The 1870s was a critical period for the transformation of British aestheticism into a mainstream phenomenon that both commodified and parodied its avant-garde origins. This transformation unfolds through three representative controversies: the 1870 publication of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, which was savaged by Robert Buchanan in his review ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; the appearance of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which pitted an avant-garde aesthetics against conventional art historical criticism; and the notorious libel trial of 1878, in which John Ruskin’s attack on James McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket led to a legal dispute that hinged on the definition of art itself. All three episodes reveal a doubleness at the heart of aestheticism: it is committed to both idealised abstraction and concrete embodiment. This doubleness underlies aestheticism’s status as an arcane philosophy that nonetheless manifests itself in highly recognisable and commmercialisable popular forms.

This chapter is the first of two on blood as a figure for kinship and species identity in the nineteenth century. It begins with the history of bloodletting and blood transfusion in the period, and documents the emergence in the second half of the century of an imaginary species body, whose individual members are characterized by their propensity to save or waste blood from the common supply. The idea of a collective body sharing a common blood is traced in a series of texts on bloodshed and blushing, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” William Morris’s “The Defense of Guinevere,” Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

A distinctive feature of Pater’s oeuvre is that, like many French critics of his generation, he wrote both literary and art criticism; in this respect his work parallels that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter. The chapter argues that, if Jerome McGann is right to describe Pater’s essay on Rossetti as ‘the best single study of Rossetti’s poetry we have’, that is because Pater provides the most persuasive interpretation of this double aspect of Rossetti’s work. The essay is densely intertextual with other writings of Pater’s in ways that can be surprising: verbal cross-references link Rossetti not only to his own chosen precursors (Dante as well as Blake and Michelangelo) but also to Gautier and Baudelaire, and, more importantly, to Plato. Thus it plays a more significant role in Pater’s overall critical project than previous scholars have recognised, not least explaining to us a historical fact that may seem difficult to understand: the extraordinary influence of Rossetti on both painters and poets of his own and succeeding generations, an influence out of all proportion, some may think, to his actual achievement in either art form.