1. An Introduction to Christina Rossetti Thursday, 20 September 2018
Learning Outcomes
To have some contextual knowledge of the life of Christina Rossetti
To understand the key characteristics of the pre- Raphaelites.

2. The Rossetti Family Tree

3. Christina Rossetti Born Died Occupation Language Nationality
Christina Georgina Rossetti ( )5 December 1830 London, England
Died
29 December 1894 (aged 64) London, England
Occupation
Poet
Language
English
Nationality
British
Literary movement
Pre-Raphaelite
Relatives
Gaetano Polidori (maternal grandfather), Gabriele Rossetti (father), Frances Polidori (mother), John William Polidori (maternal uncle), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (brother), Maria Francesca Rossetti (sister), William Michael Rossetti (brother)

4. Christina Rossetti
Rossetti was educated at home by her mother and father, who had her study religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels. She was influenced by the work of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers. Their home was open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries. The family homes in Bloomsbury at 38 and later 50 Charlotte Street were within easy reach of Madam Tussauds, London Zoo and the newly opened Regent's Park, which she visited regularly; in contrast to her parents, Rossetti was very much a London child, and, it seems, a happy one.

5. Christina Rossetti
In the 1840s, her family faced severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her father'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. Rossetti's mother began teaching to keep the family out of poverty and Maria became a live-in governess, a prospect that Christina Rossetti dreaded. At this time her brother William was working for the Excise Office and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christina's life at home to become one of increasing isolation. When she was 14, Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed. During this period she, her mother, and her sister became deeply interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in Rossetti's life.

6. Christina’s Love Interests
In her late teens, Rossetti became engaged to the painter James Collinson, the first of three suitors. He was, like her brothers Dante and William, one of the founding members of the avant-garde artistic group, the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded 1848). The engagement was broken in 1850 when he reverted to Catholicism. Later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons. The third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she also refused. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory.

7. James Collinson
James Collinson was a Victorian painter who was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from 1848 to 1850.
Born: May 9, 1825, Mansfield
Died: January 24, 1881, Camberwell
Education: Royal Academy of Arts
Period: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

8. John Brett

9. Charles Bagot Cayley

10. William Bell Scott by Frederick Bacon Barwell
                                                                  
William Bell Scott by Frederick Bacon Barwell[1]
William Bell Scott
William Bell Scott by Frederick Bacon Barwell
William Bell Scott; John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti by William Downey

11. The Rossetti family in Hastings

12. He later proposed to her but she rejected him because he was agnostic.
In January 1863 Christina Rossetti went to 81 High Street because of poor health.
It was around this time she was attracted to Charles Bagot Cayley, a linguist and translator.
He later proposed to her but she rejected him because he was agnostic.
Christina stayed here with her cousin Henrieta Polydore who was suffering from Consumption. In fact Christina at this time also had a persistent cough which suggests she may have been developing the illness.
In the early 1860’s he and the poetess Christina Rossetti, Gabriele Rossetti’s daughter, fell in love. There were two impediments to their marriage: one was financial, but Christina’s brother William Michael Rossetti (a successful civil servant and art critic) offered to give them an allowance. The bigger obstacle was Charles Bagot Cayley’s agnosticism: Christina Rossetti was a devout high Anglican and felt she could not marry someone who did not share her religious sympathies. Nonetheless they remained devoted to each other till his death. Several of Christina’s poems were about their love, and one - The Wombat - was inspired by the Rossettis' nickname for him.

13. Charles Bagot Cayley
Charles Bagot Cayley died at his London lodgings of heart disease on 5 December Christina Rossetti’s 53rd birthday .
He was buried in Hastings, near his mother and shares his grave with his sister Sophia.
There is now only a rather solitary pine tree that appears to mark the location of the grave.
In the words of Christina’s brother William, he “continued to be a living personality in her heart”, and she saved every memento of him.
William wrote that as she lay dying in December 1894, she talked of him “in terms of almost passionate intensity.”
In April 1884 Christina made a special trip there to visit his grave and her poem ‘One Seaside Grave’ has been connected to this.
In the early 1860’s he and the poetess Christina Rossetti, Gabriele Rossetti’s daughter, fell in love. There were two impediments to their marriage: one was financial, but Christina’s brother William Michael Rossetti (a successful civil servant and art critic) offered to give them an allowance. The bigger obstacle was Charles Bagot Cayley’s agnosticism: Christina Rossetti was a devout high Anglican and felt she could not marry someone who did not share her religious sympathies. Nonetheless they remained devoted to each other till his death. Several of Christina’s poems were about their love, and one - The Wombat - was inspired by the Rossettis' nickname for him.

