THE CHIEF REASON Christina was anxious to finish work on her book was not rivalry, however, but her forthcoming visit to Italy. William had suggested mother and sister join his annual pilgrimage to their ancestral land, which neither had yet visited. It was a prospect so alluring that she was almost afraid to tempt fate by speaking of it, describing it as a fata morgana, and carefully qualifying her announcements. ‘It seems not impossible (though so pleasant as to suggest improbability) that by the end of May I may go with William to get my first glimpse of Italy,’ she told Macmillan, while to Anne Gilchrist she expressed the sort of self-postponing wish that came to infuriate William, saying she almost hoped the ‘whole lovely scheme’ would miscarry, thereby allowing him to travel alone and reach Naples. But this was holding her thumbs: there was no doubt of her eagerness.
Her excitement at the idea of going to Italy makes one wonder why, except for William, the family as a whole showed so little desire to visit the land of their fathers. They had grown up amid the constant aspiration of Papa’s triumphant return, when tyranny would be defeated. Sometimes, recall had seemed imminent, only for hopes to be dashed and finally abandoned. After his death, continuing conflict made visits difficult but not impossible – there were comfortable British communities in Florence and Rome, and little risk to travellers. By now William was a seasoned tourist, feeling at ease as both an English gentleman and Italian expatriate. Gabriel on the other hand had baulked at all opportunities to visit Italy, and Maria showed no wish to do so, despite her language teaching. So only Christina and Mamma took up William’s offer of a joint expedition, to be confined to the north in the interests of age and ease of transport.
Once the proofs were done, Christina showed little further anxiety over her book, knowing better than to hustle her brother regarding the illustrations. ‘My Prince, having dawdled so long on his own account, cannot grumble at waiting yr. pleasure; and mine too, for your protecting woodcuts help me to face my small public,’ she wrote. For his part, Gabriel continued to intervene in her affairs by trying to extract an advance from Macmillan, in what he evidently considered a persuasive manner. ‘Now couldn’t you be a good fairy and give her something down for this edition – say £100? You know she is a good poet, and some day people will know it,’ he wrote. ‘That’s so true that it comes in rhyme of itself! She’s going to Italy and would find a little moneybag useful.’ But the contract was for half-profits, and Mac demurred, as Gabriel reported with disgust to his sister, who in turn wrote to her brother in dismay. ‘Mr Macmillan writes under a complete misapprehension as to my Italian-tour-fund, precarious indeed if it depended on P. P. instead of on unfailing family bounty,’ she wrote. ‘However, now I will write direct to him and set matters as straight as words can set them.’ She was happy with existing arrangements so would Gabriel please wash his hands of the vexatious business and leave her to deal with Mac? What on earth had made him connect the Italian holiday with her earnings from the new book? She thanked Gabriel for his ‘brotherliness in business matters’, but her firm reassumption of responsibility shows her awareness that this might more accurately be called meddling. Laughingly she also declined a half-case of Madeira, for medicinal purposes, procured by Gabriel’s new acquaintance Charles Howell, saying it might be prized by connoisseurs, but was ‘altogether lost on a Goth who knows not wine from wine’. Dr Jenner prescribed sherry and to sherry she would stick. William Jenner was a rising physician whom the family had first met around 1853; he ministered to the All Saints’ Sisterhood and was Christina’s preferred medical adviser; evidently he had declared her fit enough to travel.
On the eve of their departure, Christina sat to Gabriel for a portrait drawing, and on 22 May the travellers left London, on an inauspiciously dark and thundery morning. Stopping first in Paris, where they revisited Notre Dame and the Louvre as well as the international Exposition, and also met up with the Heimanns, they set off towards Basle on 26 May, via Langres high above the Marne valley, where Christina and William admired the view from the ramparts, and thence proceeded to Lucerne and Andermatt. As was his custom, William kept a dull travel diary, of places visited, sights seen and prices paid.
‘Wherein lies the saddening influence of mountain scenery?’ Christina wrote years later, evidently still puzzled by her reaction to the Alps. ‘For I suppose many besides myself have felt depressed when approaching the “everlasting hills”.’ Was their sublimity too overwhelming? Hitherto, Christina had seen no landscape grander than the Malvern Hills, and for a grandchild of the Romantic generation she was unaccountably cast down:
Well, saddened and probably weary, I ended one delightful day’s journey in Switzerland; and passed indoors, losing sight for a moment of the mountains.
