Episode 4: When Wombats Do Inspire
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Number 16 Cheyne Walk must have been a noisy place in 1869. Between the shrieking peacocks, the pontificating art critics, the endlessly reciting poets, and the charging zebu in the garden, the cacophony would have been something to experience. This was, after all, the home of poet, painter and Pre-Raphaelite movement founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti surrounded himself with an exotic menagerie of poets, artists, stunners and wild animals; and nestled there at the heart of the hurly burly, oblivious to it all, was a wombat. Welcome to Rime, where we’re burrowing into tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington.
Wombats were a particular obsession of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his siblings, poet Christina Rossetti and critic William Michael Rossetti. And Gabriel’s own brand of larger-than-life, passionate yet self-destructive charisma was such that his acolytes, the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or PRB) and their satellites, quickly became obsessed as well. As PRB painter Val Princep said, “Rossetti was the planet around which we revolved; we copied his way of speaking. All beautiful women were 'stunners' with us. Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures.”
Wombats are marsupials hailing from Australia and Tasmania. They have short, stubby legs and a short, stubby tail, and usually weigh 45-80 pounds; they look a bit like a cross between a koala and a roly-poly bear cub. They live in extensive burrow systems that they dig with their teeth and claws, and they’re mainly nocturnal or crepuscular (meaning they come out for food at twilight). Females have one joey at a time, which they carry in a pouch; but unlike other marsupials the pouch opening faces the wombat’s hind legs instead of its abdomen, so that it doesn’t pull dirt into the pouch on top of its young during all the burrowing. Wombats don’t go around on their hind legs, though, so the babies aren’t in danger of falling out, in case you were worried (I was). Though preyed upon by dingos and tasmanian devils, the wombat is incredibly tough in defense of its burrow and its young. Its chief means of protection are the thick cartilage over its rump and its powerful hind legs, which it uses to literally crush the skulls of its attackers against the inside of its narrow tunnel walls. Roly-poly, but fierce.
Wombats, like most everything else from Australia, had been captivating Europe since their first reports in the late 1790s; even empress Josephine Bonaparte, Napoleon’s wife, had a wombat in her private menagerie at Malmaison. Growing up in London, the Rossetti siblings were regular visitors to the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, which had had wombats in residence since 1830. The Rossettis continued to visit the zoo into adulthood, with the express purpose of seeing “the Wombat’s Lair,” as Gabriel called it; and the siblings brought friends there to visit the wombats as well. Both Gabriel and Christina, who also enjoyed drawing, sketched the animals at the zoo that captivated them; Christina produced a charming drawing of a very cuddly looking wombat.
Wombats were often part of the scenery when the Rossettis were at work. In 1857 Gabriel was commissioned to decorate the ceiling and upper walls of the newly constructed Oxford Union, in what is now its Old Library. He rustled up a team of other artists, including Val Princep, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and they set to work painting murals with scenes from Arthurian legend. The bright light streaming in through the windows caused too much glare, so they were whitewashed. And since the artists couldn’t resist drawing on that fresh white surface, they covered it all in endless wombats. Wombats that were lost when the whitewashing was removed, unfortunately; but visitors can still spy one wombat lurking amongst the painted scenes, happily going about its own business in the midst of high Arthurian drama.
Christina mentions wombats several times in her poem Goblin Market, when describing the curious appearances of the goblins who tempt heroines Laura and Lizzie with their tantalizing fruits: “One had a cat’s face, / One whisk’d a tail, / One tramp’d at a rat’s pace, / One crawl’d like a snail, / One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry, / One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.” Gabriel’s illustrated frontispiece for Goblin Market includes that same obtuse and furry wombat, pressing a basket of fruit toward young Laura as she succumbs to temptation.
Even closer to home was the mural painted in the early 1860s in the drawing room at Red House, the house that William Morris commissioned for himself and his new bride, consummate stunner Jane Burden. Rossetti had spotted Jane and her sister on the street in Oxford during the painting of the Union murals, and she became the model for Guinevere. Jane eventually modeled for many of the PRB painters; but no one more than Rossetti, who went on to make her almost the living embodiment of the term Pre-Raphaelite. Later on he would become increasingly obsessed with Jane after the death of his own wife: poet, artist and model Lizzie Siddal. But for now, the group of young friends—the Morrises, the Rossettis, and the Burne-Joneses, came together to beautify the interior of Red House, in the halcyon days of a communal artistic experiment that ultimately could not last. The centerpiece of their work on the house is a mural in the drawing room by Burne-Jones: a wedding feast—Arthurian again—depicting William and Jane Morris as the wedded couple. And yet, look again: because even there, in the midst of a medieval feast, curled up under a bench, is a little sleeping wombat.
