Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History [1 ed.] 9780821441046, 9780821414545

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Christina Rossetti and Illustration

Christina Rossetti and Illustration
Publishing History

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ohio University Press

Athens

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 © 2002 by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ∞ ™ 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1 Portions of some chapters have appeared in different form in several previously produced articles and chapters. Parts of the introduction and chapter 7 are adapted from “The Jael Who Led the Hosts to Victory: Christina Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelite Book-Making,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, n.s., 8 (spring 1999): 50–69; parts of the introduction and chapters 2 and 7 are adapted from “Modern Markets for Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 32.3–4 (1994): 249–77; parts of chapters 2, 6, and 7 are adapted from “Visualizing the Fantastic Subject: Goblin Market and the Gaze” in The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 137–69; part of chapter 3 draws on “The Dialogue of Image and Text in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song,” Victorian Poetry 37.4 (1999): 465–91; and parts of chapters 6 and 7 are adapted from “Goblin Market as a Cross-Audienced Poem: Children’s Fairy Tale, Adult Erotic Fantasy,” Children’s Literature 25 (1997): 181–204. Plate 9, “A rose is pink / by the fountain’s brink” by Jose Aruego, from the book, What Is Pink, by Christina Rossetti, illustration copyright © 1971 Jose Aruego. Published in the United States by Macmillan Publishing Company. Reproduced by permission of the Sheldon Fogelman Agency, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, – Christina Rossetti and illustration : a publishing history / Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (acid-free paper) . Rossetti, Christina Georgina, ‒—Illustrations. . Rossetti, Christina Georgina, ‒—Relations with publishers. . Authors and publishers—England—History—th century. . Literature publishing—England—History—th century. . Women and literature— England—History—th century. . Illustrated books—England—History—th century. . Illustration of books—th century—England. I. Title.  .  '.—dc 

or my parents, John and Irma Janzen

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: A Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

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p a r t o n e ictorian Productions 1. 2. 3. 4.

Christina Rossetti’s Visual Imagination Pre-Raphaelite Bookmaking Books for Children Devotional Books

21 56 91 141

p a r t t w o wentieth-Century Reproductions 5. 6. 7. 8.

The Religious Rossetti The Children’s Rossetti Christina for the Connoisseur Visualizing Rossetti in Print, Pigment, and Performance

Notes Bibliography Index

171 189 221 250 275 295 311

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4

2.5 2.6 2.7

Figures Christina Rossetti’s pencil portrait of Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti, 1853 Christina Rossetti’s pencil sketch of William Michael Rossetti, c. 1861 Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “Septuagesima Sunday” in John Keble, The Christian Year (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1837) Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “Fourth Sunday in Advent” in John Keble, The Christian Year Title page for The Christian Warfare against the Devill, World and Flesh, by John Downame (London: William Stansby, n.d.) Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “Fifth Sunday after Epiphany” in John Keble, The Christian Year Frederick Sandys, illustration for “Amor Mundi,” Shilling Magazine 2 (June 1865): 193 H. L. Stephen, illustration for “An Alphabet from England,” St. Nicholas Magazine 3.1 (1875): 56 Charles Ricketts, illustration for “An Echo from Willowwood,” Magazine of Art 13.9 (1890): 385 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Buy from us with a golden curl,” frontispiece for Goblin Market and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1862) Emblem 14, Book 3, in Francis Quarles, Emblems Divine and Moral (London: William Tegg, 1866) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Golden head by golden head,” title page for Goblin Market and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1862) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “You should have wept her yesterday,” frontispiece for The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1866) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The long hours go and come and go,” title page for The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems Emblem 2, Book 4, in Francis Quarles, Emblems Divine and Moral Laurence Housman, title page for Goblin Market (London: Macmillan, 1893)

25 27 31 33 36 37 48 51 53

70 71 73

78 80 81 88

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2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 4.1 4.2

Laurence Housman, double-page opening for Goblin Market (London: Macmillan, 1893): 44–45 Arthur Hughes, frontispiece for Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893) Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Angels at the foot,” Sing-Song, 1 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Our little baby fell asleep,” SingSong, 4 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Motherless baby and babyless mother,” Sing-Song, 130 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “Motherless baby and babyless mother” Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?” Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?” Sing-Song, 19 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “There’s snow on the fields,” SingSong, 9 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “A diamond or a coal?” Sing-Song, 101 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “An emerald is as green as grass,” Sing-Song, 102 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “If a pig wore a wig” Arthur Hughes, illustration for “If a pig wore a wig,” Sing-Song, 44 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “Wee wee husband” Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Wee wee husband,” Sing-Song, 108 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “I have a Poll parrot,” Sing-Song, 114 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “I caught a little ladybird” Arthur Hughes, illustration for “I caught a little ladybird,” SingSong, 106 Arthur Hughes, “Flora and the children in the enchanted room,” Speaking Likenesses, 29 Arthur Hughes, “Maggie meets the fairies in the wood,” frontispiece for Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874) Arthur Hughes, “Maggie drinks tea and eats buttered toast with Granny,” Speaking Likenesses, 95 Arthur Hughes, “The Apple of Discord,” Speaking Likenesses, 11 “Harebell,” Called to Be Saints (London: SPCK, 1881), 377 “Hepaticas,” double-page opening for St. Matthias, Called to Be Saints, 170–71

89 103 104 105 107 107 109 110 112 114 115 117 118 120 120 121 123 125 131 132 134 136 152 154

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4.3

“Marigolds,” double-page opening for St. Luke, Called to Be Saints, 470–71 4.4 “Snowdrop,” Called to Be Saints, 148 5.1 “Portrait of Miss Rossetti, Taken from that in ‘The Girlhood of the Blessed Virgin,’ by D. G. Rossetti,” frontispiece for Ellen A. Proctor, A Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1895) 5.2 “‘One sorrow more,’” Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” by Christina Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1899), 74 5.3 “The Angels Came and Ministered unto Him,” Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent Compiled from the Works of Christina G. Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1903), 12 6.1 Henry Ospovat, frontispiece for “The Good Sister” in Heroines of Poetry, by Constance E. Maud (London: John Lane, 1903), 202 6.2 Martin Ware, “Laura started from her chair,” etching for Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), 42 6.3 Marguerite Davis, frontispiece for Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book and Other Poems for Children, by Christina Rossetti (New York: Macmillan, 1940) 7.1 Florence Harrison, headpiece illustration for “A Portrait,” Poems by Christina Rossetti (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1910), 263 7.2 May Sandheim, “Buy from us with a golden curl,” frontispiece for Selected Poems of Christina G. Rossetti (London: Andrew Melrose, 1907) 7.3 Laurence Housman, textual decoration for Goblin Market (London: Macmillan, 1893) 8.1 Hugh G. Riviere, The Lonely Life. Royal Academy Pictures 1899, 187 8.2 Frank Craig, Goblin Market, reproduced in “Royal Academy Exhibition 1911,” The Studio 53 (1911): 28 8.3 E. H. Shepard, “Gobbling Market,” Punch or The London Charivari, 11 March 1942, 189 8.4 Poster for Nick Hedges’s production of Goblin Market (Battersea Arts Center, London, 1995) 8.5 Playbill for the Circle in the Square production of Goblin Market, by Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon (New York, 7 April 1986) 8.6 Playbill for the Trestle Theater Company production of Goblin Market, composed by Aaron Jay Kernis, for the January 1995 tour of England

155 159

174 181

183

200 211

215 237

239 246 257 261 262 267 269

271

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1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

13

14 15 16

Color Plates, following page 176 Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “A frisky lamb” in the Sing-Song manuscript Christina Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for the “Tree of Life” Alice Donlevy, plate 2 from Outlines for Illumination: Consider, by Christina G. Rossetti (privately printed 1866) Illuminated manuscript by an unknown artist for The Face of the Deep, by Christina Rossetti A. C. Michael, frontispiece for Goblin Market in My Book of Stories from the Poets, by Christine Chaundler (London: Cassell, [1919]) Ellen Raskin, “Laughed every goblin,” from Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, illustrated and adapted by Ellen Raskin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 18 Arthur Rackham, “White and golden Lizzie stood,” from Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti (London: Harrap, 1933) George Gershinowitz, “She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth,” illustration for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (Boston: David R. Godine, 1981), 35 Jose Aruego, “A rose is pink / by the fountain’s brink,” double-page opening for What Is Pink? by Christina Rossetti (New York: Macmillan, 1971) Bernadette Watts, double-page opening for Fly Away, Fly Away, Over the Sea, and Other Poems for Children by Christina Rossetti (New York: North-South Books, 1991) Lucien Pissarro, decorated page for “The Dead City,” from Verses by Christina G. Rossetti (London: Eragny Press, 1906) Florence Harrison, “And like a queen went down / Pale in her royal crown,” frontispiece for Poems by Christina Rossetti (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1910) Kinuko Craft, “White and golden Lizzie stood,” illustration for Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market: A Ribald Classic,” Playboy 20.9 (1973): 117 John Bolton, “White and golden Lizzie stood,” illustration for Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market. Pacific Comics 1.1 (1984): 15 Edward Robert Hughes, “Oh, what’s that in the hollow . . . ?” c. 1895. Watercolor with bodycolor Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door upon Myself, 1891. Oil on canvas

Acknowledgments

Like all books, this one has been built over time with the labor of many. My first thanks go to David Sanders and Nancy Basmajian at Ohio University Press, whose unfailing courtesy and ready assistance made bringing this book through the press a real pleasure. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reader whose judicious comments and strong encouragement were a great help in the final stages of revision. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to Tony Harrison, who generously gave time he did not have to read and comment on an early version of my manuscript. My work is beholden throughout to his insights and inspiration. I am also grateful to Mary Arseneau, who gave valuable advice on my SPCK chapters and helped me understand the significant influence of Christina Rossetti’s home life on her aesthetics. The initial stage of this project, a much smaller study of the illustrated versions of Goblin Market, owes much to the counsel of W. David Shaw and the late W. E. Fredeman, and to the encouragement of Linda Hutcheon. My obsession with tracing every possible visual version of Rossetti’s work was facilitated by the generosity of the many scholars, collectors, bibliophiles, and interested lay people who sent news of Rossetti works in print, pigment, and performance, shared research notes and leads, or gave me access to their private collections. Among all these wonderful people, I must single out Jan Marsh, whose welcome notes alerting me to a newly discovered painting or illustration, and whose generous sharing of her compendious knowledge of the subject, deserve my heartiest thanks. I am grateful, too, to Diane D’Amico, Linda Schofield, Leonard Roberts, Geoffrey Beare, Paul Goldman, Angela Thirlwell, Jill Shefrin, Frances Guthrie, Anne Harvey, Frederick Maser, Roderic O’Conor, Nicholas Rossetti, Susan Plowden, Evelyn Whinney, John Bolton, Nick Hedges, Martin Ware, Marie Stewart, and Martha Gould, for their interest in, and support of, my work. I will always be in debt to my intrepid research assistant, Colleen Franklin, who not only blazed a trail through illustrated periodicals for me and kept meticulous notes, but also shared my passion for this project. My research was made possible by the courteous and knowledgeable staffs at the libraries and archives I visited in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I am grateful, too, to the collectors, artists, and institutions that

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have generously permitted visual works in their copyright to be reproduced in this book. Every effort has been made to ensure that all necessary permissions have been obtained. Nipissing University provided support for this book at every step of the way, granting me a much needed research leave in 1998–99 that permitted me to write the first draft of the manuscript, and providing assistance with the costs of reproduction and travel in a series of grants. Nipissing’s generous subvention has allowed the publisher to include the color plates that enhance this book. I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which supported my research in its initial stages with a Post-doctoral Fellowship and then underwrote the costs of the expanded project with a General Research Grant in 1996–2000. Without such material support this work might well have joined the ghostly ranks of Pre-Raphaelite illustrated “books that never were.” My last, best, thanks must go to my family. To my children, Ali and Jak, who were fed on the pap of Goblin Market from a tender age, and who are now ready to write Rossetti trivia for any game show that cares to hire them, my loving thanks for their faith, patience, and charity. To John, who endured much in the making of this book, thank you for believing, hoping, and rejoicing as I struggled to know in part.

Abbreviations

ADC

Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia Library Special Collections AH Arthur Hughes AM Alexander Macmillan Bell, CR Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (1898; New York: Haskell House, 1971) BLMS British Library Department of Manuscripts CGR Christina Georgina Rossetti CP The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979–90) CS Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (London: SPCK, 1881) DGR Dante Gabriel Rossetti FD The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (London: SPCK, 1892) FL The Family Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (1908; New York: Haskell House, 1968) FMB Ford Madox Brown FMLR Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti Harrison, CR Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) HRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin LDGR Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67) Letters The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. Antony H. Harrison, 4 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997–) LH Laurence Housman LS Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (London: SPCK, 1883) LWMR Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990)

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Marsh, CR

Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994) MFR Maria Francesca Rossetti Packer, CR Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) RML The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, ed. Lona Mosk Packer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) PW Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904) SF Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (London: SPCK, 1879) SL Speaking Likenesses, in SP SP Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) SPCK Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge SS Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, facs. of 1872 ed. (New York: Dover, 1968) TF Time Flies: A Reading Diary (London: SPCK, 1885) WMR William Michael Rossetti WMR, Diary The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

introduction

A Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

C

HRISTINA ROSSET TI’S life and work were bound up with illustration. This intimate relationship continued after her death, as her texts were reproduced in illustrated formats for a variety of audiences throughout the twentieth century. Combining pictures and words in printed form may therefore be seen as an important element in the production of the commodity known as Christina Rossetti in the international marketplace for well over a century. Audiences and meanings have been produced along with the illustrated gift books, picture books for children, and devotional books and tracts signed with her name from the time she entered the world of Victorian publishing to the present. Rossetti’s career as a writer coincided with the development of the book trade into one of Britain’s largest and most powerful industries. Linking her personal story and the institutional one is the common feature of illustration. In 1850 Rossetti made an early appearance in a commercial publication, an occasional periodical produced by her Pre-Raphaelite associates. Despite its limited circulation, short duration, and anomalous use of etching rather than wood engraving, The Germ was a significant initial venue for the aspiring poet. The Pre-Raphaelite focus on the interrelations between art and literature in general, and on the creative and critical possibilities generated by pairing pictures with poetry in particular, had a profound impact

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on the young Christina. Throughout her long professional life Rossetti frequently sought out illustrated contexts for her published work. 1850 is also a landmark year in the history of the British book industry and its relations with a growing market of consumers (Altick, 294). For many of these newly literate or newly leisured book buyers the visual had a particular appeal that enterprising publishers were quick to capitalize on. With the rise of wood engraving, the improvement of paper quality coupled with a decrease in cost, the advent of the steam press, and increasingly sophisticated distribution networks made possible by the railway, illustrated periodicals, newspapers, and books of all kinds proliferated. At the same time middle-class consumers, eager for objects that would confirm for themselves and display to their visitors their own sophisticated status, created a new market for gift books of illustrated poetry. As a specialized form of literature, poetry represented “culture” in a way that the upstart, best-selling novel, could not. Recognizing “that culture was a marketable commodity and that technology could be used specifically for its widespread and profitable sale” (Anderson, 10–11), publishers paid particular attention to producing poetry in salable packages. From the illustrated anthologies and reprints of the 1860s to the limited first editions of the fin de siècle, pictures helped sell poems. Students of Victorian publishing history, however, have focused almost exclusively on the fields of fiction, series publication, and periodicals. With the exception of an interest in the production of anthologies in the period, scant attention has been paid to the genre of poetry, and even less to the production of Victorian illustrated poetry.1 While this is less true of studies in twentiethcentury publishing, the important connections between Victorian publishing practices and twentieth-century developments in the production of illustrated poetry have yet to be made.2 Taking Christina Rossetti as a case study, this book seeks to establish those links and explore their complexities by mapping the genealogy of her publications from their genesis in her lifetime through their ongoing reproductive life after her death.

Image, Text, Book “‘One thing which occupied C[hristina] to an extent one would hardly credit,’” William Michael Rossetti told his sister’s first biographer, “was the making-up of scrapbooks for Hospital patients or children—This may possibly have begun before she removed to Torrington Sq[uare] [i.e., 1876]: was certainly in very active exercise for several years ensuing—say up to 1885. When I called to see her


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

and my mother it was 9 chances out of 10 that I found her thus occupied—I daresay she may have made up at least 50 biggish scrapbooks of this kind—taking some pains in adapting borderings to the pages etc. etc.” (qtd. in Bell, CR, 54–55)

Just as William Michael dismisses one of Christina Rossetti’s main occupations for ten years of her life, so too have scholars failed to credit this non-writerly charitable activity. But the making of some fifty “biggish scrapbooks” for children and hospital patients is neither incidental nor irrelevant to Rossetti’s career. In creating these albums—selecting and arranging images and texts cut from newspapers and periodicals and presenting them attractively within borders adapted to the content, size, and physical appearance of each page—Rossetti acts as editor, illustrator, and publisher all in one. Despite their limited distribution, her scrapbooks remain “books” produced for specific audiences, in a visual-verbal format calculated to give pleasure to the eye and nourishment to the soul. Christina Rossetti’s habits of production throughout her long career as a writer demonstrate a consistent interest in combining image and text. William Michael’s dating of her scrapbook making—roughly the mid-1870s to mid1880s—provides a publication context which enables us to see this private, charitable activity as an extension of, rather than a drain on, her creative work. Indeed, the principal audiences for Rossetti’s commercial publications at this time correlate to the projected recipients of her scrapbooks—children and members of the lower-middle or working classes. In the early seventies she published Sing-Song (1872) and Speaking Likenesses (1874) for the juvenile market and throughout the decade she sought publication in illustrated children’s periodicals like St. Nicholas Magazine and Wide-Awake. Both these magazines, incidentally, urged their privileged middle-class subscribers to remember those less fortunate and donate their discarded issues to children’s hospitals. Rossetti’s scrapbooks for children might well have included illustrated poems from these very magazines—perhaps even her own “An Alphabet from England” (St. Nicholas Magazine, 1875) or “Brother Bruin” (Wide-Awake, 1885). The second audience William Michael identifies for Christina’s scrapbooks— hospital patients—is differentiated not by age but by class. Victorian middleclass and well-to-do patients were attended in their homes; hospitals were for the indigent. Rossetti’s second projected readership for her scrapbooks is, therefore, in keeping with the audience targeted by her principal publisher during these years, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). The SPCK produced a great mass of devotional material which, in the case of tracts, was distributed freely to the lower classes. Their books, on the other hand, were

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either purchased by well-to-do patrons and given as gifts to the poor or, because of the society’s policy of low prices, made accessible to lower-middle- and workingclass consumers at its subsidized depots (W. K. Clarke, 192). The wide circulation of SPCK illustrated tracts ensured that even the poorest homes would have access to visual imagery and printed texts.3 While not all SPCK books were, like their tracts, illustrated,4 the publisher remained well aware of the importance of the visual in enticing readers. The SPCK always produced its books in attractive formats: bibliographic features such as tooled bindings, black-letter typefaces, ruled pages in red and black ink, and decorative initials contributed to their visual appeal. Rossetti’s production of these fifty or so large scrapbooks for children and hospital patients was likely inspired by sympathy for what Patricia Anderson has called “the visual deprivation of the inmates of charitable institutions” (198) and Linda Dowling has described as an “unrelenting visual squalor” in the lives of ordinary Victorians (68). From this point of view Rossetti’s forgotten scrapbooks, with their carefully adapted “borderings . . . etc.,” share something of William Morris’s more public desire to counteract contemporary ugliness with the “Book Beautiful” and “the promise of aesthetic democracy” in his Kelmscott Press productions (Dowling, 68). In painstakingly constructing these albums from the detritus of a print culture readily accessible to the middle classes in the masses of illustrated newspapers and periodicals that flooded the market from mid-century on, Rossetti was attempting, in her own small way, to democratize image and text. Perhaps she was aware of the degree to which the working poor were “book-starved,” or had heard stories about children who scavenged their wealthier neighbors’ dustbins for discarded issues of illustrated magazines (Galbraith, 32). Rossetti herself grew up in a visually enriched environment. Although the family had limited financial resources, their modest home had a few works of original art, and their small library was stocked with illustrated books such as the Iconologia of their friend Filippo Pistrucci (who painted the children’s portraits in 1838), the emblems of Francis Quarles, the fables of John Gay, and a variety of fairy-tale, science, and religious books embellished with woodcuts. Sometimes her brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, would bring home prints picked up at stationers’ shops for the siblings to color (DGR: His Family Letters, 1:43). Her sister Maria was encouraged to develop the art of flower painting at age twelve with the gift of an instructional book from Count Pepoli (LDGR, 1:3), but she does not seem to have shared her younger siblings’ interest in artistic matters. In contrast, Christina worked hard at developing any artistic gift she might have. In her twenties she studied drawing with Ford Madox Brown and tried her hand at portraiture and wallpaper design; she con-


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

tinued to sketch occasionally for personal pleasure throughout most of her long life. But it was Dante Gabriel who was singled out from an early age as the family artist, and his career as a painter and illustrator had a profound effect on his sister’s life. When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed in 1848 with Dante Gabriel and William Michael among its seven founding members, the group sometimes met at the family home. As a woman Christina could not become one of the “brothers” and did not attend the PRB meetings. Nevertheless, she was involved in their artistic activities, serving as a model for many of their early paintings and sometimes going to their studios, or to various exhibits, to view their work. Furthermore, like the members of the PRB, Christina was inspired by the “sacramental aesthetic” John Ruskin developed in his second volume of Modern Painters, in which material fact becomes resplendent with symbolic truth and spiritual meaning (Harrison, CR, 29). Coming of age in such an environment, Rossetti became fascinated by interrelationships between the visual and verbal arts. Her interest in interart relationships was enhanced by her brother’s fortuitous discovery of William Blake, for Christina soon shared Dante Gabriel’s admiration for the painter-poet. Reinforced by such aesthetic influences, Rossetti’s religious background provided the fundamental base for her highly visual sensibility and her sacramental view of life. George Landow has suggested that Victorian “Evangelicals sought the pleasures of the ear and the High Anglicans those of the eye” (19), and there can be no doubt that Rossetti was greatly affected by the visual pleasures of her worship experiences. In 1843 she began attending Christ Church, Albany Street, then the leading London church of the Oxford Movement, and so came into immediate contact with the Tractarianism that had as much effect on her life and art as Pre-Raphaelitism.5 Tractarian sacramentalism brought with it an increased emphasis on symbol and ritual in both the ceremony of worship and church decoration, and thus encouraged worshippers to “read” material signs for their spiritual significance. Rossetti attests to this in her youthful novella, Maude, when she describes the lectern cover Mary and Agnes have designed. Maude is able to read such traditional religious devices as “the Cross and the Crown of Thorns,” “the keys of S. Peter,” and “the Sword of S. Paul,” but needs help with the meaning of the floral emblems embroidered on the borders (SP, 27). Maude’s creator would not have had this difficulty, for Rossetti was not only schooled in the figural tradition of religious iconography extending back to the Middle Ages and Renaissance; she was also, as Gisela Hönnighausen has shown, familiar with the emblematic Victorian “language of flowers.” Furthermore, the Tractarian movement’s revival of typological and analogical modes of thought, especially as expressed in the poetry of John Keble and Isaac Williams, nurtured Rossetti’s own tendency to view objects and events as material signs of a

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profound spiritual reality. In Tractarian poetry, in the sacramental symbolism of the early Pre-Raphaelites, and in the writings of John Ruskin, religious and aesthetic influences combined to impart an idea fundamental to “a symbolic view of life” (L. Hönnighausen, 12): Rossetti’s notion that “All the world over, visible things typify things invisible” (SF, 244). From the various strands in her cultural experience Christina Rossetti developed a visual imagination that informed both her poetic practices and her modes of production.6 By visual imagination I mean not only the habit of conceptualizing ideas in concrete images, but also the obverse activity, the tendency to see phenomenal objects as figurations of abstract concepts. Both these imaginative tendencies determined the visual-verbal aesthetic she developed and practiced throughout her nearly fifty years of creative production. While critics have long recognized the significance of Rossetti’s sensuous imagery and “word painting,”7 they have not considered the material side of her visual imagination. This study seeks to demonstrate that Rossetti’s “‘pictorial’ modes of representation” (Harrison, CR, 24) should not be considered only as poetic analogues for painting. Rather, our understanding of her pictorial modes of representation should include the literally pictorial. In the illustrated texts she produced in collaboration with a variety of artistic partners, Rossetti sought to combine picture and word not only to enhance the beauty (and hence desirability) of her work but also to extend its meanings by introducing a nonlinguistic form and a hermeneutic framework. Rossetti’s entrance into the Victorian publishing market was coeval with England’s “Golden Age” of illustration, and her association with the PreRaphaelite artists who “changed illustration completely” in the sixties (Goldman, Victorian Illustration, 2) obviously furthered her interest in visual-verbal collaborations. Four of her first five commercially produced volumes for the general market (Goblin Market and Other Poems, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, Sing-Song, and Speaking Likenesses)8 and one of her devotional works (Called to Be Saints) were illustrated in their first editions. Although this was a radical departure from the contemporary Victorian publishing practice of issuing only proven good sellers with pictorial embellishment, Rossetti scholars have overlooked the significance of her books’ unique physical forms. The image, however, is as much a part of a book’s semiotic system as the letterpress. Perhaps more than any other bibliographic feature, a picture determines audiences and shapes reception. A historically specific and culturally aware analysis of Rossetti’s works must take into account their production and reception as illustrated books, both within her own lifetime and subsequently, in twentieth-century reprints. Illustrated books are not simply physical objects or “products.” They are also


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

social processes, involving a complex network of relationships in historically specific situations that change over time. By the same token, texts are not composed of unmediated words. The material features of production—including such physical details as typeface, paper, cover design, and decorative or illustrative material, as well as such institutional issues as copyright, price, advertising, and distribution systems—contribute to their signifying structures. Whether or not we are conscious of these details during the reading process, meaning is in fact “a function of all these matters.” As Jerome J. McGann has taught us, the meaning of a work emerges through the combined force of its bibliographic and its linguistic codes (Textual Condition, 12, 15).9 For this reason the interpretive act must include an analysis of all the social processes that go into the making of a book. Books are always collaborative acts, involving not simply an author but also an editor, publisher, printer, and binder—and, in the case of an illustrated book produced in the Victorian period, an artist and engraver. These social networks of production extend to include the readers and audiences who are produced along with the book (Macherey, 70), for visual imagery contributes to the way reading markets are differentiated by age, gender, and class. With the passage of time, “the signifying processes of the work become increasingly collaborative and socialized” (McGann, Textual Condition, 58), as editors, publishers, and artists reproduce the text in new formats for audiences in different social, historical, and geographic circumstances. As a commodity emerging from a capitalist mode of production for highly specialized markets, a book comes to our table saturated with histories and expressive of ideologies both personal and institutional that we must learn to read.10 This is a sociohistorical study of the publishing history of Christina Rossetti’s illustrated books. Using a materialist hermeneutics11 I map the production and reception of her works under changing conditions, from the poet’s PreRaphaelite days through the late twentieth century. Examining not simply the relationship between image and text but also all aspects relating to their production in specific books under particular circumstances, I focus as much on bibliographic issues as I do on linguistic or iconographic matters. Indeed, the premise of this study is that the three aspects under scrutiny—image, text, and book— must be studied relationally. Their complex social and institutional relationships contribute to the interpretive structures Rossetti’s works make available to her readers with each new production. Since signifying systems are embedded in the material form of Rossetti’s books, their meanings cannot be traced solely to an originary, authorizing, writer, but must be seen as social and institutional outcomes as well. Even in her lifetime, factors beyond the author’s control resulted in certain textual effects that influenced reception and interpretation. Once her works had become part of the public domain with the expiration of copyright in

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the early twentieth century, illustrated Rossettis proliferated and meanings multiplied with their audiences. The continuities and the divergencies in the production and reception history of illustrated works published under Rossetti’s name are reflected in this book’s two-part, mirroring structure. Part 1, “Victorian Productions,” begins by situating Rossetti’s interest in illustration within a visual imagination shaped by her own sociohistorical context, and then goes on to examine the production of her illustrated poetry, children’s writing, and devotional works. Part 2, “TwentiethCentury Reproductions,” examines each of these sites of publication in reverse order—the religious market, the juvenile market, and the connoisseur’s market— and concludes by looking at other ways in which Rossetti’s work has contributed to visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Likewise, the remainder of this introduction is divided into two parts. I begin by providing a general overview of the materialist aesthetic that prompted Rossetti to publish her work in illustrated form. I then offer a case study of Goblin Market’s production in the twentieth century to demonstrate the critical necessity of using a materialist hermeneutics to understand illustrated books.

