, he alludes tellingly to their shared support of Italian reunification: ‘Now had you and I learnt the use of rifles, we might go together and be some use at Rome or Venice.’⁴² Active members of the corps were expected to attend eight days of drill and exercise every four months or twenty-four days a year. Unsurprisingly, some recruits were not long lasting: Rossetti apparently questioned every order; Morris had problems distinguishing his left from his right during drill; Holman Hunt was always losing parts of his disassembled rifle; and Ford Madox Brown shot his own dog when attempting rifle practice.⁴³ Others like Val Prinsep, William Blake Richmond, and Frederic Leighton, later president of the Royal Academy, were long-serving and highly efficient members, with Leighton, ‘who had a genius for success in whatever he put his hand to’, proving a brilliant company commander from early on, and ending up lieutenant colonel and commanding officer of the entire corps.⁴⁴

The Arts Club, formed in 1863 by the painter Arthur Lewis, originated as a social by-product of the Artists’ Rifles in which Lewis was a volunteer.⁴⁵ The club’s premises in Hanover Square provided a haven for professionals and amateurs involved in the arts. Burges was an original member, with Swinburne joining in 1864. Boyce dined there with Edward Godwin and others including Burges and Swinburne on 24 April 1867, and reports that ‘tremendous political discussion arose after dinner, Swinburne frantically joining in’ (BP, II, p. 1078). The discussion was probably about Italian reunification, of which Swinburne was a passionate supporter, with his poems on this theme making up his next poetry collection Songs before Sunrise (1871). The word ‘frantically’ hints that he was drunk. As he was slight in build, even small amounts of alcohol could lead to intoxication and inflame his excitable temperament. When Boyce had dined at the club in February the previous year, he had reported ‘Swinburne in a very excited state, using fearful language’, something he did in polite company only when drunk (BP, II, p. 1075). In fact, in early 1866 Swinburne had nearly been banned from the club when, being drunk and unable to find his own hat in the cloakroom, he had thrown others’ hats on the ground and stamped on them.⁴⁶ He was probably drunk on the second occasion when Burges made an entry about him in his diary abstract for 1866, which reads simply ‘Swinburne twisted spoon’.⁴⁷ By this, we might assume that in a fit of alcohol-fuelled high spirits Swinburne had deformed one of the beautiful items that Burges himself had designed. However, this entry probably relates to another drunken incident at the Arts Club in early 1866, presumably witnessed by Burges, when Swinburne himself admitted ‘bending double one fork in an energetic mood at dinner’ in a letter to William Michael Rossetti of 26 March.⁴⁸ (He may well have learnt this cutlery-bending trick from William Morris who was prone to distorting spoons and forks when impassioned.⁴⁹) Swinburne survived this crisis but, after a second threatened expulsion in 1869, he finally resigned from the club in August 1870.

We have no records of Swinburne and Burges meeting after 1867 but, up until his resignation, Swinburne, when in London, used the Arts Club on an almost daily basis to write his letters and socialize, so they very likely saw each other there and after that encountered or heard of each other through mutual friends such as Edmund Gosse and Lord Leighton, later Burges’s near neighbour in Holland Park. However, there is an intriguing tangential link in that Burges was the architect of two remarkable Yorkshire churches — Christ the Consoler at Skelton-on-Ure, and St Mary’s, Studley Royal, the latter considered his ‘ecclesiastical masterpiece’ — both commissioned in 1870 to commemorate the untimely death of Swinburne’s maternal cousin Frederick Grantham Vyner, a young man of 23 who, like Swinburne, was a former Etonian and Oxford undergraduate.⁵⁰ Vyner was one of a small group of British tourists visiting Marathon in Greece kidnapped by brigands. When negotiations with the British government broke down and a rescue attempt failed, he and his fellow captives were murdered on 21 April 1870, an event subsequently known as the Dilessi Massacre. The affair was widely reported in the international press with Swinburne himself writing to Rossetti on 6 May 1870 that he was

so shocked by that Greek business (you know one of the victims was my cousin, & I had never thought of him except as a schoolboy — and it is altogether so horrid & revolting) that it has taken away my taste for anything Greek — including my verses on the nation.⁵¹

