St. Mary Magdalene Penintiary, Highgate
- in early 1859, Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penintiary - a charitable institution for the reclamation of ‘fallen women’.
- ‘An Apple Gathering’ / ‘Maude Clare’ were written before this but demonstrate a prior interest within ‘fallen women’.
- ‘Goblin Market’ composed in the same year she started this work
Rossetti’s education
Christina and her sister received their educations entirely from their mother. May link to Our Mothers - a dedication to women as mothers and their dedication, perseverance and virtue amidst struggle.
Browning vs. Rossetti
Readers have generally considered Rosetti’s poetry to be less intellectual, less political and less varied than Browning’s.
Conversely, though, many have acknowledged Rossetti’s greater lyric gift, with her poetry often displaying perfection in diction, tone and form under the guise of utter simplicity.
Christina and Dante Gabriel
their father called the pair the ‘two storms’ of the family.
Counselling her niece
Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behaviour in her younger years. When she was older, counselling a niece with similar tendencies, she emphasised the importance of learning self-control.
William Michael’s memoir
in his memoir, Christina’s brother laments the thwarting of her high spirits; as an adult she was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.
the Oxford Movement in London, 1840s
- the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina’s poetry. She emphasises her belief in the ability for all individuals to have a relationship with God, and her poems are littered with imagery associated with the Church pre-reformation.
- the main aim of the movement was to rehabilitate the dignity of the Church against the interference of the State and politics
Religion in Rosetti’s work
More than half of her poetic output was devotional, and the work of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. After the publication of Sing Song and the recovery from her illness, Rossetti turned almost exclusively to devotional writing.
Recurring themes in her poetry
- The inconstancy of human love
- the vanity of earthly pleasures
- renunciation
- individual unworthiness
- the perfection of divine love
1845 Collapse of health
sometimes believed symptoms to have been psychosomatic, rescuing Rosetti from having to work as a governess like her mother and sister.
The relevance of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
- Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group
- she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings
- 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. It is plausible to suggest that many of her poems function as verbal Pre-Raphaelite portraits.
- recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of noticing the Tractarian influences
James Collinson
- proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848
- refused, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. he promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted.
- ended in 1850 as Collinson reverted to Catholicism
- poems she wrote at the height of her love for him (like Remember) have some of the most poignant lines about the immenence and inescapability of death.
conflicting identities
female, poet, Anglo-Catholic
Maude: A Story For Girls and being a ‘woman-poet’
The main conflict of the narrative revolves around Maude’s experience of the incompatibility of ladylike behaviour and poetic achievement.
Like the author, Maude is torn between pride in her work and moral qualms about that pride.
Finanical crisis
The Rossetti family were victims of a financial crisis, so much so that they had to move from Charlotte Street to Camden Town.
The Crimean War
Christina volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down.
Prostitution
was considred to be a social evil in Victorian times
Reworking poems
Rossetti often only changed a word or two before publication. But, in the case of major revisions, they took the form of the deletion of whole stanzas, sometimes even being reduced to half of their original length.
this is the case for ‘Echo’ and ‘Maude Clare’
economy of expression is a key signifier of Rossetti’s work and results in meaning being more suggestive than explicit.
why read Rossetti?
we find profound emotional conflict and complexity in her poetry, in addition to an endlessly creative lyric art. she resists easy categorisation - never the didactic or complacent Victorian voice - and rather seeks to express intense emotions and passions.
Rossetti’s originality
Rossetti takes the traditional poetic form - the sonnet as a love poem - and uses it in radically individual ways.
We also see this originality in her tendency to challenge and tease her reader. We expect lyric poetry to be confessional and revealing but Rossetti can consciously craft an enigmatic metaphor which she refuces to elucidate.
Population of Britain
at her birth in 1830, the population was 12 million
by her death it had surpassed 30 million
Up-Hill and At Home
written on the same day in 1858 (28 years old)
industrial revolution
Eric Hobsbawm (famous historian that looked at the rise of Capitalism etc.) held that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s. Rossetti was born in 1830, thus she had grown up seeing the full effects of the industrial revolution on the society around her.
W.J. Courthope’s highly influential essay, ‘The Latest Developments of Literary Poetry’ (1872)
W.J. Courthope’s description of Pre-Raphaelite poetry excludes the work of Christina Rossetti because of his emphasis on the brethren’s clearly subversive or antiorthodox traits. He perceives them as a disquieting avant-garde. Although, as we shall see, social subversiveness (but of different kinds) is a characteristic common to Christina Rossetti’s vers