A Materialist Aesthetic Rossetti’s methods of production were informed by visual-verbal principles and practices at all stages of her creative work. She had a habit of drawing small sketches in pencil or watercolor, both in the formative stages of a poetic project —for example, in incidental sketches in letters or in the illustrated manuscript she produced for Sing-Song—and, after a book was completed, in the marginal illustrations she added to published volumes. Because Rossetti illuminated not only her own work in this way—notably her first commercially published volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems—but also books she admired by other writers, such as John Keble’s Christian Year, her illustrative practices seem to be integrally connected to a critical and imaginative vision moving beyond the borders of linguistic codes. Thus it is not surprising that when she entered the marketplace as a publishing writer she sought venues that would enable her to combine words with pictures. Like her fellow Pre-Raphaelite poet William Morris, Rossetti had what Jerome McGann has called a “materialist aesthetic,” one which acknowledged the importance of “the compositional environment” in the making of poetry and which resisted current publishing practices in an effort to exploit “the resources of the physical media that were the vehicular forms” of her writing (“A Thing to Mind,” 56). Rossetti’s interest in publishing matters was, however, more modest than Morris’s. She did not, for instance, share his need to control


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

all aspects of her books’ bibliographic codes from typography to paper, or attempt to circumvent the contemporary book trade by becoming her own publisher. She did, however, take a strong interest in the material form of her publications, from illustration and binding to the number of leaves to the kind of publisher and printer. Indeed, like Morris, whose interest in the physical appearance of his books was apparent in his selection of the superior Chiswick Press for his early works (57), Rossetti indicated her determination to provide a suitable compositional environment for her poetry by selecting Macmillan and Company as the publisher of her first commercial books, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866). Alexander Macmillan was one of the few publishers at the time who “always cared greatly for the details of book production—for the outward appearance” of a work (C. Morgan, 64). For this reason, the bibliographic format of Rossetti’s early publications, like Morris’s, demonstrates her “artistic aims in a material, apparent way” (McGann, “A Thing to Mind,” 57). As Samuel D. Albert suggests, “[t]he process and problems of printing, as well as the struggle to synchronize form and content” that plagued Morris throughout his career, even after he established the Kelmscott Press at the fin de siècle, were anticipated, and indeed partially overcome, by Christina Rossetti in the sixties. She met the challenge of the typically “poor coordination of text and image” in contemporary book production by having her brother Dante Gabriel design her first two volumes of poetry (93–94).12 While it is in the area of illustration that Rossetti’s materialist aesthetic is most evident, it is also important to recognize that her first two publications are virtually unique in the period because of the wholeness of their book design. As Paul Goldman observes in Victorian Illustration, “Both are true first editions, containing new designs made specifically for them, and, in addition, [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti designed the bindings in a chaste medieval manner reflecting the contents. Such a guiding hand linking text, illustration and binding was most unusual in an era often criticized for creating illustrated books artificially.” Working in collaboration with her brother, Christina Rossetti produced trade books that “possess a clarity of purpose and execution today only found in the precious realms of the private press” (3). In the history of Victorian book production the importance of these trade books published by Macmillan and Company in the sixties cannot be overemphasized. In the first place, the fact that they are, indeed, “true first editions” in an age when illustrated works were almost exclusively reprints of proven good sellers distinguishes them from virtually all other Victorian publications during the “Golden Age” of illustration (Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books, 21). Secondly, they are distinguished examples of book design and of the integration of

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image and text in a period when even the most celebrated volumes—such as the Moxon Tennyson illustrated by Pre-Raphaelite artists and others in 1857—have been accused of “disgraceful ‘book cobbling’” for the lack of coordination between their visual and verbal elements (Goldman, Victorian Illustration, 3). Finally, the two pictures Dante Gabriel Rossetti provided for each of his sister’s volumes are remarkable productions in the innovative Pre-Raphaelite style of interpretive, decorative, and intellectual illustration which had such a profound effect on the book artists of the nineties, when illustrated first editions truly came into their own. When one considers that Dante Gabriel Rossetti published only ten book illustrations, and that four of these appeared in his sister’s volumes, his subsequent influence on late-Victorian book design clearly has a specific application to Christina’s poetry. The siblings’ creative partnership gave them an unusual degree of control over the final product, rivaling even that of the powerful Victorian publisher. Despite Alexander Macmillan’s habit of giving “precise instructions to the designers who worked for him” (C. Morgan, 64), the final illustrations for Rossetti’s two volumes were determined by the author and her artist rather than by their publisher. To his chagrin, Macmillan had to put up with this subversive encroaching on his usual province when Dante Gabriel followed his own lead in selecting pictorial subjects. Even more galling, perhaps, he had to accept that the books would be published, not when he advertised them, but when the two Rossettis were ready to go to print. Macmillan’s marketing plans to produce Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress as Christmas books were undermined by delays related to the very illustrations that were to make them salable commodities in this lucrative gift market. It is usual to point the finger of blame at Dante Gabriel and his notorious procrastinating, but Christina’s complicity in the publishing delays should be recognized. Her role in the postponement of the publication date is especially evident in the production of The Prince’s Progress. In December 1865 she wrote Macmillan to say “the woodcuts cannot be ready for Xmas” and to ask him “to keep back P.P.,” despite his recent “‘few days’ advertisement.’” With a mixture of deference and assertiveness, Rossetti continues: “yet if you agree with me in thinking Gabriel’s designs too desirable to forego, I will try to follow your example of patience under disappointment” (Letters, 1:265). Nine months earlier, Christina had written to her brother with regard to the delayed designs: “if that enterprizing publisher [Macmillan] has been prodding you it is di proprio moto, not instigated in word by me. Your woodcuts are so essential to my contentment that I will wait a year for them if need is—though (in a whisper) 6 months would better please me” (1:239). Ultimately, Rossetti had to wait a year and more for her “laggard book” (275), but her “contentment” was contingent not on the


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

early publication of her poetry, but rather on the production of a book which would combine image and text in a well-designed format. As she confided to Gabriel in April 1865, “My Prince, having dawdled so long on his own account cannot grumble at awaiting your pleasure; and mine, too, for your protecting woodcuts help me to face my small public” (246). As first-edition illustrated books, Rossetti’s inaugural volumes not only exemplified a Pre-Raphaelite verbal-visual aesthetic but also were astute marketing maneuvers, helping her “face” her public in tandem with an artistic partner. Such a production strategy was doubly empowering: in addition to enabling her to exercise more control over the business of publication than was usually the case in the Victorian book trade, it allowed her to carve out a small but special niche for herself in a demanding market. By the 1860s, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a highly regarded painter whose celebrity would attach more value to her books in the marketplace and potentially increase their salability. Thus her production strategy worked both aesthetically and commercially, allowing her to embody her materialist aesthetic in the physical form of her books and to pursue her commitment to fame and poetic vocation.13 If Christina Rossetti was indeed, as Swinburne enthusiastically hailed her after the successful publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems, “the Jael who led their host to victory” (Gosse, Life, 127), this may be ascribed in no small measure to the fact that of all the Pre-Raphaelite poets, only she produced her poetry in a physical form which conformed to the movement’s commitment to visual/verbal and author/artist partnerships. As W. E. Fredeman recognized in his germinal Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study, “A concern with illustration may in fact be considered an integral part of the Pre-Raphaelite innovation” (185). Nevertheless, despite frequent proposals for illustrative projects, The Germ remains the single illustrated publication “to emerge from the combined efforts of the Brotherhood” (Fredeman, “Woodman,” 10). Although published a decade and more after the demise of the PRB, Christina Rossetti’s first two volumes of poetry realize in concrete ways the aspirations behind the Brethren’s “fantasy editions of illustrated books that never were” (9). Moreover, despite the interest in the visual arts of such PreRaphaelite poets as her brother, Dante Gabriel, and William Morris, only Christina Rossetti produced her work in illustrated form before Morris established his Kelmscott Press in 1891. Rossetti’s most collaborative partnership, however, was arguably not with her brother but rather with his Pre-Raphaelite associate, Arthur Hughes, who illustrated her two works for children, Sing-Song and Speaking Likenesses. SingSong was brought out by the Dalziel Brothers under the Routledge imprint for the Christmas market of 1871. Although struggling with her nearly fatal Graves disease, Rossetti was particularly aggressive in her negotiations for an appropriate

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illustrator for this book. During contract negotiations in April 1871 Rossetti wrote the Dalziels that her acceptance of their offer was conditional on her independent approval of the artist: “I gladly agree to the terms you propose and will send you a formal note to that effect, if you will first inform me whom you intend employing to design the illustrations and if of course the name pleases me” (Letters, 1:369; my emphasis). The artists suggested by the Dalziels, however, were not pleasing to Christina or her brother William, who was helping her transact business during her illness. Resisting the contemporary practice of producing books illustrated by many hands, the Rossettis suggested “that, if Hughes will undertake to do all the illustrations, that will be better still,” and went on to give directions about the desired “character of designs” in keeping with the nature of the verse, the size of the type, and so on (qtd. in Letters, 1:371, n. 4). The degree of collaboration between artist and author in the production of Sing-Song is unique because Hughes worked from Rossetti’s own illustrated manuscript, in which she had included a small pencil sketch above each poem. Unlike any other of her published works, then, Sing-Song, from its initial manuscript stage, was conceived as a Pre-Raphaelite pairing of verbal and visual elements. Rossetti was so delighted with the artist’s work, and so keenly aware of the commercial viability of illustrated texts, that, on seeing the proofs for the book in August 1871, she wrote the Dalziels to say “the cuts deserve to sell the volume” and to suggest that the collaborative nature of the book be acknowledged by printing “‘Arthur Hughes’ in larger type on the title page” (Letters, 1:375).14 When Macmillan agreed to publish her next book, a collection of stories for children, she told him that “nothing would please me more than that Mr. Arthur Hughes” be given the commission for Speaking Likenesses, although she deferentially acknowledged that the selection of illustrator usually fell to the publisher, not the author (Letters, 2:9–10). No doubt aware of the high praise both image and text had received in the reviews of Sing-Song, Macmillan deferred to Rossetti’s judgment, and gave Speaking Likenesses to Hughes. Speaking Likenesses was the last of Rossetti’s illustrated first editions over which she exercised such a degree of authorial control, but she did bring out one other illustrated book in her lifetime. Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (SPCK, 1881) contains numerous botanical line drawings of flowers illustrating Rossetti’s textual descriptions. There is no evidence that the author had any part in assigning or overseeing the designs. Nevertheless, it is an important publication because it realizes so fully Rossetti’s emblematic purposes for this book in particular and for her art in general. Moreover, its production history offers a glimpse into the workings of a large Victorian religious publishing house, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The SPCK’s significant departures from the publication practices of a general trade publisher like


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

Alexander Macmillan provide an instructive case study in how the material aspects of a book affect its meanings. As Pierre Macherey remarks in his Theory of Literary Production, “the question of how the text communicates with its readers” is profoundly connected to “the study of the conditions of literary production” (69). For this reason a publishing history cannot speak of production without taking into account reception, or discuss the present artifact without unearthing its previous material forms. Thus my study of Christina Rossetti’s illustrated books in part 1 includes an exploration of the modes of production in the Victorian book trade in order to provide a base from which the complex changes that took place in the twentieth century may be understood. This groundwork facilitates my account, in part 2, of the very material effects these reproductions have had on reception and interpretation.

A Materialist Hermeneutics Since the beginning of the twentieth century Rossetti’s visual imagination has been reified in both predictable and, in some cases, unexpected, ways. It is not surprising, for example, that the SPCK should recycle her religious poetry in their illustrated pamphlets and books. In works such as Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” (SPCK, 1899) and Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent from the Works of Christina G. Rossetti (SPCK, 1903) Rossetti’s verses are converted to Sunday School lessons with the addition of stock religious images taken from the publisher’s files. In the secular realm it is also not surprising that many artists interested in fantasy should turn to Rossetti’s poetry, for the twentieth-century tradition of fantasy illustration derives from the PreRaphaelites (Whitlark, 59). This heritage is especially evident in a lavish gift book illustrated by Florence Harrison in 1910 for Blackie and Sons, Poems by Christina Rossetti. The tradition continued throughout the century, with even the American children’s book illustrator Ellen Raskin attempting to capture “the sharp-focus, hard-outline PRB technique” (Raskin, “Afterword”) in her own color illustrations for an abridged Goblin Market for juveniles in 1970. The fantasy tradition is also apparent in some of the less predictable forms Rossetti’s poem has taken, such as its infamous reproduction in the pages of Playboy Magazine in 1973. Religious tract, lavish gift book, children’s picture book, pornographic fantasy—the proliferation of illustrated Rossettis in the twentieth century has multiplied the poet’s audiences. Each publication is produced for a specific segment of the reading market, a segment whose age, class, and gender determinants are produced by all the bibliographic features of the book, but especially by its printed imagery. Illustrated reprints issued after an author’s death thus provide a fascinating

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subject of investigation in the “history of the book” as it has recently been conceived: a material study of a work’s production and reception in a variety of markets for different audiences. Inevitably, works that are reillustrated establish new dialogues between image and text and generate new meanings along with their physical reformations. Unlike first-edition illustrated books, the reprint is not a collaboration between an artist and a contemporary author and her publisher, but rather a complex network of relationships and associations extending over time and space. Publishers who decide to reprint a text and commission illustrations for it have a particular marketing strategy in mind, a designated audience to target, and a host of economic concerns, not least of which is the obvious profit motive. At the same time, the artist who illustrates a “classic” engages not only with the verbal text but also, often, with previous pictorial (and, sometimes, critical) interpretations of that text. Moreover, the reprint is, in all senses of the word, a reproduction. The relationship between the verbal and visual elements in an illustrated reprint establishes a dialogue between a work from the past and its new temporal and spatial environment. For these reasons, examining a work that has been illustrated, and reillustrated, for more than a century in both Britain and North America tells us much about the history of Rossetti’s critical reception. It also reveals the formative roles that such material aspects of book production as publishing practices, economic and institutional relationships, and bibliographic and pictorial codes have in the production of both audiences and meanings. These are all profoundly consequential material issues, attendant on the book as a physical, human-made object. As Pierre Macherey says, “Readers”—and, I would emphasize, their interpretations—“are made by what makes the book” (70). Approaching both first editions and illustrated reprints from the perspective of a materialist hermeneutics means being equally attentive to linguistic and bibliographical codings. It also requires a charting of literary and social histories always in the making. Only by focusing on the particular material aspects of a single work or set of works can we understand a writer’s books in their full context. As McGann explains in The Textual Condition, “‘the meaning of the texts’ will appear as a set of concrete and always changing conditions: because the meaning is in the use, and textuality is a social condition of various times, places, and persons” (16). Rossetti’s Goblin Market, for example, is never the same work when it assumes a different physical manifestation, and our understanding of either her individual poem or her oeuvre as a whole lacks necessary context when we ignore its material form(s). Indeed, failure to attend to the historical particularity of her texts and their transmission in the marketplace has resulted in certain scholarly fallacies. One particularly egregious example of this is the uninvestigated truism long reiterated in Rossetti studies: that Goblin Market was


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

“a nursery favourite in the Victorian period.”15 This critical commonplace is supported by neither the poem’s publication nor its reception history. Goblin Market is a model case study for a materialist hermeneutics because it was the combination of its linguistic codes—such as the poem’s fairy-tale genre and nursery-rhyme meters—and its bibliographic codes—notably, the presence of pictures—that produced the fantasy Victorian nursery poem that never was. Studying the production and reception of the poem in the Victorian period with attention to its economic, institutional, and cultural environments demonstrates that Goblin Market’s primary contemporary market was the adult reader, specifically one appreciative of books as beautiful objects. This is as true for the poem’s first publication in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), accompanied by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s two designs, as it is for its first appearance as an illustrated reprint in 1893, with Laurence Housman’s numerous full-page illustrations and textual decorations. Although Housman’s illustrated version of the poem clearly belongs to the period’s illustrated gift books for collectors, critics have missed the book’s cultural context by ignoring its publication history. Thus Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester include Housman’s Goblin Market in their historical survey of children’s book illustration, while Jonathan Cott, in his anthology of Victorian children’s fantasy, and R. Loring Taylor, in his edition of Rossetti’s works for children, both reprint a facsimile of Housman’s version of the poem. Although Taylor acknowledges that Goblin Market “was not originally written for children,” he claims that “it was apparently Victorian culture rather than the author’s intention which identified the work as children’s verse,” citing as evidence the poem’s republication “in illustrated editions” (vi, vii).16 The poem was not, however, republished in illustrated editions in the Victorian period. Housman’s Goblin Market, published by Macmillan in 1893 for the adult market, was the only illustrated reprint before the twentieth century. Thus it was clearly not “Victorian culture” but rather twentieth-century culture that “identified the work as children’s verse.” To understand how this misclassification of the text and its transmission in the marketplace occurred, it is necessary not only to return to the site of the poem’s initial production and reception, but also to investigate the practices of publication and interpretation in our own day. Certainly our modern equation of picture books with juvenile literature, together with our virtually exclusive identification of the fairy tale with a child audience—biases not shared by the poem’s Victorian readers—are two important influences in our retrospective reconstruction of the poem’s life in its own period. Other cultural and social conditions have also played their part in our myth about the poem. For example, changing attitudes toward what constitutes children’s literature, and also toward human sexuality—particularly as it relates to Victorian women and children—have significantly affected the poem’s modern

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reception. This has a particular application to Goblin Market, since its notoriously multivalent metaphors have often been read as sexually suggestive, and since sexuality has always been more or less prohibited in representations for children. Although the taboo against sexuality in books for the young has remained relatively constant over the years, however, conceptions of what makes a poem or a picture “sexy” have not. Twentieth-century representations of Victorian culture as mute and repressed in regard to sexual matters, of their children as sexless and their spinsters as sexually ignorant, also played a part in a classification of Goblin Market based on a model of Victorian “innocence” and modern “knowingness.” It is “We ‘Other Victorians,’” as Michel Foucault has named us (3–4), who have retroactively produced Rossetti’s poem for our Victorian forechildren. This projection of our own sensibility onto another time period has resulted in an imaginative reconstruction of contemporary reception—in effect, in the invention of “the Victorian child as audience” for the poem (Watson, 66)—in those analyses of Rossetti and her work lacking a grounding in publishing history. In The Child Figure in English Literature, for example, Robert Pattison states that “‘Goblin Market’ does not seem today like a children’s poem, yet in its own day it was often included in books for the young” (142). Bibliographic evidence makes it patently clear that Goblin Market was never included in books for young Victorians,17 but Pattison (inaccurately) cites Harvey Darton as the authority for his claim. What Darton in fact says in his germinal Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life is that Goblin Market was not produced as a children’s book at all in the Victorian period, although “it had its direct appeal to the young imagination: and the fact was recognized without delay, which is here the significant historical point” (282). Despite his sociohistorical approach to children’s literature, Darton provides no contemporary evidence for his “historical point,” leaving it as yet another inference masquerading as fact in the critical interpretation of Rossetti’s work. Darton may well have been thinking of Mrs. Norton’s initial review of the poem in Macmillan’s Magazine (1863), in which she acknowledged the child as a potential reader of the poem. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Goblin Market was particularly popular with young Victorians. The poem is significantly absent from the lists of poems that Victorian youth “liked best” in the survey of schoolchildren’s favorite literature included in Edward Salmon’s Juvenile Literature As It Is in 1888 (14–24). Since Goblin Market had made its inaugural appearance in a school textbook only in the year previous to Salmon’s study (in M. A. Woods’s A Second School Poetry Book [1887]), its absence from the pupils’ lists may not be surprising. Its omission does suggest, however, that in the quarter of a century since the poem’s first publication, Goblin Market had


Materialist Aesthetic and a Materialist Hermeneutics

not yet become a favorite on family reading lists either, for the Victorian habit of reading aloud in domestic settings provided the usual transition phase for the movement of literature from the drawing room to the nursery. This brief history of Goblin Market’s misprision as a Victorian children’s poem illuminates how a materialist hermeneutics can enrich our understanding of a work. Clearly, the meaning(s) generated by Rossetti’s texts cannot be adequately discussed without due attention to their historical uniqueness as works produced by particular persons (editors, publishers, artists) for designated audiences at specific times and places. This study’s focus on Rossetti’s visual imagination both allows her own modes of production to be localized in the context of the contemporary Victorian book trade and maps the ongoing effects of that powerfully visual imagination on twentieth-century publishing and institutional practices, including those of the academy. While this exploration of Rossetti’s materialist aesthetic provides the first full-scale attempt to take into account the poet’s strategies of production, the employment of a materialist hermeneutics permits a corollary analysis of the reproduction and reception of her work, from the Pre-Raphaelite period to the postmodern. This is the history, not of a book, but of many books published under the name “Christina G. Rossetti.”

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PART ONE Victorian Productions

1

, Christina Rossetti s Visual Imagination To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion, all in one. —John Ruskin

Pre-Raphaelite Artist Manqué: “Of course I never became competent” N the mid-1850s, perhaps at about the same time that William Holman Hunt was sitting on his camp stool on the shores of the Dead Sea painting a dying goat, Christina Rossetti recorded the following dream: Night, but clear with grey light. Part of church in the background with the clock-side towards the spectator. In the churchyard many sheep with good innocent expressions; one especially heavenly. Amid them with full face a Satan-like goat lying, with a kingly look and horns. Three white longish-haired dogs in front, confused with the sheep though somewhat smaller than they: one with a flattering face, a second with head almost entirely turned away, but what one sees of the face sensual and abominable.—

Years later—William Michael suggests as late as 1880— Rossetti appended the following note: “This real dream left me with an impression it was my duty to paint the above subject as a picture—contingent duty, perhaps. Of course I never became competent” (Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism, 48–49). Rossetti apparently received this dream as a divine message enjoining her to record its earthly features and their symbolic meaning in an oil painting for all to read— a biblia pauperum for the nineteenth century. Both the

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subject matter and her view of art as a kind of visual sermon have much in common with Hunt’s contemporaneous Scapegoat (1854–56) and, indeed, with the typological approach to religious subjects characteristic of the early work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.1 Perhaps, in her own modest way, Christina harbored secret hopes of wielding a worthy brush beside the brethren; a playful letter of 1852 to William Michael Rossetti suggests as much. Writing to her brother about Hunt’s recent sale of The Hireling Shepherd, she asks William to convey congratulations to the artist and “the information that I will paint a picture on considerably lower terms, if he would kindly name this to his patrons” (Letters, 1:56). Despite the self-deprecatory irony, there is a serious element to this statement, for at this period in her life, William tells us, Christina was in fact cultivating “any aptitude which she might possess for art-work” (FL, 20). In later asserting “Of course I never became competent,” Rossetti hints that her failure to acquire professional skill was almost a foregone conclusion. According to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself one of the Victorian period’s most successful painters, Christina might, “had she chosen to study and take pains, . . . have done something as an artist” (WMR, “Notes,” 464). Always one of his sister’s staunchest supporters, with a heartening faith in her innate talent, Dante Gabriel is, nevertheless, somewhat off the mark here. This privileged eldest son of an artistic family was singled out from an early age for a career as a painter who would bring renown to the Rossetti name. Protected from life’s vicissitudes, he was never called from his studies to contribute to the family income, even when the father’s illness meant that his mother and his two sisters, together with his brother, William, had to work to support themselves and him. His patriarchal privilege extended beyond his immediate family into the world of social institutions, for as a male artist Dante Gabriel enjoyed free entrance into the Royal Academy School of Art as well as access to the advice and instruction of older artists in their private studios. Given such a background, what could he know of his sister’s degree of choice in study or leisure for application? The record shows that Christina did, with some difficulty, and in adverse circumstances, study art for a time, and that she also, over a period of nearly a decade, took some pains to develop her drawing and painting skills. From her teen years she had sketched and painted in watercolors, but it was not until the early 1850s that she began to seek professional instruction. Rather than face the grim prospect of governessing, to which she was not at all suited, Christina preferred to try for what success she might with painting as a means of support. Certainly she knew as well as her brother that the predilection for writing verse was not likely to add to the family coffers, and that with painting she had a chance at least of an income. Perhaps Dante Gabriel had shared with her Leigh Hunt’s famous advice that painting could make him “a rich man,” whereas

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poetry “is not a thing for a man to live upon while he is in the flesh” (qtd. in Ainsworth, 1). In any case, art for her was a vocation to be taken seriously, not a feminine “accomplishment” to while away the leisure hours or use for display purposes on the marriage market, and in this respect she differed from many of her Victorian sisters. But by no means all. Feminist art historians like Susan Casteras, Deborah Cherry, and Pamela Gerrish Nunn have shown that female artists became increasingly professional, and prominent, in the Victorian period. To recognize this change in the traditional world of art, “a new critical category—variously dubbed ‘women [sic] artist’ and/or ‘lady artist’”—emerged in the 1850s, precisely at the time that Christina Rossetti was considering a professional art career. But aspiring female painters experienced the adverse effects of the instituted difference implied in this special category for, as Cherry points out, “Women artists were located in asymmetrical and unequal relations to art education, art administration and professional status” (53). This asymmetry is particularly evident in the different artistic opportunities available to the Rossetti siblings. Unlike Dante Gabriel, Christina had no access to the Royal Academy School of Art, which effectively excluded women pupils until the late 1860s and then admitted only a limited number on a restricted basis, not permitting life study, for example, until 1903 (Casteras and Peterson, 11, 13). The private art schools to which she and other women artists seeking instruction had access were of unequal quality, held separate (and again restricted) classes for female students, and, unlike the Royal Academy School, charged tuition.2 Facing such obstacles, Rossetti had recourse to the “two main options in art education for women before 1860”: evening classes at a private art school and instruction from an established artist (Cherry, 59). Perhaps because of Ford Madox Brown’s association with the school, Rossetti took lessons at the new North London School of Drawing and Modeling, established in 1850 for the main purpose of instructing artisans “engaged in masonry, carving, plastering, cabinetmaking, casting and chasing of metals” in “‘the true knowledge of form.’” Although not an artisan requiring such technical instruction, Christina Rossetti, like many other middle-class women who could not afford private instruction, had little alternative for art education. Thus, with her eyes set on a possible career in the fine arts, she joined working women seeking instruction in drawing and professional design in the school’s segregated female classes offered on alternate evenings, first by Charles Lucy and later by Ford Madox Brown. Tuition fees were 1s 6d a month (Surtees, Diary, 70 n. 2). This cannot have been an easy fee for the struggling Rossetti family to pay each month during the two years or so that Christina apparently studied at the school. We first hear of her drawing from nature in the form of “wood-shavings picked up from a joiner’s yard” at the

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Camden Town school in William Bell Scott’s memoir (279, 282). Scott dates this at about 1850, but the actual time for the onset of Rossetti’s art classes is more likely 1851.3 In the winter and early spring of 1853 both Dante Gabriel and William refer to Christina’s regular attendance there (LDGR, 1:120; LWMR, 39). Presumably Christina’s formal art instruction ceased in April of that year with her departure from London to Frome, where she and her mother had assumed responsibility for a small school. With the cessation of formal instruction and the removal from the metropolis, one might have thought Christina’s artistic ambitions would lapse, but the reverse seems to have been the case. According to William Michael’s testimony, it was while at Frome, with its daily unpleasant task of teaching, that she “was to have addicted herself to art with some zeal” (LWMR, 46). In situ, she found this lofty intention more difficult to realize than she had anticipated. By mid-August she had already exhausted some of the art supplies she had brought with her and was writing William for new paintbrushes to be sent from London, as those available in the village were inadequate to her needs. William, however, was tardy in dispatching them, and when they finally arrived more than a month later she found little leisure even “to fasten my brushes on their sticks,” let alone “settle to work” (Letters, 1:74, 80). In addition to painting, Rossetti also worked at her pencil sketching, focusing on the art of portraiture. Within weeks of arriving at Frome, Rossetti sent two pencil portraits of her beloved mother to William in London (fig. 1.1) Diffidently, she hinted that she was not satisfied she had captured an acceptable likeness of Frances’s regular features. William agreed: “the two pencil heads of our mother done by Christina . . . are not good, the features being too attenuated” (Letters, 1:62 n. 1). It is telling that Rossetti chose to send her attempts for William’s inspection rather than seeking Dante Gabriel’s professional assessment, although it seems likely that William showed her efforts to their brother.4 Christina herself, however, does not seem to have responded directly to Dante Gabriel’s invitation to her to “enclose a specimen” of her handiwork, either in 1852 when he found she had been “perpetrating portraits of some kind” during her stay with the Swynfen Jervis family or in 1853 when she continued the practice at Frome. Perhaps she feared to “rival the Sid” and so invoke his ire (LDGR, 1:108).5 Her lack of confidence in her artistic abilities persisted. In July, after months of sketching and painting, she confessed to her friend Amelia Heimann, “I have not much faith in my own achieving greatness and fame in the Art” (Letters, 1:71). Perhaps her pessimism was reinforced by her mother, who persisted in seeing the world of visual art as a male preserve. After reading Anna Mary Howitt’s recently published An Art Student in Munich, Frances Rossetti wrote Dante

1.1 Christina Rossetti’s pencil portrait of Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti, 1853. Private Collection. © Christie’s Images, New York, 2002.

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Gabriel: “should her talent be equal to her admiration of art, she will indeed prove a great artist; but in this regard small is my faith in woman kind.”6 With such a small faith in the potential of women artists in general, Frances’s belief in her own daughter’s likelihood of achieving artistic fame and financial success must have been meager. Although in the same letter she wrote that “Christina appears now really desirous to apply to portrait painting, and I trust gives promise of something good,” the “something good” Frances anticipated for Christina’s art appears to have been personal rather than professional. Far from hoping Christina would, like her brother, succeed in painting for profit, Mamma thought that the study of art “might prove advantageous to her in more ways than one, carrying her a little out of herself.”7 Ever solicitous for her daughter’s welfare, Frances saw portrait painting, being neither dangerously subjective nor morbidly introspective, as a corrective balance to poetry writing, and therefore encouraged Christina’s portraits of the family members and servants who were, of course, her only available models. But such encouragement could not carry with it the hope of professional success. Although she continued to sketch family members on occasion, as is recorded in a pencil drawing of William Michael during their trip to Normandy in 1861 (fig. 1.2), Christina was never able to “satisfy myself or anyone else” with her attempts at achieving a likeness. Ultimately, she gave up “hopes of my future greatness” in art, taking some comfort from the knowledge that “at worst I shall not be the first person who has failed” (Letters, 1:61–62). Perhaps—to adjust Dante Gabriel’s remarks to historical circumstances—had Christina had more opportunities for study and instruction, and more time and encouragement for developing her skills, she might “have done something as an artist.” At this distance it is impossible to tell, though from the evidence of the scattered drawings remaining, and despite persistent rumors of a lost painting oeuvre,8 Christina seems to have been correct in her assessment of her own artistic talent. After the failure of the Frome school in 1854 she also abandoned any thoughts of painting as a profession and concentrated her ambition for fame on her poetic career. But recognizing that she did not, like her gifted brother or their much-admired predecessor, William Blake, have the innate talent to become a poet-painter did not prevent Christina from maintaining a lifelong interest in the ways in which poetic language could be extended by visual art. Redirected rather than quelled, her visual imagination found other outlets, both private and public, for expression.

Female Illustrator: A Private Art Destined not to become a renowned painter of symbolic works like her PreRaphaelite brethren, Christina Rossetti focused instead on that other visual art

1.2 Christina Rossetti’s pencil sketch of William Michael Rossetti, c. 1861. Reproduced courtesy of the University of British Columbia Library Special Collections. ADC box 10, folder 3.

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so integral to the movement: illustration. From the late forties to at least the late seventies, Rossetti illustrated a variety of contemporary writers, but principally works by herself and members of her family. Like many women of her day— including Queen Victoria and her daughters—Rossetti practiced literary illustration for private pleasure rather than public recognition and financial reward (Irwin, 165). Unlike most of these closet illustrators, however, Rossetti was a gifted poet whose status as a fringe member of the Pre-Raphaelite group put her in touch with a radical new approach to visual-verbal relations. She therefore approached the business of illustration as both an imaginative poet who understood the work of metaphor and a visual interpreter who recognized that the artist’s job was to complement and extend verbal narrative and symbol. As primitive as they are private, her illustrations in manuscripts, letters, and books from her personal library are not valuable as works of art. They are, however, of immense significance as material embodiments of her visual imagination. Offering a glimpse into the poet’s mind at work, the crude drawings demonstrate Rossetti’s critical response to the work of others and her dialogic engagement with her own poetry in another medium. In fact, they offer a rare object lesson in a Pre-Raphaelite poet’s visual-verbal aesthetics. Apparently well aware of the importance of this work, Rossetti wrote to William, as she approached the end of her life, advising him “not to disperse my library to the four winds without careful inspection of copies, lest you should squander unsuspected treasures here and there” (FL, 167). Regrettably, Rossetti’s personal library has been somewhat scattered. All the books she is known to have illustrated with marginal drawings—watercolors for Verses Dedicated to My Mother (1847) and Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), and pencil sketches for her Seek and Find (1879), Gabriele Rossetti’s L’Arpa Evangelica (1852), Maria Rossetti’s A Shadow of Dante (1871), John Keble’s The Christian Year (1837), and Isaac Williams’s The Altar (1847)9—are lodged in various private libraries. Only her illustrated manuscript for Sing-Song (c. 1870) remains easily accessible in the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts. The dispersal of Rossetti’s library makes “careful inspection of copies” difficult, but the list of titles is itself revealing. Apart from ornamenting her own poetry, Christina seems to have illustrated devotional texts exclusively. Her choice of texts tells us much about the workings of Rossetti’s visual imagination and the purposes of her materialist aesthetic. Rossetti’s selection of religious works to illustrate—three books of devotional poetry and two exegetical works10—is particularly telling. Significantly, the list includes the book of religious verse Gabriele Rossetti published two years before his death in 1854, L’Arpa Evangelica. Although Christina may have made the marginal illustrations during her father’s lifetime, it seems more likely that

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her numerous pencil designs were added later, as an act of love and devotion. Perhaps they were made at the same time that the grieving daughter inserted “Hymn after Gabriele Rossetti” into the book. William Michael surmises that this translation of her father’s “Nell’ Alto della Comunine” was composed “not long after our father’s death” (“Notes,” 471). One can imagine that this book, which gave evidence of her father’s turning to the Protestant faith in his last years, together with her conviction that he “‘died a patient Christian’” (Marsh, CR, 92, 150), gave the devout Rossetti much comfort. Ornamenting its pages was a way for the daughter to engage in a posthumous dialogue with her father on matters dear to her heart and central to her life. The other two books of devotional poetry illustrated by Rossetti were also homages to father figures in a way, for John Keble and Isaac Williams were both founders of the Tractarian Movement that had such a profound impact on Christina Rossetti’s life and work. As G. B. Tennyson has shown, this influence was not simply theological, but also poetic. The Tractarian influence on Rossetti, however, goes beyond poetic style to provide a formative base for her materialist aesthetic. Her illustrations for Keble’s and Williams’s poetry indicate that her visual imagination was activated as much by the Tractarian religious impulse to embody the visionary (G. B. Tennyson, 28) as it was by the PreRaphaelite commitment to visual-verbal partnerships. In other words, illustration had, for Rossetti, not only an aesthetic and interpretive function, but also a deeply spiritual significance, for it was by this material means that the invisible could be made visible, just as the ineffable could be hinted at in the resonance of poetic language. Both the number and style of Rossetti’s illustrations for Keble’s The Christian Year argue for a close engagement with her Tractarian predecessor. Rossetti produced 109 designs: one headpiece for each poem in the volume. Each drawing is roughly two inches wide by one to two inches high. Most of these tiny illustrations are quite detailed, compressing, in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelite woodcut, a great deal of pictorial matter and symbolic detail into a small space. This would have been a time-consuming task, demonstrating a sustained commitment to the project of providing visual, interpretive responses to Keble’s poems. Rossetti would have needed time for reading, reflecting, and planning, as well as for actually drawing the illustrations. These designs are mostly finished works, with almost no second thoughts in the way of erasures or overdrawing evident. It seems likely, therefore, that Rossetti worked out her ideas in rough first, before putting pencil to page. Producing more than one hundred drawings of this kind must have been the work of some weeks or months. The illustrations may even represent an aspect of her daily devotional life, recording her material engagement with The Christian Year over a twelve-month period.

