An incident of astonishing intensity and strangeness in Rossetti's life was the exhumation of Lizzie Siddal. Rossetti chose the enigmatic Charles Augustus Howell to organise this task (...) Howell had been Ruskin's secretary but was sacked in 1870. Howell (who was remembered as 'the worst man in London' in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton') claimed to be a Portuguese nobleman and always wore the red ribbon of the Order of Christ (Morris thought he must have stolen it) but it appears his father was actually an English merchant. He was full of tall stories (...) He claimed to have seen a man with a dog's head and excused the extravagant lateness of his arrival for a dinner at the Burne-Jones household by claiming that his hansom cab had crashed into another that proved to contain his Doppelgänger who had handed him his own card. Georgiana Burne-Jones sat and fumed. He is officially recorded as having died of pneunomia in 1890 but the story also runs that this was a cover for the fact that he was found in the gutter with his throat slashed and a golden half-sovereign in his mouth. That is the authentic Howell.

There's a painter his friends calls G------,   Whose pictures the public ne'er see;       If you want to know why,    It's because he's so shy To show how funny they be.

In his adult years he threw a party to celebrate the awakening of his dormice (whom he provided with little bamboo chairs (...)) from their winter sleep but in spite of his prodding them and exhorting them to wake up, they were all dead.

In 1862 Tudor House was about one hundred and fifty years old (...) At first Rossetti lived here with his brother William, Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith. Meredith soon left. Some accounts say that it was on the very first day after he had witnessed the appalling sight of Rossetti at breakfast at which 'he devoured like an ogre five poached eggs that had bled to death on five slabs of bacon' and did not wish to repeat the experience.