Rossetti: AO3 (biographical)

Father (Gabriele Rossetti)

• an Italian poet and political exile

• a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London

• his health collapsed when R was 13y.o leaving him unable to teach so R’s mother took up former employment and 2 of her other siblings also took on employment. R stayed home as a companion to her ailing fahter

Mother (Frances Polidori)

• brother is John William Polidori (author of ‘The Vampyre’)

• R dedicated her first poetry collection Verses to her mother

• R wrote her first poem "To my Mother on her Birthday" when she was 11.

early education

• All children received their earliest education from their mother (who had trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family)

• When Frances Rossetti (the mother) read to her children she favoured religious texts such as the Bible, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

  • The children's education began to differ when the boys began attending day school - formally instructed in classics, mathematics and sciences.

• When they began reading for themselves however they generally shunned their mother's edifying selections in favour of more imaginative delights, e.g. The Arabian Nights or Thomas Keightley's Fairy Mythology (1828).

  • Later favourites included Sir Walter Scott (European Romanticism), Ann Radcliffe (pioneer of Gothic fiction), and Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis (Gothic horror) ("Monk" Lewis due to the success of his 1796 Gothic novel The Monk).

  • Asked to describe her poetic influences, Rossetti speculated in an 1884 letter to Edmund Gosse: “If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather’s cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London.” 

    • It was in this cottage she fostered the attention to the minute in nature that marks her poetry, also observing the corruptibility and morality that became keynotes in her work.

childhood

• Very happy. Affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings.

• In temperament she was most like her brother DGR, their father called the pair the "two storms" of the family in comparison to the "two calms" Maria and William.

• Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behaviour, she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper.

  • self control was achieved, but potentially too much - William laments the thwarting of her high spirits in his memoir. as an adult she was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained

• The children produced a family newspaper, "The Hodge-Podge or Weekly Efforts", the first issue dated 20th May 1843. a later periodical was titled "The Illustrated Scrapbook"

• Her early poetic efforts included experiments in lyric, devotional, pastoral, ballad and fantasy forms.

work with fallen women

• In early 1859 began volunteering at a charitable institution (St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate) for the reclamation of 'fallen' women.

  • By the summer of 1859 she was devoting a great deal of time to her work at Highgate and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal and illegitimacy - however she had a prior interest in these themes, demonstrated by 'An Apple-Gathering' and 'Maude Clare'. 'Goblin Market', the theme of a fallen woman saved by a 'sister' can be seen as informed by her experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary, she was known as 'Sister Christina'

  • Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil; other Pre Raphaelite treatments of the subject include DGR's 'Jenny' and his unfinished painting Found

• She also petitioned for legislation to protect children from prostitution and sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent.

PRB and R’s poetry

• DGR was gathering the circle of young men of the PRB. He assumed Christina would participate, but she was never a member and refused to have her works read aloud in her absence on the grounds that such a display was unseemly.

• Nevertheless her poetry has been described as Pre-Raphaelite in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism.

• However more recent critics have remarked that the PR elements have been overemphasised at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences.

• But she was defo involved - he sat as Mary for Dante Gabriel’s paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), and her pensive Italianate countenance was a familiar image in the first phase of the movement. The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.

Ruskin’s opinion on Goblin Market

• DGR sent 'Goblin Market' to art critic John Ruskin, Ruskin's criticism of it is infamous.

  • He singled out for criticism the original meter that is now so often praised: he acknowledged the poem's 'beauty and power' but asserted it as unpublishable because it was 'so full of quaintness and offences' adding, 'irregular measure… is the chief calamity of modern poetry… your sister should exercise herself in the servest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like.'

role of her older brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti

• In poetics, my elder brother as my acute and most helpful critic.'

• Throughout her career, Dante Gabriel not only critiqued her work but also negotiated with publishers, assisted with book design, corrected proofs, and provided illustrations for her publications. As Goblin Market and Other Poems was being prepared for the press, he advised on the selection of poems and proposed new titles for some - including the title poem which was originally called 'A Peep at the Goblins'. He also provided frontispiece and title-page designs drawn from that poem.

• DGR played a large role in the preparation of the The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866), evident from the almost daily correspondence between them

critical reception of Goblin Market and Other Poems

• a critical success, critics welcoming a fresh and original poetic voice

R’s relationship w religion

• Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossetti's shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, influencing virtually all of her poetry.

  • Was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement

• Had close ties to Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser.

• More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so.

  • The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

 

• Throughout her life her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism intensified, taking some odd forms such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord's name printed on them.

R and illness

• In 1845 she, 2 years after her father's collapse in health, suffered a decline in health.

  • This breakdown mystified biographers, some of whom surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make financial contributions to the family by working as a governess. She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, however another doctor speculated she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania.

• Rossetti had bouts of serious illness throughout her life; William insists in his memoir that one cannot understand his sister unless one recognizes that she “was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid.”

  • The morbidity that readers have so often noted in her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina’s ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition. 

 

• From 1870-2 Rossetti was dangerously ill, at times apparently near death. She was then diagnosed with Graves' disease. Although she recovered, the threat of a relapse always remained. Moreover, the crisis let her appearance permanently altered and her heart weakened.

 

• Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1892 and underwent a mastectomy performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on the 29th Dec 1894.

 

Who were the men who Rossetti rejected?

1. James Collinson (1848)

2. Charles Bagot Cayley (1866)

why was James Collinson rejected

• In 1848 PRB James Collinson proposed marriage but was turned down due to his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. He returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time and was accepted.

  • Collinson struck biographers as an unlikely suitor, generally portrayed by anecdotes as a lacklustre sleepyhead, and opinion is mixed as to whether Rossetti was ever in love with him.

  • Engagement ended in the Spring of 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism.

why was Charles Cayley rejected

• In the autumn of 1866 she declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. Cayley had begun studying Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossetti's enthusiasm for Dante and endearing himself to them with his attentive visits during their father's final illness.

  • A hesitant romance probably began to develop around Rossetti and the absentminded scholar around 1862. Rossetti's reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised: In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down “on grounds of religious faith.

what was Cayley and Rossetti’s relationship like

• A hesitant romance

• Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883, she served as his literary executor. She declined having a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking they be destroyed. After Rossetti's death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian titled "Il Rosseggiar dell'Oriente" (The Reddening Dawn) (composed between 1862-1868) is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley. It was first published in Rossetti's New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (1896).

R and women (social AO3)

• During the early 1860s Rossetti was often in contact with female artists, including the members of the Portfolio Society, an informal group organised by Barbara Bodichon and female poets, such as Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell.

• She published poems in the feminist periodicals The English Woman's Journal and Victoria Magazine and in various anthologies.

R’s political views later in life

• Although becoming increasingly reclusive, she became more politically outspoken in later years.

• Critical of slavery, imperialism and military aggression, she was most passionately committed to the antivivisection movement (against animal experimentation).

• She also petitioned for legislation to protect children from prostitution and sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent.