context

Question 1

when was Rossetti born

Answer 1

Born in 1830 - 7 years before Queen Victoria came to the throne

Question 2

did she come from an educated background?

Answer 2

Born into a very literary family - often known as the least literary member of the family

Question 3

where was she educated and what was her religion?

Answer 3

Along with her sister she was educated at home and raised a devout Anglo-Catholic

Question 4

what greatly impacts Rossetti?

Answer 4

the fact that her Father becomes critically ill 1842 - a year later she starts attending church services

Question 5

what happens to Rossetti in 1845?

Answer 5

she suffered from poor health and a mental breakdown - suffered poor physical and mental health from the age of 14

Question 6

what were Victorian stereotypes?

Answer 6

Prudish refusal to admit the existence of sex hypocritically combined with constant discussions of sex, thinly veiled as a series of warnings.
An era of strict social proprieties of which religious practice was an integral part.

Question 7

what were the vital features of the victorian era?

Answer 7

Religion
Class based society
Hierarchical - the main organising principles of Victorian society were gender and class
Britain’s status as the most powerful empire in the world
Changing landscape
Growing number of people able to vote
Chartism - working class male suffrage
Suffragettes - a national movement
Growing state and economy due to industrialisation
Cities are growing rapidly as people leave the countryside in search of a better life
More people were being educated

Question 8

Religion in the Victorian era

Answer 8

England is regarded as a Christian country throughout the 19th century
Religion was a very important part of victorian life and society.
Regularly visited church or went to chapel on sunday.
The Bible was read often
People were not only very religious but also were God fearing.
Church building and restoration - massive increase in the number of clergymen
More religious freedom for denominations that are not Church of England
Outward signs of religion were more obvious in Victorian Britain than today.
Churches were built in the new industrial cities and about half the population attended regularly.
In villages and older towns and cities, parishes continued to be centres of the life of the community, as they had been for centuries.
Even those who were not Christians or did not hold traditional beliefs would have recognized the Christian origins of the moral and ethical standards of the day.

Question 9

Growing faith and doubt

Answer 9

Industrial revolution and the emergence of new scientific ideologies played a crucial role in challenging the old religious beliefs and superstitions
Charles Darwin and “The Theory of Evolution”
Shook the foundations of religious belief as many saw this as being contrary to the teachings of the Bible
His book “The Origins of Species” made people change their perception of religion as it challenged the origins of man
With scientific progress people gradually started to withdraw from traditional religious values
Study of the scriptures as historical texts, and scientific advances such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (developed at Down House in Kent), made it more difficult for many educated people to accept the literal truth of the Bible.
The 19th century was also the first time in England that a substantial number of public figures openly declared that they had no religious beliefs.
It was in the cities that experienced a breakdown of religious practice and what amounted to a secularisation of social consciousness and behaviour.

Question 10

Impact of religion on writers

Answer 10

Whether deeply religious or not, most nineteenth Century writers were strongly influenced by the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.
From hearing readings and sermons week by week in church, they absorbed the language and rhythms of the Bible.
A characteristic of Victorian fiction is that there are many echoes and direct references to the Book of Common Prayer and to the Bible.

Question 11

Gender

Answer 11

During the Victorian period men and women’s roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history.
Victorian gender ideology was premised on the “doctrine of separate spheres.” With men and women only coming together at breakfast and again at dinner.
The ideology of Separate Spheres rested on a definition of the ‘natural’ characteristics of women and men.

Question 12

how were men and women different and meant for different things?

Answer 12

Men were physically strong, while women were weak.
For men sex was central, and for women reproduction was central.
Men were independent, while women were dependent.
Men belonged in the public sphere, while women belonged in the private sphere.
Men were meant to participate in politics and in paid work, while women were meant to run households and raise children.
Women were also thought to be naturally more religious and morally finer than men (who were distracted by sexual passions by which women supposedly were untroubled).

Question 13

Marriage and sexuality

Answer 13

A young girl was not expected to focus too obviously on finding a husband. Being ‘forward’ in the company of men suggested a worrying sexual appetite.
Women were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction. One doctor, William Acton, famously declared that ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.
Girls usually married in their early to mid-20s. Typically, the groom would be five years older. Not only did this reinforce the ‘natural’ hierarchy between the sexes, but it also made sound financial sense.
Young and not-so-young women had no choice but to stay chaste until marriage. They were not even allowed to speak to men unless there was a married woman present as a chaperone.

Question 14

The double standards

Answer 14

According to that double standard, men wanted and needed sex, and women were free of sexual desire and submitted to sex only to please their husbands. These standards did not mesh with the reality of a society that featured prostitution, venereal disease, women with sexual desires,
All the major cities had red light districts where it was easy to find a woman whom you could pay for sex.
Syphilis and other sexual diseases were rife, and many young men unwittingly passed on the infection to their wives.
The Contagious Diseases Act were instituted from 1860 which allowed, in certain towns, for the forced medical examination of any woman who was suspected of being a sex worker. If she was found to be infected she was placed in a ‘Lock Hospital’ until she was cured.
A reform movement led by Josephine Butler vigorously campaigned for a repeal of the acts, arguing that it was male clients, as much as the prostitutes, who were responsible for the ‘problems’ associated with prostitution
Many charities were instituted to help reform prostitutes. Charles Dickens even collaborated with the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to set up a ‘Magdalen House’ which would prepare girls for a new life in Australia.