Then from a window I faced them again. And lo! the evening flush had turned snow to a rose “and sorrow and sadness fled away”.
A day or so later, they made their ascent of the St Gotthard by horse-drawn diligence. ‘We did not tunnel our way like worms through its dense substance,’ she wrote later after the rail link was opened; ‘we surmounted its crest like eagles. Or, if you please, not at all like eagles: yet assuredly as like those born monarchs as it consisted with our possibilities to become.’ But ‘better to be the last of eagles than the first of worms.’
The eagle was of course her father’s image of aspiration. For both Mamma and herself this was an important journey, and the entrance into Italy its keynote. Suddenly, at a certain point on the pass, came a minor but symbolic epiphany, when Mount St Gotthard ‘bloomed into an actual garden of forget-me-nots’, an ‘unforgotten and never-to-be forgotten lovely lavish efflorescence which made earth cerulean as the sky’, and retained its significance in a later sonnet:
All Switzerland behind us on the ascent,
All Italy before us, we plunged down
St Gotthard, garden of forget-me-not …
‘Could we forget that way which once we went?’ she asked, whether or not one flower had bloomed to mark the spot. All her life, Italy had been a place of hearsay, imagination, idealism. William’s previous travels had prepared them for something of everyday reality, but the actuality was almost certain to disappoint. Nevertheless they were so determined to find everything delightful, rejoicing as soon as they crossed into the Ticino in ‘the loveable Italian faces and musical Italian speech’, that all acquired glamour.
‘Our small continental tour proved enjoyable beyond words; a pleasure in one’s life never to be forgotten,’ she reported to Anne Gilchrist. ‘My Mother throve abroad, and not one drawback worth dwelling upon occurred to mar our contentment.’ Indeed, everything was wonderful, she added, joking at their own enthusiasm. Even the exceptionally ugly pigs were turned to Italy’s advantage, although not so the native poppies, whose colour was disappointingly pale.
At Como she and William went out on the lake in the evening, while nightingales sang and her brother talked politics with the boatman. This was truly Romantic, without Keatsian melancholy, and for once nature matched her mood:
So chanced it once at Como on the Lake:
But all things, then, waxed musical; each star
Sang on its course, each breeze sang on its car,
All harmonies sang to senses wide awake.
All things in tune, myself not out of tune,
Those nightingales were nightingales indeed:
Yet truly an owl had satisfied my need,
And wrought a rapture underneath that moon,
Or simple sparrow chirping from a reed;
For June that night glowed like a doubled June.
They stayed longest at Milan, where they witnessed the historic unveiling of a statue to Cavour, and visited the main hospital, noting happily that the children’s ward was ‘quite a pretty sight with its population of poor little patients’. ‘I don’t say a word about art treasures,’ Christina confided to Anne, ‘the truth being that I far prefer nature treasures’, but they saw lots of paintings, William in particular being assiduous in pursuit of art. Exhausted, Christina spent the next day resting. They then travelled to Pavia, Brescia (where their guide was an ex-soldier who claimed to have known Papa) and to Verona, returning by Bergamo, Lecco and Chiavenna, before recrossing the Alps via the Spflugen Pass.
The itinerary however was less important than the emotions, which perhaps did not quite match the occasion. In an anecdote that has been taken to refer to this journey, Christina later recorded her disappointment at failing to see a rainbow in the spray when descending a mountainside next to a ‘mountain torrent’, adding ‘In all my life I do not recollect to have seen one, except perhaps in artificial fountains.’ This seems scarcely possible, though like her mother Christina had no liking for precipitous landscapes and can have seen few natural waterfalls. Slight as it was, her regret matches that for the unappreciated four-leaf-clover of her childhood, symbol of lost opportunities, and despite the forget-me-nots and nightingales, regret and disappointment were her dominant feelings, inscribed in lines written and headed En Route:
Life flows down to death; we cannot bind
That current that it should not flee:
Why should I seek and never find
That something which I have not had?
Fair and unutterably sad
The world hath sought time out of mind;
For words have been already said,
Our deeds have been already done
Yet life runs past …
What was she seeking in Italy? Was she sad because the dreams of her youth would now never be fulfilled, just as the real Italy could not deliver its ideal? Indeed, had not Italy always been a place she would seek and never find the undefinable something that she felt she had never had? Adulthood meant the relinquishing of dreams.
