It was beautiful. Standing there long enough, one was left with only a shadowy recollection of the incidents.
A few weeks after her final meeting with Dolly, Christina was walking with William along a busy street in London when she spied Charles Cayley from a distance. His suit, as out of date as the cocked hat and ruffles of Shakespeare, could be spotted ten miles away. In a flash, she thought about the people and activities that filled her life now and in the past—Gabriel, her mother, her poetry, Dante, her father, her lost uncle, her church, her charity. Cayley noticed her and changed direction toward her. She froze.
“Did you arrange for him to be here?” Christina asked her brother.
“Christina,” William replied, “who do you mean? What did you see?”
She fell backward, the back of her head landing hard on the sidewalk.
* * *
—
She woke up with her head and neck sore from the fall. William and Cayley were standing over her, looking down with grave concern, along with a man with silver whiskers snapping his fingers. She waited for the wave of embarrassment and self-recrimination to wash over her, but it never came.
“. . . quite serious. My sister does not faint,” William was saying.
“Look.” Cayley gestured toward Christina. “Her eyes. They’re open.”
“Can you sit up?” asked William, gently placing his hand beneath her head.
“Wait. If you please,” Christina said, wanting to stay right where she was. “I feel out of sorts and . . . lazy.”
“I should think you are out of sorts, swooning before our eyes,” said William. He then must have considered how odd that last word was for his sister, for he exclaimed: “Lazy!”
William consulted more with the silver-whiskered man, who turned out to be a doctor. He assured William there didn’t seem to be anything serious to worry about and excused himself from the little spectacle.
Christina examined the sky. You rarely ever stopped to do that in London, there was so much to divide attentions among the buildings, the towers, the people and horses. You never looked heavenward.
“This is not the time, Mr. Cayley,” William was arguing.
“I don’t care if it isn’t,” said Cayley. “Miss Rossetti, can’t you hear me? I have never been adept at expressing my emotions or speechifying, so forgive me. You take care of so many others, practically of everyone you meet, and you must allow someone to return the favor. Allow me to.”
“Mr. Cayley?” Christina said.
“Miss Rossetti—” He swallowed hard, for a moment glancing back to William. “I started to say this to you once before, and haven’t stopped torturing myself for never finishing. You sent me some verses that I’m sure I didn’t fully understand, but they were melancholy and despondent and lovely and made me love you more. You shall never be alone, and you will be all better with me. You will be Mrs. Cayley from now on!”
“It is a suitable match,” William admitted.
The sky.
In the London sky she faced something special. The atmospheric conditions caused by the smoke and fog in the air sometimes created a kind of copper vapor unlike anywhere in the world. Christina stared into the unreal heavens and said, “I have thought about what my father believed, that Beatrice was not real, and what you seek to demonstrate, Mr. Cayley, that she was. But she is never real and always unreal in others’ eyes. How different Beatrice’s legacy might have been had she spoken for herself, even the more powerful had she been unhappy instead of happy.”
Cayley again looked at William, this time in confusion, then back at Christina, until he had a thought that enthralled him. “How well you know my interests, Miss Rossetti!”
Christina’s mind returned to the events in the late winter of 1870, and when she did, it was like tumbling up a flight of stairs—she could not think of any one moment without remembering in rapid succession all of the horrors and tragedies and triumphs. It sometimes occurred to her that with the punishments demonstrated by Sibbie and her followers—the Prideful, the Envious, the Wrathful, the Slothful, the Avaricious and Prodigal, the Gluttonous, and the Lustful—there had never been an attempt made to represent the very first area of Purgatory encountered by Dante: the “Ante-Purgatory.” This was the location where humanity’s souls resided who were not ready to confront their vices at all. These shades had avoided Hell and its hopeless torments, but were still being prepared for the path over the mountain toward Paradise. Dante provided a poignant depiction of those temporarily trapped near the base of the divine mountain, listening to the beating of the waves as oncoming vessels brought ever more souls. They prayed that, as they waited, the works of the devil would not intrude on them.
Shelter us from our ghostly foe . . .
