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Thackeray, ed. G. N. Ray, 2 (1945) ∙ W. B. Yeats, Uncollected prose, ed. J. P. Frayne, 1 (1970) ∙ M. Beerbohm, The Poetsʹ Corner (1904) ∙ T. S. Eliot, ‘Whitman and Tennyson’, Nation and Athenaeum (18 Dec 1926) ∙ T. S. Eliot, ‘In Memoriam’, Selected essays, rev. edn (1951) ∙ M. Girouard, The return to Camelot: chivalry and the English gentleman (1981) ∙ J. Killham, Tennyson and The Princess: reflections of an age (1958) ∙ H. Nicolson, Tennyson: aspects of his life, character and poetry (1923) ∙ D. Piper, The image of the poet: British poets and their portraits (1982) Archives Harvard U., Houghton L. ∙ Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln ∙ Trinity Cam. SOUND Tennyson Society, Lincoln Likenesses J. Spedding, drawing, c.1831, NPG ∙ S. Laurence, oils, c.1840, NPG ∙ D. G. Rossetti, drawing, 1855, Col. U. ∙ T. Woolner, plaster relief, 1856, NPG ∙ G. F. Watts, portrait, c.1863–1864, NPG ∙ J. M. Cameron, photograph, 1865, NPG [see illus.] ∙ J. M. Cameron, photographs, NPG ∙ bust, Trinity Cam. Wealth at death £57,206 13s. 9d.: probate, 16 Dec 1892, CGPLA Eng. & Wales © Oxford University Press 2004–11 All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press Christopher Ricks, ‘Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27137, accessed 2 Nov 2011] Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830–1894), poet, was born on 5 December 1830 at 38 Charlotte Street, London, the second daughter and fourth child of Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti (1783–1854) and Frances Mary Lavinia, née Polidori (1800–1886). Her father, a Neapolitan patriot who had escaped to England in 1824, was an Italian scholar, an expert on Dante, and professor of Italian at Kingʹs College, London. He married, at the age of forty‐three, the 26‐year‐old daughter of Gaetano Polidori and Anna Maria Pierce, another of whose children, John William Polidori, was Byronʹs physician and the author of The Vampyre (1819). Christina Rossetti was close in age to her sister and brothers—Maria Francesca Rossetti (1827–1876), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), and William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919)—and they were bound by a strong family feeling. Their home was open to visiting Italian scholars, adventurers, and revolutionaries; the works of Dante and Petrarch were part of their birthright; and all the children were taught—the boys until they went to school, the girls until they were deemed to be ready to be employed as governesses—by their mother, who was a formidable influence on all their lives. Childhood and illnesses Christina Rossettiʹs childhood—to judge from her brother Williamʹs reminiscences and from the blithe tone of her childrenʹs verse—was happy. Family interests included visits to the zoo in Regentʹs Park (and an enthusiasm for animals in general), chess, and games of bouts‐rimés (where the challenge is to write a sonnet to fit a given sequence of rhymes within a certain time); a family newspaper was also kept. Among her surviving juvenilia there is a poem addressed to her mother, dating from 1842, and a volume of Verses which was privately printed by her Polidori grandfather in 1847. At about the age of fifteen she suffered a collapse in her health and was attended by several different doctors, who advised that she spend winters at
the seaside. As a young girl she was vivacious, even (according to her own report) short‐tempered; the children were characterized by their father as being two storms—Christina and Gabriel—and two calms— Maria and William. A caricature by Gabriel of Christina shows her destroying a room in a fit of anger. As a teenager she became neurotically self‐aware, always on her guard against sins of vanity and idleness, reluctant to transgress her own strict rules of behaviour. William described this change of personality in his 1904 memoir of his sister: ‘Her temperament and character, naturally warm and free, became “a fountain sealed” … Impulse and elan were checked, both in act and writing’ (Rossetti, ‘Memoir’, lxvi). It is likely that it was about this time that her deep religious convictions were formed, when she came under the influence of the Puseyite minister of Christ Church, Albany Street. Her mother and her sister regularly attended church and Christina was a devout Anglican all her life. In 1849 Christina Rossetti again became seriously ill, and in 1857 she seems to have experienced a major religious crisis, which prevented her from taking the sacraments; this was also the year in which she wrote several of her most heartfelt poems. There is a decided absence of any contemporary accounts of these periods of collapse—apart from some of her melancholy verses (termed her ‘groans’ by her brothers) and a perfervid semi‐autobiographical story, ‘Maude’ (1850), whose heroine, a poet, loses all zest for life and dies young. This absence of any explanatory material intrigues modern biographers, who have gone to a good deal of trouble to invent psychosexual reasons for the breakdowns. The recorded events which may have influenced her depression, however, include her fatherʹs illness and his loss of paid employment, which led to her mother and sister having to go out to work; there must also have been a sense of the closing in of her own life as an invalid. The Pre‐Raphaelites In her late teens Christina Rossetti became involved in a group of her brothersʹ painting friends—among them Ford Madox Brown, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais—and she was, emotionally at least, involved in the formation of the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose dissolution in 1852 she marked with some sprightly comic verses. It is difficult to know how much contact she had with these young men. In one much quoted account, in a letter to William in 1849, she is characteristically sliding out of the picture: Think of my dismay; today I met Mr Hunt on the stairs; and actually not knowing him, ran past without exchanging greetings. Unconsciously I have thus transgressed the rules of my unlivable‐with politeness; and this reflection costs me a pang. (Letters of Christina Rosetti, 1.26) But she took an interest in their projects, continued to visit their studios, and, in one poem, ‘In an Artistʹs Studio’, she takes a strongly sympathetic view of the painterʹs feelings for his model. She sat for the figure of the Virgin in Gabrielʹs Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce ancilla domini! (1850), and was a model for works by Millais and Hunt and also sat for one of the founding Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood, James Collinson. Suitors rejected Collinson was the first of Christina Rossettiʹs three suitors. In 1849 she became engaged to him and went to stay with his family at their house in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but her letters from there reveal only her awkwardness and longing for home; a barrier may also have arisen in his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The engagement was broken off in 1850. A second proposal came from one of her fatherʹs former pupils, the Dante scholar Charles Cayley, who was refused in 1856 but became a lifelong friend. The third candidate for her hand was the painter John Brett, who did at least two portraits of her and is believed to be the rejected admirer in her forthright poem ‘No, Thank you, John’. I never said I loved you John: Why will you teaze me day by day. Further ill health Christina Rossettiʹs appearance at this time—pale, narrow‐jawed, with large‐lidded eyes and long, uncurled hair—might be seen as a prototype for the introspective, melancholy Pre‐Raphaelite female, a look which
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