The victim’s widowed mother, Lady Mary Vyner of Newby Hall, and his sister Henrietta, Lady de Grey, wife of George Robinson, Earl de Grey and later Marquess of Ripon, used the unspent money raised for the ransom to part fund the building of these magnificent churches on their neighbouring estates.⁵² Swinburne had been on good terms with the de Greys — they were friendly with his own close friend Richard Monckton Milnes — and spent a week with them in the autumn of 1861 and, though we have no evidence that he ever saw Burges’s memorial churches, he must have known about them through his family.⁵³ There were several other memorials raised to the murdered man and his companions, including a stained-glass window (1872) designed by Edward Burne-Jones for Morris & Co. in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, where Vyner had been an undergraduate.⁵⁴ As one commentator has observed, ‘There can be few young men of the nineteenth century so much mourned, and so well commemorated.’⁵⁵

Burges died on 20 April 1881 over a year before the publication of Swinburne’s Arthurian epic Tristram of Lyonesse in July 1882. Like his Pre-Raphaelite compeers, Burges must have known well the medieval legend of Tristram and Iseult (or Tristan and Isolde — the heroine’s name appears in many variant forms). Moreover, Iseult features in texts by Chaucer and Tennyson whose poems, according to his brother-in-law R. P. Pullan, ‘were Mr. Burges’ chief text-books’ for the decorations he would later design for his own home.⁵⁶ A cult of the Tristram and Iseult legend existed early on among Swinburne’s Pre-Raphaelite circle. As an undergraduate influenced by Morris’s recent poetry collection The Defence of Guenevere (1858), Swinburne produced an unfinished medieval pastiche ‘Queen Yseult’ in the same year.⁵⁷ Other early Pre-Raphaelite works of visual art include Morris’s soon-to-fade fresco painting of Sir Tristram on the walls of the Oxford Union, his painting of his future wife Jane Burden as La Belle Iseult (1858), the ‘Tristram and Isoude’ series of stained-glass windows by Morris & Co. commissioned for Walter Dunlop of Harden Grange (1862) with contributions by Morris, Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, and Val Prinsep, and Rossetti’s painting Tristram and Isolde Drinking the Love Potion (1867) based on his own window design. Burges does not seem to have illustrated the legend directly, although Isolde appears in a roundel portrait in the decorative scheme illustrating the Parlement of Foules on the walls of the Chaucer Room at Cardiff Castle, a building lavishly decorated by Burges for his patron the Marquess of Bute. This particular scheme was produced in 1889 by Charles Campbell to his own designs, so it is unclear how far he may have been following Burges’s intentions.⁵⁸

Yet other elements of Swinburne’s Tristram chime well with Burges’s own decorative predilections. Although he was unable to read Swinburne’s epic in its entirety, he may well have already sampled the ‘Prelude’ (which later opened Swinburne’s epic) and ‘The Sailing of the Swallow’ (later Canto 1). These had been published in 1871 and 1877, respectively.⁵⁹ Swinburne’s ‘Prelude’, which opens with a passionate tribute to the power of Love — ‘the first and last of all things made’, the ‘root and fruit of terrene things’ — would surely have appealed to the romantic side of Burges whose monumental fireplaces for the Winter and Summer Smoking Rooms at Cardiff Castle, created in the early 1870s, celebrate the spirit of Love.⁶⁰ Both fireplaces feature seasonal depictions of medieval courting couples. Above, on the chimney piece of the Winter Smoking Room stands the gold-crowned figure of Love holding a gilded bow (Fig. 4), and on the chimney piece in the Summer Smoking Room sits the figure of Cupid holding two love birds. The fireplaces are inscribed respectively with the Virgilian line ‘Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori’ (Love conquers all; let us, too, yield to love) and the motto ‘Aestate viresco’ (In summer I flourish), presumably a reference to Love’s ascendancy in this season.⁶¹

Fig. 4: William Burges, Fireplace with figure of Love, Winter Smoking Room, Cardiff Castle. Wikimedia Commons.

