In a recent article in Victorian Literature and Culture, I made what I thought was an interesting point about Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s revisions to a particular passage in “The Burden of Nineveh,” a poem (written in 1850) about a monumental sculpture of an Assyrian bull-god being hauled into the British Museum. In the first published version (1856), the narrator observes that “Some colour’d Arab straw-matting,/ Half-ripp’d, was still upon the thing”(lines 21-2). Rossetti revised the poem extensively prior to its republication 1870 Poems, and I wrote that, in a poem about an excavated thing that Rossetti calls “the mummy of a buried faith,” this passage would likely have evoked the manuscripts exhumed from Elizabeth Siddal’s grave, those

    Such a reading might stand as representative of a large class of literary interpretations that draw on textual history in more or less serious ways, and yet which are bound to collide with new data to be revealed by our burgeoning electronic resources. These resources include not only (in this case) Jerome McGann’s Rossetti Archive (www.rossettiarchive.org) but the Networked Interface for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (www.nines.org) and comprehensive databases such as the ProQuest’s American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900 and British Periodicals series. In addition, our means of investigating data is being transformed rapidly by software including complex search engines, indexing protocols, and collation tools like JuXta (www.patacriticism.org/juxta/). As a result, a significant portion of the scholarly record will need to be revisited and rewritten based on the information that can be gleaned via these new methods of textual processing. 

    My reading of Rossetti’s revisions to the “straw-matting” passage, and our understanding the history of “The Burden of Nineveh,” stand in need of precisely this kind of correction. There are at least two problems with my interpretation quoted above: first, the exhumation occurred on October 5, 1869, several months after the version of “The Burden of Nineveh” with those revised lines was set in type (in the Penkill proofs printed in August of 1869). Therefore Rossetti could not have been thinking of the disinterred manuscripts as he transformed that ancient textile to its ghostly “print.” Second, and more damningly, that revision was in fact made much earlier, in 1858: the version of the poem printed in The Crayon (an American art periodical) in that year also has the “print of its first rush-wrapping” lines. Rossetti did revise the poem substantially in 1869, but the lines in question were carried forward virtually unchanged. My reading of this scene of revision, therefore, turns out to be mostly an imaginative projection.@In that article, I make another, related mistake in a footnote, where I state that “The version of ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ printed in [the Penkill proofs] was very close to the 1856 version, apparently having been copied from the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine text”(391, n.24). The Penkill proofs contain a version already seriously revised from the 1856 text, including the new reading of the “rush-wrapping” lines from The Crayon.
  

    One might say that the skewed chronology matters less for Rossetti than it might for others, given the strangely proleptic cast of his imagination (a subject Jerome McGann engages in his recent book on Rossetti). Yet it remains the case that the textual genealogy of “The Burden of Nineveh” stands in need of some re-tracing. With McGann's Rossetti Archive and William Fredeman's edition of Rossetti's letters now becoming available, a great deal of new information about Rossetti’s life and work can be brought to bear on textual matters. In this case, two manuscript fragments from the composition stage of “The Burden of Nineveh” – and a further fragment from a later stage of revision – have come to light, and these give us new information about the poem’s evolution. In addition, as I’ve mentioned, the version published in the periodical The Crayon indicates that Rossetti took the opportunity to begin to revise the poem. What follows, then, is a kind of field report from the archive with regard to a poem that deserves more careful attention than it has so far received.@The research for this article was performed primarily using the Rossetti Archive (http://www.rossettiarchive.org). I was also aided by the collation program JUXTA, developed by Applied Research in Patacriticism at the University of Virginia (http://www.patacriticism.org).

    It is worth noting that “The Burden of Nineveh” was always an important work for Rossetti, though he recognized its difference from his typical style and subject matter. John Ruskin, too, admired the poem after seeing it in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in August 1856, and asked Rossetti who wrote it. A subsequent letter from Rossetti to William Allingham suggests that this episode was the germination point of the 1870 Poems:

Further, when years later he did put together such a volume, “The Burden of Nineveh” had a kind of priority in Rossetti’s mind.  In an October 1869 letter to Alicia Losh, during the run-up to the publication of the 1870 Poems, he wrote, “The ‘Nineveh’ I reckon on as destined probably to be the most generally popular thing in the book.  I do not regard it with indifference myself, but am inclined to give the preference to the more emotional order of subject”(Correspondence 69.186).  Indeed, the question of preference is interesting with regard to the ordering of Rossetti’s poems. In the 1881 edition of his Poems, for example, “The Burden of Nineveh” is seventeenth, but in the 1870 Poems, it appears fourth. Indeed, the poem hovered in third position in the early proofs (i.e., the Penkill, A, and A2 proofs, all dating from August and September of 1869), and after the final proofs for the first edition were printed on March 1, 1870, Rossetti wrote to his publisher F.S. Ellis asking him to move “Nineveh” up to third position again:

The sentimental or moral things are "The Blessed Damozel," "Nocturn," and "The Burden of Nineveh." Ultimately, "Troy Town" ended up between "Nocturn" and "Nineveh" in the first edition, but it is clear the Rossetti had faith in "The Burden of Nineveh" as one of the first few works that would greet the reader of his finely-crafted 1870 Poems. Later collected editions have sometimes obscured this priority.