Charles Augustus Howell was John Ruskin's secretary, agent and model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and exhumer of Lizzie Siddal. But he is also said to have been a master blackmailer and a forger of works of art.
In Victorian London, amidst the Pre-Raphaelite community and political conspiracies, loomed a man of adventurous spirit and great wit: Charles Augustus Howell. He was an agent for great artists and an art dealer, secret agent and master of blackmail. Arthur Conan Doyle made him a character in the Sherlock Holmes stories and called him the worst man in London.—Happy_Evil_Dude