It was as though she could see them again ranged around her—Dr. Holmes, Tennyson, Browning, even Dolly Williamson, in the search for Gabriel—and in her mind she, too, was listening to the waves as she climbed onward.
“Miss Rossetti,” Cayley shouted, in case she lost hearing in her fall. He held out his hand to her. “Dear Miss Rossetti, haven’t I loved you since I watched you at your desk in Charlotte Street while I pretended only to do my labors with your father? Take my hand now and be my wife.”
She thought about living in Charlotte Street. She would steal into her tiny room to write poetry on the corner of her washstand. It was uncomfortable and awkward writing against that washstand, but it was her corner.
“Haven’t you made a decision?” Cayley asked.
“Have you?” William asked.
“Well?” Cayley added eagerly.
A small crowd of impatient and curious pedestrians had formed a semicircle behind Cayley and William around the woman sprawled out on the ground.
“My favorite poet on earth, I cherish . . . ,” came a whispered voice. “Please, how I cherish her!” Pushing right through the two hovering men, a young woman leaned over and in the same voice declared, “You’re Christina Rossetti. Are you alive?”
Christina’s pinned-up hair had come loose in the fall and spread out in a thousand points over the dirt-encrusted ground. Her lips opened into a smile as her eyes floated along the clouds of copper.
INSIDE THE DANTE CHAMBER
My novel The Dante Club centered on Boston’s Dante trailblazers confronting a series of murders in 1865 based on Dante’s Inferno. While drafting it, I began jotting down ideas for continuing the story. I wanted to progress further along in Dante’s vision of the afterlife by moving from Inferno to the next canticle of his Divine Comedy, Purgatory, which happens to be my favorite, maybe because it most closely resembles modern dramatic storytelling. I also wanted to shift most of my focus from American “Danteans” to the fascinating circle of British poets who, contemporaneously, explored and wrestled with the unique poet of Florence.
Knowing I would carry over Oliver Wendell Holmes from the first novel, at a very early stage I decided to recruit Alfred Tennyson (whose poetry is quoted in a pivotal scene of The Dante Club), the Rossetti siblings, and Robert Browning, all actual devotees of Dante. I originally expected Browning to become the emotional lead of the novel, but the more I thought about Christina Rossetti, she pushed to the center and drove the story. As in The Dante Club, I’ve aspired to remain as authentic to their real voices and lives as possible, including that of Inspector Adolphus “Dolly” Williamson, whose cases ranged from terrorist conspiracies to the first murder on a train in England, and who years later played an elderstatesman role in the pursuit of Jack the Ripper.
Transformations abounded in culture and society when The Dante Chamber takes place. Religions had splintered into so many esoteric groups that many Victorians turned away from organized worship and belief systems. Filling this vacuum were movements such as spiritualism, mesmerism, ceremonial magic, and other quasi-religious approaches to life. The “sanatorium” depicted i
n my novel is both a product of imagination and of research into examples of utopian, apocalyptic, and cultlike collectives of the nineteenth century (including the Millerites, who prophesied specific dates for the cleansing of the world, and may have inspired suicides, and the utopian Brook Farm, whose “Phalanstery,” or communal living structure, met a fate that mirrored my novel’s Phillip Sanatorium. The spring snowstorms in the novel are based on those recorded in England in 1849, 1876, and 1879). Opiate use, tied to the sanatorium in my story, also became sophisticated and grew into a full-blown trade outside of supervised medical use.
There’s an anecdote Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) told that I liked to think of while working on The Dante Chamber. He visited Tennyson at Farringford on the Isle of Wight. While they smoked, writes Carroll, their “conversation turned upon murders, and Tennyson told us several horrible stories from his own experience.” Tantalizing (Carroll didn’t give more details). Tennyson, of course, wouldn’t have been talking about the violence he and his companions tackle in my novel—part of the fiction of my historical fiction—but I was intrigued by the many ways this group of figures really did face the dark sides of life. Christina Rossetti, as shown in my novel, worked regularly with aiding prostitutes in desperate situations. Browning held his wife Elizabeth in his arms as she died and was absorbed by it for the rest of his life. Tennyson, in addition to dealing with a pattern of depression in his family, paid close attention to crimes and criminal trends.