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Like her other illustrative work, Rossetti’s headpieces to the poems in The Christian Year show, in all respects except sophistication and trained skill, her approach to illustration as a serious art. In her pictorial practice she follows her brother Dante Gabriel’s dictum and “allegorize[s] on [her] own hook on the subject of the poem” (LDGR, 1:239), producing interpretive, highly subjective responses to the text in the approved Pre-Raphaelite manner. Like other PreRaphaelite illustrators, too, she favors compositions focusing on human figures and dominated by symbolic elements—in her case, stars, crescent moons, suns, birds, flowers (especially roses, lilies, and violets), fruit trees, crosses, and dragon-like monsters. Furthermore, as Diane D’Amico has pointed out, these visual motifs also appear as tropes in her own writing, so the “recurring image patterns have far more in common with Rossetti’s own poetry than with Keble’s” (“Christian Year,” 37), and this, too, is typical of the Pre-Raphaelite personal approach to illustration (see chapter 2). Christina Rossetti’s visual imagination is rooted in an analogical frame of mind. She found Tractarian poets like Keble and Williams inspirational because they mirrored her own emblematic tendencies. Like the seventeenth-century poet Francis Quarles, who saw “the Heavens, the earth, nay, every creature,” as “Emblems” of God’s glory (“To the Reader”), the Tractarians frequently used the trope of Nature as God’s book to express their analogical view of the world. As G. B. Tennyson points out, the foundational text for the Tractarian view of “Nature as an analogue of God” is Romans 1:20: “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (67). This scripture informs much of Rossetti’s devotional writing, poetic themes, and illustrative concerns. Romans 1:20 is also the informing text for Keble’s influential Tract 89 and appears again as the epigraph to his poem for Septuagesima Sunday in The Christian Year. The poem begins “There is a book, who runs may read,” and goes on to elaborate on nature as a system of correspondences to divine or heavenly meanings. Rossetti’s illustration for this poem shows the material means by which her visual imagination sought to express the invisible or spiritual (fig. 1.3). Her headpiece sketch does not focus on any of the natural phenomena itemized in Keble’s verses, but rather on the divine message she as a Christian should read in the signs that surround her. The design shows a young woman with streaming hair rapidly ascending a steep path on a grassy hill decorated with flowers. She is in darkness, and the horns of the waning crescent moon crowning her head both point out the way she must travel, and offer a reminder of the transience of temporal life. At the end of the path, surrounded by a double band of stars, a celestial figure (presumably Christ) radiates light and holds his arms out in a gesture of welcome or encouragement. This highly symbolic drawing invites

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the reader/viewer to interpret its visual motifs in the same way that Keble’s poem asks its audience to interpret the objects of the material world: as visible signs betokening an invisible reality. In this Rossetti shows herself to be an ideal reader of Keble, who used nature in his poems to lead the Christian “from observation of physical beauty to reflection on what lies behind the appearances to worship of the creator of all things” (G. B. Tennyson, 101). Rossetti’s illustration, which symbolically inscribes her personal interpretation of Keble’s poem, records precisely this spiritual movement. Especially significant in Rossetti’s design is her focus on the poetic injunction to “run,” for her female figure is, literally, running up the hill. In Keble’s

1.3 Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “Septuagesima Sunday” in John Keble’s The Christian Year (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1837). Reproduced by permission of the owner and The British Library. Permanent loan no. 113.

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poem, running is the prerequisite, along with “Pure eyes and Christian hearts,” to reading God’s book of nature for the “heavenly truth [it] imparts” (66).11 Christina is responding from her position as a Christian poet here, for Keble’s verses allude to a scriptural text that had a deep meaning for her own sense of vocation. The young woman who, as an aspiring artist, had felt it a divine duty to paint the vision received in a dream ultimately became a writer who likewise felt the obligation to “write the vision” in vivid images to inspire others to “read” and “run” toward salvation (Hab. 2:2). As she wrote toward the end of her life in her own commentary on spiritual revelation, The Face of the Deep, To expound prophecy lies of course beyond my power, and not within my wish. But the symbolic forms of prophecy being set before all eyes, must be so set for some purpose: to investigate them may not make us wise as serpents; yet ought by promoting faith, fear, hope, love, to aid in making us harmless as doves. “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it”:—God helping us, we all great and small can and will run. (195)

Rossetti’s emphasis in this passage and throughout her devotional prose is on the necessity of both spiritual vision and symbolic representation. As a professional writer, she sought modes of production which would enable her to combine visual and verbal signs to express symbolic truth. As a private illustrator, she embodied her visual imagination in a personal iconography that reveals the extent to which the acts of reading and interpretation were, for her, indeed acts of sight enabled by “the adoring eye of faith” (FD, 151). Rossetti’s illustration for the “Fourth Sunday in Advent,” another poem in which Keble uses the trope of Nature as God’s book, similarly reveals her sense of vocation. A poem about the Christian poet’s constitutional inability to read God’s book of nature completely and record that vision adequately in appropriate images and tuneful music had an obvious resonance for Rossetti. Instead of focusing, however, as do the bulk of Keble’s stanzas, on the perfection of sound and sight awaiting the Christian in paradise, she remains, in this design, and in contrast to that for Septuagesima Sunday, earthbound. Drawing on a recurring trope in her own poetry, Rossetti represents the lyrical “I” of Keble’s verse as a trio of women, perhaps aspects of the same self. This is a highly personal response. Apart from the speaker, whose “eye unworthy seems to read / One page of Nature’s beauteous book,” Keble’s poem suggests only two other possible human subjects for illustration: the vague “Memory” the speaker finds himself incapable of painting; and the personified Music, whose song the speaker hopes to hear (17). Rossetti’s headpiece for “Fourth Sunday in Advent” (fig. 1.4) depicts a seated woman with a book at left, a central figure standing before an easel, and her female model, a woman leaning under a willow tree, at right. The illustra-

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tion provides an eloquent testimony to the life of a woman who had been, in her day, both artist and artist’s model, and who was still a public poet and a private reader. With the publication of her devotional prose works beginning in 1874, however, Rossetti became a very public reader of scripture, offering her commentaries for a wide audience. It is significant that the only devotional prose work Rossetti is known to have decorated with pictorial marginalia, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879), is a celebration of creation in which she draws the analogy between the artist and God as creator. Like all

1.4 Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “Fourth Sunday in Advent” in John Keble’s The Christian Year. Reproduced by permission of the owner and The British Library. Permanent loan no. 113.

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Tractarian analogies, this one emphasizes the earthly and temporal as a pale and insubstantial shadow of the divine reality: Matters of everyday occurrence illustrate our point: an artist may paint a lifelike picture, but he cannot endow it with life like his own; he may carve an admirable statue, but can never compound a breathing fellow-man. Wise were those ancients who felt that all forms of beauty could be but partial expressions of beauty’s very self: and who by clue of what they saw groped after Him they saw not. Beauty essential is the archetype of imparted beauty; Life essential, of imparted life; Goodness essential, of imparted goodness: but such objects, good, living, beautiful, as we now behold, are not that Very Goodness, Life, Beauty, which (please God) we shall one day contemplate in Beatific Vision. (SF, 130)

The above passage not only expresses the essence of Keble’s poem for the “Fourth Sunday in Advent,” but also the Tractarian doctrines of Reserve and Analogy that so clearly informed Rossetti’s verbal-visual aesthetic. For Rossetti, all visible signs could and should be read for their inherent symbolic meaning and application to her own spiritual life, whether they were natural phenomena like spiders frightened by their own shadows, artificial objects like oxidized bottles found in a roadside ditch, or works of art like the engravings of William Blake (TF, 121–22, 135, 88). The impulse to illustrate devotional works written both by herself and by others evinces a double desire on the part of the poet. In the first place, Rossetti’s visual responses to the spiritual message of verbal texts are highly personal ways of engaging with a symbolic system of which she felt ineluctably a part. Illustration gave her a way to respond both as creator (artist/reader) to creator (poet) and as created (human) to Creator (God). In addition, she saw the illustration of religious works as both a private act of devotion and part of her church’s highly visual expressions of worship. By the 1870s, The Christian Year was undergoing “missalization,” as G. B. Tennyson calls the process, for illustrated versions of the text were coming out in ever more elaborate editions, making Keble’s book “itself a kind of Prayer Book, an Anglican devotional manual complete in physical detail with the features characteristic of devotional publications.” As Tennyson suggests, “The volume was from the start an incitement to devotion; it was inevitable that this quality would find expression in the physical presentation of the book” (90, 87, 91). And if meditating on the illustrations in a text could be seen as part of High Church devotional practice, how much more so might the activity of producing one’s own illustrations be the outward and visible sign of one’s personal spiritual state? While Rossetti uses an interpretive, Pre-Raphaelite approach to illustration, she derives her style and subject matter from a long-standing religious tradition

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of pictorial representation. Like the illustrations found in the emblem books and allegorical title pages of the Renaissance, Christina’s drawings are strong in symbolism and weak in “truth to nature.” Her illustration for Keble’s “Fifth Sunday after Epiphany” exhibits an even more direct influence from these visual precursors. Just as the title page for The Christian Warfare against the Devill World and Flesh depicts the Flesh, or human sinfulness, as a bare-breasted woman with a tail (fig. 1.5), so too does Rossetti represent the sinful self that blocks the light of salvation as a bat-winged female figure with a scaly, serpentine tail (fig. 1.6). From early poems like “The World” and “Amor Mundi” (CP, 1:76, 213–14)12 to her late devotional writings, Rossetti clearly accepts the traditional iconography of woman as a representation of human weakness and sin. She uses this tradition, however, in a self-consciously revisionary way. In The Face of the Deep, her last and most engaged piece of writing on symbols and their interpretation, she observes: “Temptation, by a common instinct, seems to be personified as feminine: let us thence derive courage; the symbol itself insinuating that as woman is weaker than man, so temptation is never so strong as the individual assailed.” In this commentary on the Revelation of St. John she recognizes that “the woman and the beast by a foul congruity seem to make up a sort of oneness,” but considers this symbolism to be part of an inadequate human sign system: “Whatever this Apocalyptic beast may prove in fulness of time, it exhibits some likeness to that world, flesh, devil, which are my daily antagonists; of which I must daily, hourly, momentarily beware” (FD, 357, 399, 331). Thus when Keble writes, “Ah! ’tis the world enthralls / The Heaven-betrothèd breast” and speaks of being betrayed by “The traitor Sense” (58), Rossetti responds by drawing on the traditional symbol of temptation as part female, part beast. The image makes clear that it is the flesh in its bestial form that leads one into sin and effects a barrier between the spiritual self and the divine presence. By placing this figure in front of the cross of salvation, Rossetti responds both to Keble’s poetic lines “Sin only hides the genial ray, / And, round the Cross, makes night of day” and to the accompanying motto from Isaiah that serves as the epigraph to the poem: “your iniquities have separated between you and your God” (61, 58). Rossetti’s addition of a symbolic picture to accompany the scriptural motto and poetic verse effectively transforms her personal copy of Keble’s The Christian Year into a Victorian version of the seventeenth-century emblem book. Rossetti’s visual imagination was indebted to this old art of relating image to text through both strands of her aesthetic heritage. As Lothar Hönnighausen has demonstrated, the revival of the emblematic tradition in Victorian England, embraced so thoroughly by the early Pre-Raphaelites, was heralded by Anglo-Catholic works such as Keble’s The Christian Year and Isaac Williams’s

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1.5 Title page for The Christian Warfare against the Devill, World and Flesh, by John Downame (London: William Stansby, n.d.).

1.6 Christina Rossetti’s headpiece design for “Fifth Sunday after Epiphany” in John Keble’s The Christian Year. Reproduced by permission of the owner and The British Library. Permanent loan no. 113.

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Baptistery (1842) (10) and The Altar—significantly, the very works on which Rossetti practiced her private art of illustration and expressed her own emblematic tendencies. Throughout her life, in picture and word, Rossetti sought ways of expressing the spiritual in the sensuous, the numinous in the material. Illustration, by allowing her to combine spatial and temporal concepts, also enabled her to express a double vision. This double or analogical vision could see the phenomenal object (or its graphic representation) in all its sensuous materiality—its “presence”—while at the same time looking beyond or through the physical form to the transcendent reality it implied. For her essentially typological or analogical habit of mind, illustration also offered the opportunity to establish correspondences, not only between image and text, but also between material sign and spiritual meaning. Rossetti saw herself as living in a semiotic universe, one whose physical signs required constant, and correct, reading by the Christian penitent. Ultimately the signs conveyed “one meaning and one only” to her: that we ought not to be “influenced and constrained by the hollow momentary world we behold in presence, while utterly obtuse as regards the substantial eternal world no less present around us though disregarded” (TF, 122, 36). At the same time, she recognized that our limited human perception is incapable of seeing “face to face” that “substantial eternal world.” Human understanding requires the “shadows” of the visible world: “any literal revelation of heaven would appear to be over spiritual for us; we need something grosser, something more familiar and more within the range of our experience” (TF, 42). Rossetti’s materialist aesthetic provided this “something grosser.” As Herbert L. Sussman explains, “The highest power of the imagination” for figural thinkers “lies neither in the accurate perception of the phenomenal nor in the unmediated vision of the transcendent, but in the integrated sensibility that can see with the greatest acuity the phenomenal fact while simultaneously reading the fact as sign of a higher reality” (xvi). It is this “highest power” that Christina Rossetti’s visual imagination expresses, and that her illustrative practices embody. Rossetti’s illustrations for her own poems—her marginal watercolors in the printed texts of Verses Dedicated to Her Mother and Goblin Market and Other Poems, and her pencil sketches in the manuscript of Sing-Song—reveal the same tendency to symbolic depiction evident in her pictorial responses to devotional work. There is also, however, a much higher incidence of literal representation. This is particularly evident in her illustrations of narrative poems such as “The Dead Bride” in Verses, which is illustrated, predictably enough, with an image of a white-clad bride on her bier, surrounded by candles (Hatton, 178). There are a fair number of literal illustrations for her nursery rhymes, too, where the intended child audience rightly elicits a close correspondence between image and

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text. Nevertheless, Rossetti ornaments many, if not most, of the poems in these collections with symbolic designs. William Michael aptly refers to Christina’s drawings as “emblem[s]” or “device[s]” (“Notes,” 464 and passim), for they do indeed emulate emblematic traditions in their function and effect. However, for these secular verses,13 Rossetti draws more on the Victorian language of flowers than on religious iconography to convey her emblematic meanings. Sabine Haass has traced the connection of Victorian floral emblems to the typological thinking of such important influences on Rossetti as Ruskin and Keble (243), while Gisela Hönnighausen has convincingly shown the degree to which Rossetti herself makes use of this tradition in her poetry and prose. Rossetti’s abiding interest in interrelating picture and word, however, suggests that her debt to the emblematic tradition goes much deeper than her use of symbols, types, and figures14 as tropes to represent her verbal meanings. Christina’s propensity to use floral symbolism likely has its roots in family traditions. All the Rossettis were acquainted with Dante’s multifoliate rose as a symbol for the beatific vision of Paradise.15 Indeed, Christina uses this pictorial symbol to decorate the tenth chapter, “The Paradise,” of Maria’s A Shadow of Dante. On the more immediate domestic front, the family also used flowers to convey, with old-world courtliness, a gracious admiration. Gaetano Polidori, for example, on printing his granddaughter’s Verses on his hand press, presented her with a bouquet of red and white roses and an accompanying poem beginning These roses I give you are a symbol in their different colours of your spirit and your heart (trans. Marsh, CR, 75)16 In a similarly symbolic vein, Rossetti draws on the language of flowers when she ornaments “Burial Anthem” with forget-me-nots and “To My Mother on Her Birthday” with heartsease (WMR, “Notes,” 465, 464). The moss rose, one of Rossetti’s favorite flowers, and a recurring symbol for love in her poetry, is aptly used to decorate such poems as “Rose,” “Charity,” “The Solitary Rose,” “The Dying Man to His Betrothed,” and “The End of Time.” In the last two poems, Rossetti expands the range of symbolic meaning by coupling the language of flowers with other emblematic devices. In “The Dying Man to His Betrothed,” the betrayal of love and the presence of sin are conveyed by the emblem of a rosebush entwined by a snake; the transience of love and beauty in “The End of Time” is depicted by the device of a rose crossing a scythe, with an hourglass set into the angle (WMR, “Notes,” 466, 465). One of the most interesting of her floral emblems is found in “Love attacked,” which she decorates with convolvulus

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(Hatton, 174). Since the poem makes the traditional comparison between the transience of love and the brief bloom of flowers, the device has an obvious conventional meaning. The specific use of convolvulus, which in the Victorian language of flowers means “extinguished hope” (Greenaway, 13), adds resonance to the poem’s theme. Rossetti produced 39 watercolor illustrations for Verses and 35 for Goblin Market, as well as 121 pencil sketches for Sing-Song. The drawings demonstrate her personal commitment to, and interest in, complementing poetic language with visual imagery in order to develop wider symbolic meanings. The watercolor illustrations in particular must have been fairly time-consuming, and those for Goblin Market especially so, for they are described as having more detail than the devices in Verses.17 William Michael claims that the two designs for “At Home,” for instance, “inefficiently done as they are, carry a certain imaginative suggestion with them” (“Notes,” 482). Certainly they carry an apocalyptic resonance which ironically emphasizes a “tomorrow” to which the feasting friends of the poem are oblivious (CP, 1:28).18 A Rossetti family favorite, particularly with Dante Gabriel (WMR, “Notes,” 482), “At Home” is indeed one of the most haunting and memorable of Christina’s “ghost” poems. In it the spirit of the lyric speaker returns to “the much frequented house” only to find her friends singing, laughing, and planning for the next day: I listened to their honest chat: Said one: “Tomorrow we shall be Plod plod along the featureless sands And coasting miles and miles of sea.” Said one: “Before the turn of tide We will achieve the eyrie-seat.” Said one: “Tomorrow shall be like Today, but much more sweet.” The speaker grieves that in their talk of “Tomorrow and today,” the friends do not remember her enough to speak of “yesterday”: a poignant enough comment on life’s being for the living. Yet the meaning of “tomorrow” in the text is expanded when read in conjunction with the images Rossetti painted to accompany it. The first design is particularly apocalyptic: No. 1 shows the blanched form of the ghost in a sky lit with cresset flames. On one side the sky is bright blue, the flames golden; on the other side, dark twilight grey, and the flames red. (WMR, “Notes,” 482)

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The picture’s division into day and night skies is an effective way to portray the spirit straddling the worlds of “tomorrow and today,” while the bipartite structure also gestures symbolically toward the inevitable end of all our days, death. Rossetti’s second illustration for the poem expands on this meaning by generalizing from the death of the individual to the end of the world itself: No. 2 is the globe of the earth, rudely lined for latitude and longitude. The equator divides it into a green northern and a grey-purple southern hemisphere. Over the former flare sunbeams in a blue sky; below the latter the firmament is dimly dark, and the pallid moon grey towards extinction. (WMR, “Notes,” 482)

Drawing on the same night/day contrast that she used in her first illustration for the poem, Rossetti’s second picture underscores the irony of her characters’ cries of “tomorrow” by hinting that, like the individual, the world itself will pass away—that a night will come to extinguish all things. Seen in this light, her illustrations for “At Home” invite a more typological reading than is usually given the poem, with the feasters now seen as analogous to those in scripture who fail to fast, watch, and pray against Christ’s second coming. As William Michael says, Christina’s drawings are indeed highly suggestive. Her ability to use the visual to complement and extend, rather than to mimic and reflect, the verbal, shows that her visual imagination, like that of William Blake, sought not just correspondences, but also contraries, for the full expression of meaning. William Blake’s influence on Rossetti’s visual imagination was perhaps as strong as the emblematic tradition from which his composite works also derive. In his use of a suggestive, expanding symbolism rather than a limiting one-toone correspondence in his double works of art, Blake appealed to Rossetti’s PreRaphaelite instincts. William Michael told her biographer, Mackenzie Bell, that his sister did not “read B[lake] much or constantly,” but admitted, “certainly she prized the little she did read” (Bell, CR, 308). It is clear that Rossetti particularly prized Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, for she not only drew on image patterns from this work in her own songs for children, as Antony Harrison has shown (Victorian Poets, 149–50), she also followed his model of extending verbal meaning with complementary pictures. Her illustrated manuscript for her own nursery rhymes for children, Sing-Song, combines the symbolism of picture and word in a way akin to Blake’s Songs. Like Blake’s illuminated book, Rossetti’s illustrated manuscript was conceived as a verbal-visual composite, for she relied on the pictures to complete the meaning of her verses, often suggesting in her sketches both narrative directions and symbolic tropes for which there are no actual textual referents. Her design of three angels encircling an infant for “Our

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little baby fell asleep,” for instance, adds a divine element not present in the poem, reassuring the child reader that between falling asleep and waking to “kiss Mamma again,” the infant will be given heavenly care (SS, 4).19 By thus complementing her simple lyrics with “‘earthly pictures with heavenly meanings’” (SF, 24), Rossetti ensured that, at one level at least, her symbolism would not be beyond a child’s comprehension.20 The addition of these sketches, then, shows Rossetti’s awareness of her child audience, an awareness also demonstrated in later letters to her nephews and nieces in which she would occasionally include a small sketch to entertain them or explain her meaning. Sometimes her Sing-Song drawings offer the child a visual clue to a riddle’s verbal solution, as in that for “There is one that has a head without an eye,” which depicts a needle and thread stuck into a pincushion to show that “Half the answer hangs upon a thread!” (SS, 71). Cognizant of the fact that young children typically demand a close degree of correspondence between text and image, Rossetti satisfied the literalist urge of the toddler by providing a number of strictly “illustrative” images, such as her delightful picture of a little girl holding her skirts wide and playing in a “cowslip meadow” with a “frisky lamb” (see plate 1). Nursery rhymes inevitably have a dual audience: the preliterate child and the reading adult. Like Blake, Rossetti ensured that her illustrated Songs would work on levels appropriate to both audiences. Harrison comments that “Rossetti learned important symbolist techniques from Blake” (Victorian Poets, 151). These techniques include the layering of meaning for multigenerational audiences through composite image/texts that are simultaneously literal and symbolic: I have but one rose in the world, And my one rose stands a-drooping: Oh, when my single rose is dead There’ll be but thorns for stooping. (SS, 85) Rossetti’s illustration for this lyric depicts a red rose with many thorns, drooping in a red pot. Like Blake’s “The Sick Rose” from Songs of Experience, Rossetti’s picture/poem dyad insists on the literal materiality of the rose while at the same time implying a more abstract symbolic meaning. Even if the child reader gains nothing more than a generalized sense of this world’s transience and suffering, Rossetti has made her point. Meanwhile, the adult reader might see, as Harrison does, “that the rose is at once a unique flower, a beloved, and Christ” (Victorian Poets, 152). These multilevel symbolic readings are enhanced by Rossetti’s literal illustration which is, paradoxically, more symbolically resonant than Arthur Hughes’s design for the same picture. Hughes portrays a mother sitting by the

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bed of a sick child, presumably the “one rose” (“Rose”) of the lyric (SS, 85). Hughes’s illustration personalizes the lyric speaker’s grief by giving it a human object. This technique is probably more adapted to the immediate needs and comprehension of the juvenile audience than the adult, but it lacks the challenge and resonance of Rossetti’s less denotative symbolism. Hughes’s consideration of Sing-Song’s primary juvenile audience, however, does not generally prevent him from realizing Rossetti’s multivalent meanings and continuing the Blakean dialogue between image and text established in her illustrated manuscript (see chapter 3). By the time she produced the 121 illustrations for her Sing-Song lyrics early in 1870, Rossetti knew very well that her illustrative talents were not adequate for the public marketplace. Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti initially assumed that his sister intended her manuscript sketches for publication (LDGR, 2:797), the poet herself had no such illusions. “I fear you may have misconceived what the illustrations amount to,” she wrote her prospective publisher, F. S. Ellis, in February 1870, “as they are merely my own scratches and I cannot draw” (Letters, 1:341). Rossetti’s drawings, however, had another important purpose. Conceived from the outset as a composite image/text, Sing-Song eventually would have illustrations commissioned from a professional artist. Guided by her visual directions, this artist would, she hoped, find that her “scratches,” as she modestly referred to them, “help[ed] to explain [her] meaning” (342).

Publishing Poet: A Verbal-Visual Aesthetic Christina Rossetti did not, like William Blake, produce and print her own pictures and verses, nor, like her brother Dante Gabriel, devote her life to developing “the double work of art” in poetry and painting.21 But she did develop a unique verbal-visual aesthetic that informed her practices of production in significant ways throughout her career. Her dedication to the Pre-Raphaelite pairing of the sister arts led her to seek publication as often as possible in the illustrated periodicals that flourished in the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century publishing trade. Similarly, her commitment to the collaborative partnership of picture and word led her to ensure that her book publications be in attractive physical formats and, whenever possible, accompanied by illustrations. This kind of collaboration necessarily resulted in a certain loss of control over the final product and the public’s reception of it, for the linguistic code of the verses was put into dialogue with the iconographic code of the picture. Meaning took place in the interaction between the two independently produced semiotic systems. Despite some loss of artistic control, the addition of illustrations served a

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number of purposes for Rossetti. Most obviously, they increased the beauty of the publication, and hence its desirability, whether in periodical or book form. Furthermore, illustrations had the potential to extend and enrich the text by providing another artist’s response to the same subject in another medium. Finally, the presence of illustrations aided in Rossetti’s overall project of questioning the adequacy of human sign systems to express the numinous. As mere material objects, neither picture nor printed word could do more than gesture toward what for Rossetti was the eternal realm of truth; but she recognized that these “shadows” were all that human artists have for their earthly creations. The coupling of image and text on the printed page provided object lessons in correspondences for her audiences and fostered the hermeneutic habit of interpreting all material signs for their symbolic significance. When, in the mid-1850s, Rossetti made the decision to focus all her career ambitions on poetry, she had already established the basis for the visual-verbal aesthetic which would inform her publication process henceforth. If she could not be an artist herself, she would collaborate with professional illustrators to bring her poems before the public in creative partnerships of picture and word. In realizing her plan Rossetti was able to capitalize on a period in publication history when illustrated periodicals proliferated. Bracketing her long career are two significant magazine publications. “Maude Clare,” published in Once a Week in 1859 with an illustration by John Millais, may be seen as Christina G. Rossetti’s official introduction to the literary world.22 “The Way of the World,” published in the Magazine of Art in 1894 with an illustration by W. E. F. Britten, forms her public farewell as the last poem published before her death. The first of these publications came about when John Millais, then working as an illustrator for the newly launched Once A Week, encouraged Christina to send in a poem and offered to illustrate it himself (WMR, Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism, 232–33). This early publication should be seen as emanating from the collaborative aesthetic characteristic of Pre-Raphaelitism from its initial Brotherhood phase. At first, indeed, there seems to have been a bit of rivalry over which of the erstwhile brethren should illustrate Christina’s poem, with Dante Gabriel insisting that the duty and pleasure should rightfully be his. When the proprietors of Once a Week were unable to pay him enough, however, he gave way to Millais (Marsh, CR, 247–48), who produced a somewhat uninspired drawing of the haughty Maude Clare. “The Way of the World,” at the other end of her career, offers further evidence of Rossetti’s lifelong commitment to cooperative visual-verbal ventures. In sending her poem for consideration to the Magazine of Art, the poet knew her brief eight-line lyric, if accepted, would receive a full-page illustration, as this was the magazine’s standard practice. In-

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deed, Rossetti was at some pains to select poetry she personally considered “capable of illustration”23 when she sent material to the Magazine of Art. Between these significant signposts in Rossetti’s publishing career are an array of illustrated publications, in both periodical and book form. While Rossetti did send material to unillustrated literary magazines such as the prestigious Athenaeum and dependable Macmillan’s Magazine, she also frequently sought out those Victorian periodicals—such as the Shilling Magazine, the Argosy, and Atalanta in Britain, and Scribner’s Monthly, Wide-Awake, and St. Nicholas Magazine in America—that catered to the increasing demand for pictures in printed texts. Unlike Tennyson, who was arguably the period’s most “pictorial” poet, Rossetti was very willing to have her own “word-painting” realized in another medium. Whereas Tennyson “disliked illustrations to his own poems, because ‘they never seemed to him to illustrate his own ideas’” (Hagen, 100–101), Rossetti willingly subjected her verses to creative interpretation. Aware that the reader/viewer’s response to her poetry would be mediated not only by the accompanying pictorial image but also by the context of the magazine as a whole, Rossetti was careful in her choice of periodicals, rarely sending material to a publisher whose magazine she had not first examined for content and presentation. She also knew that while illustration would make her poetry immediately eye-catching and visually pleasurable, it also opened the possibility that the audience thus arrested might be misdirected in interpreting her text. Despite a certain amount of appropriate caution, this was a risk Rossetti was evidently willing to take with the Victorian periodical press. A sampling of Rossetti’s poetry published in illustrated magazines at the beginning, middle, and end of her career offers vital evidence of how her verbal-visual aesthetic affected the production and reception of her work. In the early years of her career, Rossetti’s poetry was in high demand by PreRaphaelite illustrators who shared her collaborative verbal-visual aesthetic and were eager to give her suggestive imagery graphic expression. After John Millais had illustrated “Maude Clare” for Once a Week and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had illustrated the title poem to Goblin Market and Other Poems, their PreRaphaelite associates vied for the honor of appearing in print in tandem with Christina. Early in 1866 Isa Craig, who had recently edited work by the Rossetti siblings for Poems: An Offering to Lancashire, called on Dante Gabriel with a request that he illustrate one of the poems Christina had lately submitted to her magazine, the Argosy. Perhaps Christina herself had suggested her favorite illustrator to her editor, but he was far too busy preparing his much delayed wood blocks for The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems to take on additional magazine work. “I couldn’t do it,” Dante Gabriel wrote Christina, “but, as the poem

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seemed good for illustration, I sent her on to Sandys, and, failing him, to Hughes, as some fearful creature illustrating No. 2 seemed to be threatened” (LDGR, 2:586). Rather than either “some fearful creature” or the dependable Arthur Hughes, who was to illustrate Christina’s work with such sensitivity in the seventies, it was Frederick Sandys who got the commission from Craig. One of the residents of Cheyne Walk during this year, Sandys was, at this time, a close friend of Dante Gabriel, who thought his draftsmanship excelled that of all living artists (Reid, 55). Paul Goldman concurs with this view, giving his opinion that “Sandys was arguably one of the most interesting and genuinely talented of all the black and white illustrators” of the sixties (Victorian Illustration, 51). Working with her Pre-Raphaelite associates gave Christina a limited amount of input into their productions, and she was quite capable of asserting her own artistic rights when necessary. For example, when Dante Gabriel asked Christina if she would mind changing the title of “Husband and Wife” to Grave-Clothes and Cradle-Clothes, as “the only thing [Sandys] could think of was to make a drawing of the woman lying dead, with some women preparing the graveclothes and baby-clothes at the same time” (LDGR, 2:586), Christina apparently did mind such a cavalier treatment of her text. “Husband and Wife” appeared unillustrated in A Masque of Poets (WMR, “Notes,” 486). As an artistic partner, Christina was willing to go only so far. Her poem might inspire the visual imagination of her collaborator, to whom she granted a certain amount of creative license; but when it came to matters of conformity, the poet maintained that illustrations should generally adapt to the text, rather than the other way around. At about this time she asked her brother, intermittently at work on his designs for The Prince’s Progress, whether “two small points in the frontispiece might advisably be conformed to the text? to wit, the Prince’s ‘curly black beard’ and the Bride’s ‘veiled’ face’” (Letters, 1:230). But artistic independence may be prized equally by both creative partners. Dante Gabriel veiled the Princess but kept the Prince beardless, while Christina retained her original descriptive passages. Thus, in any such partnership, there will inevitably be some disjunction between the image and the text in matters both large and small. In the best illustrated works, such differences, far from introducing paralyzing contradiction, provide the creative tension that invites interpretation. This is, indeed, one of the hallmarks of the Pre-Raphaelite approach to illustration: to be both a free-standing work of art, and an engaged, interpretive reading of the text which may or may not be in sync with that of other readers. Frederick Sandys’s illustration for “Amor Mundi,” for example—long recognized as one of the great graphic works of the Golden Age of Illustration and the illustrator’s masterpiece—offers a creative interpretation of Rossetti’s poem to which William Michael objected (fig. 1.7). Christina’s own response to

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Sandys’s design has not survived, although her delight at the prospect of his illustrating her poem is documented in a letter of 1865 (Letters, 1:240). So there is little evidence either to support or to contradict William Michael’s assertion that Sandys’s depiction of the speakers of the poem as a pair of lovers “was [not] exactly the authoress’s intention.” William Michael’s own reading of the text is “that both her personages are female: one of them a woman, the other the World in feminine shape” (“Notes,” 485). Dante Gabriel’s interpretation, on the other hand, seems to be in line with Sandys’s more sexualized view of the speakers, and with this Christina seems to have concurred. In one of her editions the poet wrote in the margin beside the poem: “‘Gabriel remarked very truly, a reminiscence of The Demon Lover’” (qtd. in WMR, “Notes,” 485)—suggesting, at the very least, that she was open to seeing the figures in her poem as a man and a woman, whatever her original “intentions” may have been. Sandys’s illustration for “Amor Mundi” is so packed with Pre-Raphaelite detail that the viewer’s eye at first takes in little more than the large central figures of the middleground, a woman holding an apple and a mirror, and a man playing a lute. Happily absorbed in each other, neither notices what the viewer also misses on first glance: the snakes that writhe at their feet and, a little further on, the open pit with its rotting corpse that dominates the extreme foreground of the picture. And when the eye finally fixes on the details of that foreground—the toad (a traditional symbol of sexuality) perched on the broken lyre and the rat gnawing at the dead woman’s wrist—the viewer is compelled to return to the central figures to reevaluate them, their relationship, and their symbolic objects. As Jeffrey Laird Collins perceptively remarks, “the artist skillfully exploits the differing viewpoints of subject and spectator to underscore the dramatic tension of the poem, pressing his very method of rendering into service as an illustrative tool.” It is Sandys’s skill in making the viewer initially “identify with the lovers and almost to swoon with them” (83) that makes this illustration such a magnificent interpretation of Rossetti’s poem. The delayed horror that comes to the reader at the conclusion of the lyric with the discovery of the “thin dead body” and the knowledge that “there’s no turning back” (CP, 1:213–14) from this path is thus duplicated in Sandys’s use of the picture plane to depict various stages in the lovers’ downward progress. He also uses emblematic attributes to develop his allegorical reading of the poem. With her mirror and fruit, the woman is presented as a figure for the vanity and temptation of the flesh, while her carefree male companion and his musical instrument represent the human tendency to immerse oneself in the pleasures of the day. Sandys’s graphic interpretation of “Amor Mundi” may be, as William Michael thinks, more sexualized than Christina “intended,” but its typological iconography and dramatic reenactment of the speakers’ narrative progression make it a powerful visual companion to the text.