In the notebook, this piece began with even more gloomy thoughts:
Men work and think, but women feel;
And so (for I’m a woman, I)
And so I should be glad to die
And cease from impotence of zeal,
And cease from hope, and cease from dread,
And cease from yearnings without gain,
And cease from all this world of pain …
With a few pious additions, this was later turned into a poem about an immured nun. It was, William opined, ‘clearly a personal utterance’ and he surmised that the title signified that ‘by essential condition of soul’ Christina felt she too was walled up. Yet with or without the conventual element, this seems more of a protest than a celebration of exclusion from the world, and its connection with the journey to Italy suggests the ambiguous nature of that experience.
In London, the Rossettis always felt partly foreign; in Italy they felt English. Christina was particularly charmed by the warmth of the people whose ‘naturalness and freedom from self-centred stiffness struck a chord in her sympathies to which a good deal of what she was used to in England offered no response,’ as William observed. But memory was also at work, for their childhood days had been filled with Italian warmth, among the host of histrionic exiles. Now, they seldom heard the language spoken in London. So this was, in a way, a nostalgic homecoming to their almost native country. ‘Blessed be the land that warms my heart,’ Christina wrote. ‘Take my heart … Dear land, take my tears.’
William took her desire literally, writing later that it would have suited Christina ‘much the best both for health and for mental satisfaction’ to have settled permanently in Italy (so long as close to an Anglican church ‘readily attainable in any large Italian city’). But this was to misunderstand. As Christina knew, inner contentment was not a matter of location, and such yearnings could be a snare. Later, in Time Flies, she recounted an anecdote of an artist who sought the most healthy place in which to settle, finally finding the perfect spot in Italy, where he promptly died. As she knew, Italy was a homeland of the heart, but she belonged to Britain. And in a number of poetic reflections she pondered the split inheritance, acknowledging both reality and loss:
To come back from the sweet South, to the North,
Where I was born, bred, look to die;
Come back to do my day’s work in its day,
Play out my play –
Amen, amen, say I.
To see no more the country half my own,
Nor hear that half familiar speech,
Amen, I say: I turn to the bleak North
Whence I came forth –
The South lies out of reach …
Her sense of being born in exile, in the ‘bleak North whence I came forth’, shadows the melancholy weft running through her verse, with its lifelong desire for the unattainable home to which she might return, like swallows flying south at the end of summer – which always brought tears to her eyes, ‘and the sweet name to my mouth’.
But if Italy was a motherland, symbolic of the sweet security of infancy, it was also ‘strange, and not my mother’. For her English heritage was equally strong, or at least had its own virtues, like the pigs and poppies. Six days after her return to the ‘northern’ sphere, she articulated this poetically in verses about Enrica Filopanti, ‘a very agreeable, bright-natured’ woman introduced by Letitia Scott, who was ‘eminently Italian in manner and character’:
We chilled beside her liberal glow,
She dwarfed us by her ampler scale,
Her full-blown blossom made us pale
She summer-like and we like snow.
We Englishwomen, trim, correct,
All minted in the self-same mould,
Warm-hearted but of semblance cold,
All courteous out of self-respect.
Of semblance cold: the continuing self-criticism. Christina never ceased to regret her loss of natural warmth, the change from open-hearted ‘Italian’ childhood to trim, correct ‘English’ womanhood. The poem however ended on a different note, in praise of the stiff lip and quiet strength of her actual, adult nationhood, saying that if Enrica found them colourless and chill like the northern sea:
Rock-girt – like us she found us still
Deep at our deepest, strong and free.
English nationalism was also firm within her. The bleak North was her real homeland.
*
Soon after their return, Robert Browning called, specifically to make Christina’s acquaintance. He sat in the parlour ‘talking well and amusingly for an hour or so’, and subsequently told William he was ‘much gratified’ by the meeting, though it appears Christina retreated behind her customary shyness, leaving mother and brother to converse. Yet Browning was speaking as a fellow poet, describing how he was currently engaged on a long historical poem concerning an Italian cause célèbre ‘of an elopement of a suffering angel of a wife with an apostolic priest, and the machinations and murder enacted by the husband’. ‘The mazes and conflicting appearance of right and wrong in the case,’ William recorded, and ‘the difficulty of finding out who deserved to be hung – the husband was so, and rightly, as Browning finally concluded – took possession of his sympathies.’
