Here's a couple more literary figures I've done cartoons of:
Lord Byron
Actually, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's uncle, John Polidori, was Byron's personal physician during the famous "Haunted Summer" that produced Polidori's tale "The Vampyre" and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Polidori was later fired by Byron, and after "The Vampyre" was published it was mistakenly believed to be written by Byron himself, despite protests to the contrary by Byron and Polidori. The story was a great success and started a literary vampire craze. (Well, some things never change...)
The Rossetti children never really knew their Uncle John, as he took his own life before they were born.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poe was actually a favorite author of Rossetti's and Edward Burne-Jones'. Burne-Jones had a taste for the macabre, but he admitted that Poe's gruesome story, "The Black Cat" was a little too much for him. (It might be because Ned was a devoted cat-lover, as was Poe himself, oddly enough.)
Rossetti did illustrations for Poe's poems and his own poem, "The Blessed Damozel", is sort of a reverse viewpoint of Poe's "The Raven".
When I was a kid there were several collections of short stories around the house, and two of them were Poe. He wrote lots of humorous stories, Often the source of the humor was the insanity of the viewpoint character . . . of course.
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