And if thou wilt, remember
Isabel Colegate
Virginia Woolf once wrote that if she were bringing a case against God Christina Rossetti would be one of the first witnesses she would call. This is hardly fair to God. If ever a woman willed her own unhappiness it was that unyielding Italian, who was blessed with a purer poetic gift than her famous brother and cursed with a tendency towards self-immolation which became an addiction. No one could ever have persuad- ed her to testify against her stern God; she would have insisted that he was the love of her life.
She found him, this dreadful deity, in that section of the Victorian Church of England most influenced by the Oxford Movement. She and her mother, her sister and her aunts, all became fervent disciples of the Reverend William Dodsworth, whose sermons at Christ Church, Albany Street, in Marylebone, were commended by Newman and considered by Dean Church to rank with those of Keble and Pusey. There was a strain of melancholy and hypochondria in the Rossetti family which easily turned to religiosity. The father, Gabriele, was the son of a blacksmith from the Abruzzi who became librettist to the San Carlo Opera in Naples and finding himself on the wrong side politically in the troubled post-Bonaparte years fled to Malta and thence to London, where he soon found patrons. 'The man appears to me to be good and clever,' wrote one of them patronisingly, 'Though not without his natural fault of redundancy, of which I have been endeavouring to cure him.' Gabriele became in due course Professor of Italian at King's College, London, and married another exile, Fanny Polidori, sister of Byron's much teased doctor 'Polly- wolly'. Fanny's father, Gaetano Polidori, was an austere Tuscan, whose daughters were not allowed to learn to dance; Fanny herself dedicated her life to her husband and children, earning their deep devotion and respect and setting Christina an exam- ple of self-sacrifice it was impossible for her to follow. Impossible because Christina was a poet, and poets may write about self- sacrifice but cannot perform it and remain poets. It is the self which sings. 'My heart is like a singing bird, Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an apple tree; Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit ...'
The early talent was nurtured in a happy childhood, her father a Dante scholar, warm-hearted and voluble, with a habit of picking up any stray Italian he might meet in the street and bringing him home to tea, her mother in calm control of order and morality, her elder sister Maria pious and comforting, her brother William always kind, her brother Gabriel her imagination's equal and the family's pride. It all came to an end when the unfortunate Professor lost his sight, and with it his income. Gabriel was off to study art, and before long the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was launched, with all the 'good fellows' and the 'stunners' and the jolly times, from which Christina was increasingly excluded. Her brothers had an inflexible view of a woman's role which was probably a reflec- tion of their mother's attitude rather than normal Victorian prejudice; after all, Georgina Burne-Jones came of a respectable family and no one seemed to think she had to be protected from her husband's friends. Indeed she was able to befriend poor Lizzie Siddal in a way that 'I don't mind the work; its the Tube I hate.' Christina never managed to do even when they had become sisters-in-law. The increasingly retiring, self-denying, valetudi- narian, eventually indeed ill, Christina does not seem to have been a meek character. As she grew older she became increasingly alarming, and for all her self-deprecation she knew her own worth as a poet. But even the poetry, which possibly mattered to her more than anything else — more than the two rather weedy suitors with whom she was apparently in love but whom she turned down on religious grounds — had too often to be subsumed by the faith; hours must have been devoted to the pro- duction of what are really no more than pious jingles.
Frances Thomas has written an exem- plary biography of this exasperating woman. It is meticulously researched and sensibly cautious in its conclusions. Christi- na was secretive, and painfully polite; there are blanks in her story. Why did she refuse to marry George Cayley, her second suitor; who only veered a little towards agnosti- cism? Was it fear of sex, or of childbirth? Was it to protect her poetic gift? And if it was, did that give her one more cause for self-castigation? Frances Thomas compares her poetry at one stage to George Her- bert's, but Christina never swept a room to glorify God; she did so to punish herself. Her religious writing is as different in tone from Herbert's as a sermon by William Dodsworth is from one by Richard Hooker or Lancelot Andrewes. And yet she was a poet; as well as the short poems often anthologised and In The Bleak Midwinter which is sung at hundreds of carol services every Christmas, many of her less known poems and sonnet sequences are most deli- cate and skilful. She also had an odd and interesting imagination, being much attracted by wombats and frogs. Goblin Market, once her most famous poem, has a strange and sinister vividness, rather like a painting by Richard Dadd. Frances Thomas indeed tentatively suggests that, like Dadd, Christina may have had a taint of madness, which would account for the excessive caution with which she lived her life. Certainly she was depressive, but beyond that it is impossible to go. She shrieked dreadfully in her last illness, so that her neighbours complained, but it seems that this was through fear of eternal damnation; she had been much visited by her favourite priest the Reverend Charles Gutch who, according to her brother William, 'took it upon himself to be austere where all the conditions of the case called on him to be solacing . . . .' It was a long way from the childhood storytelling in the midst of the clever, loving family.
During her girlhood [William wrote], one might readily have supposed that she would develop into a woman of expansive heart, fond of society, and diversions, and taking a part in them of more than average brilliancy. What came to pass was of course quite the contrary.
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