Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English writer of romantic and devotional poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
She was the youngest sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings, including Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850). Some of her early poetry, such as "Goblin Market", was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set to music by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set to music by Darke and other composers. Her work has influenced the writings of Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin.
Christina was affected throughout her life by ill-health and depression. She never married, despite receiving three offers, but devoted her life to her poetry and her religious faith.
Early life
Christina Rossetti was born on 5 December 1830 at 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), London. Her father was Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and political exile from Vasto, Italy, and her mother was Frances Polidori, the sister of John William Polidori.
Christina was the youngest of four children: Maria Francesca was the eldest, born in 1827; then Gabriel Charles Dante (later known as Dante Gabriel) in 1828; and William Michael in 1829.
The children were brought up in the Protestant faith. Their mother was very devout, although their father, a lapsed Catholic, held unorthodox religious views. The family's often heated discussions over differing aspects of religion made a deep impression on the young Christina.
Education The Rossetti siblings enjoyed a close relationship, and together they produced a family magazine called the Hodge Podge. All four were interested in creating poetry, stories and illustrations. Christina was a precocious child, known for her fiery temper, who dictated her first story to her mother before she learnt to write."Author Profile: Christina Rossetti", Literary Worlds, BYU.edu, Web, 19 May 2011. Though her brothers were educated at boarding school, Christina and her sister Maria were educated at home by their parents. Christina read a variety of religious works, and also classics, fairy tales and novels. She delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The household was a bohemian one, open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries. The influence of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and influenced Christina's later writing. The family home in Bloomsbury was within easy reach of Madame Tussauds, London Zoo and the newly opened Regent's Park, which Christina visited frequently. Unlike her parents, she felt at home in London and was seemingly happy during her early years.Packer, Lona Mosk (1963) Christina Rossetti University of California Press, pp. 13–17.
Financial troubles
In the 1840s, the Rossetti family, never wealthy, faced increasing financial troubles after a deterioration in Gabriele Rossetti's physical and mental health. In 1843, he was diagnosed with persistent bronchitis, possibly tuberculosis, and faced losing his sight. He gave up his teaching post at King's College, and though he lived another 11 years, he suffered from depression and was never physically well again. Christina's mother began teaching to support the family, and Maria became a live-in governess, a prospect that Christina dreaded. At this time, William Rossetti was working for the Excise Office, and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christina increasingly isolated at home.Packer, Lona Mosk (1963) Christina Rossetti University of California Press, p. 20.
When she was 14 Christina suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed. During this period she, her mother and her sister became absorbed in the Anglo-Catholic movement that had developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in her life. Between 1842 and 1847, Christina underwent a change of personality, explained by her brother William as a combination of "ill health and an early blight to the affections," as well as a growing preoccupation with religious matters, describing her as "a fountain sealed."
Engagement to James Collinson In her late teens, Christina became engaged to the painter James Collinson. He, like her brothers Gabriel and William, was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, established in 1848.Packer, Lona Mosk (1963) Christina Rossetti University of California Press, p. 29. However, the Collinson family did not warm to Christina, and she ended the engagement in 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism. This early disappointment marked Christina profoundly. Modelling
Christina sat for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings. In 1848 she sat for the Virgin Mary in his first completed oil painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, the first work he inscribed with the initials "PRB", for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The following year Christina modelled for his depiction of the Annunciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini!
Christina was also an artist, attending the North London Drawing School in the early 1850s, and later producing her own drawings as guides for the illustrators of her poetry books.
Poetry
From 1842 onward, Christina began collecting and dating her poems. Most of these were written in imitation of her favourite poets. In 1847 she began experimenting with verse forms such as sonnets, hymns and ballads, while drawing on narratives from the Bible, folk tales and the lives of saints. Her early pieces often meditate on death and loss in the Romantic tradition.
In 1847, Christina's grandfather Gaetano Polidori published a small volume of her poetry, which was given out to family and friends. In 1848, two poems, "Death's Chill Between" and "Heart's Chill Between," were published in the Athenaeum magazine."Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)," eNotes.com, Web, 19 May 2011.Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti and the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood She used the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" in the literary periodical The Germ, published by the Pre-Raphaelites from January to April 1850 and edited by her brother William. This marked the beginning of her public career.The Cambridge Companion to English Poets (2011), Claude Rawson, Cambridge University Press, pp. 424–429.
