|
Charles Augustus Howell (10 March 1840 – 21 April 1890) was an art dealer and alleged blackmailer who is best known for persuading the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal. His reputation as a blackmailer inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton".〔Basbenes, Nicholas A. ''A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books'', p.15-16."〕 ==Life== Howell was born in Oporto, Portugal to an English father, Alfred William Howell, and a Portuguese mother. He claimed to have aristocratic Portuguese ancestry, and would wear a red ribbon of the Portuguese Order of Christ, which he proclaimed to be an inherited family order.〔G. G. Williamson, ''Murray Marks and His Friends'', p.118〕 He moved to Britain in his youth, allegedly after having been caught cheating at cards.〔Samuel C. Chew, ''Swinburne'', Little, Brown, and Company, Boston: 1929, p.67.〕 In 1858 Howell left Britain shortly before his friend Felice Orsini attempted to assassinate Napoleon III, leading to rumours that he was involved in the plot. He returned in 1864. Howell was the friend and business agent of both Rossetti and John Ruskin. Ruskin employed him as a secretary between 1865 and 1868. Ruskin trusted Howell with "affairs needing delicate handling and a wise discretion." This was usually to manage Ruskin's discreet charitable donations. But Howell sought increasingly to obtain complete control of Ruskin's finances.〔 Eventually Edward Burne-Jones persuaded Ruskin to sever his connection with Howell. According to Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti, Howell was a skilful salesman "with his open manner, his winning address, with his exhaustless gift of amusing talk, not innocent of high colouring and actual blague – Howell was unsurpassable". His ability to exploit people's "hobbies and weaknesses" secured Rossetti several commissions.〔Mike Hepworth, ''Blackmail: publicity and secrecy in everyday life'', Taylor & Francis, 1975, p.55.〕 Howell organised the exhumation of Dante Gabriel Rosseti's wife Elizabeth Siddal and the retrieval of the poems he had left in her coffin in 1869. Rossetti insisted that the exhumation be kept absolutely secret. Howell also became a business adviser to Algernon Swinburne, becoming "not only his man of business but also the partner of his amusements and the recipient of his confidences." Some "burlesque and indecent letters" which Swinburne wrote to Howell were somehow acquired by George Redway, a publisher, who used them to blackmail Swinburne into giving up the copyright of one of his poems.〔 Swindburne blamed Howell, and after his death wrote that he hoped he was "in that particular circle of Malebolge where the coating of eternal excrement makes it impossible to see whether the damned dog's head is or is not tonsured."〔Nicholas Freeman, ''Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain'': Edinburgh University Press, 2011, p.208〕 Howell's connection with the Rossetti family is said to have ended when he was alleged to have persuaded his lover Rosa Corder to create fake Rossetti drawings.〔M. C. Rintoul, ''Dictionary of real people and places in fiction'', Taylor & Francis, 1993, p.521.〕 In 1883 Corder gave birth to Howell's daughter, who was christened Beatrice Ellen Howell.〔(The Correspondence of James McNeill Whister )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Charles Augustus Howell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|