But simply the notion that the gypsies had no fixed abode, were thought to be thieves, and seducers, to boot, was enough for the upper middle classes to reject them utterly, as immoral and dangerous beings, liable to do any criminal act their fertile minds could dream up, from stealing children to murder. The middle-class morality of the English upper classes did not allow for non-conformity to the rules. Thus gypsies became the stuff of children’s nightmares, having been told that the gypsies would come and steal them away if they weren’t good.
This is the stigma attached by society to outsiders of all kinds over the centuries. In Victorian England it became not only attached to the gypsies themselves, but to any non-conformists in society’s midst: the group of writers who lived and worked in Grub Street in the 1840’s, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists in the mid-century, the decadent poseurs of the Aesthetic movement of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, on into the new century where the artists and writers willingly embraced the gypsy life, some literally living in gypsy camps in the countryside. The early Bohemians were more anxious to be accepted into the ranks of the upper middle classes than their later counterparts. There were some members of the upper middle classes who were at least ready to be their patrons, but letting Bohemians fraternize with their families or be treated absolutely as equals was not possible. Those who were knighted or became more mainstream in their style were more easily assimilated, but never fully.
Alongside the artists and writers, there was another class who were regarded with even more suspicion, the theatrical entertainers, actors, actresses, dancers, and opera singers. They naturally lived a gypsy existence, as actor/managers and their companies only made profits if they toured the country as well as playing the big theatres in London. Like the gypsies, actors married actresses and their children often followed in their footsteps. Only rarely did an actress marry outside of the profession and then it was necessary immediately to drop her career. Actors might marry women who were not actresses but much more rarely, as what respectable woman would want to live a gypsy lifestyle?
William Makepeace Thackeray was probably one of the first to use the term bohemian to describe an artistic, wild soul. In Vanity Fair he wrote of his heroine, Becky Sharp, “Becky liked the life. She was at home with everybody in the place, pedlars, punters, tumblers, students and all. She was of a wild, roving nature, inherited from father and mother, who were both Bohemians, by taste and circumstances.”(2) The idea of the bohemian lifestyle being “by taste” is an interesting one. Is Thackeray saying that this girl’s parents were gypsies or Bohemians by choice? Thackeray tells us that Becky is Bohemian towards the end of the book because she is travelling around Europe and becoming a “perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your hair stand up on end to meet.”(3) He also knew it as a term for people who lived rough, undisciplined lives, hand-to-mouth existences. It was a common term for a group of writers who were living in London’s Grub Street, trying to make their living writing.
At the time of the publication of Vanity Fair, a group of young artists were attempting to diverge from the academic school of painting. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was spearheaded by several artists, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Deverell, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Rossetti’s brother William Michael was along as scribe and clerk of the precepts of the Brotherhood and editor of their short-lived journal, The Germ. Their aim was to go back to the values and techniques of the medieval and early Renaissance painters, with their jewel-like tones and religious symbolism. But the Pre-Raphaelites did not intend to ape the old ways, but to adapt them and give them meaning in the Modern age, full as it was of horrid factories and machine-made goods. In fact, they hoped to bring their fellow Victorians to an understanding of the beauties of nature and also to see the reality of life around them. They were not only concerned with the past beauties of nature, but the present realities of British life. Much social commentary can be found particularly in the work of Ford Madox Brown and even in some of Rossetti’s early work. Works like Brown’s The Last of England and Rossetti’s Found showed the realities of emigration and prostitution. The seminal portrayal of the working class reality is Ford Madox Brown’s large painting Work, which is peopled with figures from all walks of life interacting around a large road-work site. From the ragamuffin girl in a ragged silk dress three sizes too large for her, through the figure of philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle leaning against a railing, watching the proceedings, to a dainty young upper-middle class woman picking her way delicately around the muddy site, all are perfectly rendered in minute Ruskinean detail.
The Pre-Raphaelites had an apologist and champion in the person of John Ruskin, himself a writer and philosopher, whose visits to Italy and France inspired both the Neo-Gothic architecture of Augustus Pugin and G.E. Street and the focus on Nature and medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites. It was Ruskin who wrote in praise of Millais’ Christ in the House of his Parents, in the face of the torrents of abuse hurled on the painting by Charles Dickens and others. The Pre-Raphaelites took his precepts about the depiction of Nature to heart and rendered every detail of every blade of grass on the brook side and every petal of the lilies held by the Angel Gabriel. They applied their paints over a white layer of gesso so that their colours would be as jewel-like as those of the medieval stained glass Ruskin wrote about.
The lifestyle lived by the Pre-Raphaelites was perhaps a little more respectable than that of the Grub Street writers. Their morals were those of most Victorian men of the time, and at least one of them, Ford Madox Brown, was happily married. The others, however, did have the habit of picking up young working class women and making them first their models, then their mistresses. This reputation preceded them wherever they went, so that women like Lady Charlotte Schreiber would not allow their young daughters to visit salons such as were held at the Prinseps’s Little Holland House in London: “I know there cannot be a worse place to go alone than Little Holland House, amidst artists and musicians, -- and all the flattery and nonsense which is rife in that (otherwise) most agreeable society.”(4) Pamela Todd in Pre-Raphaelites at Home asserts that Georgiana Burne-Jones, as a young unmarried woman, could not be introduced to Rossetti’s mistress Lizzie Siddal until after Rossetti had married Lizzie in 1860, though she could meet Rossetti himself, in the company of her fiancé, Edward.(5) Georgiana makes no mention of Lizzie not being introduced to her in her memoir of her husband’s life, preferring to dwell on the melancholy sweetness of her friend.