This, which became The Ring and the Book, does not quite sound the kind of story to take possession of Christina’s sympathies, though she certainly possessed a Gothick imagination and much admired Browning. She had probably not yet read his latest volume Dramatis Personae, since William only started it a fortnight later, but it contained familiar subjects and styles, handled with metrical flexibility and irregular rhyme schemes such as she herself favoured. Abt Vogler, which she later listed as one of her favourites, was here, and so was Mr Sludge the Medium, an attack on the spiritualist hoaxer Daniel Home.
Spiritualism was a big issue of the day, for both believers and sceptics, and into the mouth of his medium Browning put some thought-provoking lines of defence. Why should spirit communication be so summarily dismissed? Were not such ideas the basis of religion? ‘Go back to the beginning,’ says Sludge:
The first fact
We’re taught is, there’s a world beside this world
With spirits, not mankind, for tenantry.
On death were not all supposed to pass into the spirit world, watching over the living? The Bible, too, contained a fair number of messengers from ‘the other side’, from the ghost of Samuel onwards. Angels, too, spoke to the faithful, and from Aaron’s Rod to the Raising of Lazarus the Bible was full of miracles. So there was a prima facie case for the manifestations produced in spiritualist seances, even if Sludge himself is an impostor, as he freely confesses.
‘To me the whole subject is awful and mysterious,’ Christina wrote, admitting that she could not otherwise account for the spirit messages, but trusting that ‘simple imposture’ would prove the true explanation. Like Browning she was profoundly distrustful of spiritualism, not least because it was opposed by the Church. Yet as Browning noted, its ideas were also partly in keeping with orthodox notions of the life beyond and the spiritualist craze obliged her to examine and formulate her beliefs regarding ‘the world beside this world’. As she hoped, the apparently supernatural effects of spiritualist seances were proved fraudulent, but what of the supernatural itself? Ghosts and revenants and voices from beyond the grave, not to speak of angels in heaven, filled her poetic imagination. Did she believe in such phenomena? As a good Christian, she certainly believed in life after death; did she also believe in the continued presence of the dead, watching over and sometimes speaking to the living, as she so frequently portrayed them doing?
Victorian theology was not unclouded on this issue, even within the Anglican communion. It taught the doctrine of life everlasting – that physical death is but a transition, before the soul moves to another existence or plane, commonly called ‘heaven’. But this concept was partly contradicted by the Adventist teaching to which Christina had been strongly exposed in youth, that at the Last Judgement Christ would come again to judge both the quick and the dead and assign all souls either to heaven or hell. This meant, among other things, that however holy in life the dead could not pass straight to heaven but had to wait until the End of Time.
This difficulty – ignored by the majority of the faithful – was reconciled through the theological doctrine of ‘Soul Sleep’, whereby souls after death were believed to rest in a limbo existence akin to earthly sleep, dreaming of paradise but not yet enjoying it. Death was thus seen to initiate a period of spiritual suspension, to be broken on the Last Day. Judging from her devotional works, Christina believed in soul sleep, which would not then allow for posthumous intervention in the lives of the living. The revenants in her poetry are therefore figures not of literal belief but of metaphorical imagination – ghosts symbolically speaking for and from the heart and the past, in the shape of dead lovers, betrayed women, lost children.
As she pondered these things, however, she became less and less certain, freely acknowledging that such matters were truly unknowable. In everyday terms, she retained her childhood beliefs in heaven as a place the dead ‘go to’, and where in due course all would be reunited. Towards the end of her life, she suggested that they were not allowed to communicate with the living, lest the living be thereby encouraged to strive heavenwards for the sake of reunion. ‘Any of us who have lost our nearest and dearest may realize how keen would be the temptation to love – Alas! it may be to go on loving the creature more than the Creator,’ she wrote. But this was merely a conjecture: the true meanings of the divine order remained always partly obscured – as in the Tractarian doctrine of Reserve – for the faithful to accept on trust.
Gradually, in her middle years, as a result of serious reading and study, the notion of the world beyond as a kind of great waiting room in the sky gave way to a more mystical vision. At first a paradisal dream land, where all sorrows and disappointments would fade into insignificance, heaven became an Ideal realm, dimly apprehended in life but representing the ultimate reality. Steadily, from Plato, St Augustine and seventeenth-century divines as well as latter-day theological writers like Isaac Williams and the work of William Blake, she constructed a religious and philosophical account of the relation between the earthly and divine, imperfect and perfect, actual and ideal. In her figuration, heaven remained an eternal promise but also a concept of everyday aspiration. ‘On earth the possibility of harmony entails the corresponding possibility of discord,’ she wrote later. ‘Even on earth, however, whoever chooses can himself or herself keep time and tune: which will be an apt prelude for keeping eternity and tune in heaven.’