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1.7 Frederick Sandys, illustration for “Amor Mundi,” Shilling Magazine 2 (June 1865): 193.

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The Shilling Magazine in which Rossetti was so delighted to be accepted for publication did not flourish beyond its inaugural year, but the poet always had her eyes open for other attractive illustrated magazines, both in Britain and in America. When a new children’s magazine was launched in New York under the editorship of Mary Mapes Dodge, Rossetti was immediately interested: “As to ‘St Nicholas’ I cannot fail to admire its attractively beautiful appearance, & to wish myself a nook in its pages; only I fear I shall not find a suitable piece for the purpose . . . tho’ I will hold myself at liberty to send some little thing, should one I like to offer occur to me” (Letters, 2:46). The “attractively beautiful appearance” of St. Nicholas Magazine owed much to the commitment of both the editor, Dodge, and the publisher, Scribner’s, “to produce the most beautiful and entertaining periodical for youth which it was possible to create” (W. F. Clarke, 1064). Having the entire Scribner’s stable of illustrators at her service certainly helped Dodge meet this goal (Saler, 162). In addition to the attractive appearance of this illustrated periodical, Rossetti would no doubt have approved of its literary and editorial contents and tone. Dodge wrote the editorial page in the voice of Jack-in-the-Pulpit, a persona that allowed her to be a little “preachy,” especially in matters concerning the natural world and the small birds and beasts of which Rossetti was so fond. Indeed, with its second monthly issue, the magazine launched a nationwide juvenile movement with the publication of an essay entitled “For the Birds,” which prompted the establishment of the “Bird Defenders.” In what must have been an unprecedented civil action, children across the country signed up to protect their feathered friends from the cruel hands of their peers, promising to conquer the enemy by using “example and argument and facts, instead of powder,” until “the birds have perfect peace” (Haskins, 72). The poet who had recently published such verses as “Hear what the mournful linnets say,” “Hurt no living thing,” and “If the sun could tell us half ” in Sing-Song would surely have been pleased to see this concerted effort to help children “Think of cruel boys who take / Birds that cannot fly” (SS, 121). Given her eagerness to find “a nook” for herself in the pages of St. Nicholas, it is not surprising that Rossetti would soon find something suitable to submit. “An Alphabet from England” (fig. 1.8), Rossetti’s delightful teaching rhyme, appeared in the section “For Very Little Folks,” which always followed the Jack-inthe-Pulpit editorial. In this introduction to “A New Volume of ST. NICHOLAS!” in 1875, Jack emphasized an editorial policy which would have appealed very much to Christina Rossetti: That reminds me: AM I a real Jack-in-the-Pulpit? you have asked—a true plant, growing and preaching out in the sunshine? Well, perhaps no. Perhaps yes. This much is certain: I do live in the sunshine; I do try to grow; and I do love to talk to the boys and

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girls of ST. NICHOLAS—open their eyes and their minds by pointing out all sorts of queer truths here, there, and yonder—and to put into their hearts grateful, loving thoughts toward the Giver of all good. (54)

Rossetti’s celebratory alphabet is appropriately placed in this context. Her poem exuberantly points out some “queer truths” that Jack-in-the-Pulpit might have endorsed, such as “I am I—who will say I am not I?” and expresses a litany of “grateful loving thoughts toward the Giver of all good,” as in “N is a nut—in a nutshell it grows; / Or a Nest full of Nightingales singing—oh, list!” (CP, 3:45–47). The line drawings by Henry L. Stephens that surround her verses are conventional illustrations in the nursery-book tradition. Comic and literal rather than beautiful and interpretive, the illustrations are also didactic, with each picture firmly anchored by a caption extracted from the text. Presumably the editor of St. Nicholas was not worried about redundancy when it came to instructing and entertaining children. But Rossetti, whose own illustrations for her nursery rhymes demonstrated her awareness of the needs of a juvenile audience, would have understood such a literal approach to her text. Rossetti continued to publish poems suitable for children in American illustrated periodicals, even though this practice sometimes led to problems with international copyright, as when her sale of “A Christmas Carol” (“A Holy Heavenly Chime”) in 1882 to Wide-Awake in Boston meant she would lose the British rights to her own poem.24 In an attempt to circumvent this eventuality, Rossetti wrote to Macmillan offering the poem for his January number, explaining that it could not come out in England until after 15 December. However, the editor of Wide-Awake, Ella Farman Pratt, seems to have caught wind of Rossetti’s plan and nipped it in the bud.25 “A Holy Heavenly Chime” was published in Wide-Awake’s Christmas number for 1882, profusely illustrated over two pages of text with Pre-Raphaelite-inspired illustrations by an anonymous American artist; it did not appear in England until Macmillan brought out Poems: New and Enlarged Edition in 1890. The same was true for another poem of Rossetti’s illustrated in Wide-Awake, “Brother Bruin,” which was published in the December number of 1885.26 Pratt’s policy was to pay her contributors about £5 for the poem and its copyright.27 In accepting the sale of the copyright, Christina signaled that her desire to appear in illustrated form could outweigh other considerations. Although she insisted to Macmillan during contract negotiations for A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881 that “copyright is my hobby: with it I cannot part” (Letters, 2:269), she was evidently more willing to part with this prized commodity in international periodical publications than she was in books published at home. Clearly the inducement to publish her work for children in the well-illustrated American magazines was strong enough to overcome her equally strong views on copyright.28

1.8 H. L. Stephen, illustration for “An Alphabet from England,” St. Nicholas Magazine 3.1 (1875): 56. Reproduced by permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library.

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Rossetti’s commitment to seeking illustrated venues for her poetry continued to her final decade. When Atalanta, a British magazine for girls, began publishing its monthly numbers in October 1887, Rossetti immediately offered one of her Christmas poems. “Lo! Newborn Jesus” appeared that December with the stanzas set in alternation down an evergreen design on a starry background. The following year, “Exultate Deo” appeared ornamented with a decorative title, and illustrated by an engraving after E. J. Poynter.29 Rossetti was also quick to make contact with the new illustrated magazines such as the Century Guild Hobby Horse and the Magazine of Art that began to appear during the fin-de-siècle PreRaphaelite revival. Whereas her contributions to the Century Guild Hobby Horse were not illustrated,30 both her submissions to the Magazine of Art were, in keeping with the periodical’s editorial policy, of which Rossetti was of course well aware. After Rossetti had helped the editor, M. H. Spielmann, with an article on Dante Gabriel in 1888, she was invited to submit a poetic contribution of her own to the Magazine of Art. Appropriately enough, she sent “An Echo from Willowwood,” a sonnet which evoked her brother’s poetry and which she deemed “capable of illustration.”31 The selected poem was thus a pairing of the two Rossettis, an excellent choice for a periodical at the forefront of the Pre-Raphaelite revival of art and literature. The volume in which her poem appeared included articles by Lucy Madox Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Frederick G. Stephens, as well as a review of William Michael’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer. The Pre-Raphaelite flavor was well captured by the sonnet’s illustrator, Charles Ricketts, the man credited by Gleeson White with bringing a “new Renaissance of the Pre-Raphaelite idea” into the nineties (“The Work of Charles Ricketts,” 81). An illustrator, book designer, typographer, and, eventually, publisher, Ricketts had immense influence on the art of the book at the fin de siècle. It was he who, more than anyone, helped disseminate the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of a creative partnership between image and text. In 1890, when he began contributing to the Magazine of Art, Ricketts was at the beginning of his career, and “deeply immersed in [D. G.] Rossetti,” whose “influence shows in the work he did at this period,” as his biographer, J. G. P. Delaney comments (46, 36). The coupling of Christina Rossetti’s poetry and Charles Ricketts’s pictures, while a long time in coming, seems, in retrospect, overdetermined.32 Ricketts produced a fine diptych design for “An Echo from Willowwood” (fig. 1.9), a full-page illustration with the poem set into the plate. The divided picture plane mirrors the division of octave and sestet in the sonnet itself, and also alludes, as does Christina’s poem, to Dante Gabriel’s earlier “Willowwood” sonnets in The House of Life. Featuring a very Pre-Raphaelite design—a densely

1.9 Charles Ricketts, illustration for “An Echo from Willowwood,” Magazine of Art 13.9 (1890): 385. By kind permission of Leonie Sturge-Moore and Charmian O’Neil. Photographic reproduction courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

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crowded composition depicting anguished figures set in a dark wood—the upper frame acknowledges Ricketts’s indebtedness to the art of D. G. Rossetti, whose book illustration he so much admired and emulated. The lower frame, however, in which delicate curvilinear tracings swirl with water ripples and lily pads to encircle the joined faces of the lovers in the pool, indicates the fin-desiècle movement away from the cluttered space of Pre-Raphaelite composition to the openness of art-nouveau design. The contrast between the medievalized black upper plate and the expansive white space of the lower design is formally rendered by the asymmetrical border Ricketts uses for the upper, but not the lower, plate. Reminiscent of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s design for the title page of Goblin Market and Other Poems (see fig. 2.3), Ricketts’s rectilinear frame is punctuated at the corners by squares containing emblematic motifs. A tribute to both Christina and Dante Gabriel, Ricketts’s illustration demonstrates the steady line of influence from the first generation of Pre-Raphaelites to those who revived the spirit of that movement in the nineties. Christina’s positive response to this illustration demonstrates the extent to which she retained an openness to visual interpretation throughout her life. Upon receiving her copy of the Magazine of Art, Rossetti wrote the editor: “Last night my sonnet came to hand interpreted by the delicate fancifulness of Mr. Ricketts. The heart-suggesting water lily leaves are all his own, and I should like to thank him for the enrichment.”33 If, in her own illustrations, Rossetti sought to “allegorize on her own hook,” and to respond subjectively and symbolically to the suggestive lines of a text, she was equally receptive, as a poet, to having her own work thus “allegorized.” Rossetti’s comments about Ricketts’s illustration for “An Echo from Willowwood” show that the poet generally valued the “fancifulness” of her artistic partner, whose visual symbols constituted an “enrichment” to the text. In book production, as we shall see, she had much more control over selecting and guiding her illustrator than she did in periodical publication. Thus she could ensure that her first books were illustrated with the designs of artists who shared her view that the relationship between image and text should be complementary, and that the picture should develop visual symbols in dialogue with, rather than by repetition of, the poem. Rossetti’s commitment to the illustrated form is evident in her insistence that reprints of her first books include the original illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Hughes. When Alexander Macmillan combined the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress volumes in a collected edition, for example, Rossetti insisted that her brother’s two designs for each book be included. Writing to her publisher in August 1875 as Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems was being prepared for the press, Rossetti suggested that the ideal situation would be to “print off the 4 woodcuts (all alike without text, beyond the quoted

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line of verse) as in fact 4 plates, each to be inserted opposite the incident it represents.” If this were not possible, she was agreeable to alternate arrangements. “The only plan I feel as inadmissible,” she emphasized, “is to dispense with any one of the 4” (Letters, 2:54). This commitment to pairing picture and poetry is again evident in the republication of Sing-Song in an enlarged, revised edition in 1893. In this case, Rossetti negotiated with the Dalziel Brothers at the time of their bankruptcy for the purchase of the engravers’ entire stock of electros and woodblocks, and then offered the whole to Macmillan, on condition that she retain Hughes’s original drawings.34 Thus once again, at the end of her life, she was determined that her work appear in tandem with an artistic partner. Although she never became the painter she once felt it her duty to become, Christina Rossetti possessed a visual imagination that informed both her poetics and her publishing practices. The remainder of part 1 examines how her determination that her books appear before the public in illustrated form affected the production and reception of five of her most important works: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), SingSong (1872), Speaking Likenesses (1874), and Called to Be Saints (1881).

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2 Pre-Raphaelite Bookmaking An Emblem is but a Silent Parable. —Francis Quarles

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HRISTINA ROSSET TI’S poetic career is bracketed by two of the greatest periods in British book illustration. She entered the publishing world in the sixties, at the height of England’s Golden Age of illustration. Her death in 1894 occurred in the midst of the fine-printing revival that made the nineties a second Golden Age. Goblin Market, the title poem of her first commercially produced collection, was illustrated in 1862 by her brother, Dante Gabriel, one of the artists central to the original Pre-Raphaelite movement and its innovative approach to illustration. In 1893 Laurence Housman, a young artist at the heart of the PreRaphaelite renaissance then underway, produced the first fully illustrated separate edition of the poem. Both books were published by the Macmillan publishing house, but under very different conditions that produced not only different illustrations and meanings, but also different readers and responses. Macmillan also brought out Christina’s second collection, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, with two woodcuts by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1866. He did not, however, endorse Housman’s proposal, made within days of Christina Rossetti’s death, for a separate illustrated edition of The Prince’s Progress as a companion volume to his decorated Goblin Market, despite the latter’s success as a fin-de-siècle gift book.1 Perhaps William Michael, Christina’s literary executor, vetoed

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the project, knowing that his sister had disliked Housman’s representation of Goblin Market. Or perhaps Macmillan simply did not see The Prince’s Progress as a reasonable publishing risk for an expensively produced gift book, as the poem had never enjoyed the popularity of Rossetti’s first poetic fairy tale. The production and reception histories of the two volumes from the sixties and the new edition in the nineties show the material effects of Rossetti’s commitment to visual-verbal partnerships. One of the long-term consequences of her collaboration with Dante Gabriel Rossetti in her first two books was that it inspired the visual imagination and bookmaking interests of later artists. The co-productions of the Rossetti siblings inspired, in addition to Laurence Housman, Charles Ricketts, Lucien Pissarro, and Florence Harrison.2 In the short term, the collaborative partnership with her brother enabled her to assume more control over her work than was typically the case in Victorian publishing, with Alexander Macmillan having to take a backseat in many important aspects of her books’ production. The reception of Rossetti’s work was also materially affected by its regular pairing with pictures, for the presence of interpretive illustrations meant that her texts were always framed by another point of view. As in traditional emblem books, the combination of poetic text and symbolic picture provided an object lesson to her audience of the necessity of reading all material signs for their spiritual meaning.3 It was for this reason that Rossetti generally welcomed and promoted the parallel development of her texts in pictorial form. In some cases, however, as we shall see, she found the artist’s “reading” of her text troubling—an unsettling reminder that as the conditions of production and reception changed, the hermeneutic possibilities of her work multiplied outside her control.

Pre-Raphaelite Illustration and Victorian Publishing Christina Rossetti preferred her brother, Dante Gabriel, as an illustrator of her poetry “to the world in general” (Letters, 1:232). This preference indicates not only an understandable family bias, but also an aesthetic judgement, for Dante Gabriel’s interpretive approach to illustration did not enjoy universal approval. His largest single commission—five designs for the illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Poems brought out by Edward Moxon in 1857—failed to please his immediate audience. The laureate himself loathed his illustrations (LDGR, 1:325), while readers were puzzled, bemused, or contemptuous. The Art Journal reviewer claimed to be unable to decide whether his art was “more calculated to provoke ridicule” or pity. As an illustrator, Dante Gabriel sought opportunities for “allegoriz[ing] on one’s own hook” in an equal partnership with the poet, generally finding narrative poetry most conducive to this kind of collaboration

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(LDGR, 1:239). Tennyson abhorred such interpretive license, maintaining that “‘an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text’” (W. H. Hunt, 2:95). Christina Rossetti, on the other hand, understood that good illustrations embodied the symbolic response of an engaged reader. In other words, she shared with her brother a Pre-Raphaelite view of illustration that encouraged individual, personal interpretation. For this reason, she and Dante Gabriel formed an ideal partnership when they collaborated on Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, Dante Gabriel’s last, and in some ways happiest, essays in the art of book illustration. By the time he came to illustrate Christina’s books in the sixties, Dante Gabriel had learned a great deal about the publishing of illustrated books through his work in the Pre-Raphaelite projects that initiated the Golden Age of illustration, William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855) and the Moxon Tennyson (1857). This was a good thing, for he began his brief illustrative career with little knowledge of the bookmaking process. His first foray into book illustration revealed his technical ignorance: he had to redraw his design for Allingham’s “The Maids of Elfen-Mere” because he had failed to work on the block in reverse (LDGR, 1:226). Admitting himself “to be astounded at having drawn an illustration on wood in a moment of enthusiasm” (236), Dante Gabriel had difficulty adjusting from being an independent artist to being a mere member of a reproductive process that included designer, engraver, and printer. It was only with difficulty that Allingham convinced him to let the woodcut for his “The Maids of Elfen-Mere” drawing be published at all. The artist remained so distressed by the reproduction of his original art that he ripped the offending page out of his personal copy of The Music Master (256). For all of his subsequent book illustrations—five for the Moxon Tennyson and four for his sister’s books—Dante Gabriel Rossetti remained deeply suspicious of the reproductive process. As a poet, he had reservations about illustrated editions, believing that the “upshot” of these too frequently was that the poet’s own conception was destroyed by the illustrator. As an artist, he believed just as firmly that the illustrator’s conception was also frequently destroyed by the engraver. His small output attests to his exasperated claim that “it is only once a century that I feel disposed to ‘illustrate’” (LDGR, 239, 385). Considering his professed ambivalences, and his commitment to the more lucrative and prestigious “fine art” of painting, it is, perhaps, surprising that he should have made any contributions at all to the burgeoning print culture of illustrated books. And yet the Pre-Raphaelite commitment to combining the sister arts of poetry and painting overcame all objections. During a brief period in his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced illustrations that would go on to influence generations of book artists well into the twentieth century.

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Dante Gabriel’s second experience with illustration, the Moxon Tennyson, brought home to him the importance of maintaining artistic integrity and control in any bookmaking venture he was to be involved in. Like The Music Master, and like most illustrated poetry of the day, the Moxon Tennyson was illustrated by a group of artists working independently, not only of each other, but also of the author. Indeed, the poet was very much in the background of this enterprise, for it was Moxon who proposed the Illustrated Edition to a reluctant Tennyson, and Moxon, too, who selected six of the eight artists. After recommending Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt to his publisher on the advice of John Millais, Tennyson withdrew to his palace of art and abstained from any further involvement, content to collect his cash when the book came out and put it toward the cost of Farringford (Hagen, 102–3). Or at least he remained content until he saw the illustrations themselves and observed the lamentably poor sales. Banking on the general appeal of illustrated works in the contemporary marketplace and, more specifically, on the status value of the six artists he had selected, all Academicians,4 Moxon appears not to have considered further the actual visual effect of the work. The addition of John Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite colleagues, W. H. Hunt and D. G. Rossetti, did not cause him to anticipate any difficulties. But the illustrations by the established artists, T. Creswick, W. Mulready, C. Stanfield, J. C. Horsely, and D. Maclise, were so different in style from the work of the young Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti that the book lost its potential to appeal to a wide audience. As Holman Hunt records in his memoir, book buyers tended to approve either the designs of the old school of illustrators or the new, Pre-Raphaelite approach, but not both: “Those who liked the work of artists long established in favour felt that the pages on which our designs appeared destroyed the attractiveness of the volume, and the few who approved of our inventions would not give the price for the publication, because there was so large a proportion of the contributions of the kind which they did not value” (2:103). The commercial failure of the Moxon Tennyson cannot, of course, be considered apart from its aesthetic fiasco. A reissue of Tennyson’s first three volumes of poems, the book was to rely on its illustrations to appeal to a wide middleclass market. Moxon invested heavily in this venture, paying each illustrator a generous £25 per drawing, with the exception of Rossetti, who reputedly demanded—and got—£5 more than the other artists (W. H. Hunt, 2:73). With 54 drawings costing the publisher at least £1375 for the original art work and an additional £540 for engraving, profits were indeed contingent, as William Vaughan remarks, on “the good reception of the illustrations” (149). Moxon was so certain of his success with his targeted market that he undertook to bear the costs

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of publication himself, guaranteed Tennyson profits of £2,000, and printed 10,000 copies to be sold at the exorbitant price of a guinea and a half (Hagen, 102, 106). Too highly priced for Tennyson’s usual audience, which was accustomed to laying out five or six shillings for a book by their favorite poet, the Illustrated Edition might yet have had a chance of at least modest success if it had appeared, as Moxon had planned, in time for the Christmas gift book market of 1856 (Hagen, 106). But here again the illustrations that were to sell the book actually inhibited its sale. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s inability to keep to a production schedule, and his refusal to let the book go forward until he was personally satisfied with the engraving and printing of his drawings, delayed publication until May of 1857. As William Michael tells us, “my brother, besides being very fastidious, and therefore somewhat dilatory, over his own share in the designs, found constant reason to be doubly fastidious over the guise which his work assumed at the hands of the wood-engravers: he corrected, altered, protested, and sent back blocks to be amended” (DGR as Designer, 29–30). The truth is, the artist treated the art of illustration as seriously as he did painting, but discovered, to his dismay, that issues of quality control in book publishing were subject to many factors outside the usual experience of the solitary artist in his private studio. Dante Gabriel Rossetti emerged from these two experiences in book illustration with the determination never again to enter the field unless he had some degree of artistic control over the entire book’s design and the publication process. This he was able to achieve by working collaboratively with Christina in the production of Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. The collaboration of the two Rossettis ensured that the books would be, within the restraints of the commercial publishing industry as it then stood, works of art in themselves—not, like the Moxon Tennyson, a mishmash of visual messages, but unified books with most, if not all, aspects of their physical appearance in concert.5 In addition to providing a frontispiece and title page for each book, Dante Gabriel also designed the binding, helped in the selection of colors, advised about the size of page and type of paper, and supervised the printing. Out of the Rossetti collaboration emerged trade books whose overall coherence inspired others in the Victorian publishing industry. Another Macmillan author who demanded that his books meet “a high standard of technical and aesthetic production” immediately took the Rossetti books as his models (Cohen and Gondolfo, 28). Writing to Macmillan in 1868 about bringing out his Phantasmagoria, Charles Luttwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) recommended Goblin Market as “a good model in every way” for the type and set up, and The Prince’s Progress as a model for cover design. Dodgson did not, of course, wish to

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replicate D. G. Rossetti’s unique binding, but rather to follow his example by having the cover art echo “the subject of the principal poem” (60, 61).6 Jerome McGann suggests that Dante Gabriel’s great care for the material aspect of his own books indicates his keen awareness of their status as commodities (“Betrayal of Truth,” 348), and the same could be said of the two Rossettis’ careful control over the physical appearance of Christina’s books. Their form and fashioning amount to a manifesto of the Pre-Raphaelite verbal-visual aesthetic, produced by the circle’s first successful poet in collaboration with its most original illustrator. The books that were to establish Christina’s fame and fortune represented something else of vital importance to her artist. When he could not find a publisher to bring out his own Early Italian Poets and the projected Dante at Verona and Other Poems in illustrated form, Dante Gabriel turned to Christina’s books as a way of indulging his “bibliographical passions.” In these volumes he worked out his ideas “about integrating the written word with the decorative possibilities in the book as physical object” (McGann, DGR and the Game, 69). This opportunity for experimentation in Pre-Raphaelite bookmaking seems to have sufficed for him. The man who earned £3 for his drawing for The Music Master (Boyd, 20) and demanded ten times that fee for each of his five designs for the Moxon Tennyson appears to have produced the four remaining illustrations of his artistic career at no charge to either publisher or author. There are no surviving documents to indicate that, either when he first offered “to contribute a brotherly design” or two for Christina’s Goblin Market or subsequently, Dante Gabriel asked for, or received, any remuneration beyond the six presentation copies he requested “in consideration of the 2 drawings.”7 Perhaps it was this apparent disinterestedness that allowed him, in partnership with Christina, to exert considerable control on the publisher, Alexander Macmillan, and the production process. Alexander Macmillan was, like Edward Moxon, very much aware of the contemporary market for illustrated poetry. Unlike Moxon, however, he had a good eye for the visual effect and aesthetic integrity of a book, and would never have tolerated the incoherent “book-cobbling” of the illustrated Tennyson. No doubt Gabriel had this in mind when, still dismayed by his experience in illustrating Tennyson’s poetry, he recommended that Christina try his friend Alexander Macmillan instead of Moxon when she began to think about bringing out a collection of her verses (LDGR, 2:390). But Christina had in a sense already preempted her brother’s kind offices by sending some of her poems to Macmillan’s Magazine. It was the publication of “Up-Hill” to critical and popular acclaim early in 1861, rather than any efforts on her brother’s part, that made Macmillan particularly keen to publish more of her work. Gratified at “having got a poet at

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last” in the form of Christina G. Rossetti (2:389), Macmillan asked her to send him a selection of manuscript poems to consider for book publication. Such active solicitation of an obscure writer was not uncommon for this decisive and “hands on” publisher. Alexander Macmillan “chose the books that the firm would publish, sought out unsolicited works that he believed should bear the Macmillan imprint, and . . . pursued writers, known and unknown, whom he wanted to grace his list” (Cohen and Gandolfo, 10). A great appreciator of metrical form and a deeply religious man, Alexander Macmillan would have found much in Christina’s work to appeal to him. He was also a shrewd businessman, however, and would not have taken on her poetry if he had not seen a potential profit for his firm. As he explained in a long rejection letter to an aspiring poet in the same year that he brought out Goblin Market and Other Poems, “the point where . . . [poetic] utterance is so imbued with genius that it will command a sale, is rather a nice thing to determine.” Perhaps erring on the side of caution, he had “frequently sent back what I felt to be beautiful and touching in verse, simply because I knew it would not sell.” His business as a publisher, he wrote, was “to calculate what will commercially pay,” for “unless it will there is no reason why it should be printed” (Graves, 193–94). Presumably his publisher’s instinct led him to determine that Rossetti’s poetic genius might “command a sale” in the contemporary marketplace. Macmillan’s decision was materially assisted by Dante Gabriel’s offer to combine his art with his sister’s verses. There is no surviving documentation to indicate the process by which this offer came about, or the degree to which Christina encouraged or requested her brother’s designs. Her later comment that his woodcuts were “essential to her contentment,” her assertion that they helped her “face my small public,” and her refusal to go to print without them, even if this meant publication would be delayed by a year, suggests that the siblings were equally committed to this collaborative project (Letters, 1:239, 246). As it turns out, the woodcuts were essential to the publisher’s contentment, too. He did not make his final decision “to run the risk of a small edition” until after Dante Gabriel wrote him to offer two designs for the book. Recognizing a marketable commodity when he saw it, Macmillan then determined to “make an exceedingly pretty little volume” for the Christmas sales season of 1861 (Macmillan, 95). “Prettiness,” he knew, was a salable commodity. As he told his brother Daniel years before when they were embarking on their publishing partnership, “You don’t know the influence of prettiness on even sensible people” (Graves, 67). Moreover, he was very much aware that the name of D. G. Rossetti as illustrator would enhance the book’s marketability. If George Meredith, then literary adviser to Chapman and Hall, knew in 1860 that “illustrations from [Dante Gabriel

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Rossetti’s] hand” would “add largely” to a book’s “chances of sale” (Troxell, 6),8 Alexander Macmillan was the first publisher to capitalize on this fact. Advertisements for Christina’s poetry always included the tag “With 2 illustrations by D. G. Rossetti,” and his name was prominently featured on the publisher’s title page, though not on the decorated title designed by the artist himself. The terms of the contract Macmillan offered Christina—half profits after publishing expenses had been covered—underscore his optimistic expectations for the book’s sales. Such an agreement was by no means standard in contemporary publishing, when unknown authors, rather than their publishers, were often expected to assume the financial risk. When Charles Luttwidge Dodgson, for example, took his manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Macmillan a few years later, he did not receive anything like the terms Christina was able to secure: the publishing contract stipulated that the author “was to bear all the publishing costs, the cost of illustrating the book, and even of advertising it; Macmillan was simply to sell it—on commission” (Cohen and Gandolfo, 14). But then, Dodgson had no brother to perform the service of artistic and business partner. In contracting to bring out Goblin Market and Other Poems in illustrated form in violation of contemporary publishing practice, Alexander Macmillan showed not only his canny market sense but also his willingness to take calculated risks. His risk, of course, was lessened considerably if, as seems to have been the case, the illustrations cost him nothing more than the price of engraving and printing. Illustrated poetry, as Macmillan well knew, occupied a niche market at Christmas, when publishers could expect reasonably brisk sales. He was therefore willing to take a chance with an unknown author and a known artist in a first-edition illustrated book. Unfortunately for him, the artist’s fastidiousness, coupled with the poet’s determination not to appear in print without his accompanying woodcuts, disrupted the publisher’s marketing strategy for the gift-book season. Like the Moxon Tennyson, both Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems missed this sales season by some months. Although both collections were advertised for Christmas, the first appeared in March 1862 and the second in June 1866. Along with commercial control of his product, the publisher had to cede aesthetic decisions to the two Rossettis. Despite Macmillan’s habit of giving “precise instructions to the designers who worked for him” (C. Morgan, 64), the final designs for Christina’s two volumes were determined by the author and her artist rather than by their publisher. Although Macmillan proposed “A quaint woodcut initial—not elaborate and not sprawling down the page, but with a queer goblin, say, grinning at a sweet, patient woman face” (Macmillan, 95),

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Dante Gabriel instead initially selected “A Birthday” as the subject for the frontispiece. When, perhaps dissatisfied with his efforts to illustrate this lyric, he reverted to the narrative Goblin Market for both frontispiece and title page, he took some pains to let Macmillan know he had not made the change to please the publisher.9 Presumably he had confirmed for himself his instinctive sense that narrative poetry was most conducive to his illustrative approach, though it is very possible that Christina had some input here. The poet seems to have been in the habit of granting her selected illustrators a fair amount of interpretive freedom, but there was always some degree of collaboration and consultation. Throughout the publishing process the two worked closely together, with Dante Gabriel sending her preliminary sketches, final designs, and, after cutting, proofs of his illustrations, for her comment and approval. On publication, he protested on her behalf when the printing was “blurred & faint” rather than “full & black,” making Goblin Market and Other Poems appear “more like a penny newspaper than a careful book.”10 Together the Rossetti partners ensured that the second edition of Goblin Market, published in 1865, met their exacting standards. When Dante Gabriel’s efforts to have the title-page vignette recut to correct an error in the jawline of one of the sleeping sisters11 once again threatened to disrupt the publication schedule, Christina assured him that “as to the delay to G. M. it is nothing” compared to the true disaster of publishing imperfect work (Letters, 1:224). She, too, wished to present “a careful book” to her public. In combining her poetry with her brother’s visual art, Christina Rossetti realized a number of objectives. Perhaps not least important to this most devoted of daughters was her knowledge that the joint artistic efforts of the two gifted siblings would give great pleasure to Frances Rossetti (Letters, 1:223). But Christina was also ambitious for public fame and commercial success in the sixties, and she was well aware of the added value her brother’s designs would confer on her book. With the publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems, Christina did find her marketing niche, for the volume was by all accounts the first successful publication of the Pre-Raphaelite poets. Although a greater critical success than an immediately popular one, the book nevertheless sold steadily, and shortly after the second edition Christina became an internationally published author. In May 1866 Roberts Brothers of Boston brought out Poems, combining the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress collections into one volume, and stealing a march on Macmillan by including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s designs for the latter work a month before they appeared in England.12 Thereafter Dante Gabriel’s “Buy from us with a golden curl” formed the pictorial introduction to collections of his sister’s works on both sides of the Atlantic, and her “ardent admirers” and “large public” in America as well as in England (Sharp, DGR, 105)

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came to expect Christina Rossetti’s poems to appear in tandem with the interpretive illustrations of her artistic partner.