The nature of the artistic life necessitated some social eccentricities, such as the need to be alone with the subject of your painting for hours. Some of the more respectable women probably dealt with this by bringing husbands or friends or maids along as chaperones. But young women such as Lizzie Siddal, who was first discovered in a milliner’s shop in 1850 by Walter Deverell and his mother, were not so well attended and so their reputations were as mud. The Victorian biographers of Rossetti, who are all we have to go on for early accounts of Elizabeth Siddal, are more eager to save his reputation than hers, but insist that the couple were engaged three years after she began modelling for the Pre-Raphaelites. (6)
Once introduced to this bohemian lifestyle, even middle-class women like Georgiana Burne-Jones seemed to take to it. They felt a part of the artistic movement, involved mostly because of their husbands or lovers, but also as working artists themselves. This was not a utopia of equality however, as most of the art produced by women was declared to be “decorative”, a euphemism for less worthy, seemingly. Women did book illustration, embroidery (often designed by their husbands), and some sketching. Lizzie Siddal was training as an artist when she was discovered. She was working as a milliner/dressmaker to pay her way. But her discovery by Walter Deverell and her involvement with Dante Gabriel Rossetti meant that her own art became overwhelmed by the image that these men (and others) created of her. It is only in recent years that her talents as artist have re-emerged through the aegis of biographers like Jan Marsh. (7)
Another woman who was making a name for herself as a novelist was Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In 1866, this former actress and “brazen woman” began a magazine called Belgravia, whose contributors, mostly male, besides herself, wrote stories and articles that celebrated the literary and artistic Bohemian life. Mortimer Collins (1827–1876), Walter Thornbury (1828–1876), and George Augustus Sala (1828–1896) formed the core of Braddon’s contributors, writing articles about poetry, crimes and indiscretions in London society, and attacks on the stodginess of Victorian middle-class morality. Belgravia was a magazine that explored what it meant to be an outsider in London society, a member of the intelligentsia and of the middle-class at the same time.
Bohemianism was being defined by several articles before the publication of Belgravia. In her article, “Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Bohemian Meta-narrative of Belgravia: A Case Study for Analyzing Periodicals” (Victorian Periodical Review online), Cynthia Bandish explores several of these articles and their definitions of the term. Justin McCarthy, in a review of six French Bohemian authors for the Westminster Review in 1863, was the one to come up with what he felt was the best description of a Bohemian:
A Bohemian is simply an artist or litterateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art. In its essence, Bohemia is, or was, a protest against the subjection of human life to money-making, and of human intellect to conventional rule. (8)As Bandish goes on to say, it is not that the Bohemians didn’t approve of financial success and in fact, were happy to be paid for their work, but they did not want to sacrifice artistic control for the sake of profit. The articles in Belgravia reflected this ambivalence, revealing a “complex interrelationship” between the Bohemian and “Belgravian” or middle-class philosophies. The magazine’s title is the name of a Borough in London highly prized at the time by the upper middle-class, and thus it would appeal to those who had pretensions to that upper echelon. But the magazine also contained fiction and articles which constantly derided that same class, so it gave those readers the feeling that they were rebelling vicariously by reading this magazine.(9) Rebellion is always more delicious at second remove.
This dichotomy between respectability and Bohemianism was seen in many of the Pre-Raphaelites, both in the original brotherhood and the slightly later reconfiguration that included William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was the common denominator in both groups, was also the most Bohemian of the lot. His relationship with Lizzie, whether engaged or no, was not respectable. And his later exhumation of Lizzie’s body to retrieve the only copy of his poems – spurred on by the seemingly amoral Charles Augustus Howell – was also a very questionable act.(10) When William Morris met and married Jane Burden, daughter of a stableman in Oxford, Rossetti fell in love with her as well, and stole her away from Morris, conducting an affair with her for ten years, though condoned by Morris.
1) Raphael Samuel, “Comers and Goers,” in The
2) William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ch. LXIV.
3) Ibid, ch. LXV.
4) Lady Charlotte Schreiber, cited in Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 24.
5) Pamela Todd, The Pre-Raphaelites at Home, (
6) Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal, (London: Quartet, 1989), 36.
7) Jan Marsh has written about Lizzie Siddal many times, including in the biography mentioned in note 6, also Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (see note below), a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and many essays in larger works on the Pre-Raphaelites.
8) Cynthia L. Bandish, “Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Bohemian Meta-Narrative of
9) Bandish, "Bakhtin's Dialogism".
10) It is rumored that Howell was the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's evil blackmailer, Charles Augustus Milverton, in the eponymous Sherlock Holmes story. He sold paintings for Rossetti and other artists, but one always gets the feeling his dealings were somewhat shady.