14. Charles Bagot Cayley One Seaside Grave by Christina Rossetti
Unmindful of the roses,         Unmindful of the thorn, A reaper tired reposes         Among his gathered corn:         So might I, till the morn! Cold as the cold Decembers,         Past as the days that set, While only one remembers         And all the rest forget,--         But one remembers yet.
In the early 1860’s he and the poetess Christina Rossetti, Gabriele Rossetti’s daughter, fell in love. There were two impediments to their marriage: one was financial, but Christina’s brother William Michael Rossetti (a successful civil servant and art critic) offered to give them an allowance. The bigger obstacle was Charles Bagot Cayley’s agnosticism: Christina Rossetti was a devout high Anglican and felt she could not marry someone who did not share her religious sympathies. Nonetheless they remained devoted to each other till his death. Several of Christina’s poems were about their love, and one - The Wombat - was inspired by the Rossettis' nickname for him.

15. Religion
Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement* when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry.
The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. 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.
*The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church members of the Church of England which eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism.

16. Rossetti’s Health
In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister.
She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania. Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father’s breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter, Christina’s recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a “clammy fin” repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma.

17. Rossetti’s Health
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.”

18. Family Fun
Later in 1847 Dante Gabriel, William, and Christina began a tradition of playing bouts rimés, a game in which two of them would race to compose a sonnet conforming to a set of line endings provided by the third.
Christina excelled at the exercise, composing sonnets in a matter of minutes. In 1848 she had her first taste of fame when, at Dante Gabriel’s instigation, she submitted two of her poems, “Death’s Chill Between” and “Heart’s Chill Between,” to the prestigious literary periodical The Athenaeum; their acceptance made her a nationally published poet at seventeen. During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

19. The Pre-Raphaelites
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of artists, poets, and critics who, during late Victorian England, admired and emulated late Medieval art. This type of art dates back to a time before the appearance of artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo. The original and most famous members of the Pre-Raphaelites were John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt.
The Pre-Raphaelites sought a return to bright, rich colours and attention to detail, as well as a stress in a spiritual response to art and the importance of observing nature; all classic examples of late Medieval art.

20. The Pre-Raphaelites
In terms of literature, they created highly visual poetry, basing their techniques on those of the visual arts (great attention to colour and exact detail). They promote a greater emphasis on the legendary past. The Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood did not believe that poetry should be overtly didactic (try to teach us), but that poetry could inspire in a moral way.

21. The Pre-Raphaelites
Key artists of the period saw woman as art. In keeping with the old romantic tradition of observing women, it is fair to say that women tended to exist as images to be observed and as such they are symbols. Their symbolic status is then transformed into narrative via the artist who was often male. For Rossetti especially, it seems as if a woman's only story is her beauty as in most of his paintings his women are not doing anything active, they simply look beautiful.

22. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Lady Lilith By
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

23. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Mary Magdelene By
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

24. Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites
Christina Rossetti was barely eighteen when the Pre– Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by her brothers and their art student friends. Quiet and extremely shy, she shrank from being publicly associated with their activities, but was nevertheless closely and intensely involved with the PRB, as observer and participant. Indeed, with historical hindsight she can be given the honorary title of ‘Pre– Raphaelite Sister’ by virtue both of her literal sisterhood and her contribution to PRB productions.

25. In an Artist’s Studio
In her poem, "In an Artist's studio," Christina Rossetti responds to the tendency of Victorian artists and poets to objectify women in their experiment with aestheticism. In the poem, the artist conceives of his female subject as a passive, emotionless object which he can mould to fit his own fantasies and projections. The description of the female subject is consistent with the stereotypical Victorian view of female patience, passivity and selflessness. The image of the artist "feeding" upon his subject's face refers to the male desire to possess women as wholly aesthetic objects. Their creation is not realistic – ie. What is really there, but what they imagine to be there.

26. How does Rossetti use language, imagery and verse form to convey the objectification of women in Victorian England in this poem?
In an Artist’s Studio One face looks out from all his canvases, One self-same figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more or less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.