Commentary
Introduction
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
was the organ for disseminating the work and
ideas of the initial Pre-Raphaelite circle. Not everyone
agrees about the founding of the PRB
movement—who was most responsible, who should
be regarded as its intellectual center. WMR, the chief
record-keeper and historian of the movement, assigned
those roles to his brother in his many later writings.
But Holman Hunt vigorously disputed that view of the
matter in his autobiography, where the main agents of
the movement are Hunt and Millais.
However that may be, no one disputes the fact that it was
DGR who initiated the idea of
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
. The venture was sustained by his energy and
programmatic goals “towards
Art
” and literature. The contents of
each number reflect his ideas and influence, nor are we
surprised to learn, from surviving early documents, that
he was the chief agent working to secure material for
publication.
The key persons involved in founding the periodical were
DGR, his brother WMR, and William Holman Hunt, although
the whole of the PRB circle discussed the journal and
how it should be constituted. This initial circle also
included James Collinson (1825?-1881), Millais, Frederic
George Stephens (1828-1907), and Thomas Woolner
(1825-1892). Others more or less closely associated with
the PRB circle contributed to the periodical but were
not involved with its production. At first the idea was
to call it
<hi rend="i">The P. R. B. Journal</hi>
, a title that emphasized the desire to preserve
a certain integrity of thought. This plan was abandoned,
however, and the decision was explicitly made to enlarge
the scope of the contributions to include material that
could not be called Pre-Raphaelite in any strict sense.
Nonetheless, for all its heterogeneity
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
does sustain certain consistent attachments.
Most apparent is its anti-secular attitude. Pervading
the journal is a loosely defined but unmistakeable set
of religious goals, as well as a closely related
conviction that art and literature are the vehicles that
can be most relied upon to secure those goals. The
journal recurs to subjects like early Italian painting,
medieval topoi of various kinds, and discussions of the
relation between early and contemporary art and
literature. The latter are particularly revealing. DGR
and his friends were much interested in how works of
imagination once served both devotional and social
functions, and how at certain times—the
medieval period was paradigmatic
here—religious and secular work seemed
undivorced, as if formed in a tense double-helix. How
such a state of affairs might be recovered in the mid-
and late 19th-century was a question to be explored as
well as a goal to be gained.
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
was an instrument toward those ends. It
consisted of both verse and prose (the latter both
fictional and expository). Only four numbers were
published (January, February, March, and May, 1850).
Discontinued when it proved a financial failure, it was
critically noticed, it had a significant influence, and
eventually its importance came to be widely
recognized.
Textual History: Composition
WMR was the person who handled virtually all the
administrative and editorial chores for the journal.
Contributions from persons outside the immediate PRB
circle were secured by different means, and while some
of these materials are extremely interesting, the
journal's most important texts are the contributions
from DGR.
Textual History: Revision
The title of
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
was changed after the first two numbers to
<hi rend="i">Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts towards
Nature Conducted Principally by Artists</hi>
. Each of the four published issues carries an
engraving as frontispiece. On the cover of each number
appears a sonnet
composed by WMR.
Printing History
The first number appeared in 1 January 1850 with Holman
Hunt's etching (700 copies printed; 50 had etchings on
India paper). Only 70 were sold. The second issue
appeared on 31 January (500 copies printed, 40 sold by 9
February). Number 3 appeared on 31 March, number 4 on 30
April (print runs for both are uncertain, and apparently
only 106 copies of number 4 were sold). The poor sales
forced the journal to close down. Most of the expenses
for the financial failure of the magazine were borne by
George Tupper.
After the fame of the PRB was established,
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
was reprinted first by Thomas Mosher (1898:
Portland, Maine) and again as a close facsimile in 1901 with
an introductory
<hi rend="i">Preface</hi>
by William Michael Rossetti giving historical
and bibliographical particulars about the magazine. A
recent reprint was put out by the Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford (1992), with a Preface by Andrea Rose.
Pictorial
Each of the four issues began with an etching, a device
that clearly established the artistic focus of the
journal. The gothic types that were used for the cover
sheets (which also served as title pages) and for the
printed texts also contributed to the tone if not the
arguments of the work. These types give a vaguely
Puseyite cast to the work and locate its spiritual
inspiration in an earlier, medieval world.
Bibliographic
Hunt,
<xref doc="a.nd467.h9.1914.1.rad" from="128" to="152">Pre-Raphaelitism</xref>
, 128-152.
Carl Dowson,
<xref doc="a.">Victorian Noon</xref>
.
Martha L. Laurent,
<hi rend="i">Tennyson and the Poetry of <hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>: A Study of Early Pre-Raphaelite Poets</hi>
, Ph. D. Thesis 1965.
Marillier,
<hi rend="i">DGR: An Illustrated Memorial</hi>
,
27-31
.
James Ashcroft Noble, “A
Pre-Raphaelite Magazine,”
Fraser's Magazine
(May 1882), 568-580.
Ernest Radford, “The Life and Death of <hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
,”
Idler
13 (1898), 227-233.
Stephens,
<hi rend="i">Dante Gabriel Rossetti</hi>
, 23-28.
WMR,
<xref doc="a.pr5246.a43.rad" from="149" to="156">
<hi rend="i">DGR. Memoir</hi>
</xref>
.
WMR,
<hi rend="i">Preface</hi>
to the 1901 facsimile edition of
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
.
WMR,
<hi rend="i">The P.R.B. Journal</hi>
.
WMR,
<xref doc="a.nd467.r8.rad" link="dead">
<hi rend="i">Preraphaelite Diaries and Letters</hi>
</xref>
.