All that remained, in this wombat-mania, was for Rossetti to secure a real one of his own. After all, by 1869 he was a successful artist, and owner of a considerable menagerie of exotic animals allowed to roam freely in his back garden at number 16 Cheyne Walk, in the London neighborhood of Chelsea. At various times he kept, amongst many other creatures, a zebu, several kangaroos and wallabies, dormice, a woodchuck, armadillos, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, monkeys, an exuberantly destructive raccoon—and, of course, the peacocks, who were so loud that neighbour Thomas Carlyle was nearly driven mad by them (residents of the Cheyne Walk estates are forbidden from keeping peacocks to this day). All that was missing was the one rare creature Rossetti had longed for most of all. So how would a man of means acquire a wombat in Victorian London? It was fairly simple, as a matter of fact. He would head down to a shop on the Ratcliff Highway and order one.
Given that wombats were difficult to breed in captivity in the Victorian era, Rossetti’s wombat was almost certainly born in Australia or Tasmania, and traveled on a ship to reach London. The number of wombats coming into England and Europe at the time was so few, in fact, that it’s possible that our wombat might have been the same one that lived in the household of Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, aboard his ship Galatea. The ship had spent time in Tasmania, where the prince picked up his wombat, before a brief return to England in 1868. At that time the wombat left the prince’s care; and while it is actually possible that that wombat ended up in our shop on the Ratcliff Highway, we can’t know for sure. But a princely trans-oceanic voyage aboard a tall ship certainly fits the legend of our roly-poly friend.
Jamrach’s Animal Emporium on the Ratcliff Highway in East London was the place to purchase exotic animals in the 19th century. It was famous in its time; as was its proprietor, Charles Jamrach, who was so well-known that he was mentioned in numerous contemporary novels, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He sold animals to zoos throughout the world, as well as to private individuals like Rossetti and P.T. Barnum, who purchased an elephant named Jumbo from Jamrach. Rossetti had at one time been in negotiations with Jamrach for his own elephant, but at £400, he decided the cost was too steep. (I’m sure his neighbours heaved a collective sigh of relief.) The lure of the Animal Emporium was such that well-to-do tourists in London would take carriage rides to the shop, situated in a street otherwise famous for poverty, drunken brawling, and the horrific murders—still referred to as the Ratcliff Highway Murders—that had shocked the nation in 1811. None of that mattered much if you wanted to buy a lion for your backyard, however; or a tiger, kangaroo, penguin, wolf, or any of the thousands of small mammals and exotic birds that Jamrach kept in stock, often in cages disturbingly close to their predators. Rossetti had purchased his kangaroos there; at the time they were far more readily obtainable than wombats, and were priced accordingly—only £2.50 for a kangaroo, while the wombat that Rossetti bespoke set him back £8.
Finally in September 1869, the day of the wombat dawned. Rossetti was away in Scotland, recovering from a semi-breakdown precipitated by insomnia; an increasing reliance on drugs like chloral hydrate, taken to alleviate a hypochondriacal belief that he was going blind; and a growing infatuation with Jane Morris, wife of his closest friend. Plainly put, he was a mess. But into this gloom came a ray of light: a wombat had become available at Jamrach’s. Rossetti’s studio assistant Harry Dunn secured the wombat in his stead, and installed it in its new home at Cheyne Walk. Dunn sent sketches of the wombat to Rossetti, for whom life was suddenly looking up. He sent a comic, mock-heroic poem to Jane that manages to express his love of and excitement for the wombat, with a dose of the blithely ridiculous:
[Ode to a Wombat] by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Oh, how the family affections combat
Within the heart, and each hour flings a bomb at
My burning soul; neither from owl or bat
Can peace be gained till I have clasped my wombat.
Christina penned him a poem in Italian for the occasion, which is also glorious and ridiculous, and yet utterly sincere and loving at the same time. According to William Michael, she even coined the term “uommibatto,” for wombat:
O Uommibatto by Christina Rossetti
O Uommibatto,
Agil, giocondo,
Che ti sei fatto
Liscio e rotondo!
Deh non fuggire
Qual vagabondo
Non disparire
Forando il mondo
Peso davero
D’un emisfero
Non lieve il pondo.
John Simons, author of Rossetti’s Wombat, translates it thusly: "O wombat, agile, joyful, how have you grown, furry and round! Ah do not flee like a vagabond, do not vanish, burrowing through the world: it's really the weight of a hemisphere, not a light burden.” Christina added a couplet in English as a motto for these verses: "When wombats do inspire, / I strike my disused lyre."