Increasingly, life came to seem the shadow, with the unseen ideality of heaven as the unknowable substance. And, she insisted, in the manner of a mystic, such questions could only be approached by imagery: the human imagination could not otherwise express what, in the words she so often quoted, ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived’. Miracles she came to regard in rather the same light, as mysteries to be taken on metaphorical trust – though as a good Anglican she had little time for those ascribed to saints, nor their holy relics.
Christina’s religious faith has been described as simple and unquestioning. In fact, it developed through deep and often difficult thought. And she was altogether less credulous than her brothers in respect of spiritualism, to which she became categorically hostile, believing that all such dabbling might pave the way for ‘evil choice, imagination, conduct.’ While she was developing her ideas of Christian Platonism, William and Gabriel and even the rationalist Scott were absorbed by seances. ‘Last evening I went out to Albany St and saw William Rossetti and his sisters, and had a short walk and a smoke with him afterwards,’ Scott told Alice in October, explaining that in the street William had asserted his belief in spirit communication because Lizzie was constantly appearing (that is, rapping out things) in séances at Cheyne Walk and communicating things such as only she could know. William indeed took to attending professional séances, where he was a stranger, to keep a record of results. Once, the ghost of uncle John Polidori rapped for him, correctly identifying the manner of his death and his connection with Byron, but quite failing to remember his authorship of the Vampyre. Another medium succeeded in raising the spirit of Alice’s brother Spencer Boyd, who had died earlier in the year, though on this occasion Scott’s disbelief was undermined not so much by the message as by the fact that, on his inquiring whether he could look under the table for rapping mechanisms, the message came: ‘mind your wig’. The rest of the company laughed, not knowing he was wearing one (though the medium may have been more observant), and both Scott and William were shaken. Another time, at an amateur séance at Thomas Keightley’s home, a young friend named Louisa Parke transmitted garbled messages from Lizzie, but she had unaccountably failed to spot William attending a funeral in Highgate Cemetery the previous day (presumably ghosts were thought to maintain a perpetual vigil over their own graves). Moreover, she could not see into the future, being unable to tell William what would be the outcome of Christina’s illness.
Such pathetic ‘results’ should have persuaded William of the futility if not fraudulence of spiritualism. On a later occasion when he and Scott tried to contact Pauline Trevelyan and Walter Deverell, they recognised the results as complete guesswork, and thereafter abandoned the whole endeavour. Clearly at some level, however, they wished to believe – at least temporarily.
With her poetic liking for voices beyond the grave, Christina might also have been intrigued by spiritualism’s claims. Instead, like other women in her circle she was staunchly distrustful. Alice Boyd, for instance, had such a dislike of séances that Scott told William not to mention their experiences. Yet at the same time the men’s willingness to believe undermined their atheism – where did they imagine the spirits spoke from? – in a manner that may have given their womenfolk grounds for hope. The ghostly messages might succeed where human voices failed. For, as Scott conceded to Alice:
We cannot realize to ourselves any condition in the place of the body, and yet we are constrained to say, yes, we shall live for ever. This belief is inherent in our nature, it has existed always, and all the greatest intellects have assented to it. Of late years, I have been coming to a firm belief in a conscious future wherein we shall say to ourselves “I am the same”. I do not speak of religion; it has been my misfortune to have it always presented to me in a way that made me impatient or contemptuous. I know this has been a great misfortune. I hope my misfortune will not be increased by my influencing you to feel the same.
On the contrary, Alice’s faith was clearly influencing Scott. More silently, both Rossetti sisters hoped to save their backsliding brothers. Maria told William one reason for her joining All Saints Sisterhood was to obtain ‘the grace of conversion’ for him and Gabriel, while at a later date Ellen Heaton asserted that Christina strove for Gabriel’s redemption by prayer and self-denial, ‘bent on being Love’s Martyr for his sake’. Both statements may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that both Christina and Maria prayed and hoped for a miracle of regained faith.
