Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Published in the year of the poet's death, Caine's volume was the first and one of the most influential biographical treatments of DGR. Caine first became acquainted with DGR in 1879, and thus the book deals only with the last years of DGR's life. As Francis Fennell puts it, “This book begins the tradition of viewing Rossetti as a morbid recluse, largely because the author did not know his subject during the subject's youth” (45). Caine was “a young builder's clerk from Liverpool with journalistic ambitions”, who in 1881 “had come to live with Rossetti as a kind of attendant” (Doughty, 632). Although Caine had been a much-needed companion to DGR in his final period of illness and depression, the Rossetti family did not approve of this hasty and melodramatic biography, which sensationalized the poet's drug-addiction, paranoia, and obsession with death.