Brother and Sister and the Sister Arts If Christina Rossetti preferred her brother, Dante Gabriel, as an illustrator of her poetry “to the world in general,” he seems to have repaid the compliment by finding her verses more inspiring to his pencil than any living poet’s besides his own. This is evident not just in his well-known woodcuts for her two books, but also in his unpublished illustrations and unrealized proposals for illustrating her work.13 His pencil illustrations for the privately published Verses, produced shortly after Grandfather Polidori printed them in 1847,14 show that Dante Gabriel was drawn to visualizing Christina’s poetry from the outset of her poetic and his artistic career. Unlike the watercolor illustrations Christina added directly onto the pages of another copy of this book (discussed in chapter 1), Dante Gabriel’s pencil drawings were produced on separate sheets of art paper of a size with the text and later bound up with the printed leaves.15 Thus, on the eve of the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Christina and Dante Gabriel were experimenting with the form of the illustrated book. Dante Gabriel was as keen to illustrate his sister’s poetry at the end of his career as he was at the outset. In 1880 he offered to illustrate a sonnet by Christina as a pendant gift to his own “A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,” illuminated on the front flyleaf of David Main’s A Treasury of English Sonnets and presented as an eightieth birthday gift to Frances Rossetti.16 Christina’s “Sonnets are full of love,” later used as the dedicatory poem for A Pageant and Other Poems, was written in her own hand on the back flyleaf of Main’s Treasury. Unlike her brother’s sonnet, hers appeared without decorative embellishment of any kind. Dante Gabriel had offered to illuminate Christina’s sonnet as well as his own for their mother’s birthday gift, but Christina forestalled him by suggesting she produce her own design for the poem.17 If Christina attempted to produce a symbolic design for her sonnet similar to her pictorial marginalia in printed books, she must have abandoned the project on finding either that her sonnet was not “capable of illustration” or that her skills were not up to the task. The design Dante Gabriel produced for “A Sonnet is a moment’s monument” shows that the siblings’ shared interest in interrelating image and text was founded on a common knowledge of the emblematic tradition. In this illustration Dante Gabriel achieves, as Lothar Hönnighausen rightly remarks, “an integration of text and illustration in the manner of emblem books from Alciati and Whitney to Peacham and Quarles,” with whose works he was well acquainted

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(57). Moreover, he expected that his readers—mother and sister—would be well enough versed in such iconography to be able to interpret the emblems without difficulty: I have no doubt that your discerning eyes plucked out the heart of the mystery in the little design. In it the Soul is instituting the “memorial to one dead deathless hour,” a ceremony easily effected by placing a winged hour-glass in a rose-bush, at the same time that she touches the fourteen-stringed harp of the Sonnet, hanging round her neck. On the rose-branches trailing over in the opposite corner is seen hanging the Coin, which is the second symbol used for the Sonnet. Its “face” bears the Soul, expressed in the butterfly; its “converse,” the Serpent of Eternity enclosing the Alpha and Omega. All this I doubt not you had seen for yourself. (LDGR, 4:1760)

Christina would indeed have seen these symbolic meanings for herself at once, for she had used some of the same emblems in her own watercolor illustrations for the 1847 Verses.18 Later, the device of the winged hourglass and butterfly would form the decorative gilt stamp on the cover of Time Flies (1885). As children, Christina and Dante Gabriel were exposed to the emblematic tradition in the form of both continental iconography and native religious verse. Both grew up, moreover, influenced not only by the figuralism of Dante Allighieri and Filippo Pistrucci but also, closer to home, by the emphasis on visual symbols and typological representation within the High Church movement. Ruskin’s “materialistic” aesthetic, with its emphasis on art as a way “to feel and illustrate the relation of spiritual creatures to the substance and conditions of the visible world,” reinforced their own “materialistic” proclivities (Ruskin, Art, 395). As PreRaphaelite collaborators, they brought these shared interests to bear on the making of books that would combine the sister arts of picture and poetry in an integrated material form, one that would embody a new union of flesh and spirit by coupling the sensuous with the symbolic.

Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress From the point of view of both format and content, Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems may be looked upon as modified emblem books for a Victorian audience accustomed to symbolic interpretation.19 For both Rossettis the combination of picture and word seemed, as it had to their seventeenth-century predecessors, an ideal form of expression, for it symbolically combined the material “body” (the picture) with the intangible “soul” (the verse). In this “union of body and soul, picture and word, sense and intellect,” as Jean Hagstrum remarks, the baroque emblem book sought an interpenetration of the arts (96, 97). A similar goal is evident in the Pre-Raphaelite bookmaking in which

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Christina Rossetti’s materialist aesthetic found visual-verbal form. If, as William Michael avers, one of Pre-Raphaelitism’s defining characteristics is “the intimate intertexture of a spiritual sense with a material form” (A. Rose, 18), then the movement found one of its most characteristic expressions in the illustrated books produced by Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the sixties. “To illustrate” retained, for both Christina and Dante Gabriel, its primary etymological meaning of “to light up” or “to illuminate” a text rather than “to reflect” it as in popular contemporary usage. Therefore, in their visual-verbal partnerships they sought a dynamic, interactive relationship akin to that found in the emblem books they both admired. Image and text should mutually explicate each other, and the details of the picture should be “read” for their symbolic meaning.20 Renaissance emblems typically faced their poetic companions, encouraging readers to move back and forth between picture and word as they worked through the correspondences. While the architecture of the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress volumes prohibited such immediate engagement, the Pre-Raphaelite partners found other ways to ensure that picture and word would be in active dialogue. As frontispieces and title pages, Dante Gabriel’s designs provided the pictorial introduction to Christina’s title poems, and therefore shaped the reader’s initial experience of the poetry. At the same time, their placement as preliminary matter some pages before the first poem meant that they were also inevitably divorced from the poetry and in danger of seeming either too much like freestanding works of art or disposable additions to the text. These difficulties were addressed in both volumes by bringing the poetic matter forward out of the book proper, as it were, and into the preliminary pictorial material. The artist provided a hand-lettered caption taken directly from the poem for each of his four designs. This technique not only effected an immediate visual-verbal interchange, but also ensured that the illustration would be anchored to the poem as a whole. This use of captions is unprecedented in Dante Gabriel’s illustrative oeuvre. Indeed, as the Art Journal critic complained in his review of the Moxon Tennyson, the artist would have been hard pressed to provide a line from “Sir Galahad” that would relate the depicted scene to the poem. For Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress, however, poet and artist worked together to construct their own nineteenth-century version of the emblem tradition. Functioning as the motto under the pictura of an emblem, the caption invites the viewer to read the picture and its symbolic details closely, both on their own and in relation to the poem that follows. Dante Gabriel distinguished the frontispiece and title-page designs in both volumes by selecting a dramatic narrative moment for the first and a contemplative scene expressive of character for the second. The frontispiece for Goblin

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Market depicts the poem’s central moment of temptation, with the goblins enticing Laura to “Buy from us with a golden curl.” In the Prince’s Progress volume the frontispiece focuses on the dramatic event the entire poem moves toward, the moment at which the laggard Prince finally arrives at the castle only to find that his Bride is dead, and that even his grief comes too late: “You should have wept her yesterday.” The title-page vignettes, in contrast, endeavor to establish insight into each poem’s principal characters—Lizzie and Laura in the “Golden head by golden head” vignette for the Goblin Market volume, and the Princess in the vignette “The long hours go and come and go” for the Prince’s Progress volume. Each of these four designs functions emblematically by drawing on the typological traditions evoked in Christina’s verses while at the same time introducing some new visual motifs expressive of an independent adumbration of the theme. The relationship between image and text is therefore complementary and dialogic. Dante Gabriel responds to his sister’s suggestive narratives in his own approved manner: by allegorizing on his own hook “without killing, for [himself ] and everyone, a distinct idea of the poet’s” (LDGR, 1:239). The addition of pictures that provide symbolic readings of the text reinforces a theme common not only to Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress but also to Christina’s work generally: the necessity of deciphering all visual signs for spiritual meaning. As Mary Arseneau has shown so persuasively, Rossetti’s narrative poems seek to present in paradigm “the kind of symbolic interpretation in which Rossetti wanted her readers to engage.” Thus the “problem of the interpretation of things and events, the task of giving things a right moral reading” (“Incarnation,” 79; 83–84), is central to both poems. In Goblin Market, Laura’s inability (or refusal) to read material signs for their spiritual meaning leads to her downfall when she accepts “the fruit forbidden” offered by the seductive goblins (CP, 1:23, line 479; 14, lines 115–40).21 In The Prince’s Progress, the eponymous antihero similarly misreads objects and events throughout the entire course of his pilgrimage. From his encounter with the “Lamia-like” milkmaid who first detains him under the obviously symbolic apple tree (Harrison, CR, 117) to his long-delayed arrival at the Palace gates, the Prince fails to understand the meaning of his quest (CP, 1:95–110;22 Arseneau, “Pilgrimage,” 289). Moreover, as many critics have shown, Rossetti makes the true meaning of the visual signs encountered by her characters in both poems available to the discerning reader by her allusive and intertextual methodology.23 Drawing on literary precedents and biblical types, Rossetti’s multilayered means of expression provide an interpretive model that encourages her readers to look beyond the immediate and temporal to the permanent, unchangeable truth reiterated symbolically throughout the material world for “those who have eyes to see.” An apple, for Rossetti, is never just an apple. As a biblical type it always occupies two times and places, and its

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spiritual meaning within a symbolic narrative should be immediately obvious to readers with “such minds as mine” who are able “to catch these refined clues,” as Christina explained to Dante Gabriel (Letters, 1:228). The illustrations provided by Dante Gabriel for Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress support the poems’ allusive methodology by drawing on a typological system of representation. Furthermore, the pictures add another level of meaning by their intertextual references to visual sources ranging from the emblems of Francis Quarles to contemporary art. And just as the poems avoid the inflexibility of allegory,24 so too do the accompanying woodcuts work by a suggestive symbolism rather than a one-to-one correspondence. In picture as in poem, the imagery evokes a number of interpretive possibilities ranging from the sensuous to the spiritual. And as the response of contemporary readers makes clear, the pictorial interpretation that preceded each poem helped to shape the reception of Rossetti’s first two collections of poetry. Thus their production as illustrated books is integrally connected to the way they produce their meanings. The principal question troubling Goblin Market’s initial audience seems to have been whether the poem was a moral “allegory against the pleasures of sinful love” (Norton, 401) or an immoral narrative celebrating the delights of the flesh and containing “not a syllable to show that the yielding was at all wrong in itself ” (rev. of Poems, 845). This split in critical reception is embodied in, and was produced by, the opposing meanings Dante Gabriel Rossetti offered the poem’s first readers with his frontispiece and title-page designs for the poem. The frontispiece directs the reader’s reception of the poem as a moral allegory in which the two sisters are differentiated according to a flesh/spirit paradigm. But the title-page vignette replaces sororal difference with feminine sameness, thereby displacing the moral story with sexual fantasy. “Buy from us with a golden curl” (fig. 2.1) corresponds faithfully to the narrative description while at the same time developing its own visual symbols for an interpretive reading of the poem. In the manner of typological art, Dante Gabriel Rossetti conflates two distinct temporal situations into one spatial image for dramatic effect: the moment of Laura’s decision to succumb to temptation by exchanging a lock of her hair for the goblins’ forbidden fruit; and the moment of Lizzie’s decision to run away—an event that precedes Laura’s fall by some sixty lines. Certainly Lizzie is well off the poetic stage when Laura clips her “precious golden lock” (line 126) and this, the poem suggests, is part of the problem: a sister should “fetch one if one goes astray” (line 565), not leave one vulnerable by running from danger to save her own skin. Yet Dante Gabriel’s composition is not so much a contradiction of the text’s temporal sequence as it is an accommodation of the narrative to the requirements of a spatial medium.

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2.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Buy from us with a golden curl,” frontispiece for Goblin Market and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1862). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

The frontispiece interprets the poem as the primordial struggle between the sensuous and the spiritual. Drawing on the emblematic tradition, the artist conveys Lizzie and Laura as types for the archetypal sisters, Flesh and Spirit. By means of this visual allusion, Francis Quarles’s Emblem 14 of book 3 becomes part of the work’s intertextual apparatus (fig. 2.2). Quarles’s emblem depicts the sisters seated on the ground, with Spirit looking through a telescope at a representation of the Last Things while Flesh tries to induce her to exchange the

2.2 Emblem 14, Book 3, in Francis Quarles, Emblems Divine and Moral (London: William Tegg, 1866).

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telescope for a prism—to distract her from her sight of heaven with the enticing things of this world. Spirit has her hair bound up and is wearing a dress, while Flesh sits naked, with her long hair streaming down her back. Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses a similar contrast of coiffure and dress style to distinguish the sisters in his frontispiece. Lizzie, as a representation of Spirit, wears a plain dress and has her dark hair bound up. As a representation of Flesh, Laura has long, unbound hair. Although not naked, her buxom figure encased in a floral dress bursting at the seams amply conveys her sensuous nature. To emphasize her fleshliness, Dante Gabriel sets Laura amid the temptations of the senses in the form of the seductive goblins and their luscious fruits. In contrast, he indicates Lizzie’s moral superiority by her high position in a barren space in the uppermost corner of the picture plane. By depicting her toiling on the upward path, the artist evokes the poem’s imagery of “beacons, rocks, and a beleaguered town,” as Gail Lynn Goldberg points out (149). He also alludes to other poems in the collection, notably the famous “Up-Hill” that first interested Macmillan in publishing Christina’s poetry. Lest the reader miss these iconographic signals, the cat’s tail in the right foreground of the picture graphically recalls the serpent whose enticement to eat the forbidden fruit was the undoing of Flesh’s prototype, Eve. But the tail is also—for Dante Gabriel was fond of mixing the sexual and the spiritual—a visual pun on penis, the Latin root for both the tail and the phallus. This illustration, attached to the poem from its initial publication, may be seen as the progenitor of critical readings of Goblin Market as a Christian allegory, a sexual allegory, or both. While the frontispiece offers a reading of Goblin Market as the story of temptation and fall, however, the title-page vignette interprets the poem in the light of the relationship between the sisters. “Golden head by golden head” (fig. 2.3) portrays the sisters sleeping in each other’s arms in a bed hung with exotic draperies. The selected scene has, as David Bentley suggests, a “static (ut pictura poesis) quality” to it (71) particularly adaptive to the artist’s pencil. Dante Gabriel’s choice of such a passive moment, rather than another of the poem’s dramatic encounters such as Lizzie’s violent assault by the goblins or the subsequent climactic embrace of the sisters, at first seems idiosyncratic. Yet his instinct was to balance a dramatic scene full of activity and narrative interest with a static or contemplative one that showed something essential about the characters, something not revealed in the sisters’ different responses to temptation. In selecting this scene, the artist is in fact zeroing in on the most radical message of his sister’s poem, and one that completely overturned his own view of the matter as expressed in his poem “Jenny” as well as in a later letter to Christina. But if “to think / Of the first common kindred link” between those “So pure” and those “so fall’n” (“Jenny,” lines 207–8) is difficult for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it is

2.3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Golden head by golden head,” title page for Goblin Market and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1862). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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not so for Christina. She insisted to her brother that imaginative empathy could bridge the gap in the experiences of women from opposite walks of life (Letters, 1:234), and she put theory into practice in her regular associations with “fallen” women at the Penitentiary of St. Mary Magdalene on Highgate Hill. The “Golden head by golden head” scene in the narrative is therefore of critical importance to interpreting the meaning of the story. Although it comes after Laura has succumbed to the goblins and eaten their fruit, the poet makes no distinction between the “fallen” woman and the virtuous one: Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings, They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings. Moon and stars gazed in at them, Wind sang to them lullaby, Lumbering owls forbore to fly, Not a bat flapped to and fro Round their rest: Cheek to cheek and breast to breast Locked together in one nest. (lines 184–98) Christina’s poetic description emphasizes the innocence and purity of both sisters with its images of blossoms and snow and its evocation of a peaceful natural world in which animals take care not to interrupt their dreams and the very winds sing them to sleep. Dante Gabriel conforms to the text by emphasizing feminine sameness in his depiction of the sleeping sisters, to the extent that they seem virtually identical. By visualizing this aspect of the text, the title page contributed to what the Catholic World reviewer proclaimed the volume’s “morally dangerous tendency” with regard to “the rather delicate subject of our erring sisters” (845). The sensuous presentation of the sisters in the title-page vignette may well have contributed to the volume’s “morally dangerous tendency” in another way. “Locked together” as they are, the two sisters in their luxuriously festooned bed evoke Victorian genre paintings of sleeping women such as Lord Leighton’s Summer Moon. As Bram Dijkstra suggests, the sleeping women motif, with its emphasis on passive eroticism spiced with a narcissistic or lesbian subtext, ap-

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peared again and again in paintings of this period (64–82). “Golden head by golden head” should be seen within this cultural context. The sisters become visual twins, Pre-Raphaelite beauty mirrored and doubled. The duplication in turn mirrors the picture’s double meaning. While appearing to offer the viewer an “innocent” scene, the title-page vignette simultaneously suggests that the real subject is female sexuality. Framed as a window into the feminine boudoir, the composition positions the audience as voyeurs who have been granted a clandestine view of a moment both private and vulnerable. The sisters’ beauty, their embrace, and their sleep make their sexuality both titillating and passively available. The presence of the dream balloon located to the left of the sleeping Laura, who clutches her sister’s golden lock as if in memory of her own sexual loss, provides a reminder that the world of desire cannot be separated from this protected feminine “nest.” Contemporary readers recognized that The Prince’s Progress, like Goblin Market, was a symbolically suggestive narrative dealing with “the power of temptation” (rev. in Athenaeum, 824), but generally agreed that it lacked the earlier poem’s force. Although the scenes were vivid, the protagonist did not seem to be a “strong prominent figure” capable of supporting the “somewhat enlarged surface” of the lengthy narrative (rev. in Reader, 613). Christina Rossetti herself seems to have concurred with this judgment, readily admitting to Dante Gabriel in March 1865 “that my Prince lacks the special felicity (!) of my Goblins” (Letters, 1:230). The poem’s somewhat labored form carries the marks of its drawnout production for a number of distinct audiences prior to its publication by Macmillan in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems in June 1866. The first of these coterie audiences was the Portfolio Society, a group of mainly feminist artists and poets who set monthly subjects suitable for either visual or verbal treatment, and then circulated the results among the members for comment. Christina participated as a corresponding member in the early sixties. According to Jan Marsh, The Prince’s Progress had its origin in a lyric entitled “The Prince who arrived too late,” written on the Portfolio Society theme of “too late” (CR, 275).25 This poem, which Christina called her “reverse of the Sleeping Beauty” (Letters, 1:184), was published in Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1863. Subsequently, when Christina began assembling material for her second collection of poetry in 1865, Dante Gabriel suggested that she expand the short lyric on “The Prince who arrived too late” into a longer narrative poem as the headpiece to the volume (WMR, “Notes,” 461). In addition to offering suggestions for this expansion (not all of which Christina followed) and editorial critique during the development of the narrative, Dante Gabriel also offered to produce a pair of woodcuts for the title poem to the prospective volume. The degree of cooperation between Christina and Dante Gabriel on the title

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poem and illustrations for her second volume of poetry is probably unprecedented not just in the poet’s career but also in the history of Victorian publishing. The Rossettis discussed the structure and staging of the poem, as well as its incidents and characters, in a copious correspondence throughout the winter months of 1865 while Christina was staying at Hastings for her health. Particularly significant in terms of their artistic partnership is that Dante Gabriel seems to have begun work on preliminary studies for the illustrations before the poem itself was finished, and certainly months before the contract was signed with the publisher, Macmillan, in May.26 Thus the creative processes of composing pictures and poems occurred in tandem rather than in sequence as is usually the case with illustrated books, providing unusual opportunities for reciprocal influence between the collaborators. Christina was so committed to this verbal-visual partnership that she volunteered to substitute “frost for heat” in the line “How long shall I wait, come heat come rime” (line 7) to conform to the caption Dante Gabriel had provided for a sketch he sent her in March (Letters, 1:233). The fact that the line was not changed in the printed version suggests second thoughts on the part of both collaborators, for the drawing was also abandoned.27 Dante Gabriel would have known the ending of the poem, of course, when he began his preliminary sketches, and also Christina’s plans for the development of the whole, which they discussed. But he would not have had the poem in its final form to work from when he began drafting his pictures in February of 1865. Perhaps this is one reason for the numerous studies the artist prepared, each with slight variations in the positioning and expression of the central figures, prior to completing his designs for frontispiece and title page.28 He was illustrating a work in progress, and his work was, of necessity, “in progress” too. Unlike the Prince, however—and despite many delays endured by the patiently waiting Christina—Dante Gabriel did successfully complete his slow progress toward publication. For her part, Christina was willing to wait as long as need be for Dante Gabriel’s cuts, but she was not willing “to dispense with the 2 drawings [he] promised her” (RML, 51). Dante Gabriel’s illustrations for The Prince’s Progress, like those for Goblin Market, offer readings that convey spiritual and secular meanings simultaneously. In the Prince designs, however, he draws on the typological symbolism of Christina’s verses principally as decorative motifs, thereby opening up the possibility of an ironic interpretation. Jerome McGann has shown how, as his poetic career went on, Dante Gabriel used religious symbols only to drain them of their potency (“Rossetti’s Significant Details”), and this certainly seems to be happening in his illustrations for The Prince’s Progress. The scriptural and devotional intertexts evoked by his visual motifs do not lead to a coherent religious interpretation of the poem, but rather, as in his own poetry, work to suggest the

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insufficiency of such purely spiritual readings. That Christina continued to find her brother’s drawings “charming” attests to the fact that the designs do, on one level, portray important aspects of the poem. But the artist’s details also demonstrate that Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s reading of the text as a symbolic spiritual pilgrimage whose goal is to unite body and soul is informed as much by his own, secular, interest in this theme as by any biblical connotations. Christina’s poem clearly struck a chord with her brother’s muse. Dante Gabriel had been interested in the theme of connecting the active, public self (represented by the male artist) with the inner, reflective soul (represented by the beautiful woman) since the start of his literary career, as is evident in “Hand and Soul,” published in The Germ in 1850. In the frontispiece design, “You should have wept her yesterday” (fig. 2.4), the artist alludes to one of the poet’s most important scriptural intertexts, the parable of the virgins who must watch and pray all night, ready to light their lamps when the expected Bridegroom arrives (Matt. 25: 1–13). His visual symbols, however, gesture toward typological interpretation without offering a coherent set of correspondences. The biblical parable contrasts the five wise virgins who keep their lamps trimmed with the five foolish ones who let their lamps die out. But in this illustration there are seven, not five, lamps burning, and seven praying virgins greet the dilatory Prince at a chamber of death rather than a marriage feast. Six of these are grouped in front of the raised and recessed tomb, while the seventh arrests the Prince on the threshold with two restraining hands upon his chest. This figure at the center of the composition commands a strong visual position, arresting the reader/viewer’s attention as well as the Prince’s progress. The drawing emphasizes the power and beauty of women and the male’s isolation from that mystic feminine realm in a manner similar to that found in earlier illustrations by Dante Gabriel such as “The Maids of Elfen-Mere” for The Music Master and “The Lady of Shalott” for the Moxon Tennyson. Just as, in “The Maids of Elfen-Mere,” the pastor’s son is obviously of a different world from the Maids (Reid, 35), so too the Prince in this design is of a different ilk than his Bride’s female attendants. Dark where they are light, with his face covered rather than exposed, he enters this feminine space as a figure of death. In Dante Gabriel’s design for “The Lady of Shalott,” Sir Lancelot also occupies a separate space when he gazes down upon the dead Lady in her funeral boat, which is lit, like the princess’s bier, by seven flaming candles. In that dark and crowded composition from the Moxon Tennyson the artist mirrors the illuminated profile of the knight in the half-shaded face of the Lady, thus suggesting the fatal connection between them. Like Sir Lancelot and his dead Lady, the Prince and his dead Bride are graphically linked. With the Princess’s veiled face and praying hands dimly

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2.4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “You should have wept her yesterday,” frontispiece for The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1866). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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echoed in the Prince’s raised hand and covered face, the artist hints at their symbiotic relationship. This intrinsic connection is also suggested by the Prince’s bare, uncovered head, whose wiry dark hair is similar to that of the Princess as depicted in the title-page vignette (fig. 2.5)—a deliberate connection, as in earlier studies his head is covered and the Princess’s hair is smooth. Viewed as a double-page opening, moreover, the Princess of the title page seems to gaze, not into empty space, but toward the Prince on the frontispiece.29 Her gracefully crossed hands suggest prayerful resignation and patience, but the strong diagonal lines of her robes and her sensuous face and throat imply a much more active desire. Boxed in by the ruled title-page border as well as by the frames of window and door, and further confined by the repeating concentric circles on the casement windows, the Princess is the very epitome, as Susan P. Casteras points out, of the artist’s “countless images of waiting, embowered women of the late 1850s and 1860s” (“‘The Utmost Possible Variety,’” 27–28). These repetitive images of projected desire all contain, as Christina wrote in “In an Artist’s Studio,” “The same one meaning, neither more nor less.” Dante Gabriel does not portray Christina’s Princess “wan with waiting” or “with sorrow dim” but “as she fills his dream” of feminine beauty and sexuality (CP, 3:264). Indeed, he rejected all his earlier studies showing the Princess slumped in her chair, looking dejectedly out her window like a wistful Mariana, in favor of this intense image of a woman waiting for completion by her male counterpart. The concentric circles of the labyrinth outside the Bride’s window underscore the sexual nature of the artist’s interpretive design while at the same time implying a spiritual meaning. This dual message is facilitated once again by Dante Gabriel’s use of emblematic motifs. Although William Bell Scott scoffed that “he actually represented [the maze] as the plan, not a picture, of a labyrinth!” (44), in fact Dante Gabriel was not attempting to give a maze “from nature” in the approved Pre-Raphaelite fashion. Rather, he was drawing on the representation of labyrinths in Renaissance emblem books. In Quarles’s Emblem 2 in book 4, for instance, the maze is used to represent the world in the pictura that accompanies a poem about the spiritual pilgrimage to Paradise (fig. 2.6). Dante Gabriel’s maze similarly represents the confusions of the world that the Princess remains detached from in her “one white room” (line 23). At the same time, the proximity of Princess and maze alludes to the mirroring relationship between her experience and that of her Prince, who travels through a “Tedious land”—“Endless, labyrinthine, grim”—on his way to his Bride (lines 152, 154–55). As in his own “Blessed Damozel,” however, Dante Gabriel is interested in a physical consummation rather than an abstract spiritual union. Thus he also uses the figure of the labyrinth to symbolize female sexuality. The flowing fountain and the winged statue at the center of the maze hint of the sexual

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2.5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The long hours go and come and go,” title page for The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1866). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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fulfillment the Princess misses by remaining in her enclosed virginal space. If, as Jan Marsh suggests, “the Prince in symbolic terms [represents] the quotidian self, while the Princess is the immortal soul, which wastes and dies through neglect” (CR, 323), then Dante Gabriel’s designs add a fleshly reading of this theme in keeping with his own artistic concerns and interests. In his chapter on Christina Rossetti in English Poetesses in 1883, Eric S. Robertson recognized the kinship of the Rossetti siblings’ visual imagination: “the pictorial element in her poems is so strong, and of such a kind, that Dante

2.6 Emblem 2, Book 4, in Francis Quarles, Emblems Divine and Moral (London: William Tegg, 1866).

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Rossetti could have found twenty or thirty congenial themes in them for his pencil” (340). Praising the illustrations Dante Gabriel produced for Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress at the expense of the poems they accompany, Robertson went on to say “that the painter poet has drawn four wonderful illustrations for these poems which do what book illustrations very rarely do; they far transcend the text in their mysterious beauty, and give to the poems a richness no reader would otherwise find in them” (340–41). While Robertson is right to recognize the beauty and power of Dante Gabriel’s illustrations for his sister’s work and correct in his assessment that the illustrations direct the reader’s reception of the poetry, he is surely off the mark in attributing all the richness to the pictures. Image and text in these works are complementary: mutually enriching and mutually interpreting. Their autonomy as independent works of art requires the careful interpretation of the symbolic methods and meanings of picture and word. At the same time, their deliberate pairing demands that readers attend to the ways in which these art forms comment on and collaborate with each other. These two collections of poetry produced in the sixties must be viewed as total works of art which convey their messages through iconic and linguistic exchange. In them the two Rossettis develop a shared materialist aesthetic, one that explores and exploits “the dichotomies of res/verba, form/content, and image/text” in a way that anticipates the “physicalized language” Dante Gabriel was to work out later in his designs for his own poetry collections (McGann, DGR and the Game, 77). Reading such self-consciously materialist works requires attention, as McGann reminds us, to “three aesthetic events”: the picture, the poem, “and the liminal event that emerges from their dialectical relation” (71). In his illustrations for The Prince’s Progress and Goblin Market, Dante Gabriel shows himself to be an astute reader of Christina’s poetry, one alert to the “refined clues” she placed in them “for such minds as mine.” But he also, like all reader/interpreters, brought his own interests and experiences to his readings. Thus his pictures pursue themes evoked by the poems but informed by his own independent point of view. Christina’s willingness to allow her artistic partner to develop symbolic interpretations of her text with a high degree of autonomy demonstrates her commitment to truly cooperative verbal-visual ventures, ones that would allow the sister arts of poetry and picture to appear as equal partners within the confines of a printed book.