The whole family took a sympathetic interest in Louisa Parke, the unsuccessful medium, whom they had known since the early 1850s when she was adopted by a family related to Keightley, and brought up as a prospective lady’s maid. Being found to possess ‘a very good brain’, she was then educated to become a governess, and on several occasions the Rossettis assisted her search for employment. In 1861, for instance, she found a post through the recommendation of Maria’s friends the Hollands, and in spring 1865 she stayed at Albany Street while seeking a situation. Christina invited Lucy and Cathy Brown to join them on a visit to the Zoo, and wrote on Louisa’s behalf to Emily Seddon, who knew of a vacancy. To her vicarious relief, for she still harboured vivid memories of her own attempts at governessing, the position was not available after all. ‘Miss Parke seems less appalled than I should be at the particular children in prospect,’ she wrote. ‘I return Miss Seddon’s letter with grateful acknowledgements, and really cannot regret that my friend must perforce forego such a peculiar pupil.’ She is believed to have corresponded with Louisa for the rest of her life, but no surviving letters are known.
Another new friend was the personable Charles Howell, who charmed everyone. Soon he was collecting stamps for Christina, promising to find a kitten and sending a portrait carte of his bride-to-be, in whom aunt Charlotte detected some likeness to the Princess of Wales (than which no higher compliment in aunt C’s eyes). Christina forwarded Mr Howell’s compliments to Mamma and Maria in Harrogate with Ellen Heaton, and looked forward, with a touch of that warm informality Howell seemed able to raise in friends and strangers alike, to meeting his ‘Kate’ personally. ‘Pray pardon my unceremonious manner of naming her,’ she concluded; ‘but her surname is unknown to me, and “Miss Kate” is too hideous a way of expressing a pleasant idea.’ Within a few weeks Kate Howell was introduced, and soon she too was in correspondence.
Young Golde Heimann also sent spare stamps. ‘I only hope she does not deprive herself of what would be very good for barter,’ wrote Christina to Amelia, when inviting the whole family to supper. ‘Don’t be late, please: ourselves and no ceremony.’ Asked to meet the Heimanns was yet another new acquaintance named Caroline Gemmer, a fellow author and longstanding friend of Mr Burrows, whom Mamma and Maria had recently met. On being introduced, Christina received a copy of Mrs Gemmer’s first book, Poetry for Play Hours, which she immediately despatched to Beatrice Gilchrist with instructions to pass it on to Grace if deemed too babyish.
Mrs Gemmer wrote under the pseudonym ‘Gerda Fay’, and her book of pretty verses displayed an unsentimental understanding of childhood. A more gushing adult collection followed, entitled Lyrics and Idylls. Coventry Patmore encouraged these endeavours, identifying Mrs Gemmer as a worthy successor to Mrs Browning and Miss Procter. ‘You and Miss Rossetti’ he wrote in 1863, ‘are the only representatives of the late remarkable school of English poetesses.’ But as her pen name suggests, Caroline Gemmer’s hero was Hans Andersen, and her best work lay in children’s literature.
So, it transpired, did that of the mathematical photographer from Oxford, Mr Dodgson, who towards the end of 1865 sent Christina a complimentary copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ‘A thousand and one thanks – surely an appropriate number – for the funny pretty book you have sent me,’ Christina replied:
My Mother and Sister as well as myself have made ourselves quite at home yesterday in Wonderland: and (if I am not shamefully old for such an avowal) I confess it would give me sincere pleasure to fall in with that conversational rabbit, that endearing puppy, that very sparkling dormouse. Of the Hatter’s acquaintance I am not ambitious, and the March Hare may fairly remain an open question. The woodcuts are charming.
Her delight was general, for Alice in Wonderland was an immediate success, and her ironical letter, singling out the unconversational rabbit and most unsparkling dormouse, indicates how warmly she responded to the spirit of the tale, as did her brother. ‘Alice’s perverted snatches of school poetry are among the funniest things I have seen for a long while,’ Gabriel told the author. Dodgson’s parodies tickled many brought up on Isaac Watts’s ferocious verses, while the song to which the Lobster Quadrille is danced was recognisably based on one of Mary Howitt’s best-known poems. The Rossettis perhaps also registered how aspects of Christina’s now-public Prudent Crocodile were also incorporated into Alice’s parody of Watts’s busy bee:
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws
And welcome little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
Jean Ingelow’s Stories told to a Child were published this season, and when Christina was approached by Isa Craig, now editing of a monthly magazine called The Argosy, she therefore looked out her own earlier work in this genre. Hero: A Metamorphosis, the Andersen-derived fairytale about glory and contentment, thus appeared in February 1866. It was quite splendid, Gabriel observed, recognising its connection with Alice by also commending it to Dodgson as ‘a capital fairy tale’. He urged Christina to write ‘more such things’.