(In a twist far into the future, in 2005 Tennyson’s great-grandson was found murdered in London, a knife in his neck.)
Then we have the many mysteries of the great and strange and sometimes sinister (to paraphrase Henry James) Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As incorporated into The Dante Chamber, Gabriel’s life included chronic insomnia, opiate addiction, overdoses, suicidal phases, disappearances, and the exhumation of his wife’s body in order to retrieve his poems. At one point, Gabriel, half joking, all macabre, imagines forming “a Mutual Suicide Association, by the regulations whereof any member, being weary of life, may call at any time upon another to cut his throat for him. It is all of course to be done very quietly, without weeping or gnashing of teeth.” Like Christina, Gabriel exacerbated the many gaps in our understanding of his life by destroying many of his personal papers, especially those dealing with Lizzie, and leaving instructions to destroy more letters and papers after his death.
The paranoia of their father, Professor Rossetti, lived on in the eldest son. Later in his life, Gabriel, influenced by his heavy use of opiates, imagined Browning was part of a conspiracy (along with Lewis Carroll and others) to write and plot against him. Gabriel cut off his friendship with Browning, and his friendship with Tennyson likewise frayed beyond the point of recovery. The friendship between Browning and Tennyson (to whom Browning really did offer the story that eventually became The Ring and the Book) also suffered strains over time, reflected here.
As explored in the novel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti truly was preoccupied with Dante, as were all of the Rossetti siblings in their own ways. For the Rossettis, as for so many Victorian-era poets and artists, Purgatory, with its emphasis on the ideal but elusive woman, Beatrice, held special appeal. One of Gabriel’s paintings of Beatrice, Dante’s Dream, did in fact take approximately fifteen years to complete. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s tomb even contains a bas-relief of Beatrice and Dante. Christina Rossetti never married (after turning down the proposal of Charles Cayley and also an earlier suitor, at the sight of whom she really did faint in the street). When Tennyson died, Christina Rossetti was abashed at the rumor that she might be chosen the new, first female poet laureate. (She was not offered the position, nor was another rumored candidate, rival poet Jean Ingelow.) When she passed away, her brother William ordered inscribed on her tombstone a quote from Dante:
Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno.
Which can be translated as,
They turned to me with an act of salutation.
This epitaph invites us to imagine Christina taking the place of Dante in the afterlife, gratified to be earning respect from its suffering inhabitants.
The dates of the 1870 calendar were the same as that of 1300, the year Dante claimed he made his journey into the afterlife.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful to have been guided through this novel by two irreplaceable and gifted people also instrumental in bringing The Dante Club to life: my editor, Ann Godoff, and my agent, Suzanne Gluck. At William Morris, I also thank Andrea Blatt, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Clio Seraphim, and Elizabeth Sheinkman; at Penguin Press, Casey Denis, Megan Gerrity, Angelina Krahn, Gretchen Achilles, and Claire Vaccaro. The professor who brought me to Dante, Lino Pertile, continues to be patient with my questions and generous in his encouragement. Thanks also for advice from one of my classmates from that original “Purgatory” seminar, Adam Frost, and my go-to expert in forensic science, Mark Benecke. My circle of tireless readers and supporters to thank include Tobey Pearl, Kevin Birmingham, Benjamin Cavell, Gabriella Gage, Joseph Gangemi, and Scott Weinger; Susan, Warren, and Ian Pearl, Marsha and David Helmstadter, and my children, who give me reasons to get out of Purgatory.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Pearl is the award-winning and bestselling author of the novels The Last Bookaneer, The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, and The Technologists. His books have been New York Times bestsellers and international bestsellers, and have been translated into more than thirty languages. His nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Slate.com. He has been heard on shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and Weekend Edition Sunday, and his books have been featured on Good Morning America and CBS Sunday Morning.
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Matthew Pearl, The Dante Chamber
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