And it seems that the wombat was everything that they’d all been hoping for, and more. The first day of his return, Rossetti wrote to a friend that it was “burrowed deep in the sofa cushions indulging apparently in the more abstruse forms of thought. He is a round furry ball with a head something between a bear and a guinea-pig, no legs, human feet with heels like anybody else, and no tail. Of course I shall call him ‘Top’. His habits are most endearing. He follows one about everywhere and sidles up and down stairs along the wall with the greatest activity. He is but a babe as yet and very rough as to his coat which however is splendidly thick. The Consummate Wombat is quite smooth, and such he will be when adult. He is tremendously strong and heroically good-natured. I know you would pronounce him a perfect darling.” As Gabriel famously wrote to William Michael, “The wombat is a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness.”
Top was certainly all those things to the Cheyne Walk crowd. Stories proliferated almost immediately, from the probably true (that Top often slept in a silver épergne on the dining table during dinner), to the maybe true (that Top ate a box of cigars when everyone was busy arguing about poetry), to the possibly true (that Top successfully interrupted an endlessly monologuing John Ruskin by burrowing under his coat), to the not-at-all-true (that Top was the model for Lewis Carroll’s dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, who, coincidentally, sleeps on the table during the mad tea party. Alice was published several years before Top arrived on the scene; though Carroll too was a friend of the family, and a visitor at Cheyne Walk). That little wombat charmed some of the luminaries of the Victorian era, just by being himself; and his brief life became a thing of legend.
And a brief life it was. Because as amusing as Top might have been to Rossetti and his circle, and for as much affection as Rossetti might really have felt toward him, it did not make up for the lack of proper care that Top received. Wombats can live 20-30 years in captivity if properly taken care of; but Top died only two months after being brought into Rossetti’s home, and was probably around two years of age at the time. Wombats are herbivores; their diets consist mostly of grasses, sedges, herbs, bark, and roots. In a letter to William Michael, written while Gabriel was still in Scotland, he told his brother that he’d gotten some instructions for feeding the wombat from an acquaintance named John Trivett Nettleship, who was “always at the zoo.” Nettleship was not at the zoo because he was a naturalist or zoologist, however; but rather in his capacity as a painter of wild animals. It starts to seem like poor Top never stood a chance.
Whatever the artist-recommended diet was, it’s safe to assume it was not what Top needed, as his health degraded quickly over the weeks leading to his demise. Shortly before his death, William Michael wrote, “The wombat shows symptoms of some malady of the mange-kind, and he is attended by a dog doctor.” Again, a dog-doctor was consulted; not someone who might have actually known something about wombats. At least William Michael, by far the more responsible of the two brothers, made some kind of effort; but it was not enough. On November 6th, 1869, Top was dead; less than two months after his arrival in Gabriel’s home. William Michael wrote, “The poor wombat died […] after some spasmodic symptoms; one more instance of the extraordinarily ill-luck that has attended Gabriel’s animals.” Ill-luck seems like an overly sympathetic choice of words to describe what was undoubtedly neglect toward the animal residents of number 16 Cheyne Walk, benign or unintentional though it might have been on the part of Rossetti himself. Obsession with a creature is clearly different than actually caring for one.
And like the hapless wretch he was, whether or not he appreciated his own complicity in the matter, Rossetti truly was broken up over the death of Top. He composed an elegy about the loss, written as a parody of a popular poem from the generation before, Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore. Lalla opines, “‘I never nurs’d a dear gazelle / To glad me with its soft black eye, / But when it came to know me well / And love me, it was sure to die!’” It’s typical of Rossetti’s verse about Top, including the wombat/combat/bomb at poem he wrote in Scotland, that it’s both self-satirizing about the level of emotion being displayed, and yet sincere in its grief for the lost wombat.
[Lines on the Death of a Wombat] by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I never reared a young Wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he most was sweet and fat
And tail-less, he was sure to die!
Gabriel had Top stuffed and displayed in the front hall at number 16 Cheyne Walk. According to William Michael, the effect was not successful; the currents whereabouts of the taxidermied wombat are unknown. A second wombat, whose name, if it had one, is lost to history, was purchased six months later; but was dead less than two weeks after that. Rossetti would not attempt to secure any more wombats in the future; but rather made due with a woodchuck, who also allowed itself to be snuggled, and slept in the épergne on the dining table, and was overall much hardier than its predecessors.
