Romantic poet exhumed wife's coffin for poetry royalties, ethical king

A lengthy text post with historical anecdotes about Elizabeth Siddall and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, accompanied by a Pre-Raphaelite painting depicting a pale woman in ornate clothing floating in dark water surrounded by flowers, with one hand raised in a gestural pose. The juxtaposition combines romantic art history with casual personal narrative and a darkly comedic ending about grave robbing for poetry royalties. Extracted text: Elizabeth Siddall lived (and died) a few yards up the road from our house in Hastings. She lived with the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In his 1974 book called "Soft City" author Jonathan Raban (RIP)writes about our pioneering natural food store Ceres Grain Shop: " the macrobiotic food shop on Portobello Road, Ceres, even turns the consumption of vegetables into a mystical religion... The girls who drift about the store, filling wire baskets with soya beans, miso and wakame sea weed, have the dim inwardness of gaze of Elizabeth Siddall in Rossetti's 'Jenny'. In bedsitters in Ladbroke Grove, they create themselves over gas rings, feeding their immaculate insides on harmoniously balanced amounts of yin and yang foods. It is hard to tell whether their beatific expressions come from their convictions of inner virtue or from undernourishment..." Apart from the fact that Raban didn't really get macrobiotics, it's a nice story. Elizabeth married Rossetti at St Clement's Church (our house is the former St. Clement's rectory) and died at home from a laudanum overdose. Rossetti wrote poems in her loving memory and popped them in her coffin. A few years later he had the coffin dug up, recovered the poems and they were published. Royalties should always prevail over loyalties. A painting of Siddall as Ophelia (note the beatific expression)