Instead, Christina offered two more quite different things to Isa, including the self-loathing Who Shall Deliver Me? written in 1864 but not chosen for the new book, followed by If. Miss Craig called on Gabriel to ask if he would illustrate. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he replied to his sister, ‘but, as the poem seemed good for illustration, I sent her on to Sandys, and, failing him, to Hughes.’ Argosy might baulk at Sandys’s price, but ‘Hughes perhaps might do it cheap for love of you. You know he’s painted a capital picture from your Birthday, with the poem at full length on the frame. You ought to call and see it, which would please him.’
In the event Argosy agreed to Sandys’s fee, rather unfortunately as it turned out, for his conception of the yearning If was a large blowsy figure, modelled from Fanny Cornforth, quite out of keeping with the wistful poem. For love of Gabriel however Christina seems to have accepted his promotion of Sandys as her illustrator, for he was also at work on a woodcut to accompany Husband and Wife destined for the anthology A Masque of Poets. Sandys’s imagination proved unequal to the task: ‘The only thing he could think of was to make a drawing of the woman lying dead, with some women preparing the grave-clothes and baby-clothes at the same time,’ Gabriel wrote. This was fine, but would Christina mind changing the title to Grave-clothes and Cradle-clothes, to make this plain? It seems she did mind, or maybe the project fell through for other reasons, for no illustration appeared.
In personal terms, she much preferred Arthur Hughes, who had been a shy associate of the PRB in the early days, and whose pictures of young lovers were admired for delicate feeling and clear colour. Her response on this occasion is not recorded, and his picture is currently unlocated, but the choice of ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ for a painting is indicative of widening fame as well as friendship. So too was the invitation to contribute to a Christmas annual produced by the Dalziel firm, grandly entitled A Round of Days: Original Poems by some of our Most Celebrated Poets [with] Pictures by Eminent Artists. She sent her piece on Enrica Filopanti, rechristened An English Drawing Room, 1865, which appeared with a full-page illustration of crinolined ladies and mustachioed gentlemen, together with another item, originally entitled A Yawn but now retitled By the Sea and cut to render it impersonal; this was adorned with a vignette of waves, cliffs and stormclouds.
All these requests were gratifying and remunerative, although they placed Christina in an awkward position with Macmillan, since his magazine might justifiably have first refusal on unpublished items. In fact, when Mac made some such query towards the end of the year, Christina replied pointedly that Masson had held Consider for several months; she presumed it was unwanted and requested its return. It promptly appeared in the next issue.
Throughout the winter, Christina remained at home. ‘With the geniality of ravens my friends talk of my going away for the winter, whereas I know not of it, last winter having been uniquely exceptional, she told Emily Newton, adding to Anne Gilchrist that her leaving London had not even been suggested doctorially’. However, she was able to accept evening invitations only if offered a bed: ‘night air’ was considered noxious to her lungs. Within these constraints, she was relatively active, paying regular visits to Chelsea and daytime calls on other friends. Early in the year Gabriel summoned the family to see his latest painting, of the Bride of the Canticles and her attendants, before despatch to its buyer. ‘I should like you to see it, if you can, finished,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘as I know you nurse my productions in your dear heart. Sisters also of course if practicable’. Aunt Charlotte went too, recording a note about the young boy who sat for the figure of a black child, who wept copiously when obliged to keep still. ‘G. suggested he might be thinking about his Mammy,’ wrote aunt C, and behind this remark lay the forced separation of slave children from their parents, on which the abolitionists had built their campaign.
The American Civil War was over – William wrote a tribute to Lincoln and a long article on British responses, newly printed in the Atlantic Monthly – but the race issue was still in the public mind, for in October 1865 unrest in Jamaica had resulted in a punitive massacre and a subsequently angry debate in Britain between those who supported Governor Eyre and those who called for his arraignment. In the Argosy Isa Craig warned readers not to rush to conclusions; however much the unrest was to be deplored, the leader of the Jamaican protests, summarily executed, turned out to be an exemplary figure, the ‘self-taught and self-bought’ son of slave mother and white settler.
