ABSTRACT
W. M. Rossetti's review in the Germ, No. 1, January 1850, 34–46. William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919), brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina, whose collected works he edited, was editor of the Pre-Raphaelite magazine the Germ which ran for four issues only in 1850. It is difficult to estimate how significant to the ‘Brotherhood’ was the singling out of The Bothie for the only poetry review in the first issue of a magazine dedicated to ‘Nature’ in literature and art, since W. M. Rossetti himself in a Preface to a facsimile reprint of the Germ (1901) notes: ‘The only remark which I need make on this somewhat ponderous article is that I, as editor of the Germ, was more or less expected to do the sort of work for which other ‘proprietors’ had little inclination.’ Later, in Some Reminiscences (London, 1906), he comments that he had treated The Bothie ‘from a very admiring point of view’ (I. 102). But his taste was good: in No. 2 he noticed The Strayed Reveller, and in No. 4 Christmas Eve and Easter Day. Rossetti was only twenty when he wrote this review.
