Arthur O'Shaughnessy and the
Doomed Circle

NANCY HAUSER

The Columbia University Libraries have recently acquired a collection
of manuscripts and poems by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy,
a Victorian poet and a popular member of the Pre-Raphaelite grotip.

A RTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY achieved success in his
/'\ first try at published verse. The volume An Epic of
A )\ Women and Other Poems (1870) was dedicated to
his author friend, John Payne, and was illustrated with fanciful
drawings by John Nettleship, who subsequently became famous
as an animal painter. The poet was immediately taken into London
literary society.

He became a member of the circle which gathered around Ford
Madox Brown, the English historical painter who was the teacher
of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Brown's house, the oldest and largest
in Fitzroy Square, was like a castle with its wide and lofty rooms,
massive stone staircases, and long underground passages leading to
dungeon-like vaults. It was a house haunted by echoes and with
winds whispering secrets in its great chambers. It was the very
abode which Thackeray peopled with his Newcomes. There
O'Shaughnessy met Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Rossettis,
AVilliam Morris, and other literary and artistic figures. He had a
handsome, sensitive, and clearly cut face. His eyes were bright and
earnest behind the glasses which gave him his student-like aspect.
He was full of enthusiasm and had a keenly-enjoying nature which
delighted in everything. It is no wonder that he was a favorite in
the Brown circle.

The happy evenings at Brown's home came to an end, however,
upon the death of Brown's nineteen year old son, Oliver, for

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