Burges and Swinburne both feature processional trains or successions of historical or legendary romantic heroines in their works. Burges’s favourite poets Chaucer and Tennyson had included such trains in poems such as The Parlement of Foules (c. 1381–82), The Legend of Good Women (c. 1387), and ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1833, 1842). Many of these same women star in Burges’s decorative schemes for his own home, Tower House, Kensington, which was designed between 1875 and 1881. His drawing room, also dedicated to the theme of Love, has mythical figures such as Hero, Ariadne, Thisbe, Psyche, Francesca, Guinevere, and their respective lovers adorning the walls, while the windows feature legendary heroines like Rosamond, Cleopatra, Helen, and Beatrice.⁶² Images of his idols Tennyson and Chaucer surrounded by the women from their poems appear inside the painted wardrobe in his bedroom: ‘a bevy of legendary heroines: Eve, Lucrezia [Lucretia], Fair Rosamund, Margaret Roper, Helen of Troy, Queen Elizabeth, Jephthah’s daughter, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Iphigenia, Eleanor of Castile, Dido of Carthage and Medea’.⁶³ Partly repainted in 1870, this wardrobe, whose exterior figures stylized poppies and symbolic images and devices related to clothing, was originally made in 1859 for Burges’s Buckingham Street address, where Swinburne could conceivably have seen it in 1862. Swinburne had imitated such female processions in his early medieval-inspired poem ‘The Masque of Queen Bersabe’, collected in Poems and Ballads. Not all of Chaucer’s and Tennyson’s heroines were remarkable for their virtue — instance Medea and Cleopatra — and characteristically, Swinburne’s sequence, comprised of queenly figures from antiquity — mythical, classical, and biblical — conspicuously celebrated femmes fatales or infamous types such as Semiramis, Cleopatra, Sappho, Herodias, Pasiphae, and Messalina.

However, the sequence of ‘the sweet shining signs of women’s names’ that appears in Swinburne’s ‘Prelude’ is less sensational in nature. It forms a specific kind of alternative zodiac, linking the legendary heroines of love ‘from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere’ to months of the year with an accompanying imagery of stars, precious stones or gems, and flowers. As Swinburne explained to Rossetti in a letter of 12 February 1870 in which he announced the poem’s completion:

I have described Love as having a year with months and signs of the Zodiac of his own, a stunner for each month as sponsor. […] I have given each stunner a typical jewel-colour or flower-colour for the light of her ‘particular star’.⁶⁴

Thus, ‘like a pale and burning pearl beyond | The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond | Signs the sweet head of Maytime’ (ll. 114–16). Swinburne’s feminine calendar features Helen (January), Hero (February), Alcyone (March), Iseult (April), Rosamond (May), Dido (June), Juliet (July), Cleopatra (August), Francesca (September), Thisbe (October), Angelica (November), and Guenevere (December), the majority of whom appear in Burges’s later decorative designs at Tower House.

Burges was famously obsessed with zodiacal decorative schemes which feature in both the Winter and Summer Smoking Rooms at Cardiff and in his dining room at Tower House, while his drawing room housed his Zodiac Settle (1869–71), painted with dancing astrological figures and studded with rock crystal. He relished glowing colours and loved designs that involved precious and semi-precious stones. Swinburne’s jewel- or flower-coloured ‘spherèd signs’ would have had a powerful appeal, making one wonder if the ‘Prelude’ might have been a source in Burges’s mind when he was plotting his decorative ideas for Cardiff Castle and Tower House in the 1870s. Swinburne was fond of reciting his unpublished poetry to his friends and acquaintances and his ‘Prelude’, probably started towards the end of 1869, was completed while he was still a member of the Arts Club. This meant that casual contact with Burges was possible until August 1870 during which time Alex Haig made his watercolour perspective ‘realizations’ of Burges’s initial designs for the Cardiff Castle Smoking Rooms, both of which were exhibited in the annual Royal Academy Exhibition which opened in May.⁶⁵ However, the influence might have been reciprocal. Swinburne could have taken inspiration for his ‘Zodiac’ from conversations he had with Burges or mutual associates, or from viewing other of Burges’s designs and artefacts such as the painted wardrobe or settle. Either way, the coincidence in terms of shared themes and imagery is striking, suggesting that there are deeper points of contact between these two members of the larger Pre-Raphaelite circle than might at first appear.