Reception and (Re)production at the Fin de Siècle An illustration embodies a reader’s response to a text. Thus a reception history may be mapped in the many works of visual art produced by Rossetti’s con-

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temporaries on subjects inspired by her poetry. Within a year of the publication of The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, four paintings on subjects taken from her poetry were exhibited in London art galleries. Arthur Hughes showed a picture based on Rossetti’s “A Birthday” at the French Gallery in 1866 (Roberts no. 68); Eliza Martin’s Life Is Not Good and Joseph Jopling’s Lady Maggie were exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1867.30 Meanwhile, Lady Waterford and Eleanor Vere Boyle were working on watercolor illustrations for Gladstone’s favorite lyric from The Prince’s Progress collection, “Maiden Song” (LDGR, 2:665), and Charles Luttwidge Dodgson’s friend, the Reverend Rivington, wrote to say he was eager to illustrate a new edition “of either of Christina’s volumes, and would do it at little cost.” The sample design he sent, taken from “Passing away, saith the World, passing away,” was “a good deal like what C[hristina] herself might do if she knew enough to draw,” according to William Michael, but the amateur’s proposal was not taken up (Rossetti Papers, 236; RML, 63). There is no record to indicate that Rossetti was anything other than pleased with these visualizations of her work. But when, in 1866, George Chapman painted a picture based on “A Triad” from her Goblin Market collection, there was a dramatic response from the poet. According to William Michael’s testimony, it was Chapman’s painting that prompted Christina to omit “A Triad” from all subsequent editions of her work published in her lifetime. Apparently Chapman’s picture brought home to her the possibility “that the sonnet might be misconstrued, or unfavourably construed, from a moral point of view” (qtd. in Bell, CR, 213). From this experience Christina gained a new respect for the power of images to provide an interpretive context that could shape other readers’ responses, and was thereafter more cautious in her visual-verbal ventures. Her caution increased after her favorite illustrator, Dante Gabriel, was no longer able to collaborate with her in producing illustrated books. She knew that another artist less familiar with her work and character would be unlikely to share the “intense sympathy which [her] work always excite[d] in [Dante Gabriel]” (LDGR, 3:1380) and more liable, therefore, to produce interpretations alien to her. By the 1890s Christina Rossetti was a well-known poet whose association with the Pre-Raphaelite movement made her an object of particular interest to the younger generation. Inevitably, her visual imagination sparked the creative work of many artists interested in the art of the book as the Victorian period entered its second Golden Age of illustration. When Macmillan’s partner, George Craik, approached her with a proposal to bring out a separate edition of Goblin Market as a decorated gift book, she revealed that “the idea of an illustrated Goblin Market seems so far prevalent that not very long ago I was applied to on the subject from another quarter in case the subject had been at my exclusive disposal,31—and before that an illustrated copy was submitted to my inspection

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by a lady who was aiming at a Publisher and whom I of course referred to your Firm.”32 Although the proposals Christina mentioned remain in the category of Pre-Raphaelite “fantasy editions of books that never were,” the book proposed via Craik was, ultimately, published for the Christmas market of 1893, designed throughout by the fin-de-siècle illustrator Laurence Housman. Unlike any of Christina’s previous visual-verbal publications in her thirtyyear-long career, this Goblin Market project was initiated by an artist outside her immediate circle. A longtime admirer of Christina’s poetry and Dante Gabriel’s art, Housman was one of the decade’s young decorative artists fascinated by the illustrated books of the sixties and involved in the period’s fine-printing movement and Pre-Raphaelite revival (White, English Illustration, 162). On the strength of his success in illustrating George Meredith’s Jump-to-Glory Jane (1892), Housman wrote to Macmillan33 proposing to design a new, stand-alone edition of Goblin Market as an illustrated gift book. So committed was he to this project that he even offered to take on the risk of publication himself if necessary, despite his perennially impecunious state.34 For Housman, then, the lavishly illustrated and decorated Goblin Market, with its twelve full-page pictures and numerous textual decorations, was a labor of love. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Housman was guilty of bibliographical passions and was attuned to the ways in which the book might be produced as a total work of art. His binding design introduced a new shape to the art of the book—the long, narrow format which fin-de-siècle book artists used to such good effect.35 Housman designed the book’s shape to accord specifically with the short lines of Rossetti’s poem and objected strenuously when Macmillan proposed that he use the same format in his next commission, an illustrated edition of Jane Barlow’s The End of Elfintown (1894). The artist argued that a uniform edition would “intrude a comparison which had better not be made”: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market was “unique.”36 Housman’s proposal to Macmillan met with cautious approval. Recognizing that the current vogue for well-designed gift books created a seemingly insatiable market each Christmas season, and aware of the positive reception accorded to Housman’s first commission, Macmillan was prepared to undertake the costs of publication himself—including £25 for the drawings—and to give Christina her customary half-profits, if the illustrations met with her approval. As George Macmillan explained to Housman, “we cannot of course take any steps about the publication of an illustrated edition of Miss Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’ without first obtaining the author’s sanction.”37 But achieving Rossetti’s sanction was no easy matter, as Housman’s artwork simply did not appeal to her. Although his style was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite

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illustrators he so much admired, it was also a product of his own position as a “decadent” artist involved in such nineties’ issues as homosexual concerns and women’s rights, socialist politics, and Christian mysticism.38 What Housman prized about the Pre-Raphaelite artists was that their illustrations “were personal and intellectual readings of the poems to which they belonged, not merely echoes in line of the words of the text” (Arthur Boyd Houghton, 13). He too saw illustration as an act of illumination, defining it as “something in the nature of a brilliant commentary throwing out new light upon the subject” (22). But that “new light” may, of course, be viewed as artificial brilliance, as Housman found when Christina Rossetti did not endorse his reading of her poem. He had spelled out his “pictorial allegory” in a letter accompanying his specimen drawings, so there could be no mistake: I have imagined the goblins wearing animal masks in order to hide the wickedness that their own faces would reveal; this will give me the opportunity of a dramatic climax when in the poem they are finally defeated by Lizzie. I propose then to show them throwing aside their masks as they make their escape. I hope Miss Rossetti will not think this idea is in any disagreement with the spirit of her poem. (Nowell-Smith, Letters, 238)

Miss Rossetti, however, did consider Housman’s scheme out of keeping not only with her poem, but also with the original illustrations which had accompanied it, and which seem to have remained, after thirty years, integral to her conception of it. Housman’s “pictorial allegory,” in her view, was not a legitimate form of artistic allegorizing on “one’s own hook.” As George Macmillan explained, somewhat apologetically, to the artist, she cannot bring herself to sanction the “masks” which you introduce in your treatment of the goblins. “They might,” Miss Rossetti writes, “illustrate some better poem, but mine they falsify. Would not a study of my goblins as they stand supply an adequate variety and versatility of expression, a roguishness easily transformable into atrocity?” She then refers to her brother’s original frontispiece. (Nowell-Smith, Letters, 239)

Despite Rossetti’s negative response, Macmillan was keen to capitalize on the gift-book market with what he considered to be a profitable venture. He therefore concluded his letter by virtually offering Housman a contract if he could find his way to treating “the goblins in some other way” that Miss Rossetti could approve. Housman himself was so desirous of illustrating the poem that he was willing “to give up the introduction of the masks which carried out my own reading of the poem” in order to satisfy the author. Wishing to take into account as much as possible “all her views,” Housman asked for, and received,

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Rossetti’s letters on the subject from the publisher. He then submitted two amended designs, “this time with the masks turned into living heads,” and provided the assurance that he “would take care also to bring in all those [animals] that are named in the poem.”39 After viewing this second set of specimen drawings, Christina wrote to say she was “obliged to Mr. Housman for his compliance with my wish, and [to] assure him that my goblins will keep peace with all his” (240). Thereafter any interaction between poet and artist ceased, and all Christina could do on publication of the volume was to record her disapprobation by writing the single word, “Alas,” on the presentation copy she gave to William (FL, 190). As he remarks in his “Notes” to the poem, Christina “did not exactly take to them [Housman’s illustrations] as carrying out her own notion of her own goblins” (460). Christina’s request that Housman turn to Dante Gabriel’s frontispiece (fig. 2.1) to see what her goblins look like suggests just how closely her brother’s visual imagination must have conformed to her own. In the poem itself, Christina is teasingly vague about the actual appearance of her goblins: One had a cat’s face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat’s pace, One crawled like a snail, One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. (lines 71–76) The language is figurative, and Christina never makes clear whether her goblins are men or beasts. Even in the watercolor sketches she drew in the margins of her own copy of Goblin Market and Other Poems, the goblins are “of a scarcely definable type,” according to her brother, who describes them as “slim agile figures in a close-fitting garb of blue.” William reminds us that Christina does not give her goblins “the actual configuration of brute animals” in the poem itself, and claims that Gabriel’s illustrations are responsible for fixing this concept of the goblins (“Notes,” 460)—an observation that seems as true for the poet as for her readers. Christina thought Housman’s goblins too “ugly” to conform to her conception of them (Housman, Unexpected Years, 118), but perhaps she had forgotten that Dante Gabriel had earlier been “censured because he had made the goblin animals of hideous aspect” (Bell, CR, 208). What Christina really objected to in Housman’s drawings was not so much their ugliness as their failure to conform to the visualization of the poem that had developed out of the original collaborative bookmaking project. This is ironic, given that Housman trained himself as an illustrator by producing facsimile drawings of Dante

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Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations for Christina’s poetry. No living artist was more intimately familiar with the goblins as the Rossettis had originally produced them than Laurence Housman.40 In his illustrations for Goblin Market, Housman worked in the emblematic tradition of combining a highly symbolic picture with an allegorical text, just as Dante Gabriel Rossetti had done. The large number of full-page drawings, some of them double-page openings, gave him much room for developing his interpretation of the poem, while his numerous small textual decorations permitted him to “punctuate” the verses with his own visual comments. In Housman’s combination of “body and soul, picture and word, sense and intellect,” however, it seems that all Christina could see was a particularly misshapen body contorting the spirit of her work. Like Dante Gabriel’s frontispiece, Housman’s title-page design (fig. 2.7) contrasts the moral responses of Lizzie and Laura to temptation while at the same time highlighting the sexual suggestiveness of the scene. Housman’s goblins, like his predecessor’s, are dressed-up animals with feral or birdlike faces. But these are not the urbane seducers of the earlier composition (see fig. 2.1). Rather, they are mysteriously draped figures with wide-brimmed hats. At the center of the composition four of these cloaked goblins, holding baskets and platters of fruit, stand framed by tree trunks. In the treetops above, clusters of goblins squat on the branches as if they themselves were the offered fruit. Lizzie and Laura sit below, each forming a separate corner of the design at the bottom of the picture plane. Contrasting the sisters not by coiffure and costume as Dante Gabriel had done, but rather by attitude and associated symbolic attributes, Housman draws on an established iconography to distinguish their fallen and virtuous natures. On the right, Lizzie “cover[s] up her eyes, / Cover[s] close lest they should look” (lines 50–51). At left, Laura leans toward the goblins, gazing up at them longingly. Like the fruit in the D. G. Rossetti frontispiece, the pomegranates she holds in her arms suggest that the temptation to which she has succumbed is sexual in nature. Housman further contrasts the fallen and the virtuous sisters by means of a sexual pun. While the lost Laura’s pitcher has spilled and is empty, Lizzie’s bucket remains upright and full. To clinch his sexual reading of the poem’s central scene, Housman uses a sexual iconography popular with fin-desiècle illustrators, and arranges the entire composition around a chasm representative of woman’s biological sex.41 Throughout his illustrations for the poem, Housman combines a sensuous interpretation with a spiritual one, very much in keeping with the precedent set by Dante Gabriel. In his picture illustrating “White and golden Lizzie stood,” for example, Housman draws on religious typology to interpret the meaning of Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins (fig. 2.8). “White and golden Lizzie stood” is

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2.7 Laurence Housman, title page for Goblin Market (London: Macmillan, 1893). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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2.8 Laurence Housman, double-page opening for Goblin Market (London: Macmillan, 1893), 44–45. Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

one of the double-page openings Housman designed to form “two halves as it were of one picture” in “a revival of a mediaeval usage” he thought “effective” for Rossetti’s poem (Nowell-Smith, Letters, 238). The medieval format is congruent with Housman’s revival of a medieval typology and grotesquerie. On the verso, the cloaked goblins are hawking their wares. The recto depicts their violent assault on Lizzie. The goblins are full-sized demonic creatures, part man, part beast, drawn from some surreal underworld.42 Yet despite these grotesque features, Housman’s illustration interprets the scene as a religious allegory. In this crowded composition, the woman, the tempters, and the tree unite in a richly allusive symbolism simultaneously pointing backward to the Fall and forward to

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Redemption. The goblins who pull and tug at Lizzie are both a demon crew wishing to bring about Eve’s certain death by forcing her to eat the fruit and, at the same time, a host of revilers abusing the patiently suffering Christ. By placing the tree and the cross in the same place, Housman’s composition not only draws on a long tradition of biblical typology, but also presents a radical feminist iconography characteristic of his work.43 With her feet locked together and her upraised arms hung from the branch of the tree, Lizzie becomes a suffering female Christ who redeems the sinful Eve. That Housman could convey so strongly one of Christina Rossetti’s dominant themes yet fail to please her indicates the degree to which visual style rather than content was largely to blame for the poet’s dislike of his work. It is a truism that a book like Alice in Wonderland that is well illustrated in its first edition becomes associated with its original pictorial representations. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s original illustrations for Goblin Market, reprinted in subsequent editions throughout Christina’s lifetime, seem to have become definitive in this way. Yet Housman’s illustrated Goblin Market is remarkable for its immediate appeal to just about everybody but the author. Fin-de-siècle readers of Christina Rossetti’s poetry saw Housman’s designs as “wholly in the spirit of the work”—by which Gleeson White, the author of this review of “The Work of Laurence Housman,” meant not only Christina’s poetry but also Dante Gabriel’s original illustrations (202). The Bookman reviewer claimed “Mr. Housman seems to have received a special revelation how to interpret to the eye that wonderful, incalculable thing of pure poetry, pure genius, which Miss Rossetti once dreamt and wrote down as ‘Goblin Market’” (122). Writing for Book-Lover’s Magazine, Charles Kains-Jackson called the illustrations “verifications of the poetess’s hypotheses,” singling out Housman’s depictions of the goblins for special praise (qtd. in Engen, 141). The success of Housman’s Goblin Market with a new generation of consumers shows the extent to which books and their readers are constructed by their specific cultural and historical contexts. The author, an aging woman with only a year remaining to her, perhaps could not help thinking that Housman’s illustrations “falsified” her poem even while her fin-de-siècle readers saw them as “verifications” of her fantasy. The gap between the sixties and the nineties was a wide one, and the revival of Pre-Raphaelite books and their makers at the close of the century underscored the differences. Along with changes in the social and material system of production and reception, the hermeneutic context for Rossetti’s work had necessarily changed. The dynamics of book history show that Goblin Market could not be the same poem when it was produced in 1893 as it had been in 1862—or in 1910, 1933, 1973, or any other of its many reproduction dates in the twentieth century.

3 Books for Children But it’s obvious what an immense field there is for anyone who can just hit the taste of the new generation of Board School children. —George Gissing, New Grub Street

N March 1862, just as Goblin Market and Other Poems was going to press, Christina Rossetti was solicited for contributions to an illustrated anthology of poetry about children in which Dora Greenwell and Jean Ingelow were participating. Rossetti acknowledged she would “be very happy for something of mine to come out in a volume so ably illustrated.” Nevertheless, she had to decline the offer because “it so happens that children are not amongst my suggestive subjects, and I could not venture to promise you anything at all worthy of such plates” (Letters, 1:158–59).1 By the next decade, however, with the publication of Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) and Speaking Likenesses (1874), she had become a writer for children. Rossetti entered the field of juvenile literature just as publishers were beginning to capitalize on the possibilities of an increasingly demanding, and lucrative, set of consumers: children—or more immediately, perhaps, the parents who bought them picture books as Christmas and birthday gifts. From the landmark publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 to the end of the century, according to Percy Muir, “there were more books written for children, and of more different kinds, than in almost any other period” (English Children’s Books, 148). The Education Act of 1870 instituted compulsory elementary education for all British children, and with the attendant increase in literacy and demand for books of all kinds,

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the late-Victorian publishing industry experienced a huge growth in the juvenile market (Galbraith, 2–3). Along with the manufacture of books for children necessarily came the construction of the audience at whom they were directed. A middle-class child whose papa and mama had five shillings to spare for a picture book,2 this intended reader was defined not simply by class but also, increasingly, by age and sex. Conveying “the message that gender was acquired in stages” (Galbraith, 53), such a publishing strategy effectively produced the image of the child at the same time it produced a book for her.3 Thus Rossetti’s Sing-Song, a nursery book to be read aloud to a preliterate child, constructs an age-specific but not sex-specific audience, whereas Speaking Likenesses, a linked collection of stories for older children, is targeted at girls. The material conditions surrounding the production of these texts as illustrated books for specialized markets of middle-class children inform the messages they convey about social relationships in general and economic and sexual relationships in particular.

“Judge whether my name is marketable”: A Publication History of Sing-Song The publishing history of Sing-Song marks Rossetti’s brief defection from Macmillan. It entails a complex network of associations involving eight artists or prospective artists (not counting Rossetti herself ) and four publishers on two continents. The complications began when Alexander Macmillan made the Sing-Song manuscript the site of a struggle between author and publisher. Macmillan was not happy over the unusual degree of control Rossetti and her brother had wielded over the production process of both Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. As he informed Christina somewhat acerbically during the Sing-Song negotiations, “the Prince’s Progress has left a deficit after all sold,” owing “to delay & expence [sic]” of the illustrations.4 Thus after receiving Christina’s illustrated manuscript in late January 1870 he set to work to reestablish his predominance by flexing his publishing knowledge and power. Macmillan began the attack by questioning the nursery rhymes’ chances for a positive reception in the marketplace. He then emphasized the exceptional costs incurred if the author’s layout of a headpiece illustration for each poem were followed. Having undermined his author’s confidence, he then made his offer to publish on condition he have complete control over the work: My dear Miss Rossetti: The little Rhymes are somewhat perplexing. They are many of them very beautiful, some very appropriate to childhood, all of course have merit of a high order. But

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the public taste in England? That is the question. Then the illustrations even if slight are very numerous, and if we did not allow every one still they must be considerable & expensive. Still I should like to publish them, and if I do I would like to have them myself to deal with as I saw fit. Of course I would consult you at every step. If you see your way to letting us have the copyright for £35 I will take care that they are well illustrated & I will get them out I hope early in the summer.5

Macmillan reassured Christina that she was still free to negotiate with Roberts Brothers of Boston for an American publication of her poems. In England, however, the Sing-Song property would become his exclusively. All decisions relating to the number, kind, and style of the illustrations would be his prerogative; all determinations of production schedule would be under his control. After his unprofitable experience with the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress collections, especially the latter, Macmillan was clearly not prepared to cede his authority for another Rossetti book. If he were to publish Sing-Song, it must be on his terms. Although he was willing to compromise by purchasing a limited three-year copyright, after which the property and rights in the book would revert to the author, Macmillan was adamant that he needed absolute control over production.6 Christina, however, was equally adamant that she retain some degree of control over her book, and particularly over the illustrations that were so important to her conception of it. She asked Macmillan to return her manuscript and immediately sent it for consideration to F. S. Ellis. Dante Gabriel, who was then in the process of bringing out his first volume of Poems with this publisher, had decided that “it would be most pleasant” for all the Pre-Raphaelite poets— including not just William Morris and A. C. Swinburne, but also his sister—“to concentrate our forces” under one publisher (LDGR, 2:797).7 Ellis himself seemed keen to have this honor, letting it be known that anything by Christina—short fiction, nursery rhymes, combined editions—would be welcome at his firm.8 Moreover, he offered terms that Christina was very pleased to accept. Whereas Macmillan’s standard contract was for half profits after costs, F. S. Ellis offered a stunning “fourth part of the publishing price” on every copy sold, an arrangement that amounted to a 25 percent royalty (Letters, 1:342). This was indeed a marked improvement over Christina’s usual agreement, especially as she would receive payment for the first five hundred immediately on publication. With Macmillan she had to wait for months and even years before costs had been recovered, and even then saw her share of the profits trickle in a few pounds at a time. As the delighted Dante Gabriel told William Allingham, “Ellis . . . offers her much better terms than Mac[millan] does. She will leave Mac[millan] altogether” (LDGR, 2:806).

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In the honeymoon phase of this relationship F. S. Ellis was willing to do just about anything to keep his new author happy. In effect, this meant ceding decision-making power over the illustrations for Sing-Song to Christina. The publisher seems even to have considered publishing the nursery rhymes with her illustrations, and was no doubt relieved to learn from the poet that “the scratches” were meant only as a guide to her prospective artist (Letters, 1:341, 342). Ellis even went so far as to let go his commissioned illustrator, Charles Fairfax Murray, who had already begun work on the drawings, when Christina wrote to say that Dante Gabriel thought their friend, Alice Boyd, would likely illustrate Sing-Song “with more fun and zest than Murray though perhaps not so artistically” (343–44). That the publisher should agree, sight unseen, to the work of a “lady amateur” suggests the extent to which Ellis was, in this early stage of the relationship, concerned to do all in his power to keep what he saw as a lucrative group of poets under his aegis. But when Christina turned out to be less of an individual asset than anticipated, Ellis began to have second thoughts. The slow sales and tepid reviews of her collection of short stories, Commonplace, which Ellis published in May 1870, caused him to think again about bringing out another volume by her, especially a costly illustrated book. Luckily for the publisher, a rationale for his backpedaling lay ready to hand: the unsatisfactory illustrations by Alice Boyd. Christina had introduced Alice Boyd to the publisher as “a most particular friend of mine” and an artist “who has exhibited more than once” (344).9 Her stress on Alice’s exhibiting credentials was clearly to confer professional status on a fellow female artist, knowing that the “lady amateur” stigma dramatically decreased market value of the work. Perhaps she had even heard of the response of her own former art teacher, Ford Madox Brown, on seeing one of Alice’s paintings at the London home of the painter William Bell Scott. Expressing disbelief that the work could be by Alice rather than by Scott himself, Brown said “you must call it yours and you will immediately sell it, but nobody will dare to buy it if it is an amateur lady’s work.”10 On the strength of the combined Rossetti recommendation, Ellis seems to have been keen at first to enlist Alice Boyd’s services precisely because of her position as an “amateur lady.” Perhaps he thought that illustrating nursery rhymes for children was a female artist’s natural province and therefore felt sanguine about the commission. Certainly Boyd’s amateur status meant that her work on the 121 illustrations required by the book would come much cheaper than that of a professional artist. Inexperienced in bringing out illustrated books of any kind, the novice publisher (his focus until the late 1860s was on bookselling, not publishing) was trying to cut costs at every turn. In addition to commissioning

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an amateur illustrator, Ellis also decided to use an inexpensive reproductive process that a more experienced publisher would have known to avoid. Although hailed in 1867 as an innovative process that would eventually supersede the “troublesome and expensive” method of wood-engraving (Carpenter, 181), “Graphotype” generally had been abandoned as a viable option by the early 1870s. Problems with the process included the rapid degeneration of the plates (they were usable only for about a month), the blurred impressions that often resulted, and the difficulty artists had in producing a drawing exactly as it was to be reproduced, “for when a line is once drawn, it cannot be altered or erased, as in a wood-block” (Carpenter, 183).11 This last requirement must have been particularly challenging for an inexperienced illustrator like Alice Boyd. Certainly by the time the first proofs were pulled in early June 1870 it was evident to all concerned parties—publisher, artist, author, and associates—that Boyd’s drawings, reproduced by Graphotype, simply would not do. Without pictures, the fate of Rossetti’s Sing-Song was uncertain. When she learned that Ellis was canceling her commission, Boyd assumed that, since the inexpensive reproduction process had to be abandoned, “Miss Rossetti’s little book cannot be published as woodcuts of course would be so very costly.”12 The publisher likely shared this view of the matter, although his final decision about Sing-Song did not come immediately. Still, after watching Commonplace’s slow sales figures during the same month that he was receiving the unacceptable proofs of Boyd’s drawings for Rossetti’s rhymes, Ellis was beginning to realize that his new author might actually be a publishing liability rather than an asset. He therefore sent Christina “some melancholy statistics” about the costs of producing a lavishly illustrated book and the sales necessary to recoup expenditure and make a profit (Letters, 1:358). Well aware that the entire risk of the project lay with the publisher, Christina responded by generously proposing that Ellis “put a stop to all further outlay on the rhymes, until you can judge whether my name is marketable” (356). Ellis took ten long months before he delivered his judgment on the poet’s marketability and Sing-Song’s fate. Although he wrote Alice Boyd in early June to say he was stopping production—leaving her stranded with well over sixty prepared pen-and-pencil drawings for the book, at least nine of which had already been pulled in proofs13—he kept Christina waiting until February 1871 for his final decision about the rhymes themselves. To add insult to injury, Ellis then proposed to give Christina £35 (which she refused) “by way of compensation for the delay etc.” (WMR, Diary, 43)—precisely what Macmillan had originally offered for the copyright. Thus, a year after first shopping her manuscript around, Rossetti found herself without a publisher. Abandoned by Macmillan and

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rejected by Ellis, Christina turned to the only other firm she knew: Roberts Brothers of Boston, who had brought out an edition of her Poems in 1866 and was keen to publish more of her work. Christina had originally planned to send her verses “to my Boston publishers” if Macmillan turned down the manuscript (Letters, 1:339), but the arrangements with Ellis put these plans on hold. Aware that under the present state of international law the only way to prevent piracy was to have an American publisher bring out her work in an authorized edition to secure simultaneous American copyright for her work, she had originally approached Roberts Brothers at the suggestion of her friend and fellow poet, Jean Ingelow, who published with the firm (267).14 This was an excellent choice, for Roberts Brothers was dedicated to introducing British authors to an eager American audience (Maser, 67). The firm was also as interested as Christina herself could be in producing her work in illustrated form. Poems (1866), a combined edition of the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress volumes, included Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s frontispieces and title pages for each book, the latter altered to include “Boston, Roberts Bros.” in the lower border. The following year the Boston firm was keen to publish another illustrated edition of her work and asked her to recommend an appropriate British artist.15 Although this proposal joined the ghostly ranks of other Pre-Raphaelite editions of books that never were, it is interesting that the number-one choice of artist for this edition, Arthur Hughes, ultimately became the illustrator of Sing-Song. Thomas Niles, managing editor of Roberts Brothers, and responsible for the publishing side of the house (Maser, 67), was initially as cautious as F. S. Ellis was impetuous in bringing out the illustrated collection of nursery rhymes. Although Roberts Brothers granted that Christina’s “reputation in America” stood very high indeed, the firm was, after all, in the business of making money. “It is popularity which we want in an author,” they explained to William Rossetti, “and that she has not yet acquired” (LDGR, 3:924 n. 4). Aware that bringing out a collection of 121 nursery rhymes with an illustration on each page would be an expensive undertaking, Roberts Brothers proceeded slowly. In March 1871 Niles collected Christina’s illustrated manuscript and brought it to the Dalziels’ engraving firm “to obtain . . . an estimate as to the cost of the necessary woodcutting” before coming to a decision on “the question of publication” (WMR, Diary, 51). The Dalziels not only gave the American firm a favorable report, but were also so impressed by the manuscript’s potential that they decided “to speculate in the book to some extent” themselves and bring out the English edition under the Routledge imprint (Dalziel, 92). Although both the Dalziels and Roberts Brothers claimed to “anticipate a very favourable reception of her book of Nursery Rhymes” (WMR, Diary, 56),

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their cautious optimism was evident in the contracts each firm eventually proposed in June. Roberts Brothers offered a mere 10 percent on copies sold after the publisher had recouped costs (72). The Dalziels offered the slightly more advantageous terms of 10 percent royalties, with a promised down payment of £25 in anticipation of the sales of the first thousand Sing-Songs on publication in November (129, 131). These terms were a far cry from F. S. Ellis’s handsome offer of 25 percent royalties and even fell significantly short of the system of half profits she had previously enjoyed with Macmillan. As William Michael soberly recorded in his diary, “The prospect of profit to Christina appears remote and meagre” (72). But with the wide market available to her from the simultaneous international publication, Christina had reason to hope Sing-Song might be a commercial success and perhaps even bring the elusive popularity that had thus far not accompanied her high reputation. In the event, Sing-Song had only modest sales. Roberts Brothers did not bring out a second edition until 1875, and there was no second English edition until 1893, when Rossetti bought the electros and plates from the bankrupt Dalziels, and negotiated with Macmillan to bring out a revised edition. The book was, however, critically acclaimed from the outset, with high praise accorded to both image and text. Achieving a successful aesthetic collaboration in the volume she had conceived as a composite of image and text was of paramount importance to Christina. Somewhat wiser after her unfortunate experience with Ellis, Christina was particularly aggressive in insisting that her book be illustrated to her satisfaction. She even refused to sign the agreement with the Dalziels until she knew and approved her artistic partner (Letters, 1:369). No doubt she would have been happy to have realized Brown’s proposal “that he, Gabriel, and two or three others” might illustrate her book (WMR, Diary, 56). However, she was not willing to subject her verses to the interpretation of the motley crew suggested by the Dalziels: Johann Baptist Zwecker, Thomas Sulman, and Francis Arthur Fraser (60). At this point in the production process Christina became ill with the onset of her nearly fatal bout with Graves disease and, unable to handle her own business, delegated William Michael to transact all communications with the Dalziel Brothers. Acting on her behalf, William Michael rejected the three artists proposed by the Dalziels and recommended that Arthur Hughes be given the commission. The Dalziels accepted this proposal, and Hughes was given Christina’s manuscript in late May or early June of 1871 (61, 63).

