"Jenny" is a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is, for the most part, a dramatic monologue about a prostitute. For most of the poem, the speaker, a wealthy, unmarried man, spends the night watching Jenny sleep. The subject matter in "Jenny" is uncharacteristic of Rossetti's other work, which is much more concerned with spiritual existence than bodily relations.
"Jenny" is part of a group of poems written by Rossetti (see also "The Blessed Damozel") which were buried with Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and lived underground for nearly a decade. He had these poems exhumed by some of his friends years later so that he could publish Poems in 1870. Rossetti began writing "Jenny" in 1847, but it wasn't ready by anyone until 1860. The 1860 version was then dramatically revised and re-published in 1879, and the final version of the poem was not published until 1881. As one can see by the huge time spans between each iteration of the poem, Rossetti spent most of his literary career working on "Jenny." It is considered by modern readers as one of the most important poems in his body of work.
One of the things that characterize scholarship on "Jenny" is the fact that it has changed throughout its history. As Celia Marshik points out in "'The Case of Jenny': Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Censorship Dialectic," from 1847 to 1881, the poem "underwent extensive revision." Rossetti transformed it so completely from its initial conception to its final product that he would later date it as having been written in 1860 instead of 1847. The 1847 draft of "Jenny" no longer exists, but contemporary readers still have access to the 1860 version, the 1870 revision, and the 1881 final product. Please refer to the Related Links section of this guide for links to each extant version of "Jenny." This guide will draw line and stanza numbers from the 1870 version of "Jenny."
The 1860 and 1870 versions of "Jenny" are the most markedly different from each other. This is because Rosetti began receiving pushback for the poem's subject matter. John Ruskin, Rossetti's friend, refused to publish the 1860 version of "Jenny" because it was about a prostitute. There are several noticeable changes from the 1860 version to the 1870 version: first, Jenny is less sexualized and her beauty is emphasized instead; second, the speaker no longer pays so much attention to Jenny's sexuality; and third, the speaker directs shame and horror towards himself in response to his desire for Jenny.
All of Rossetti's editorial changes for "Jenny" shift the poem's meaning, audience, and goals. The 1860 version is much more risqué while the 1870 version is much more moralizing, perhaps even trying to teach its readers a lesson. As Marshik notes in her essay, Rossetti's correspondence with Ruskin regarding "Jenny" shows that "the poet wanted to address prostitution from the tabooed perspective of a client but that he was also aware of and trying to find ways to negotiate the mores of Victorian readership." In other words, when it came to "Jenny," Rossetti wanted to push boundaries, but he didn't want to take things too far. The 1870 version, in that sense, would have been much more "appropriate" in the eyes of Victorian readers despite the fact that it is still centered around a prostitute. It also indicates Rossetti's motivation for writing this piece: the poem changes from a "deeply erotic celebration" to a "scholarly exercise preoccupied with questions of reading and interpretation" (Marshik).
Despite the fact that "Jenny" changed from 1860 to 1870, Rossetti was never able to completely avoid criticism of this work. He tried to heed off negative reviews of "Jenny" as much as possible by asking his friends to write supportive reviews of Poems before it was published in 1870, a decision that affected his reputation for the rest of his career. Because he had garnered so much support, the initial reviews of "Jenny" were favorable. For example, William Morris wrote a review in The Academy which compared Rossetti's sonnets to those of Shakespeare. He even touched on "Jenny," in particular: "the subject is difficult for a modern poet to deal with, but necessary for a man to think of; it is thought of here with the utmost depths of feeling, pity, and insight, with no mawkishness on the one hand, no coarseness on the other."
Morris' review would suggest that readers immediately grasped what Rossetti was going for when he wrote "Jenny." The negative reviews, however, quickly started piling in. A blurb in the North American Review, for example, criticized Jenny for containing "morbidly gratified sensual sensuousness." The most famous criticism of "Jenny" and Poems as a whole was written by Robert Buchanan in an essay entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti," published in 1871. Buchanan's review harshly accused "Jenny" of being immoral and "fleshly," and lamented the impact it would have on literature. Rossetti initially laughed off Buchanan's harsh review. However, as time passed, it began to affect him more and more. His response to Buchanan, "The Stealthy School of Criticism," was published in December 1871.