Question 15

The impact of social expectations on women who “want more”

Answer 15

Young Florence Nightingale longed to be able to do something useful in the world, but was expected to stay with her mother and sister, helping supervise the servants.
Elizabeth Barrett, meanwhile, used illness as an excuse to retreat to a room at the top of her father’s house and write poetry.
In 1847 Charlotte Brontë put strong feelings about women’s limited role into the mouth of her heroine Jane Eyre:
women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. (ch. 12)
This passage was considered so shocking that conservative commentators such as Lady (Elizabeth) Eastlake in a famously scathing review of Jane Eyre likened its tone to Chartism, the popular labour movement that advocated universal suffrage.

Question 16

Queen Victoria 1837-1901

Answer 16

Victoria issued some notoriously vicious statements about “women’s rights.” For example, she was horrified from the prospect of women becoming doctors.
She was equally horrified by the campaign for female suffrage, which she described as a “mad, wicked folly.”
if women were to “‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”
She held the same views concerning distinct roles for men and women that were widespread in the nineteenth century English speaking world.
“Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for man, but with totally different duties and vocations.”
Women’s progress in British society was haunted by her words

Question 17

Chartism

Answer 17

Chartism was a working-class male suffrage movement for political reform in Britain that existed from 1838 to 1857.
Chartists saw themselves fighting against political corruption and for democracy in an industrial society. They wanted to put pressure on politicians to concede male suffrage.

Question 18

Women’s suffrage

Answer 18

Women started to rebel against historical male sexual domination. They campaigned against being forced into a sexual identity through the withholding of education and the right to vote. Many were not prepared to be defined by their biology and longed to be rid of the separate sphere ideology that left them powerless.
As far back as 1825 William Thompson and Anna Wheeler wrote an article entitled: An Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery.
This was in reply to an article that stated:‘…women did not need the vote because their interests were the same as that of their fathers or husbands, who did have the vote.’
By 1868, a number of local groups came together with the founding of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS).
Between 1870 and 1880 the suffrage movement began to gain momentum and meetings were set up all over Britain. Speakers such as Millicent Fawcett and Mrs Ronniger attended meetings. During the 1870’s an average of 200,000 signatures a year were collected in support of votes for women.
Support for women’s suffrage increased over the years to the point where it was backed by the majority of MPs.

Question 19

Christina Rossetti’s early life

Answer 19

Born in 1830, the youngest child of four in an extraordinarily gifted family.
Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian poet and political exile who immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London.
The children received their earliest education, and Maria and Christina all of theirs, from their mother, who had been trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family.
Rossetti’s childhood was exceptionally happy, characterized by affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings.

Question 20

her strong faith

Answer 20

Frances Rossetti read to her children, favoring religious texts such as the Bible, John Bunyan‘s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and the writings of St. Augustine, or moralistic tales such as those by Maria Edgeworth.
Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s. The Rossetti’s faith shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry.
Influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement.
Came under the religious influence of prominent Tractarians such as Dodsworth, W. J. E. Bennett, Henry W. Burrows, and E. B. Pusey, Rossetti had close personal ties with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser.
The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated:
More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively religious.
The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

Question 21

Christina’s trauma

Answer 21

Gabriele Rossetti’s health collapsed in 1843 - Christina remained at home as a companion to their ailing father.
In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic (cause by a mental factor) and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister. She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania.
Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father’s breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter, Christina’s recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a “clammy fin” repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma.
The morbidity of her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina’s ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition.

Question 22

The fallen woman

Answer 22

In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of “fallen” women.
By the summer of 1859 Rossetti was devoting a good deal of time to her work at Highgate, and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as “Cousin Kate,” “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,’” and “From Sunset to Star Rise.”
Poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate— “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and “Maude Clare” for instance—demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman.
Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil.
“Goblin Market,” with its theme of a fallen woman being saved by a “sister,” can also be seen as informed by Rossetti’s experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary.

Question 23

Pre-Raphaelite

Answer 23

Dante Gabriel collected a circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group;
Her poetry has been described as “Pre-Raphaelite” in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism.
More-recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences. Certainly, Rossetti was involved in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism.
The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.
One of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, James Collinson, proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848. She refused the offer, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism as the reason. Collinson promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted.

Question 24

Lost love

Answer 24

In the autumn of 1866 Rossetti declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley.
Rossetti’s reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised. In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down “on grounds of religious faith.”
At the time, William thought that there might be financial reasons.
“As to money I might be selfish enough to wish that were the only bar, but you see from my point of view it is not.— Now I am at least unselfish enough altogether to deprecate seeing C.B.C. continually (with nothing but mere feeling to offer) to his hamper & discomfort: but, if he likes to see me, God knows I like to see him, & any kindness you will show him will only be additional kindness loaded on me.”
Much is unknown about the relationship between Cayley and Rossetti. In his memoir William notes that “Christina was extremely reticent in all matters in which her affections were deeply engaged” and that “it would have been both indelicate and futile to press her with inquiries,
Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883.
She declined to have a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking that they be destroyed. After Rossetti’s death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian. Composed between 1862 and 1868 and titled “Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente” (The Reddening Dawn), the sequence is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley;