SOURCE: McGann, Jerome. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Betrayal of the Truth.” Victorian Poetry 26, no. 4 (winter 1988): 339-61.

In the following essay, McGann traces the thematic development of Rossetti's poetry, asserting that his work repeats “Dante's journey in the opposite direction, descending from various illusory heavens through a purgatory of unveilings to the nightmares and hells of his greatest work, the unwilled revelations arrived at in ‘The House of Life’.”

Rossetti has a notebook entry dating from the early 1870s in which he speaks of certain “Days when the characters of men came out as strongly as secret writing exposed to fire.”¹ What is illuminating and complex in this figure centers in the pun on the word “characters,” where both people and writing are imagined as encrypted forms—indeed, as encrypted transforms of each other. Their respective truths appear only when the false innocence of the surface is removed...