During this time Christina once more became seriously ill with depression. In 1853 she helped her mother run a school in Fromefield, Frome, but the venture was not a success. A plaque marks the house. In 1854 they returned to London, where Gabriele Rossetti died.
Christina's more critical reflections on the artistic movement her brother had begun were expressed in an 1856 poem, "In the Artist's Studio". Here she reflects on seeing multiple paintings of the same model. For Christina, the artist's idealised vision of the model's character begins to overwhelm his work, until "every canvas means/the one same meaning". Dinah Roe, in her introduction to the Penguin Classics collection of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, argues that this critique of her brother and similar male artists is less about "the objectification of women" than about "the male artist's self-worship".
At this time, Christina received an offer of marriage from the painter John Brett, whom she refused. Christina's 1860 poem "No, Thank You, John" may refer to this episode. Christina's biographer Violet Hunt states that Brett made a proposal of marriage to Christina and was rejected, adding that in 1858, Brett abandoned a portrait he had been painting of her.
Goblin Market Christina's first commercially printed collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published under her own name by Macmillan & Co. in 1862, when she was 31. Christina worked as a volunteer in 1859–1870 at the London Diocesan Penitentiary in Highgate, a refuge for fallen women – some historians have suggested that Goblin Market may have been inspired by some of its inmates.Lona Mosk Packer, (1963), Christina Rossetti, University of California Press, p. 155. Dante Gabriel Rossetti became his sister's collaborator and created a series of woodcut illustrations to the book, and in 1861 Gabriel sent a copy to the art critic John Ruskin. The response was disappointing: Ruskin acknowledged the poem's "beauty and power" but was severely critical of its "irregular measure."
After publication, Goblin Market was lauded by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Gabriel named Christina as the natural successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had died the year before, in 1861. In an interview with William Sharp in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1895): Gabriel says: "She (Christina) is the finest woman-poet since Mrs. Browning, by a long way; and in artless art, if not in intellectual impulse, is greatly Mrs. Browning's superior." The title poem, one of Christina's best-known, is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, but critics have interpreted it in various ways, including as an allegory of temptation and salvation, a comment on Victorian gender roles and female agency, a work of erotic desire and social redemption, and an allegory of "addiction and recovery". There are parallels with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the religious themes of temptation, sin and redemption by vicarious suffering.Constance W. Hassett, (2005), Christina Rossetti: the patience of style, University of Virginia Press, p. 15.
Christina had a wide circle of friends and correspondents, including the poet Swinburne. In 1883 Swinburne dedicated A Century of Roundels to Christina, and she adopted his roundel form in a number of poems, for instance in Wife to Husband.Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems, Penguin Books, London, 2001 .
Christina continued to write and publish for the rest of her life, mainly devotional work and poetry. In the years just before her death, she wrote The Face of the Deep (1892), a book of devotional prose, and in 1893 she oversaw an enlarged edition of Sing-Song, which had originally been published in 1872.Antony H. Harrison (2004), The Letters of Christina Rossetti Volume 4, 1887–1894, University of Virginia Press, .
Engagement to Charles Cayley Between 1864 and 1866, Christina became romantically involved with the poet and translator Charles Cayley, who was also a family friend. Their relationship was affectionate, but the passionately devout Christina ultimately found herself unable to marry the agnostic Cayley.
Later life
In her later decades Christina suffered from a type of hyperthyroidism – Graves' disease – diagnosed in 1872, suffering a near-fatal attack in the early 1870s. In 1893 she developed breast cancer. The tumour was removed, but there was a recurrence in September 1893. She died of cancer on 29 December 1894 and was buried on 2 January 1895 in the family grave on the west side of Highgate Cemetery, which had been opened in October 1869 so that Gabriel could retrieve a volume of poems he had buried with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal.Scott Wilson, Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3rd ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 40725-40726). McFarland & Company, Inc., publishers. Kindle Edition. There Christina joined her father, mother and Elizabeth. Her brother William was also buried there in 1919, as were the ashes of four subsequent family members.
There is a stone tablet on the façade of 30 Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, marking Christina's final home, where she died.
Character