Pre-Raphaelite Partners: Christina Rossetti and Arthur Hughes The commissioning of Arthur Hughes as the illustrator for Sing-Song is one of the happiest strokes of fortune in the history of children’s books, on a par with

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the selection of John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. The comparison is particularly apt when we recall that Carroll had similarly provided his artist with his own self-illustrated manuscript, Alice Underground. Moreover, the authors had like purposes for sharing their amateur drawings. Just as Christina hoped her “scratches” would “help to explain my meaning” to the commissioned artist (Letters, 1:342), so too Carroll intended that his pictures would give his illustrator “‘an idea of the sort of thing I want’” (qtd. in Hancher, 27). But Carroll was a much more dictatorial author than Christina, writing Tenniel numerous letters over the course of production with precise suggestions for the illustrations. As we have seen, however, Christina Rossetti approached illustration in a PreRaphaelite spirit of collaboration. She therefore gave her artist a long interpretive rein, confident that her visual guide would give the sympathetic Hughes a general feel for what she had in mind and content to let him provide personal interpretive details. Arthur Hughes deserved this confidence in his imaginative sympathy and creative ability, for he was a lifelong admirer of Christina and her work. Writing to Alice Boyd at the time of Christina’s death, Hughes confessed, “I don’t think anyone could have felt a much greater respect & love for her mind than I have, ever since the dear old days when the first number of the Germ came into my hands.” Apparently it was love at first read. Hughes never forgot the impression he received from Christina’s youthful “first appearance in print” in a revolutionary periodical that promoted the sister arts (Fredeman, “Pre-Raphaelite Gazette,” 60). His first encounter with the Pre-Raphaelite journal on Art and Poetry completely changed his direction as an artist. Throughout his long career, as he confided to William Michael in 1908, “the pictures, poems and history” of PreRaphaelitism “encouraged, helped, and tried their best to teach me” (Roberts, 9). Although never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hughes did participate in two of the most important Pre-Raphaelite-related projects that occurred after the dissolution of the Brotherhood: the illustration, in conjunction with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Millais, of William Allingham’s The Music Master in 1855; and the painting of the Oxford Union Murals in 1857. He was not invited by Moxon to contribute to the illustrated Tennyson but, in D. G. Rossetti’s view, he should have been (LDGR, 1:238). Although Hughes did not illustrate any of Christina’s periodical publications, Dante Gabriel assured his sister that Hughes would undertake such a commission “cheap for love of you” (2:586). He had, after all, already painted and exhibited two works based on themes taken from her poetry.16 In addition to sharing Christina’s Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and admiring her poetry, Arthur Hughes had another important recommendation for the SingSong commission: he was a gifted illustrator of children’s literature. By the time

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he joined forces with Christina for her nursery rhymes, his illustrations for George MacDonald’s juvenile fantasy At the Back of the North Wind had come out in Good Words for the Young (1868–70). With this publication Hughes established his name as an illustrator for children, a reputation that remained high in the twentieth century. Indeed, it was in his illustrative work for MacDonald and Rossetti that Hughes “formed the unique style which has assured him of a succession of ardent admirers” (Ray, 109). This style, a charming blend of ethereal fantasy and domestic actuality, was precisely suited to the rhymes in Sing-Song, which include lullabies, riddles, imaginative flights of fancy, practical instruction, and social commentary. As Sidney Colvin perceptively remarked in his review of the book for the Academy in 1872, both “pictures and poetry” in SingSong “appeal to everyday experience and curiosity, which makes them attractive to children at first sight and hearing.” At the same time, however, “the ulterior, intenser quality of many of these must, in an unrealised way constitute added value, we should say, even for children” (23)—and certainly for the middle-class adult reading the nursery rhymes to them. Since nursery rhymes are meant to be read aloud, they inevitably imply a double readership. Christina’s awareness of her dual child/adult audience influenced not only the writing of the verses but also the make-up of the fair copy manuscript as a composite of image and text. Arthur Hughes’s greater sophistication in the visual arts and professional background in drawing for children enabled him to enhance the composite work’s appeal. No doubt his experience as the father of an expanding family also influenced his personal response to the rhymes. He left traces of such a private connection in his drawings, for he used his own wife and children as models for the mother and babes of Rossetti’s rhymes (Bell, CR, 265, 266). One of the secrets to his success as an illustrator for children was point of view. According to his admiring successor, Laurence Housman, who considered it his “great good fortune to be brought up from my earliest years on the illustrations of Mr. Arthur Hughes,” the artist possessed the “power of identifying himself with his subject” to an unusual degree (“Illustrations,” 232, 236). Such imaginative sympathy enabled him to visualize the nursery rhymes in a way that met the needs of the juvenile audience. By frequently providing a human figure to represent the speaking voice of the lyric, Hughes offered the child reader/viewer a subject position with which to identify. In accordance with the poet’s desire “that the character of the designs should be”—like her own image/texts—“slight rather than the reverse” (Letters, 1:371 n. 4), Hughes produced black-and-white illustrations bold enough to engage a child’s interest, yet simple enough to avoid the confusion that might arise from the typically cluttered and detailed Pre-Raphaelite engraving. But his “slight” illustrations were, like Christina’s own verses and manuscript drawings, only

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superficially simple. As Housman recognized, Hughes was “one of that priceless few who have not bowed their imagination to small and trivial ways because children are physically small” (“Illustrations,” 234). Rather, by drawing on a visual repertoire within the child audience’s range of cultural reference and by adding certain other motifs to extend narrative or symbolic meaning, Hughes made his designs for Sing-Song as rich and multivalent as Christina’s verses. Although he worked closely with the illustrated manuscript, Hughes was not unimaginatively imitative in his own pictorial designs. Throughout his long and successful career as an illustrator, Hughes “felt free,” as Kate Flint rightly says, “to amend the specific visual instructions that a written text might give” (202). In his designs for Sing-Song, Hughes also felt free to amend some of the visual instructions suggested by Rossetti’s sketches. Christina’s willingness to grant Hughes interpretive freedom is evident in the four drawings she singled out for special praise on seeing the proofs. “What a charming design is the ring of elfs producing the fairy ring,” she wrote; “also the apple tree casting its apples—also the three dancing girls with the angel kissing one—also I like the crow soaked grey stared at by his peers” (Letters, 1:380). Significantly, each of the commended designs departs creatively from Christina’s own graphic suggestion while enhancing the verses’ symbolic meaning (“The wind has such a rainy sound”), gentle humor (“If a mouse could fly”), or narrative impact (“Sing me a song” and “In the meadow—what in the meadow?”).17 The success of the image/text dialogue in Sing-Song, then, derives from a sympathetic complementarity. Moreover, in true Pre-Raphaelite fashion, the line of influence went from artist to poet as well as from poet to artist. When Christina Rossetti brought out the enlarged, revised Sing-Song in 1893, the verses she added to the 1872 nursery rhymes show her close engagement with, and response to, Arthur Hughes’s drawings. The successful collaboration between Rossetti and Hughes received immediate approbation, both within the Pre-Raphaelite circle and beyond. Seeing the illustrations in proof, Ford Madox Brown declared “that the poems are about Christina’s finest things, and Hughes the first of living book-illustrators” (FL, 207). William Bell Scott wrote enthusiastically to Sing-Song’s erstwhile illustrator, Alice Boyd, that Hughes’s “large and elaborate designs for Christina’s book” were “the best things he has ever done.”18 Even the artist Christina preferred above all others as her illustrator granted Hughes ascendancy for his Sing-Song designs. Dante Gabriel claimed, “There is no man living who would have done my sister’s book so divinely well” (LDGR, 3:1035). Contemporary reviewers in England and America shared this enthusiasm. Harper’s maintained the book was equally “rich in song and picture” (299), while Scribner’s called it the best book of nursery rhymes since Mother Goose, and hoped “that every bright and song-

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loving child who reads English will have it in its collection” (629). Writing for the Academy, Sidney Colvin asserted, “The volume written by Miss Rossetti, and illustrated by Mr. Hughes . . . is one of the most exquisite of its class ever seen, in which the poet and artist have continually had parallel felicities of inspiration” (23). The prestigious Athenaeum also gave the composite work high praise.19 According to its reviewer, Hughes’s “designs echo the spirit of the verses in a manner which is very different from that of ordinary ‘illustrations,’ because they never fail to add something to the meaning of the poems, and accord with the spirit which pervades the whole volume” (11). The special relationship between image and text in Sing-Song has also been valued by twentieth-century critics. F. J. Harvey Darton, in his germinal Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, recognized Sing-Song as a masterpiece in which “the poems suited [the artist] exquisitely” (276). In A History of Children’s Book Illustration, Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester comment that the “great simplicity in both the words and the accompanying pictures [in Sing-Song] . . . set a new standard in children’s books” of the day (84)—high praise indeed when one considers that Sing-Song was published for the same Christmas market of 187120 as Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (illustrated by Tenniel), George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (also illustrated by Hughes), and Edward Lear’s More Nonsense (illustrated by the author).21 Although the praise for the Rossetti/Hughes partnership has been unstinting, however, it has not been accompanied by the kind of critical analysis that would reveal the specific ways image and text collaborate to produce meaning in Sing-Song as a whole. It is to such a materialist hermeneutics that I now turn.

The Blakean Dialogue of Image and Text in Sing-Song Christina’s layout for Sing-Song, with a headpiece illustration for each nursery rhyme, required an immediate, and reciprocal, relationship between picture and word. Hughes ensured that image and text would be a single unit of design on the printed page because he used the vignette method of illustration, whereby the drawing appears without the separating edge of a picture frame. Thus, rather than being visually isolated from the text within a ruled border as happened, for example, in the Moxon Tennyson, the vignettes in Sing-Song became an integrated part of the verses they accompanied. This close association of image and text results in a very different sort of visual-verbal dialogue than that found in Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress. As noted earlier, the pictures in these works are divorced from the text by their prefatorial placement as

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frontispieces and title pages. But in Sing-Song the presence of an illustration on each page of text, no matter how slight the verse, ensured that meaning would evolve out of the interactive relationship of picture and word in the Blakean tradition, as Christina had planned it should. While many critics have recognized the kinship of Rossetti’s Songs with Blake’s in terms of their simple surfaces and multilayered symbolism, none has seen that the Blakean effect of the verses is in part produced by their dialogic engagement with the images that accompany them.22 Until recently Rossetti scholars have tended to follow two routes in their analysis of Sing-Song. The first is to view Hughes’s illustrations as peripheral to the meaning produced by the verses— as mere decorative embellishment for the child audience, separate from the serious subtext of the lyrics and not worthy of mention, let alone analysis.23 The other traditional approach has been to view the illustrations as virtually identical with the verses themselves, so that there is no recognition of the differences in either form or content: picture and word are made to speak in one voice and the dialogue is silenced.24 Using a cultural studies approach that considers the literary work in the context of its bibliographic environment, critics like Sharon Smulders have begun to recognize that Hughes’s illustrations “contribute to the whole sense of Sing-Song” (“Sound, Sense,” 12), and U. C. Knoepflmacher has discussed the Rossetti/Hughes collaboration in Ventures into Childland. A full critical understanding of Sing-Song must take into account its material form as a composite work in the Blakean tradition. Like picture and word in Songs of Innocence and Experience, the visual-verbal partners in Sing-Song create a rich interplay of surface and symbol designed to delight and instruct the listening child while at the same time suggesting extended meanings for the reading adult. Furthermore, the image/text dialogue in Sing-Song also functions, as it does in Blake’s Songs, to advance a socially critical message. As R. Loring Taylor suggests, “readers may . . . notice that there is as much in these poems of Blakean experience as of innocence, and Christina as social reformer can often be discovered behind the child-like personae” of her verses (x). As he worked with Rossetti’s illustrated manuscript, Hughes discerned, responded to, and developed the socially engaged aspect of the nursery rhymes. Hughes acknowledges Sing-Song’s debt to Blake in the frontispiece design he produced to guide the reader’s reception of Rossetti’s nursery rhymes (fig. 3.1). Just as Blake’s title-page plate for Songs of Innocence pictures a mother reading to her children in a pastoral landscape dotted with angelic figures, Hughes’s frontispiece for Sing-Song combines the maternal, the pastoral, and the spiritual. While the mother at the center of Hughes’s illustration is knitting rather than reading to her child, her open mouth suggests she is singing the “sing-songs” that follow in the book of nursery rhymes. In this idyllic pastoral scene, birds,

3.1 Arthur Hughes, frontispiece for Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893).

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3.2 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Angels at the foot,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), 1.

bunnies, lambs, and donkeys gather round the mother to hear her songs, while in the tree above four winged putti or cherubs bend down to listen. Their unexpected supernatural presence implies that the domestic and the natural worlds are connected to, and protected by, the guardianship of a spiritual company. The naked, childish bodies of these putti suggest both the innocence of human babes and their intimate connection with the world of the spirit in a way very much akin to the work of William Blake. Hughes develops this theme throughout the volume, following Rossetti’s guide in the lead poem: Angels at the foot, And Angels at the head, And like a curly little lamb My pretty babe in bed. (1)25 Rossetti’s manuscript sketch depicts a cradle with two mature angels standing at each end. Hughes closely follows this design, but adds two of the naked childlike putti first seen in the frontispiece (fig. 3.2). This addition, a visual reminder of the opening pastoral scene, tacitly joins the lambs of that first design (see fig. 3.1, bottom right) with the lamblike infant of the opening verses. With subtle symbolic method, Hughes responds to the way Rossetti connects the sleeping

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3.3 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Our little baby fell asleep,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), 4.

infant to the natural world by her analogy with the “curly lamb” and to the divine realm by her depiction of the “Angels” who surround the crib. The world of absolute security and unity introduced in the frontispiece and opening image/text prepares the way for those lyrics in Sing-Song that deal with infant death. In “Our little baby fell asleep,” for example, picture and poem work together to emphasize that even in death the baby will not want for maternal care. Rossetti’s manuscript sketch depicts three angels, with the central one carrying the child. This is a clear case of Rossetti’s depending on the image

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to complete her meaning, for there is no reference to the angels in the accompanying lyric: Our little baby fell asleep, And may not wake again For days and days, and weeks and weeks; But then he’ll wake again, And come with his own pretty look, And kiss Mamma again. (4) Spoken in the voice of the mother, this lyric deals with infant mortality in a way comprehensible to a very young child, while the pictured ring of angels provides additional comfort with its closed circle of love surrounding and protecting the “sleeping” babe. Hughes follows Rossetti’s pictorial lead in portraying the child in the care of a divine guardianship, but simplifies the design by reducing the three angels to one (fig. 3.3). This condensation of Rossetti’s design emphasizes for the child viewer the role of the angelic protector as a temporary maternal surrogate who cares for the infant until the promised reunion with “Mamma” can take place. Together, image and text work to convey the Pauline concept of death as a sleep with a sure awakening and to suggest that in the interim maternal care is provided by angelic surrogates. This message is repeated in the image/text for “Three little children,” where Hughes, again following Rossetti’s manuscript guide, shows the “motherless children” in the care of “guardian angels” (80). Faith in such divine guardianship does not lead Rossetti to take a quietist position, however. On the contrary, as other lyrics in the collection demonstrate, it inspires an engagement in the world in which a caregiver can represent a type of Christ and divine love can be reenacted by human hands. In “A motherless soft lambkin,” for instance, Christina draws on “Blakean figures of guardianship” found in his “The Shepherd” and “The Little Black Boy,” as Harrison suggests, to “reinforce the efficacy of shepherding in this world” (Victorian Poets, 151): A motherless soft lambkin Alone upon a hill; No mother’s fleece to shelter him And wrap him from the cold:— I’ll run to him and comfort him, I’ll fetch him, that I will; I’ll care for him and feed him Until he’s strong and bold. (61)

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3.4 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Motherless baby and babyless mother,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), 130.

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3.5 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “Motherless baby and babyless mother” in the Sing-Song manuscript. By permission of The British Library. Ashley MS 1371.

Hughes’s drawing of a young girl in a snowy field wrapping a lamb in her cloak underscores Rossetti’s message that each of us, no matter how small, can be a good shepherd to the weak and the lost. This message is repeated, with a more human emphasis, in one of Rossetti’s most poignant lyrics in Sing-Song: “Motherless baby and babyless mother, /Bring them together to love one another” (125). In his illustration Hughes extends the narrative by adding a gravestone setting and the figure of a nurse or servant who brings the swaddled infant to the mourning mother (fig. 3.4). Although Smulders objects that “Rossetti does not specify . . . that the paradox of the babyless mother follows on her child’s death” (Revisiting, 110), in fact Hughes is again following the poet’s manuscript suggestion. Christina’s pencil sketch for the poem shows a little baby toddling with open arms toward a kneeling woman

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in a black mourning dress who reaches out to embrace and secure the approaching child (fig. 3.5). Hughes’s addition of the intermediary agent responds to the imperative voice of the poem—“Bring them together to love one another”—thus quietly reinforcing the social and religious duty implied in the lyric. On the earthly level, the picture/poem dyad suggests that social responsibility includes caring for motherless children, and that such undertakings are mutually beneficial for mother and child. On the spiritual level, the woman who cares for “the least” of God’s children is performing divine service for the kingdom, for the needy child stands in the position of Christ.26 As Virginia Sickbert suggests, Sing-Song conveys Rossetti’s positive response to the Victorian elevation of motherhood, and her endorsement of both the divinely ordained power of women (398) and the special grace of little children. The lyrics about the mother/child relationship in Sing-Song embody the “mighty maternal love” that Rossetti believed made “little birds and little beasts as well as little women matches for very big adversaries” and that provided the only potent force Rossetti knew of to “sweep away the barrier of sex, and make the female not a giantess or a heroine but at once and full grown a hero and a giant” (Letters, 2:158).27 Throughout Rossetti’s poetry for adults, as well as in her devotional prose and letters, one finds over and over again the suggestion that it is a Mother’s—not a Father’s—love that is the closest earthly equivalent to, and foreshadow of, the all-encompassing love of God. In her nursery rhymes for children, this maternal love breaks down with its mighty spiritual force not just the barrier of sex, but also the barrier of class. Rossetti’s “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?” addresses the issue of class in relation to a mother’s love. Her manuscript sketch shows a mother trudging through the snow with a child wrapped in a red blanket (fig. 3.6). Both picture and poem suggest that this mother is of lower or working-class origins: she is on the tramp at night, after all. There is also the possibility that she may be one of the many Victorian “fallen women” who were turned out of their homes with their illegitimate children.28 But what comes through in image and text is the overwhelming love of the mother for her child and the guarantee that, whatever the inclement temporal situation—in either the social or the natural world—the bond between mother and child is strong enough to overcome all barriers: Crying, my little one, footsore and weary? Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder: I must tramp on through the winter night dreary, While the snow falls on me colder and colder.

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3.6 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?” in the Sing-Song manuscript. By permission of The British Library. Ashley MS 1371.

You are my one, and I have not another; Sleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure; Sleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother, Dreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure. (19)

3.7 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?” SingSong: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), 19.

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Hughes’s illustration for this lyric closely follows Rossetti’s pictorial guide by depicting the mother as an isolated figure with no background setting apart from the falling snow (fig. 3.7). As in Rossetti’s sketch, this mother holds her infant so closely that it is almost part of her body, and there seems no doubt that this child, despite adverse circumstances, will be allowed to dream “of pretty things” and “pleasure”—every child’s birthright, according to Sing-Song. The issue of class is raised again and again in Sing-Song, often as a directive to the middle-class child reader to remember those less fortunate. A companion piece to “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?,” which is spoken in the voice of the outcast mother, is the lyric spoken in the voice of the secure child: There’s snow on the fields, And cold in the cottage, While I sit in the chimney nook Supping hot pottage. The contrast between the interior warmth of the chimney nook and the bitter outdoor weather is continued in the second quatrain of this poem with the child’s recognition of the difference between her comfortable situation and that of those who are, like the mother and child in “Crying, my little one,” “tramp[ing] on through the winter night dreary.” The child speaker seems to be imagining their plight when she goes on to say: My clothes are soft and warm, Fold upon fold, But I’m so sorry for the poor Out in the cold. (9) Rossetti’s sketch for the poem shows a little girl on a stool enjoying a meal out of a little bowl. Hughes duplicates this scene closely in his illustration, highlighting the contrast between the speaker’s comfort and the world outside the enclosed, protected space of the middle-class hearth by the addition of a snowcovered window in the upper left corner (fig. 3.8). One of the most interesting pairings in Sing-Song is the set of lyrics appearing on facing pages that asks the child reader to consider the value of precious gems over useful minerals and stones, “A diamond or a coal?” (96) and “An emerald is as green as grass” (97). This set of verses is also interesting for the ways in which Hughes diverges from Rossetti’s pictorial guide in order to bring out the class concerns central to each lyric. “A diamond or a coal?” is one of Rossetti’s many dialogue poems, in this case framed as a conversation between a

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3.8 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “There’s snow on the fields,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), 9.

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man and a young child. The adult speaker—whom Hughes makes a coal monger (fig. 3.9)—asks the question, “A diamond or a coal?” at the beginning of each quatrain. The child speaker first chooses a diamond, for “Who cares about a clumsy coal / Beneath the summer trees?” But as the seasons change (and the child matures) he learns to value the practical but “clumsy coal” over the useless but beautiful diamond. The second time he hears the question, “A diamond or a coal,” the child replies: “A coal, sir, if you please: / One comes to care about the coal / What time the waters freeze.” Hughes’s design for the poem brings out the class issue implicit in the opposition between the jewel and the fuel by depicting the laborer—covered in dust and black as coal himself—as another kind of “clumsy,” undervalued, agent. This is a significant departure from Rossetti’s own sketch for the poem, which shows a jeweled crown resting on a plush red cushion. With his depiction of the coal monger, Hughes not only adds human interest for the child audience looking at the picture and listening to the dialogue, but also emphasizes the correct “choice” to be made: a coal, not a diamond; a useful service, not an ornamental function. On the facing page, another exploration of the true value of precious stones extends the class-conscious focus of “A diamond or a coal?” “An emerald is as green as grass” begins as a celebration of the aesthetic beauty of gems, but the second quatrain concludes with a reversal in which true value is ascribed to the homely, but useful, flint, which can strike a fire more precious than any jewel: An emerald is as green as grass; A ruby red as blood; A sapphire shines as blue as heaven; A flint lies in the mud. A diamond is a brilliant stone, To catch the world’s desire; An opal holds a fiery spark; But a flint holds fire. (97) In his illustration Hughes again departs from Rossetti’s pictorial suggestion in order to portray the social issues raised by the poem. Like her previous sketch, Rossetti’s manuscript drawing for this lyric focuses on the jewels that offer aesthetic pleasure but have no practical value, this time by depicting a necklace fit for a queen. Hughes’s illustration, on the other hand, draws attention to the social concerns implicit in the lyric’s opposition between the precious stones and the homely flint. The picture shows a gypsy caravan with a mother building a fire while a ragged child and bent old woman look on, awaiting both warmth

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3.9 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “A diamond or a coal?” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), .

3.10 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “An emerald is as green as grass,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), .

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and a meal (fig. 3.10). Clearly, “the world’s desire,” symbolized by the brilliant diamond, has been weighed and found wanting. Together, picture and poem suggest that food, warmth, and love are the fundamental human needs to be valued and met—whether the one in need is a child or an impoverished fellow sojourner. These two lyrics contain a theme often found in children’s literature and fairy tales—that of judging individuals or objects not by their appearance, but by their true value.29 This theme is also evident in one of the most delightful poems in the Sing-Song collection, “If a pig wore a wig.” In this lyric Rossetti’s sense of humor and playfulness combine with a critique of class pretensions. With gentle irony, her nursery rhyme mocks both social climbers and those who are only too willing—like those who value diamonds over coals or flints—to be deceived about a person’s worth by his outer appearance: If a pig wore a wig, What could we say? Treat him as a gentleman, And say “Good day.” If his tail chanced to fail, What could we do?— Send him to the tailoress To get one new. (42) Rossetti’s manuscript sketch for this lyric is a comic little drawing of a pig in a wig dancing on its hind legs, to the delight of an applauding child, hair standing up in amazement (fig. 3.11). In his illustration Hughes predictably maintains the pig in his wig, but adds other marks of the “gentleman”: top hat, cane, and monocle. He also expands the viewing audience from one to three children bowing down in mock homage to the pig’s promenade (fig. 3.12). Hughes’s pictorial additions evoke Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, perhaps in winking response to Rossetti’s sly pun on tailoress/tail-less.30 The graphic allusion to the well-known fairy tale invites the child reader to consider the relationship between outer appearance and truth, while at the same time encouraging her to be like the astute child in Andersen’s story and distinguish an opulently dressed man from a bare pretender. The picture/poem dyad encourages the child to distinguish a pig from a man—a real “gentleman” from one whose surface characteristics mask an animal nature. Together, the nursery rhyme and its accompanying image not only attack the false idolatry evoked by superficial class distinctions, but also

3.11 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “If a pig wore a wig” in the Sing-Song manuscript. By permission of The British Library. Ashley MS 1371.

3.12 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “If a pig wore a wig,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), .

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engage, in complex ways, with the contemporary Victorian debate on what constitutes a true “gentleman.” The dialogue between image and text in Sing-Song often works to raise genderrelated concerns. Sometimes—as in the above reference to The Emperor’s New Clothes—the social commentary is effected through allusions to popular culture within the child’s range of reference and experience. One image/text that offers complex meaning through this intertextual device is “Wee wee husband,” a dialogue between a husband and a wife contained in two quatrains: Wee wee husband, Give me some money, I have no comfits, And I have no honey. Wee wee wifie, I have no money, Milk, nor meat, nor bread to eat, Comfits, nor honey. (103) By itself, the nursery rhyme seems in the style of “Old Mother Hubbard” who found her cupboard bare. In the interaction of picture and poem, however, a critical social comment emerges. In her accompanying manuscript sketch for this poem Rossetti depicts this tiny couple as Punch and Judy dolls (fig. 3.13). Judy stands at left in sideview, wearing an outsize mob cap, which all but obliterates her tiny face. At right, the large-nosed Punch stands in three-quarter view, wearing an enormous tricornered hat and frockcoat.31 Clearly recognizing that Rossetti’s portrayal of the wee husband as Punch and the wee wife as Judy was an important completion of the text, Hughes followed Rossetti’s visual directive very carefully here, and duplicated (though with more expertise) her toy figures (fig. 3.14). Hughes’s design depicts Judy berating a very grumpy Punch, whose empty pockets are echoed by the bare cupboard in the background.32 The conventional story line for Punch and Judy shows, which always involves domestic disputes that escalate into spouse-beating and murder, would have been thoroughly familiar to the Victorian child reader. The puppet shows were ubiquitous, not only in London streets and parks, but also in upper- and middle-class drawing rooms and at charity fêtes, where they were sometimes performed for private hire (Leach, 76; Mayhew, 474). Rossetti herself likely would have known the play well, for a Punch and Judy show used to perform regularly on the street in front of the family house in her infant years.33 The Punch and Judy narrative evoked by the

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3.13 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “Wee wee husband” in the Sing-Song manuscript. By permission of The British Library. Ashley MS 1371.

3.14 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “Wee wee husband,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), .

picture engages with the dialogue of “Wee wee husband” to move the deceptively simple nursery rhyme into a more complex frame of reference by adding the threat of assault to the miniature scene of poverty. Since Hughes follows Rossetti’s pictorial guide so closely here, it seems that the poet’s sketch did indeed help explain her “meaning,” as she hoped it would, to her artist. Hughes also takes direction from other of Rossetti’s manuscript illustrations that use doll figures to raise gender concerns, such as “All the bells were ringing” (102), “I have a Poll parrot” (109), and “I caught a little ladybird” (101). Both “I have a Poll parrot” and “I caught a little ladybird” are of particular importance to a study of Sing-Song’s image/text dialogue because they demonstrate that the line of influence between poet and artist was reciprocal. Rossetti was impelled by

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3.15 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “I have a Poll parrot,” SingSong: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), .

Hughes’s illustrations to revise and enlarge her own verses. The evidence for this is found in two annotated copies of the 1872 Sing-Song, and in the revised edition published by Macmillan in 1893 with all of Hughes’s original illustrations and some added lyrics by Rossetti. In the first edition, Hughes’s pictorial response to the seemingly lighthearted linguistic play found in “I have a Poll parrot” is a macabre drawing in which the nurse Polly’s profile mirrors the beaky Poll parrot, who is engaged in tearing the head off the doll Poll (fig. 3.15):

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I have a Poll parrot, And Poll is my doll, And my nurse is Polly, And my sister Poll. (109) Rossetti’s subsequent addition of a second quatrain to her initial lyric shows her deliberately altering her text to make it “more congruent with the scene of mutilation that Arthur Hughes had depicted,” as Knoepflmacher points out (Ventures, 351): “Polly!” cried Polly, “Don’t tear Polly dolly”— While softhearted Poll Trembled for the doll. (CP, 2:46) Visually absent from the unexpected violence of this otherwise domestic scene is the lyric speaker. In her absence, the bird’s aggression seems to be a projection of a submerged rage against a world rife with duplicate doll-like images of femininity. In his illustration Hughes may be picking up on Rossetti’s own apparent antagonism to dolls as recorded in her manuscript sketch and verse for both “All the bells were ringing” and “I caught a little ladybird.” In her addition of a new quatrain for the 1893 edition, the poet not only demonstrates her acceptance of the artist’s interpretation but also extends the dialogue by continuing the collaboration. The new quatrains Rossetti added to “I caught a little ladybird” show her responding specifically to Hughes’s illustration.34 In the first edition of 1872, the poem comprised a single quatrain, spoken in the voice of a little boy: I caught a little ladybird That flies far away; I caught a little lady wife That is both staid and gay. (101) Rossetti’s sketch for this poem, one of her most detailed compositions in the entire manuscript, works with the verse to establish a strong critique of Victorian gender relations (fig. 3.16). Her drawing depicts a little boy in a red tunic running after a ladybug, which is hovering above a potted fruit tree. Leaning against a chair at right is a large doll with curly hair, pink cheeks, and red stockings. Her arms are stiff at her sides, and her whole body is rigid. The picture contrasts the freedom of the mobile boy, the domestication of the fruit tree, the peril of the

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free-flying ladybug, and the insipid rigidity of the wooden doll in a way that moves the nursery rhyme away from its simple “Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home” lineage toward an incisive comment on the deleterious effects of contemporary gender roles and expectations. There is, of course, no specific reference in the text to a doll. But Hughes clearly recognized the importance of this visual symbol, just as he did the significance of the Punch and Judy figures in her “Wee wee husband” sketch. Hughes

3.16 Christina Rossetti, pencil sketch for “I caught a little ladybird” in the SingSong manuscript. By permission of The British Library. Ashley MS 1371.

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follows Rossetti’s pictorial guide for “I caught a little ladybird” by reproducing her doll figure, but he also adds new narrative elements (fig. 3.17). The artist condenses the poet’s design by eliminating the background setting and moving the doll and the boy into a single compositional group, familiar enough to most Victorians: the “courting couple.”35 The little boy in Hughes’s illustration is mobile, but not running free; he has already “caught” his “little ladybird,” and, as a result, finds himself trapped into slowing his pace and adapting his posture in order to support a spineless, dependent partner. The two quatrains Rossetti added to the poem in the 1893 edition show her responding approvingly to Hughes’s development of the narrative while at the same time accounting for his omission of the flying ladybug present in both her manuscript sketch and her original lyric: Come back, my scarlet ladybird, Back from far away; I weary of my dolly wife, My wife that cannot play. She’s such a senseless wooden thing She stares the livelong day; Her wig of gold is stiff and cold And cannot change to grey. (CP, 2:44) In her addition to the original poem Rossetti develops the implications of Hughes’s illustration by emphasizing that Victorian constructions of the feminine as doll-like, ornamental, and passive have negative effects for both men and women. The absent ladybird becomes a symbol of the male child’s loss in choosing the “senseless wooden thing” over the freely flying natural creature. As Sickbert suggests, “the voice of the mother behind the male speaker warns her daughter that becoming a dolly wife not only sentences her to an almost deathlike passivity but also results in isolation; the husband who claims her for her ‘femininity’ will tire of her and beg the active, independent lady to return. The mother might equally be addressing her son to beware of his choice of lover” (402). What Sickbert and others have missed in their analysis of this poem, however, is that Rossetti’s original quatrain does not include the notion of the “dolly wife” that the young boy tires of.36 This later addition developed out of a complex system of responses between an artist and poet committed to developing meaning through the interactive engagement of image and text. The critical tendency with regard to Hughes’s illustrations has been to see them as a kind of “dolly wife” to Rossetti’s mastertext—charming, ornamental,

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3.17 Arthur Hughes, illustration for “I caught a little ladybird,” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Macmillan, 1893), .

dependent. As the dialogic interaction of picture and poem in “I caught a little ladybird” suggests, however, neither Rossetti nor Hughes had much use for hierarchical relationships of power. Thus, throughout Sing-Song, artist and poet “walk arm in arm”37 as equal partners in the production of meaning. Guided by Christina’s manuscript sketches and inspired by her verses, Arthur Hughes produced images which continued the dialogue with the text that had been established in the author’s fair copy, and the poet paid him the compliment of extending that dialogue beyond the book’s first publication into its revised

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edition of 1893. But Christina had already expressed her desire to continue a verbal-visual dialogue with Hughes long before the fin de siècle. Two years after the publication of Sing-Song she asked him to collaborate with her once more on a work for children, this time a linked collection of stories in the fantasy vein: Speaking Likenesses.

