Jonty Claypole

One of the most famous pre-Raphaelite paintings, a hideous painting called Awakened Conscience by Holman Hunt from 1853, is a painting of a fallen woman, a man's mistress, sitting in the household he set up for her.

And she's sitting on his lap.

And there's a birdcage in the background, which is a very clunky metaphor for her life as a caged bird.

And the light of God is streaming into the windows and she's rising up from this man's lap, right, because her conscience has awakened.

And actually, it just looks like he's doing something very dirty to her.

There was another very famous sequence of paintings by a Cree-Rath adjacent painter called Augustus Leopold Egg called Past and Present, which is a Hogarthian triptych.

But it's stripped of all of the ambiguity and joy that Hogarth has.

And it's called Past and Present.

And the first painting is this

husband who's discovered a letter which shows his wife's affair.

And, you know, she's on the floor sobbing and the children's lives are ruined.

And then in the last painting, she's a prostitute living under a bridge by the Thames.

And in fact, she's died.

She's died because she had an affair.

Into this, into this comes Christina Rossetti.

Because Christina Rossetti's job, she had a part-time job, was that she was a sister, as they were called, in the Highgate Penitentiary for fallen women.

volunteering in an incredibly grim institution.

There is no redeeming aspect to this institution.

It bullied women who basically had reached a point of homelessness and just needed looking after to go into this convent-like environment where they would just lecture that, had to attend endless religious services.

They were deprived of their names.