Scholars who write about Rossetti, the PRB, and their obsession with wombats make much of the fact that Top seems to have been named after William Morris, who was known as Topsy in their circle, because of his amazing head of curly hair. They argue that the wombat’s roly-poly body shape must be a subtle dig at Morris as well, who was always rendered as rather portly in Rossetti’s caricatures of him (despite Rossetti’s own comfortable bulk). They try to read Rossetti’s drawings of Top—particularly the drawing of Jane Morris leading Top on a leash, both of them wearing halos—as some kind of manifestation of Rossetti’s resentment toward Morris for his marriage to the woman Rossetti loved. But this doesn’t really work, because for all his faults, Rossetti loved Top; so instead they must pivot and read Top as some kind of locus of guilt over the friendship that Rossetti was slowly destroying in his obsession with Jane. So their relationship was strained; and yet Rossetti named a loved creature after Morris, perhaps as a way of being closer to the friend he was losing through his own actions. But why should the wombat be in a stand-in for Morris, just because of the name? It was Gabriel who was obsessed with them; so if anything, the wombat should be a stand-in for him. How does the wombat’s representation look from that angle? Suddenly the painted wombat at the Morris’s wedding feast seems a bit darkly prescient on the part of Burne-Jones. And can we really not imagine that a man might want to be walked on a leash by a beautiful woman? Or perhaps, after all, a wombat is a wombat is a wombat. Maybe the emphasis on Top as a stand-in or metaphor is just another way of distancing ourselves from the real animal, as if he was only ever a prop in someone else’s personal myth-making, or a strained metaphor for lost friendship and poor choices. Top lived, and was loved, for all his owner’s faults; and he deserved better from all of them, but he deserves better from us too.
Top arrived into an ongoing story: the self-created mythology of Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite brothers, who freely cast themselves into Arthurian and medieval legend; and also the mythology of wild tales that result from dubious choices with real consequences, usually reserved for the people not doing the telling. Top was one of those not telling, but told about; and I find I’m more interested to know what he would have said about his experiences, had he been able. I first learned about Top as an undergraduate English major writing about Rossetti, still too young not to fall for the romance that the Pre-Raphaelites were so skilled at drawing around themselves. Now I’m a bit more circumspect around Rossetti and his ilk; it’s easier to see the cost of their behaviour on those who had no choice but to bear it. So many legends were born of Top’s brief stay in Cheyne Walk; but from the creature at the heart of it, there can be only silence.
We can take heart, however, in the fact that Top is not forgotten. For who could forget such a beguiling wombat, despite having never met him in the fur? Wombat love continues to this day at Morris’s Red House in Bexleyheath, Southeast London, where visitors can follow its Wombat Trail around the house and grounds, spotting wombats in unexpected places. Top’s sorrows are not forgotten either: he’s the subject of a portrait by contemporary artist Walton Ford, whose painting The Invalid—Cheyne Walk 1869 depicts Top’s decline, as he convalesces in the garden with some other residents of the menagerie at 16 Cheyne Walk. In honor of Top, and in memoriam (as this is November, the month of his death, 151 years ago), I’m inviting everyone to write a poem about wombats. Send them to me via the Rime website or rimepoetry@gmail.com, and I’ll compile them into a special post, celebrating the life of that “most beautiful of God’s creatures.”
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. The theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Thanks for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode. You’ll also find links to my own poetry and visual art, so check it out. And if you enjoy Rime, please leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. Those ratings really help potential listeners find the great stories we’re telling here. Until next time!
Sources
Gnyp, Marta. “Interview with Walton Ford for Zoo Magazine, Spring 2018.” www.martagnyp.com/interviews/walton-ford.php
Oxford Union Library (oxunionlibrary). “Everyone knows that Rossetti and his pals painted our famous murals. However, did you know Rossetti owned a wombat? And that this wombat is hidden in this mural? Any guesses where? It's not your average looking wombat...#PreRaphaelites #Wombats #Victorians” 27 June 2018, 9:50 AM. Tweet.
Parkins, Wendy. “The Red House Discoveries (Or, the Wombat in the Drawing Room).” Journal of Victorian Culture Online, 22 August 2013.
jvc.oup.com/2013/08/22/the-red-house-discoveries-or-the-wombat-in-the-drawing-room
Simons, John. Rossetti's Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals in Victorian London. Middlesex University Press, 2008.
Trumble, Angus. “Rossetti's Wombat: A Pre-Raphaelite Obsession in Victorian England: A lecture by Harold White Fellow, Angus Trumble, at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 16 April, 2003.” www.nla.gov.au/angus-trumble/rossettis-wombat-a-pre-raphaelite-obsession-in-victorian-england
Trumble, Angus. "’O Uommibatto:’ How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat.” www.publicdomainreview.org/essay/o-uommibatto-how-the-pre-raphaelites-became-obsessed-with-the-wombat