Similarly, and as I mentioned at the outset, Rossetti altered a line in “The Burden of Nineveh” for The Crayon, changing the phrase, “Some colour'd Arab straw-matting,/ Half-ripp'd, was still upon the thing” to “The print of its first rush-matting/ (Wound ere it dried) still ribbed the thing.” Giving up the idea that he had seen ancient “matting” “woven languidly” by the “brown maidens” of Nineveh, Rossetti alters the image to the marks or “print” such matting left upon the stone. In fact, such marks are also dubious as survivals from antiquity, and the whole vacillation suggests that Rossetti was working from his imagination here, describing something he did not actually see. In any case, this revision is part of a pattern of corrections that Rossetti would continue earnestly as he revised “The Burden of Nineveh” for the 1870 Poems, attempting to iron out its various historical misprisions. The Crayon text reveals that this process began much earlier than 1869. JuXta reveals other variants between the Oxford/Cambridge and Crayon texts of the poem that are more minor, and likely not attributable to Rossetti. Oxford/Cambridge has “When to the wind the salt pools shook,” whereas The Crayon has “Where to the wind” etc. in line 138. Another variant occurs in line 169, where the former’s “curtain joys” is replaced by the latter’s “certain joys”; this could easily be the error of a compositor, and indeed The Crayon text is marked by a number of typos (e.g, in lines 148, 190, and 191). Nevertheless, the “rush-wrapping” revision indicates the significance of The Crayon text as part of the early evolution of the poem.

    One final piece of evidence needs to be introduced: a fragment of a fair-copy manuscript of “The Burden of Nineveh,” dating from early August 1869.@On this manuscript, recently discovered by McGann in the Library of the South African National Gallery, see http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1850.sangms.radheader.html Now held in the library of the South African National Gallery, this manuscript page in Rossetti’s hand presents the first two stanzas of the poem as it appeared in both the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) and The Crayon (1858). On the back of the page is a note from Rossetti to the printer asking for proofs “as soon as possible,” and placing this fragment very early in the composition history of the 1870 Poems. Since the Penkill proofs (the earliest integral proof-stage of that volume) present very different opening stanzas of “The Burden of Nineveh,” this manuscript and the requested proofs must precede 18 August 1869, when the Penkill proofs were completed. We know that Rossetti had begun tinkering with his poems in proof in late July (in the case of “Sister Helen,” for example, an early galley proof survives), and this “Burden of Nineveh” manuscript was part of that same stage of revision.@For more on this “Sister Helen” galley proof, see http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/2-1851.prinproof.radheader.html We can therefore date Rossetti’s significant recasting of “The Burden of Nineveh” with some precision to the second week of August 1869. His transformation of this poem about monuments and memory occurred just as he began to re-imagine his entire career as a poet and to prepare his own monument, the 1870 Poems – a monument that would come to depend on a “dead disbowelled mystery…stark from the charnel”(15-7): the notebook exhumed from Lizzie’s grave.

    My goal in this brief investigation has been to illuminate the textual history of “The Burden of Nineveh,” with particular reference to the Marillier manuscript facsimiles and The Crayon version of 1858. It turns out that both of these somewhat ancillary publications in fact present important witnesses to Rossetti’s literary work. Especially when coupled with the JuXta tool, McGann’s Rossetti Archive has great potential to yield similar discoveries, just as it offers scholars the opportunity to correct erroneous imaginings of Rossetti’s composition and publication history. The scene of nineteenth-century publication was large and variegated in ways that we are only now (as significant portions of it are digitized) coming to apprehend; the industrial press meant a scattering of documents across unexpected ranges, especially in the periodical press. Our growing ability to search this material electronically is transforming the landscape of textual scholarship and bibliography, with major consequences for literary criticism as well. These small episodes regarding Rossetti’s “The Burden of Nineveh” are emblematic of the complexities of Victorian literary transmission, and of the power of digital tools and archives to help us sort the past.

WORKS CITED

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----. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman, 9 vols. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2002-08. [cited by letter number]

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Stauffer, Andrew. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh." Victorian Literature and Culture 33.2 (2005): 369-94.