Collaborative networking is undeniably integral to the Rossettis’ intimate circle, but the Swinburne–Burges relationship — here reconstructed through creative overlaps and supported by information obtained from letters, diaries, biographies, and artworks — gives us a good example of how those networks extend out to connect figures who might not at first sight be considered obvious artistic allies. In retracing those connections, it also suggests that there is more common ground between Pre-Raphaelitism and Victorian Gothic than might have originally been thought. As literary scholars and art historians continue to unearth more valuable documentary evidence of this rich artistic period, we may yet discover more, not only about the Swinburne–Burges relationship, but about many other significant alliances and connections that will help reshape our understanding of the Victorian cultural landscape.

Notes

1. Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (Faber, 1994), p. 141. [^{^}]
2. Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols (Macmillan, 1904), I: 1833–1867, p. 163. [^{^}]
3. Edmund Gosse’s The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Macmillan, 1917) is the most important early biography of the poet but not always reliable. Far more accurate and the best modern biography to date is Rikky Rooksby’s A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Scolar Press, 1997). [^{^}]
4. See ‘G. P. Boyce’s Diaries 1848–1875’, in The Boyce Papers: The Letters and Diaries of Joanna Boyce, Henry Wells and George Price Boyce, ed. by Sue Bradbury, 2 vols (Boydell Press, 2019), II, p. 1014, hereafter BP. Subsequent references are given in parentheses in the main text. Boyce began moving in on 5 April 1856 and spent his first night at Buckingham Street on 23 April. Mordaunt Crook records Burges moving in shortly after a break with Henry Clutton, his then business partner. See J. Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (Murray, 1981), pp. 44 and 349, n. 79. [^{^}]
5. My thanks to Charlotte Ribeyrol for kindly providing me with copies of the abstracts, housed in the V&A. Diary of William Burges (1827–81): Abstract of diaries (1880), London, National Art Library, V&A, Call No: 69.J.37. [^{^}]
6. Rooksby, p. 63. Swinburne spent a few days in Newcastle with William Bell Scott after the funeral. See Raleigh Trevelyan, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle (Chatto & Windus, 1978), p. 163. [^{^}]
7. See Charlotte Ribeyrol, William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 19, 26. [^{^}]
8. J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols (Longmans, Green, 1899), I, p. 160. See also Gosse, pp. 66, 70. Swinburne attended the christening and accompanying festivities for the Morrises’ first child, Jenny, on 21 February 1861 (Mackail, p. 161), which involved an overnight stay on a sofa, and he is listed as being present in Red House for the 1861 census (7 April 1861). See ‘What the 1861 Census Form Tells Us about William Morris and Life at Red House’, News Shopper, 17 March 2011 <https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/8914030.what-the-1861-census-form-tells-us-about-william-morris-and-life-at-red-house/> [accessed 28 November 2025]. [^{^}]
9. Boyce records his first visit to Red House on 3 August 1860 (BP, II, p. 1042). [^{^}]
10. Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (Phoenix/Orion Books, 2005), p. 221. [^{^}]
11. The book attracted only four lukewarm or dismissive reviews. See Clive Simmonds, ‘Publishing Swinburne: The Poet, His Publishers and Critics’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Reading, 2013), I: Text, pp. 13–17, doi: 10.17863/CAM.13945. [^{^}]
12. Swinburne might have resided with friends or relatives such as his paternal aunt, Miss Julia Swinburne (18 Grosvenor Street) with whom he stayed on later occasions. [^{^}]
13. Ribeyrol, p. 53. [^{^}]