Slavery was also the theme of Madox Brown’s new painting The Coat of Many Colours, which Christina saw on the easel in April, in the studio of the Browns’ new home, ‘a large and handsome house in Fitzroy Square,’ as she told Anne, adding that Lucy was as nice as ever, Cathy quite grown up, and Nolly already exhibiting talent. She went to stay overnight with Alice and the Scotts, where she met Swinburne, whom she found ‘as surprizing as usual’ – though in polite company Swinburne’s manic behaviour was controlled and the tales of his intoxication, bawdy talk and sliding naked down the banisters at Cheyne Walk were largely concealed from well-bred ladies – and this month she and the family dined again at Cheyne Walk, together with the Heimanns and Ellen Heaton. Gabriel had decided to paint Mamma’s portrait, and at the same time produced a new chalk drawing of Christina.
She herself was not producing much, despite the demand from anthologies. After the clutch of poems inspired by Italy, only twelve new pieces appeared in the succeeding twelve months. Through Jean Ingelow’s good offices, however, she received an offer from Roberts Bros in Boston to publish Goblin Market in the United States, on generous terms. This was partly to prevent piracy, for no reciprocal copyright existed and, as she noted proudly, over two thousand copies of her book had already been bought by American readers.
At her request Macmillans forwarded proofs of The Prince’s Progress and later in the year a double volume was issued in Boston, as Poems by Christina Rossetti. As Roberts Bros did not wait for any woodcuts, it so happened that American readers saw The Prince before those in Britain.
1 fata morgana: CGR to DGR 31 Mar 1865; CGR to AM 30 Mar 1865; CGR to ABG Apr 1865
2 My Prince: CGR to DGR Apr 1865
3 be a good fairy: DGR to AM 28 Apr 1865
4 complete misapprehension: CGR to DGR 3 May 1865
5 sherry: CGR to DGR Apr 1865
6 saddening influence: TF 111
7 St Gotthard: TF 112
8 enjoyable beyond words: CGR to ABG Jul/Aug 1865
9 children’s ward: ibid
10 spray rainbow: TF 178, where the reference to a single companion, and the date to which this incident is allocated do not tally with the 1865 journey. Possibly the incident did not take place in Switzerland, as has been assumed, but in Britain.
11 personal utterance: PWs 487
12 the best for health: SRs 348–9
13 Browning: WMR to WBS 14 Aug 1865
14 awful and mysterious: CGR to DGR 23 Dec 1864
15 any of us who have lost: FD 44
16 on earth: FD 321
17 evil choice: FD 274
18 last evening … Scott conceded: WBS to AB 3 Oct 1865, Pictor Ignotus 93–4
19 we cannot realize: ibid
20 grace of conversion: Thomas 293; for the words attributed to Ellen Heaton see Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore, John Murray London, 1933, 115, where the conversation appears to date from 26 Apr 1889 – after DGR’s death. That both CGR and MFR prayed for their brothers’ return to the Church is undeniable; whether their other devotions were directed at this aim is more speculative.
21 Miss Parke: CGR to LMB Apr/May 1865; see also Surtees no. 405, and letter from A. J. K. Todd to Virginia Surtees 23 May 1963, according to which Louisa Parke carried on a correspondence with CGR all her life. If preserved the letters have not yet come to light.
22 Pray pardon: CGR to CAH 9 Aug 1865
23 Don’t be late: CGR to ABH 25 Oct 1865
24 You and Miss Rossetti: Coventry Patmore to CG 9 Feb 1863, in Memoir and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, ed. B. Champneys, 1900, i, 236
25 thousand and one: CGR to CLD, Nov/Dec 1865
26 capital fairy tale: DGR to CLD 2 Feb 1866 and DGR to CGR 5 Jan 1866
27 I couldn’t do it: DGR to CGR 5 Jan 1866
28 Grave-clothes etc: ibid
29 Consider: CGR to AM 5 Dec 1865
30 geniality of ravens: CGR to Emily Newton Nov 1865 and to ABG Apr 1866
31 I should like: DGR to FLR 26 Feb 1866
32 thinking about his Mammy: CLP in RPs 175
33 large and handsome house: CGR to ABG Apr 1866
34 chalk drawing: Surtees no. 429, inscr. Sep 1866
35 Roberts Bros: CGR to Roberts Bros 3 Jan 1866. Her correspondent here was probably Thomas Niles, brother-in-law of Lewis Roberts, who had successfully marketed Ingelow in the USA; see also CGR to ABH 10 Oct 1865