Hunt's heartache in Desperate Romantics episode four

This week, our episode-by-episode review of the Victorian drama sees temptress Annie Miller causing strife in the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Together again? ... Miller and Hunt in Desperate Romantics.

"Well, bugger me if it isn't Ali Baba," spluttered Rossetti, boggling at the vision of enraged exoticness that had materialised in the doorway. It wasn't Ali Baba. It was "Maniac" Hunt, fresh from his all-inclusive Club 18-30 holiday in the Holy Land and spoiling for another pointless punch-up.

"GNNNYYEEEEAAAARRR", he said - not unreasonably, as it happens, given that Rossetti was using Hunt's girlfriend's breasts as earmuffs at the time. Nevertheless, it wasn't until he whipped out his "large supply of hashish – straight from Syria," that they were able to chuckle about it (Annie was "merely modelling" for Rossetti, silly!), nursing their bruises and generally bonging it up in Hunt's impromptu Class B drugs hospice. Maniac unveiled his latest masterpiece. It was a painting of a goat. A large, self-conscious goat, perched awkwardly on some rock or other under a sky the colour of disemboweled tangerines. It was hideous but it was a Religious Metaphor, apparently, which made it good. So good, in fact, that it would be purchased for 450 guineas by a man who looked like Noddy Holder. Bingo! Progress at last then – and a measurable step forward in the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's thus far nebulous plan to tear the art establishment apart by dint of their balls and excellence.

Elsewhere, the Pygmalionisation of Annie Miller continued apace. Instructed by the absent Hunt to attend deportment and etiquette classes, she was now using words like "concur" and "diaphanous", spinning a parasol coquettishly as London responded to this vision of basic education and knockers by giving her a 21 gun trouser salute. Not that this enforced emposhment was having much effect on her libido. Indeed, Annie continued to play musical bums with anything in a cravat, flirting with Charles Dickens, deflowering a gaspingly grateful Fred and thrusting her loaves at monstrous alpha-toff and "well-known rake" Lord Rosterley and his unnaturally stiff hat. Hunt was inconsolable. Honking like a bereaved gander, he trudged off to Rossetti's studio to punch some advice out of him.

"What you like about Annie is her potential to wander. Her GRUBBINESS," counselled Rossetti as his best friend smashed his face into some foliage. "Without that (gasp) you no longer (umph) find her (gurgle) desirable."

It seemed to do the trick. Driven crackers by her GRUBBINESS, Maniac begged Annie to marry him. Then, desperate, he offered her £100 to sod off to Australia to leave him and his conflicted genitals in peace. "I love you", he wailed, wringing the tears from his Ra-Ra-Rasputin beard as the only woman he'd ever fancied sniggered off into the night.

Then it was all back to Rossetti's for tea and commerce with John Ruskin. But it wasn't Rossetti's work that interested the critic: it was Lizzie's. "She is an untouched genius," he observed, scattering praise and cash over her doodles and forecasting greatness for the pair's imminent double-act: Lizzie the sensationally gifted protégé, Rossetti the … local art teacher.

And that's where we left them: Rossetti glugging laudanum in an alleyway while a similarly emasculated Maniac boohooed all over his drawings.

Could this mark an irreparable tear in the fabric of the PRB fraternity? Will the "circle" be "unbroken"?

Original article here.