14. BP, II, p. 1058. Terry Meyers speculatively dates to early April 1861 a letter by Burne-Jones to Swinburne that implies an intimate friendship with Solomon. See Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. by Terry L. Meyers, 3 vols (Pickering & Chatto, 2005), I: 1848–1874, pp. 12–13. [^{^}]
15. Letter to W. M. Rossetti (4 December 1895), in The Swinburne Letters, ed. by C. Y. Lang, 6 vols (Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1959–62), VI: 1890–1909 (1962), p. 92. [^{^}]
16. According to the Llandaff Cathedral website, Swinburne supposedly modelled for the kneeling shepherd, but the image bears little resemblance to him. He is a much closer match to the angel at the far right of the row of angels peering through the stable windows. Rossetti mentions completing the central panel and its installation in the cathedral in a letter to Frederick Sandys (28 September 1861), in The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by William E. Fredeman, 10 vols (Brewer, 2002–15), II: The Formative Years, 1835–1862: 1855–1862 (2002), p. 406. [^{^}]
17. Tessa Wild, William Morris and His Palace of Art: Architecture, Interiors and Design at Red House (Wilson, 2018), p. 136. Image reproduced on p. 137 as Fig. 74. [^{^}]
18. The brief entry ‘With Edis to Morris’s Bexleyheath’ occurs towards the end of his list for that year’s ‘Occurrences’ suggesting a date later in 1861. ‘Edis’ is the architect Colonel Robert William Edis (1829–1937). Burges might conceivably have made an earlier visit as ‘Mrs Morris’ and ‘Mrs B. Jones’ appear in the list of ‘Persons’ in his diary abstract for 1860. (The Burne-Joneses, married on 9 June 1860, stayed with the Morrises at Red House from August to October 1860 with frequent visits thereafter.) See Suzanne Fagence Cooper, How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris (Quercus, 2022), p. 123; Georgiana Burne-Jones, I, p. 213. [^{^}]
19. Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life (Heinemann, 1914), p. 74. [^{^}]
20. Letter to Frederick Sandys (28 September 1861), in Correspondence, ed. by Fredeman, II, p. 406, emphasis in original. [^{^}]
21. See Joyce Zonana, ‘Swinburne’s Sappho: The Muse as Sister-Goddess’, Victorian Poetry, 28.1 (1990), pp. 39–50 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002039> [accessed 29 November 2025]; Catherine Maxwell, ‘Swinburne and Sappho’, Notes and Queries, 48.2 (2001), pp. 155–58, doi: 10.1093/nq/48-2-155; and Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Solomon, Swinburne, Sappho’, Victorian Review, 34.2 (2008), pp. 103–28 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/27793672> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]
22. See the online RIBA catalogue note, ‘Designs for Painted Panels for the Decoration of the “Great Bookcase”’, RIBA <https://www.ribapix.com/Designs-for-painted-panels-for-the-decoration-of-the-Great-Bookcase-made-for-William-Burgess-house-and-offices-at-15-Buckingham-Street-London-the-central-panel-represents-Poetry-and-shows-Sappho-and-P_RIBA31235> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]
23. BP, II, p. 1065. Rossetti and Boyce had visited the exhibition previously, Boyce on 16 June (BP, II, p. 1064). Rossetti mentions an earlier visit in a letter dated 14 May 1862 (Correspondence, ed. by Fredeman, II, p. 471). [^{^}]
24. ‘M. Prudhomme on Art and Science at the International Exhibition’, in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. by Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, Bonchurch edition, 20 vols (Wells, 1925–27), XV: Prose Works, Vol. V (1925), pp. 401–09. W. D. Paden indicates that Swinburne produced this essay in response to a series of articles on the exhibition which contained philistine and hostile descriptions of artworks by his friends and other admired painters. These disparaging articles appeared in the magazine All the Year Round (21 June 1862, 23 August, 30 August, and later dates). The manuscript was returned to Swinburne by the editor of The Spectator Richard Holt Hutton in mid-December 1862. See W. D. Paden, ‘Swinburne, The Spectator in 1862, and Walter Bagehot’, in Six Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought, ed. by Harold Orel and George J. Worth (University of Kansas Press, 1962), pp. 91–115 (pp. 108–09). [^{^}]
