Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English writer of romantic and devotional poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
She was the youngest sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings, including Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850). Some of her early poetry, such as "Goblin Market", was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set to music by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set to music by Darke and other composers. Her work has influenced the writings of Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin.
Christina was affected throughout her life by ill-health and depression. She never married, despite receiving three offers, but devoted her life to her poetry and her religious faith.
Christina Rossetti was born on 5 December 1830 at 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), London. Her father was Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and political exile from Vasto, Italy, and her mother was Frances Polidori, the sister of John William Polidori.
Christina was the youngest of four children: Maria Francesca was the eldest, born in 1827; then Gabriel Charles Dante (later known as Dante Gabriel) in 1828; and William Michael in 1829.
The children were brought up in the Protestant faith. Their mother was very devout, although their father, a lapsed Catholic, held unorthodox religious views. The family's often heated discussions over differing aspects of religion made a deep impression on the young Christina.
The Rossetti siblings enjoyed a close relationship, and together they produced a family magazine called the Hodge Podge. All four were interested in creating poetry, stories and illustrations. Christina was a precocious child, known for her fiery temper, who dictated her first story to her mother before she learnt to write. Though her brothers were educated at boarding school, Christina and her sister Maria were educated at home by their parents. Christina read a variety of religious works, and also classics, fairy tales and novels. She delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The household was a bohemian one, open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries. The influence of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and influenced Christina's later writing. The family home in Bloomsbury was within easy reach of Madame Tussauds, London Zoo and the newly opened Regent's Park, which Christina visited frequently. Unlike her parents, she felt at home in London and was seemingly happy during her early years.
In the 1840s the Rossetti family, never wealthy, faced increasing financial troubles after a deterioration in Gabriele Rossetti'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. Christina's mother began teaching to support the family, and Maria became a live-in governess, a prospect that Christina dreaded. At this time William Rossetti was working for the Excise Office and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christina increasingly isolated at home.
When she was 14 Christina 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 had developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in her life. Between 1842 and 1847 Christina underwent a change of personality, explained by her brother William as a combination of "ill health and an early blight to the affections," as well as a growing preoccupation with religious matters, describing her as "a fountain sealed."
In her late teens Christina became engaged to the painter James Collinson. He, like her brothers Gabriel and William, was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, established in 1848. However, the Collinson family did not warm to Christina, and she ended the engagement in 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism. This early disappointment marked Christina profoundly.
Christina 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, the first work he inscribed with the initials "PRB", for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The following year Christina modelled for his depiction of the Annunciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini!
Christina was also an artist, attending the North London Drawing School in the early 1850s, and later producing her own drawings as guides for the illustrators of her poetry books.
From 1842 onward Christina began collecting and dating her poems. Most of these were written in imitation of her favourite poets. In 1847 she began experimenting with verse forms such as sonnets, hymns and ballads, while drawing on narratives from the Bible, folk tales and the lives of saints. Her early pieces often meditate on death and loss in the Romantic tradition.
In 1847 Christina's grandfather Gaetano Polidori published a small volume of her poetry, which was given out to family and friends. In 1848 two poems, "Death's Chill Between" and "Heart's Chill Between," were published in the Athenaeum magazine. She used the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" in the literary periodical The Germ, published by the Pre-Raphaelites from January to April 1850 and edited by her brother William. This marked the beginning of her public career.
During this time Christina once more became seriously ill with depression. In 1853 she helped her mother run a school in Fromefield, Frome, but the venture was not a success. A plaque marks the house. In 1854 they returned to London, where Gabriele Rossetti died.
Christina's more critical reflections on the artistic movement her brother had begun were expressed in an 1856 poem "In the Artist's Studio". Here she reflects on seeing multiple paintings of the same model. For Christina, the artist's idealised vision of the model's character begins to overwhelm his work, until "every canvas means/the one same meaning". Dinah Roe, in her introduction to the Penguin Classics collection of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, argues that this critique of her brother and similar male artists is less about "the objectification of women" than about "the male artist's self-worship".
At this time Christina received an offer of marriage from the painter John Brett, whom she refused. Christina's 1860 poem "No, Thank You, John" may refer to this episode. Christina's biographer Violet Hunt states that Brett made a proposal of marriage to Christina and was rejected, adding that in 1858, Brett abandoned a portrait he had been painting of her.