As an aspiring writer of 25, Hall Caine felt honoured to meet his idol, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who, by 1880, was living in seclusion in Chelsea. Rossetti's wife, the archetypal pre-Raphaelite beauty, Lizzie Siddall, had languished on the pedestal on which he had set her. Falling into a depression, she eventually died of an overdose. Rossetti buried a volume of poems with her, but seven years later, believing it to have been his best written work, he had her exhumed in order to recover it. Subsequently, and during the time Caine knew him, depressed and guilt-ridden, he too fell into a decline and became dependent on drugs. Caine gives an impression of what it was like to meet Rossetti and to share a home with him in the last few months of his life.