25. See, for example, Rooksby, p. 83; and Crook, p. 91. [^{^}]
26. See, for example, Rooksby, p. 101; and Crook, p. 98. [^{^}]
27. Crook, pp. 97–98; Rooksby, p. 19. For Swinburne’s collection, see the auction sale catalogues collected in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, Vol. 6: Poets and Men of Letters, ed. by John Woolford (Mansell, 1972). [^{^}]
28. BP, II, p. 1056 (2 June 1861). For Boyce’s references to ‘Borgia’, which Rossetti was continually borrowing back for retouching and adaptation, see also BP, II, p. 993 (3 March 1852), p. 1008 (8 April 1854), pp. 1026–27 (27 December 1858), p. 1030 (23 July 1859), p. 1034 (24 February 1860), p. 1065 (22 October 1862), p. 1067 (13 March 1863), and p. 1069 (16 July 1863). The painting is now owned by Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle. A slightly later enlarged replica (1863) is owned by the V&A. [^{^}]
29. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lucretia Borgia: The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei, ed. by Randolph Hughes (Golden Cockerell Press, 1942). [^{^}]
30. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘A Ballad of Life’, in Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, ed. by Kenneth Haynes (Penguin, 2000), p. 3. See also Haynes’s note, p. 324. [^{^}]
31. ‘August’ first appeared in The Spectator, 6 September 1862, p. 997, where it preceded an important essay by Swinburne, reviewing Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, the first significant review of this collection in English. See also Maxwell, p. 157. [^{^}]
32. Crook, p. 312. [^{^}]
33. The lead source for the following information is Deborah Cherry, ‘The Hogarth Club: 1858–1861’, Burlington Magazine, 122.925 (1980), pp. 236–44 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/879933> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]
34. William E. Fredeman, ‘The Letters of Pictor Ignotus: William Bell Scott’s Correspondence with Alice Boyd, 1859–1884: Part 1’, Bulletin of The John Rylands Library of Manchester, 58.1 (1975), pp. 66–110 (p. 80, n. 1). [^{^}]
35. Swinburne Letters, ed. by Lang, I: 1854–1869, p. 27. [^{^}]
36. Cherry, p. 242. [^{^}]
37. For key sources of information concerning the Artists’ Rifles, see Lucy Paquette, ‘The Artists’ Rifles, London’, The Hammock, 29 April 2013 <https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/the-artists-rifles-london/> [accessed 29 November 2025]; and Patrick Baty, ‘The Artists of the Artists Rifles: The First 35 Years’, London Historians, July 2013 <https://www.londonhistorians.org/?s=articles> [accessed 29 November 2025] (originally published in the London Historians Members Newsletter (November 2012)); and Barry Gregory, A History of the Artists Rifles 1859–1947 (Pen & Sword, 2006). A major historical source is Sir William Blake Richmond’s ‘Recollections’, in The Richmond Papers from the Correspondence and Manuscripts of George Richmond R.A. and His Son Sir William Richmond, R.A., K.C.B., ed. by A. M. W. Stirling (Heinemann, 1926). [^{^}]
38. Swinburne Letters, ed. by Lang, I, p. 29. Boyce records leaving his subscription for the Rifle Corps at Millais’s house on 18 April 1860 (BP, II, p. 1038). [^{^}]
39. Baty, p. 3. See also The Richmond Papers, where Swinburne is listed as a member of the Artists’ Rifles (p. 164). [^{^}]
40. Rooksby, p. 43. [^{^}]
41. Crook, p. 39. [^{^}]
42. Swinburne Letters, ed. by Lang, I, p. 37. [^{^}]
43. The first three anecdotes can be found in William Blake Richmond’s edited memoir in The Richmond Papers, ed. by Stirling, pp. 165–66. For Brown, see Ford M. Hueffer [Ford Madox Ford], Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (Longmans, Green, 1896), p. 166. Georgiana Burne-Jones (I, p. 227) also records Rossetti’s intransigence as a recruit and her husband’s irregular attendance but indicates that Morris attended drill regularly. [^{^}]
