George Meredith (1828 - 1909) was a distinguished English novelist and poet whose esoteric style is well represented by the opening sentence of this letter of his: ‘I must compass you, in default of a better likeness, to the adventurous Odysseus descending to the shades and working the spirits of the dead’. The letter, written in 1907 in his magnificent hieroglyphic-like hand, is addressed to the noted Italian archeologist and architect Giacomo Boni (1859 - 1925), whose best-known work is the Villa Blanc on the Via Nomentana in Rome. Meredith was a well-connected individual, his friends including figures as famous (and diverse) as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Regarding his Pre-Raphaelite connections, it is known that Meredith sat for an iconic picture from this genre, namely The Death of Chatterton (1856), by Henry Wallis. Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century poet with whom the Romantics identified because of his inability to achieve poetic success in a prosaic world, was remembered by P. B. Shelley who, in his eulogy to John Keats titled Adonais (1821), included the following verses: ‘The inheritors of unfulfill’d renown/ Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,/ Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton/ Rose pale, his solemn agony had not/ Yet faded from him.’ While Chatterton’s tragic, teenage death has raised him to posthumous immortality, twenty-first-century critics have been arguing whether or not he really committed suicide, his poisoning possibly being the result of arsenic overdose taken to treat a venereal disease. George Meredith (1828 - 1909) was a distinguished English novelist and poet whose esoteric style is well represented by the opening sentence of this letter of his: ‘I must compass you, in default of a better likeness, to the adventurous Odysseus descending to the shades and working the spirits of the dead’. The letter, written in 1907 in his magnificent hieroglyphic-like hand, is addressed to the noted Italian archeologist and architect Giacomo Boni (1859 - 1925), whose best-known work is the Villa Blanc on the Via Nomentana in Rome. Meredith was a well-connected individual, his friends including figures as famous (and diverse) as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Regarding his Pre-Raphaelite connections, it is known that Meredith sat for an iconic picture from this genre, namely The Death of Chatterton (1856), by Henry Wallis. Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century poet with whom the Romantics identified because of his inability to achieve poetic success in a prosaic world, was remembered by P. B. Shelley who, in his eulogy to John Keats titled Adonais (1821), included the following verses: ‘The inheritors of unfulfill’d renown/ Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,/ Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton/ Rose pale, his solemn agony had not/ Yet faded from him.’ While Chatterton’s tragic, teenage death has raised him to posthumous immortality, twenty-first-century critics have been arguing whether or not he really committed suicide, his poisoning possibly being the result of arsenic overdose taken to treat a venereal disease.
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