“‘Ah bitter love!’ she sung”: music and unobtainable erotic desires in Theophilus Marzials’s Love’s Masquerades

Abstract

“I have never ceased to regret,” William Bell Scott wrote in his Autobiographical Notes, “that the reception [Theophilus Marzials’s] first volume met with has prevented him from persevering” (Minto 1892, 194). Given that Marzials’s first and only collection of poetry, The Gallery of Pigeons, and Other Poems (1873), faced disapproval from critics including the much-celebrated Dante Gabriel Rossetti – who, upon receiving a complimentary copy of Marzials’s poetry, wrote to the author and candidly stated his dissatisfaction with the collection – Marzials’s dejection was arguably very understandable. Marzials subsequently wrote to Scott and admitted that he felt as though “what [Rossetti] says is true, that my book is crude and immature, and, what to my mind is worse, trivial” (Minto, 194). My paper strongly disagrees with Marzials’s dispirited suggestion that The Gallery of Pigeons was unimportant or insignificant, arguing instead that his poetry articulates the most private (and often dangerous) aspects of sexuality and sexual identity in the midto late-nineteenth century. In doing so, I call attention to how music is employed throughout The Gallery of Pigeons, focusing primarily on Love’s Masquerades – a sonnet sequence contained amongst the collection and one within which the personified Love appears in different guises and performs various sexual and romantic roles – to imagine, explore, and express specifically unobtainable erotic desires; their unobtainability arising from the social disruption that they threaten. Very little has been written on Marzials or his poetry, so in its absence a brief biographical note might be helpful. The youngest of five children, Theo Marzials was born on 20 December 1850 to Antoine-Theophile Marzials and Mary Ann Jackson. Although he only published the aforementioned Gallery of Pigeons, Marzials also contributed to the literary periodical The Yellow Book during the final years of the nineteenth century. When The Gallery of Pigeons did not receive the praise that its author might have wished for, Marzials turned his attention to music, consequently spending much of his time working as a composer. Nevertheless, he sometimes amalgamated both of his artistic interests; Pan Pipes (1873), for example, tied together the poetry of Christina Rossetti (the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the illustrations of Walter Crane with Marzials’s musical compositions. In a similar vein, Marzials composed a musical version of