44. The Richmond Papers, ed. by Stirling, p. 165. [^{^}]
45. The key source is G. A. F. Rogers, The Arts Club and Its Members (Truslove and Hanson, 1920). [^{^}]
46. See Rooksby, p. 129, who remarks that there are several versions of this story. [^{^}]
47. Burges Diary Abstract 1866. [^{^}]
48. Swinburne Letters, ed. by Lang, I, pp. 161–62. [^{^}]
49. See Fagence Cooper, p. 91. [^{^}]
50. Crook, pp. 237, 231; Rooksby, p. 177. [^{^}]
51. Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. by Meyers, I, p. 186. [^{^}]
52. Crook, p. 230. [^{^}]
53. Swinburne Letters, ed. by Lang, I, p. 45. [^{^}]
54. See Crook, p. 391, n. 41. [^{^}]
55. [David Winpenny], ‘Frederick Vyner — A Noble Englishman Murdered by Brigands’, Ripon Civic Society, 3 May 2018 <https://riponcivicsociety.org.uk/2018/05/03/frederick-vyner-a-noble-englishman-murdered-by-brigands/> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]
56. The House of William Burges ARA, ed. by R. P. Pullan ([n. pub.], 1886), p. 4. Iseult is mentioned three times in Chaucer’s works and appears in Tennyson’s unsympathetic retelling of the Tristram legend in ‘The Last Tournament’ (1871), collected in Idylls of the King. [^{^}]
57. The first canto of Swinburne’s ‘Queen Yseult’ was published in the Oxford journal Undergraduate Papers, 1 (December 1858), pp. 41–50. All six cantos were then privately published by T. J. Wise in 1918 and then included in the Bonchurch edition of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. by Gosse and Wise, I, pp. 9–24. They can now be accessed at ‘Queen Yseult’, The Camelot Project: A Robbins Library Digital Project <https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/swinburne-queen-yseult.html> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]
58. See Matthew Williams, Cardiff Castle and the Marquesses of Bute (Scala Arts/Heritage Publishers, 2019), p. 126. [^{^}]
59. ‘Prelude’ was published as ‘Tristram and Iseult: Prelude of an Unfinished Poem’, in Pleasure: A Holiday Book of Prose and Verse (King, 1871), pp. 45–52; and ‘The Sailing of the Swallow’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1877, pp. 287–308. See Algernon Charles Swinburne: Selected Writings, ed. by Francis O’Gorman, Twenty-First Century Oxford Authors (Oxford University Press, 2020), which includes both these early versions. [^{^}]
60. ‘Prelude’, in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Selected Writings, p. 282 (ll. 1, 26). [^{^}]
61. Virgil, Eclogues, 10. 69. The phrase ‘Amor vincit omnia’ appears on a brooch worn by the Prioress in the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For images of the fireplaces, see Williams, title page illustration, and pp. 72–73, 79, 86, 93. [^{^}]
62. Crook, p. 317. [^{^}]
63. Crook, p. 327. The wardrobe has been acquired and restored to its original position in Burges’s bedroom by Jimmy Page, the current owner and custodian of Tower House. For a photograph of the left interior panel, see Figure 59 in Nicholas Roquet, ‘Life in Costume: The Architectural Fictions and Anachronisms of William Burges’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, McGill University, 2011), p. 347 <https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/cz30px867> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]
64. Swinburne Letters, ed. by Lang, II, p. 90. [^{^}]
65. See under ‘Architecture’, entries 744 and 752, in The Exhibition for the Royal Academy of Arts, The One Hundred and Second ([n. pub.], 1870), pp. 37, 38 <https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/exhibition-catalogue/ra-sec-vol102-1870> [accessed 29 November 2025]. For an image of Haig’s watercolour design for the Cardiff Castle Winter Smoking Room (1870), National Trust collection, Knightshayes, Devon, see ‘The Proposed Design by William Burges for the Smoking Room at Cardiff Castle’, National Trust <https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/541121> [accessed 29 November 2025]. [^{^}]