How were Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s buried poems recovered in 1869?

In 1862, following the tragic death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried the only complete manuscript of his poems with her in Highgate Cemetery.1

By the end of the 1860s, as Rossetti’s interest in poetry returned, he sought to recover these works. The exhumation was carried out in 1869 through the agency of his business associate, Charles Augustus Howell. The process was reportedly a source of significant distress for the superstitious artist. Following the recovery, the poems were published in 1870.1