Christina Rossetti: Poems Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti was born in 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), London, to Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and a political exile from Vasto, Abruzzo, Italy, since 1824 and Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician John William Polidori.[1] She had two brothers and a sister: Dante Gabriel became an influential artist and poet, and William Michael and Maria both became writers.[1] Christina, the youngest and a lively child, dictated her first story to her mother before she had learnt to write.[2][3][4]

Rossetti was educated at home by her mother and father through religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels. Rossetti delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.[5] The influence of the work of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and influenced Rossetti's later writing. Their household was open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries.[3] The family homes in Bloomsbury at no.38 and later no.50 Charlotte (Hallam) Street (now demolished)[6] were within easy reach of Madame Tussauds, London Zoo and the newly opened Regent's Park, which she visited regularly. Unlike her parents, Rossetti felt at home in London and was seemingly happy.[3][5]

In the 1840s, Rossetti's family faced financial troubles due to a deterioration in 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, suffered from depression and was never physically well again. Rossetti's mother began teaching to support the family, and Maria became a live-in governess, a prospect that Christina Rossetti dreaded. At the time her brother William was working for the Excise Office and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christina increasingly isolated at home.[7] When she was 14, she 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 developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in her life.

In her late teens, Rossetti became engaged to the painter James Collinson, the first of three suitors. He, like her brothers Dante and William, was a founding member of the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, established in 1848.[8] The engagement ended in 1850 when he reverted to Catholicism. In 1853, when the family had financial difficulties, Christina helped her mother keep a school in Fromefield, Frome, but it did not succeed. A plaque marks the house.[9] In 1854 the pair returned to London, where Christina's father died.[10] She later became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons.[8] A third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she likewise refused.[3]

Rossetti 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, and the first work he inscribed with the initials "PRB", later revealed as standing for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.[11] The following year she modelled for his depiction of the Annunciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini. A line from her poem "Who shall deliver me?" inspired a painting by Fernand Khnopff called I lock my door upon myself. In 1849 she again became seriously ill with depression, and around 1857 had a major religious crisis.[3]