“With a view to the market”: Speaking Likenesses After the publication of Sing-Song, Rossetti seemed to consider Roberts Brothers of Boston her primary publisher. It was the American publisher who was first treated to a glimpse of her next work for children. Explaining that “I do not like to offer my little fairy story elsewhere, without first making myself sure that you are not inclined to think about it,” Rossetti indicated that she would consider sending the new work to Macmillan only if she had a negative response (Letters, 1:418). When Roberts proved disinclined to take on her fairy story, it took Rossetti more than a year to swallow her pride and return to Macmillan. But in February 1874 Rossetti finally attempted to heal the four-year-long rift in business relations with her former publisher by offering Alexander Macmillan “a little prose story, such as might I think do for a child’s Xmas volume.” Her uncertainty about reestablishing relations with Macmillan is evident in her somewhat strained style: “if you would allow me to send it you to be looked at you would truly oblige me” (Letters, 2:6). Writing back by return post, Macmillan assured Rossetti he would be very interested to see Nowhere and Its Inhabitants (Rossetti’s first title for Speaking Likenesses). He also enticed his errant author back to his firm with a “cheque for £15, which is rightly in excess of the half profits which we were to send you” on the close of the Goblin Market account. Even more tantalizing, the publisher hinted that he was thinking about bringing out Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress in a combined edition—a proposal that had proved a stumbling block during their last negotiations in 1870 (7).38 When Macmillan finally accepted the manuscript of Speaking Likenesses in April, however, his terms were somewhat chastening. Rather than their old system of half profits, Macmillan repeated the terms he had offered unsuccessfully for Sing-Song four years before. By attributing his two-month delay in accepting the manuscript to the fact that “the question of illustrations has been a difficulty,” Macmillan further reminded Rossetti of their earlier Sing-Song negotiations. Then, as now, the publisher was not willing to undertake the expense unless he had full control, and he closed by offering Rossetti the same terms— £35 for the copyright—as he had for the nursery rhymes.39 As Chas. E. Pascoe wrote in a contemporary article in the Athenaeum, “The balance of power is on the side of the publishers,” because “the publishers have the money, and the au-

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thors have not” (52). Rossetti capitulated to Macmillan’s demands. “I am glad to accept your offer for Nowhere,” she wrote, “not having expected success with you just now.” She did, however, assert some degree of control over publication by stipulating that if the book were not published by the end of the year, “the copyright simply & without any further process reverts to me” (Letters, 2:9). Selling her copyright meant that Rossetti would have no further rights in her own work, and in fact would no longer be the legal owner of her intellectual property. Moreover, such an arrangement would obviously give Macmillan a great deal more control over both the publication process and the final product. Buying an author’s copyright outright was common enough in the Victorian publishing industry—though not, as I discuss below, a usual practice at the House of Macmillan. Some authors found it attractive because the publisher took on all risks of publication while the author received a guaranteed price for his or her work regardless of sales. On the other hand, if the book proved a great success, the publisher might make “so large a profit over the years that the author felt aggrieved” (Nowell-Smith, International Copyright, 51). This indeed seems to have happened in the Rossetti/Macmillan situation. When a thousand copies of Speaking Likenesses had been sold within two months of publication and the book bid fair to have a modest sales success despite adverse reviews, Rossetti tried to renegotiate the publishing contract and exchange the agreed-upon sale of copyright for the old system of half profits (Letters, 2:38–39). Although her proposal was unsuccessful, she did achieve her object for the forthcoming combined edition of her poems. Like all her previous (and subsequent) publications with Macmillan, Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875) was published on a system of half profits that permitted her to retain the copyright (42). The sale of the copyright for Speaking Likenesses is something of an anomaly in the careers of both publisher and author. Alexander Macmillan always advised his authors to retain their copyright and actively lobbied for changes to the laws to ensure that “‘property in books’” would receive the same protection “‘as property in land or in the funds’” (Graves, 390, 320).40 But Macmillan had been somewhat unceremoniously dumped by Rossetti four years before and his professional pride was bruised. According to Charles Graves, his first biographer, “no writer of note ever transferred his allegiance to another firm” (390). Rossetti’s temporary defection and chastened return required a suitable welcome for the prodigal, perhaps, but also a suitable punishment. Macmillan’s offer to purchase the copyright of Speaking Likenesses may be seen as a flexing of the publisher’s muscles intended to bring his errant author properly under control. The struggle for control informs all aspects of the production process for Speaking Likenesses and leaves its traces in the book itself.

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Rossetti’s uncharacteristic agreement to sell the copyright for Speaking Likenesses suggests two things. First, the author was clearly anxious to return to Macmillan, and the offer of £35 was not—apart from the irksome loss of ownership in her work—ungenerous. Two years after the publication of Sing-Song on an agreement of 10 percent royalties, Christina had probably not recovered much more (if as much) from the Dalziels. By the following year she was forced to authorize a reduction in price for the trade sale of the remainder (Letters, 2:46). Second, she was eager to get Speaking Likenesses out on the market— preferably, as she indicated, the Christmas market with its attendant high sales figures. All Rossetti’s correspondence over the publication of Speaking Likenesses stresses its status as a commercial commodity. On receiving six complimentary copies from Macmillan in November 1874, she wrote the publisher to express a wish that her book would have an effect similar to that of the goblins’ fruit upon Laura, and create an insatiable desire in its female readership: “I only hope the public appetite will not be satisfied with 6 or 60, but crave on for 600 or 6000 at least!” (30). With Speaking Likenesses Christina Rossetti was deliberately entering the marketplace with a view to supplying the demand for illustrated children’s fantasy created by Lewis Carroll’s two successful Alice books, both published by Macmillan. As she confided to Dante Gabriel, the book was written as “a Christmas trifle, would-be in the Alice style with an eye to the market” (12). Recognizing that part of Lewis Carroll’s success in his Alice books lay in his partnership with the inimitable John Tenniel, Christina determined to continue the collaboration that had been so successful in her nursery-rhyme book and secure Arthur Hughes for Speaking Likenesses as well. In writing to Macmillan with this proposal, Rossetti cannily reminded him of the critical “verdicts” that had proclaimed Hughes’s Sing-Song illustrations “charming.” She also facilitated the publisher’s decision by helpfully providing the artist’s address (Letters, 1:9). Macmillan was no doubt well aware of Hughes’s skill as an illustrator for children, not just of Sing-Song, but also of the fantasies of George MacDonald, published by the rival firm of Alexander Strahan.41 And as Carroll’s publisher for the Alice books, Macmillan also knew the market value of good illustrations for works of fantasy. The publisher may even have conveyed the author’s intention to write “would-be in the Alice style” to the illustrator, for the drawings Hughes produced for Speaking Likenesses are also very much “in the Alice style,” as many critics have noted.42 It is unlikely that Christina had any direct influence on her illustrator. All the correspondence relating to the artwork was conducted between Macmillan and Hughes, with the publisher occasionally sending the author progress bulletins. It was through Macmillan, for example, that Christina heard “that Arthur

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Hughes engages not only to do my illustrations but to do them by mid-June: so presumably my ‘Nowhere’ [Speaking Likenesses] will be out for Xmas.” Thus, unlike his previous collaboration with Rossetti in the production of Sing-Song, this time the artist had no authorial direction to rely on apart from the text itself. For the nursery-rhyme book Christina knew not only the nature of the prospective illustrations, but also their precise number, as both of these had been indicated in her manuscript guide. In the case of Speaking Likenesses she did not even “know whether it will have many or few cuts” and surmised there would be “only a few, I dare say” (Letters, 2:15). Rossetti’s minimal expectations were sensible. A mid-June deadline would mean Hughes had only a few weeks to produce the illustrations.43 Not surprisingly, the artist could not meet such a demanding schedule. In the event, Hughes produced his twelve illustrations— six full-page drawings and six vignettes—by 22 July. The pressure of the deadline is evident in his work, which is uneven. While some of the pictures are powerful drawings in their own right and ably perform their Pre-Raphaelite function as interpretive partner to the text, others are conventional or confused. Hughes himself was aware that this visual-verbal partnership lacked “the parallel felicities” (Colvin, 23) of their nursery-rhyme venture. “I like to think I did the ‘Sing Song,’” he wrote after Christina’s death, “and regret dreadfully that I did not make better drawings to the Speaking Likenesses” (qtd. in Roberts, 27). Hughes may assume artistic responsibility for the unevenness of designs for Speaking Likenesses, but he must share the book’s relative lack of both aesthetic and commercial success with author and publisher. Rossetti’s initial title for the book, Nowhere and Its Inhabitants, together with her professed desire to enter the juvenile fantasy market, influenced her publisher’s response to the book and hence his marketing strategy for it. But despite her “Alice style” professions, Rossetti’s story is not a fantasy in the nonsense tradition of Carroll. Rather, as U. C. Knoepflmacher has so persuasively demonstrated, it is an anti-fantasy that evokes the wonders of the Alice books only to refute them (Ventures into Childland, chapter 10). The purpose of the immersion in the wonderlands of her linked stories is to return the little female traveler—and the child audience— from “the Land of Nowhere” to “Somewhere” closer to home (SL, 132).44 Alexander Macmillan, however, did not see the book in quite this way. Thus when Rossetti changed the title to “Speaking Likenesses” at the proof stage in July Macmillan demanded an explanation. “Very likely you did not so deeply ponder upon my text as to remark that my small heroines perpetually encounter ‘speaking (literally speaking) likenesses’ or embodiments or caricatures of themselves or their faults,” Rossetti wrote the publisher with a trace of acerbity. Since she was waiting “to receive my revise with all its pretty pictures” at the time, it is clear that the illustrations had been completed while Hughes was under the

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misapprehension that the book was entitled “Nowhere.” This explains why the artist did not take advantage of the “point & neatness” of the title in his illustrations for the book (Letters, 2:19). Like Macmillan, he seems not to have pondered Rossetti’s text deeply enough to remark this for himself. Thus the Birthday Queen of the first story, for example, was not made, as she ought to be, a mirror image of the birthday girl, Flora, in either “The cross fairy deprives Flora of her strawberry feast” or “Flora and the children in the enchanted room” (fig. 3.18).45 The titles for the pictures as given above point to a further problem with image/text (in)congruency in Speaking Likenesses. On receiving a copy of the book on publication, Rossetti was horrified to discover that the list of illustrations had not treated her “subjects as I should . . . have treated them: the word ‘fairy’ I should altogether have excluded as not appropriate to my story” (Letters, 2:30–31). But in purchasing the copyright Macmillan had acquired authorial rights in the book, and he availed himself of the privilege of authorship by drawing up the list of illustrations himself (or having a staff member do so). Whether strategically or by oversight, the publisher then neglected to include a copy of the list when he sent the author proofs for correction. And although Rossetti hoped for a cancel of both the list of illustrations and the title page, to the wording of which she also objected,46 Macmillan made no effort to remedy the matter. Perhaps he had too much at stake: between purchasing the copyright and paying artist, engraver, printer, and binder, the publisher had incurred high costs he wished to recuperate in brisk sales. The captions in the list of illustrations appear to be part of his marketing strategy to attract the interest of the browsing bookshop customer. On flipping through the book, the prospective buyer would no doubt find Hughes’s drawings engaging, while the promise of “fairies” in the list of illustrations might seem the guarantee for a nice fanciful book to buy a child. To clinch the matter, Macmillan selected as frontispiece Hughes’s design for the third story, which the publisher labeled “Maggie meets the fairies in the wood” (fig. 3.19). With such a pictorial introduction, Christmas book buyers could not fail to anticipate that Speaking Likenesses would offer a pleasant journey into the land of make-believe. Even though the ghostly children of the frontispiece conform to the text and have nothing particularly fairylike about them, Hughes’s depiction of Maggie as a Red-Riding-Hood-like figure might seem to substantiate the purchaser’s expectation for a fairy tale. On purchasing and reading the book, however, the consumer would no doubt have received something of the shock that Christina Rossetti did on seeing the list of illustrations. The promise of a pleasant excursion into fairyland is definitely not fulfilled in this collection of three linked stories narrated by a nononsense aunt who extemporizes them to entertain her nieces. The anti-fantasy is established when the aunt meets her audience’s plea to “be wonderful” by

3.18 Arthur Hughes, “Flora and the children in the enchanted room,” Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874), 29.

3.19 Arthur Hughes, “Maggie meets the fairies in the wood,” frontispiece for Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874).

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handing out sewing to be done for the poor. “No help no story,” she insists (SL, 143, 136). Moreover, the “wonder” is not to be enjoyed for its own sake. The stories she relates while the girls work are didactic tales in which unpleasant experiences in fantasy worlds serve to teach her little heroines to become more selfless (Flora), subservient (Edith), and self-postponing (Maggie). The aunt seems to be a dour predecessor of Mary Poppins, who likewise invokes magic only to deny it in favor of social rules. In this context the list of illustrations that precedes the tales and their accompanying pictures seems especially subversive of the anti-fantasy project of Speaking Likenesses. The captions are a strange combination of invention, quotation, and paraphrase. They do not serve to bring image and text closer together as was the case in Dante Gabriel’s Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress designs, but rather to draw attention to the gap between them. This is true for even simple illustrations, such as the vignettes which introduce and conclude the story. The caption for the title-page vignette, which borrows from the text a passage about “a chair press[ing] gently against her till she sat down” (SL, 125), is contradicted by the illustration that shows Flora greeting an anthropomorphized chair in the act of bowing to her as it makes her acquaintance. The caption for the book’s final inset page decoration, “Maggie drinks tea and eats buttered toast with Granny,” is even more disruptive of the expected congruence of image and text. Rather than depicting anything like the aforesaid tea, the picture shows Maggie emptying her basket to show Granny the pigeon, kitten, and puppy she has collected on her return through the wood (fig. 3.20). As Rossetti protested to her publisher, she “should (as who would not?) have described the last on the list [‘Maggie drinks tea and eats buttered toast with Granny’] in other terms” (Letters, 2:31). Norman Feltes has argued that the commodity text, “produced in struggle by the new ‘professional’ author within the new structures of control over the publishing process,” in turn “produces its readers by interpellating, that is, by addressing and engaging an infinity of bourgeois subjects, ‘traced’ in the text” (8, 9). Although Feltes focuses on the Victorian novel in his study of the effects of the new capitalist mode of production on the publishing industry, the same argument might be made for juvenile literature. By the end of the century, children’s books were becoming an increasingly commodified product aimed at middle-class consumers eager to furnish their nurseries with illustrated books. As contemporary children’s book critics such as Edward Salmon and Gleeson White noted, the gift book was an indispensable part of the Christmas festival (Salmon, 11; White, “Children’s Books,” 67). It was also an indispensable part of the capitalist economy of late-Victorian Britain, which saw the book trade develop into an international business producing books for the English-speaking

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3.20 Arthur Hughes, “Maggie drinks tea and eats buttered toast with Granny,” Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874), 95.

world across its far-flung empire. A reviewer in the Times praised the season’s Christmas books in 1871 (the year Sing-Song came on the market) precisely because “they do honour to the enterprise of English publishing.” Within this industry, Alexander Macmillan stood out as one of the “most enterprising publishers of children’s books,” and this prestige gave him a considerable amount of power (Alderson, “Tracts,” 247, 251). The publication of Speaking Likenesses in 1874 shows how even the “unworldly” Christina Rossetti becomes enmeshed in the capitalist mode of production. Her trio of anti-fantasies would have been most appropriately placed with her future publisher, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The SPCK at the time was one of the leading producers of illustrated books for children in the socially conscious and moral vein of Speaking Likenesses. But Rossetti’s professional relationship with the SPCK was still some years in the future. Using Speaking Likenesses as a means of reentering the secular market under the

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aegis of the Macmillan imprint, Rossetti found herself caught up in a process of production in which she as author played but a small part. The book she wrote “with a view to the market” contains traces not only of the struggle over the control of meaning, but also of its status as a commodity-text directed toward a class- and gender-specific audience. The production of the audience in relation to the commodity-text is established at the outset of Speaking Likenesses. Heading the list of Flora’s birthday presents on the first page is “a story-book full of pictures” with which her father has surprised her—just as, perhaps, the child reader of Speaking Likenesses has been surprised with this illustrated book on her birthday or Christmas morning. I say “her birthday” because the audience Rossetti constructs is clearly female. The aunt in the narrative frame tells the stories to a group of five nieces, and all her tales focus on the adventures of little girls whose experience of the masculine seems, for the most part, to be negative. As Kathryn Burlinson comments, “the specifically feminine context that is established in [Speaking Likenesses] echoes the female world of Goblin Market—when male figures do appear they are always threatening, unpleasant and preferably avoided” (297). This female context is equally constructed by the pictures that accompany the text. Arthur Hughes focuses on the innocence (and even martyrdom) of the girl child in contrast to the aggression of boys in illustrations such as “Flora and the children in the enchanted room” (see fig. 3.18) and “The boy with the great mouth full of teeth grins at Maggie.” One of his most successful drawings—“The Apple of Discord” (fig. 3.21)—powerfully combines with the text to establish this gender-specific audience for the book. At the same time, it provides an eloquent object lesson in the power of the picture to produce meaning and shape audience reception. “The Apple of Discord” depicts the quarreling children in the real world of Flora’s birthday party, before she passes through a door at the end of the yew tree alley, which opens into the fantasy world inhabited by the Birthday Queen. The foreground of the picture captures well enough the altercations between these discontented boys and girls, but the commanding middleground introduces the fantastic in the figure of an enormous, bare-breasted goddess with Medusa-like hair. Actual and fantasy worlds appear to occupy the same temporal moment, yet they are separated spatially. As Maurie McInnis points out, the “Medusa [who] looms over the children menacingly . . . does not participate in their pictorial reality; indeed, the spatial relationship between this figure and the children remains unclear” (72). There is a certain perverseness in this illustration, not least because Hughes has chosen to illustrate a metaphor, and a parenthetical one at that. In telling the story, the aunt—who, contrary to critical opinion is not anti-lyrical but rather given to flights of descriptive fancy as when she

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3.21 Arthur Hughes, “The Apple of Discord,” Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874), 11.

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describes the “bell flowers” ringing “without clappers” (SL, 123)—employs a metaphor which her literalist nieces understand no more than they do her musical harebell: Flora fell down and accused Alfred of tripping her up, Richard bawled out that George broke away when fairly caught, Anne when held tight muttered that Susan could see in spite of bandaged eyes. Susan let go, Alfred picked up his little sister, George volunteered to play blindman in Susan’s stead: but still pouting and grumbling showed their ugly faces, and tossed the apple of discord to and fro as if it had been a pretty plaything. [What apple, Aunt?—The Apple of Discord, Clara, which is a famous apple your brothers would know all about, and you may ask them some day. Now I go on.] (SL, 121)

By depicting what the narrator herself has refused to explain, Hughes avails himself of a long-standing tradition in illustration whereby the visual clarifies what is left vague in the verbal text. At the same time, however, this male artist is taking on the role of the absent brothers who “know all about” Greek mythology and could explain it to their ignorant sisters who have not studied the classics but know how to hem pocket handkerchiefs, stitch seams, and overcast buttonholes. Although the nieces interrupt with many questions during her storytelling, this is the only one the aunt refuses to answer. Nevertheless, the book’s own production within a juvenile market differentiated by age and sex provides a material, if not audible, reply. For the larger audience of middle-class girls reading Speaking Likenesses, the message seems to be that some kinds of books—some forms of knowledge—are only for boys. Girls can read self-improving fantasies but not, apparently, classical mythology. The aunt’s silence on this point deliberately deflects attention from the female vanity and competitiveness contained in her allusion to the Judgment of Paris.47 She aims to inculcate a spirit of cooperation and responsibility in her immediate audience of nieces, just as the author does in her targeted audience of middle-class girls. Hughes responds with a terrifying female figure apparently ready to bowl an apple into the crowd of quarreling children. By mixing his metaphors—fusing the head of Medusa onto the mythological figure of Discordia—Hughes subverts the implication that males have access to superior knowledge while at the same time presenting a commanding image of naked female power. Instead of the Angel in the House enjoined in the narrative, the picture subversively presents a figure as eroticized and dangerous as the North Wind Hughes created for MacDonald’s fantasy but without her saving graces or mentorial function.48

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In the narrator’s use of classical allusion, Hughes seems to have detected a submerged female rage akin to that found in Rossetti’s “From the Antique” or “The Lowest Room,” and to have depicted it in the form of a disruptive goddess with a menacing “falsetto muscularity” (to use Dante Gabriel’s term) of her own.49 His figure’s commanding and unexpected presence arrests the attention of the reader-viewer to the extent that the narrative itself must learn, for a moment, “Not to be first” (“The Lowest Room,” CP, 1:207.265). Indeed, the picture is so powerful that readers have been misled into thinking that this Medusa is part of Rossetti’s story, as Knoepflmacher does when he refers to “a narrative that includes figures as bizarre as the Medusa-headed goddess of discourse [sic] who plagues little Flora” (Ventures, 31). The double slip by this careful reader and astute critic speaks eloquently of the picture’s power over reception. The “Medusaheaded goddess” exists only in the illustration and is not, of course, included in Rossetti’s narrative, which merely refers tangentially to the “apple of discord” in a descriptive passage about a childish spat. Furthermore, misnaming the disruptive figure the “goddess of discourse” suggests that Hughes’s figure has indeed become subliminally associated with the narrator—if not the author herself—who is the presiding “goddess of discourse” in this fantasy world, with the power to determine all actions, characters, and scenes at will for, as she tells her nieces, “this is all make-believe” (SL, 129). Thus the struggle for control that characterizes the production of the commodity-text leaves its traces in Speaking Likenesses itself in the form of pictures that overpower the narrative, and of captions designed not to anchor the image in the text but to drop shillings in the till. Ironically, the resulting array of mixed messages adversely affected sales. While buyers were willing enough at first to purchase a fantasy book written by Christina Rossetti, illustrated by Arthur Hughes, and brought out by Lewis Carroll’s publisher, Alexander Macmillan, the sales fell off soon after Christmas. A second edition was never called for and, unlike the popular Sing-Song (see chapter 6) the book has never been reprinted as a single volume for children.50 While Victorian reviewers were content to limit their opinions to the view that Speaking Likenesses “would have been more original if Alice had never been to ‘Wonderland’” (Athenaeum, 878), twentieth-century critics were generally less kind, with a TLS reviewer calling it “a peculiarly revolting book” (“Not all Roses in the Victorian Nursery,” xi). Recently, however, scholars have attempted to recuperate Speaking Likenesses as a misunderstood text whose purpose is neither to entertain children with tales of wonderland nor to revolt them with the grotesque savagery of sexual warfare in the nursery. Rather, the stories offer an unflinching social critique of Victorian gender and class relations, with a particular focus, according to Julia Briggs,

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on the intended reader, the protected middle-class child.51 Briggs suggests that Speaking Likenesses should not be compared with the Alice books, “whose world of play without learning it criticizes, but rather . . . [with] those other central Victorian classics whose fantasies were associated with social conscience: Charles Kingsley’s TheWater-Babies (1863) . . . or George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871).” By opposing stories about the privileged Flora and Edith to the tale of working-class Maggie, Speaking Likenesses sets out, like much contemporary writing for children, to make its middle-class reader, in her nursery stocked with books and toys, aware of the many children who had no parents, toys, nurseries, and gardens (229). Briggs’s analysis is persuasive, and the literary and social contexts she provides for Speaking Likenesses are surely important. Yet her conclusion that the final episode, in which Maggie is given a view of the Aurora Borealis as a substitute for the much-hoped-for glimpse of the Christmas tree, offers an implicit critique of the Christmas commercialism that buries the season’s spiritual meaning (226) seems somewhat unsettled by the book’s own material context—especially when we recall that the author hoped that the public would buy not “6 or 60, but . . . 600 or 6000” copies of her book during the Christmas sales season of 1874. If we agree with Briggs that the linked stories work to make the reader aware “of the means of distribution and consumption” (225), then the irony of Speaking Likenesses is that it is itself implicated in the system it critiques. Written explicitly for the Christmas market and targeted by the publisher at the middle-class consumer buying gifts of the season for his or her child, Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses is a “speaking likeness” of the very consumerism it condemns.52 Perhaps aware of this irony, Rossetti began to move away from the commercialism entailed in general trade publishing by seeking alternative religious houses for her didactic works. In the same year that she published Speaking Likenesses, Rossetti also brought out the first of her books of devotional prose, Annus Domini. This book was published by James Parker of Oxford, but all her subsequent devotional works were brought out by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). These publications for the religious market were produced under very different material conditions than Rossetti’s secular works. Although Rossetti in her subsequent trade publications never permitted a repetition of the loss of control she endured on selling the copyright of Speaking Likenesses to Macmillan, she invariably sold her copyright to the SPCK. Perhaps the complete submission to a higher authority seemed appropriate in religious publishing. Certainly the pursuit of fame and fortune seemed to her to be beside the point in this arena. “I don’t think harm will accrue from my S.P.C.K. books

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even to my standing,” Christina later wrote Dante Gabriel: “if it did, I should still be glad to throw my grains of dust into the religious scale” (Letters, 2:257). In stark contrast to her publishing for children, Rossetti was not, in her devotional publications, concerned with whether her name were “marketable,” nor writing “with a view to the market” understood narrowly as the venue for the sale of goods. Rather, she was content to sell rights in her work to the Christian foundation that would turn her grains of dust to spiritual profit by broadcasting her work in books, pamphlets, and tracts.

4 Devotional Books All the world over, visible things typify things invisible. —Seek and Find

“Earthly pictures with heavenly meaning”

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OSSET TI expressed her visual imagination throughout her devotional prose, not by combining image and text as she had in her secular publications, but by training the eye of her reader to see the material world with spiritual eyes. In Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879), for example, Rossetti analyzes the firmament first with an artistic regard to color and then with what she describes later in the same work as the “spiritual perception” which corrects and sanctifies “natural perception” by apprehending “things eternal” in “things temporal” (180):

To our eyes it [the firmament] appears blue, sometimes deepening towards purple, sometimes passing into pale green; purple, an earthly hue of mourning, and green our tint of hope. One colour seems to prophesy of that day when the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn (St. Matt. 24.30): one, to symbolize that veil of separation beyond which faith and love discern our ascended Lord, and whereinto hope as an anchor of the soul sure and steadfast entereth (Heb. 6.19, 20). Remote from either extreme stretches the prevalent blue, pure and absolute: thus the sky and its azure become so at one in our associations, that all 141

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fair blue objects within our reach, stone or flower, sapphire or harebell, act as terrene mirrors, conveying to us an image of that which is above themselves, as “earthly pictures with heavenly meanings.” (SF, 23–24)

Blue, purple, green: each has its special and vibrant tone, like the shimmering pigments of a Pre-Raphaelite canvas. Each, too, has its spiritual significance, and its beauty cannot be separated from its special “heavenly meaning.” Indeed, the purpose of earthly beauty, for Rossetti, is to inspire admiration and reverence for the supreme artistic creator, God. A Christian perspective sees in the “fair blue objects within our reach”—the sparkling sapphire or luminous harebell— mirrors of the “absolute” blue of the firmament, the ultimate “handywork” of God the creator. Although, for Rossetti, the fallenness of the world means that there will always be a “veil of separation” between this world and the next, “eyes that have been supernaturalized” (FD, 116) by faith and love are able to read and interpret the spiritual significance of the phenomenal world. “Earthly pictures with heavenly meaning” aptly describes the materialist aesthetic that impelled Rossetti to seek publishing venues that would allow her to combine her texts with symbolic images. But visual-verbal partnerships proved less available to her when she turned from secular to devotional publishing. Early in her career Rossetti tried to combine the visual with the verbal in her religious publications by asking Dante Gabriel to supply a block for an illustrated Christmas anthology proposed by the Reverend Shipley (Letters, 1:224).1 Later she invited her friend and Pre-Raphaelite associate, Frederic Shields, to design a cover for Time Flies: A Reading Diary. When the plan had to be abandoned due to the artist’s illness, she wrote to him to say, “My book must trust for success to its inner grace and not to the mantle of your name and fame” (Letters, 3:254).2 Thus the collaboration between picture and word, artist and author, which had characterized Rossetti’s secular publishing in the sixties and seventies, was somewhat sacrificed in the last two decades of her life when she wrote increasingly for the religious market. Of her six books of devotional prose, only Called to Be Saints (1881) was illustrated. As we shall see, the botanical illustrations in this work provide an object lesson for Rossetti’s view that “all the world over, visible things typify things invisible” (SF, 244).

“Young Plants and Polished Corners”: A Publishing History Rossetti completed the manuscript of “Young Plants and Polished Corners”—the original title for Called to Be Saints—in November 1876. Although she had already, in 1874, brought out her first book of devotional prose, Annus Domini, with the religious publisher James Parker of Oxford, she somewhat surprisingly approached her trade publisher, Macmillan, with her new book. “I

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have by me a completed work, a sort of devotional reading-book for the redletter Saints’ Days, which of course is longing to see the light & which I shall be glad if you will consent to look at,” she wrote on 4 November (Letters, 2:109). Rossetti must have been gratified by Macmillan’s warm response to her querying letter: If you would kindly send me your MS “Young Plants &c” we will most willingly consider whether we can undertake it. I don’t think you will doubt that it is a real pleasure to us to publish for you & both Mr. Craik & myself have the sincerest belief in your genius & goodness—intellect real & spiritual & would gladly, apart from commercial considerations, be the means of disseminating what you can give far & wide. If we fail it surely is not from want of will & sympathy. I forget who published your “Annus Domini.” Was it a success?3

Macmillan’s concluding question no doubt suggested to Rossetti that the publisher was not, perhaps, quite so disinterested in “commercial considerations” as to be eager to disseminate her devotional work without at least some promise of success in the marketplace. And indeed when Macmillan returned the manuscript after only four days, his rejection letter made it clear that “commercial considerations” were the reason. The publisher did not believe that he would not be able to find a readership for “Young Plants and Polished Corners”: I am sending back your MS. at once, with a feeling of the real goodness and thought that underlies what you have written & elaborated; but at the same time a sense of perplexity as to how all that noble emotion should take to itself such a form. I can partly see your purpose & even sympathize with it to a certain extent. But it is all too merely curious—as I understand it—to interest, or edify serious life. Am I wrong? or are you wrong? You know that I feel your genius, how gladly I would work with it. But this I have no hope of & very limited sympathy with.4

Macmillan’s perplexity about Rossetti’s manuscript is understandable. Although she told him that her book followed a “particular plan” related to the title, “Young Plants & Polished Corners” (Letters, 2:110), both the content and the format of this long and unwieldy work could well be seen as “too merely curious” to be edifying or interesting to general readers. Certainly the religious publisher who ultimately accepted the manuscript, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, did not seem to think the title particularly indicative of contents. When the SPCK brought out the book in 1881, the title was altered to the more descriptive Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied. As the subtitle suggests, Rossetti’s book is intended as a devotional companion to the Book of Common Prayer. Beginning with the first saint of the liturgical year, St. Andrew, and progressing in sequential order through his fellow apostles and evangelists to the celebration of All Saints on the first of November,

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the book celebrates the minor festivals of the Church Calendar. For each of these festivals Rossetti provides “Sacred Text” references to the celebrated Saint; “Biographical Additions” suggested by legend, tradition, and inference; a “Prayer” for the appropriate virtue or grace; a “Memorial” composed of Psalms for the festival with, in a parallel column, scriptural allusions to the saint’s life; an ascribed stone (if the saint is one of the twelve apostles); and a flower chosen from English plants in bloom on the feast day and selected by Rossetti as appropriate to the saint in question. It is in this last, emblematic, section of the work that Rossetti’s “plan” for “Young Plants and Polished Corners” becomes most evident. On the whole, it is not surprising that the publisher of the Christian Socialist writer, F. D. Maurice, would have “very limited sympathy” with the format of such a work. Had Macmillan considered its message a little more closely, however, he might have been surprised at how much it conformed to his own democratic tendencies. The SPCK, a High Church publisher, was a much more obvious choice for the work than Macmillan, but even this religious publishing house hesitated over “Young Plants.” Rossetti first approached them with the long-abandoned manuscript in January 1880, a few months after the SPCK brought out Seek and Find (1879) which was, like all her devotional work for this society, “Published under the Direction of the Tract Committee.” The minutes of the Tract Committee show just how difficult it was for a manuscript to be accepted by the SPCK. Although by 1875 the society had, for the first time, an editorial secretary in the form of the Reverend Edmund McClure,5 it continued to rely on a publishing process that had direct connection with the church hierarchy, making one’s publication by the SPCK a testament to one’s orthodoxy. Guided by five bishops acting as referees, the Tract Committee, itself composed of Anglican priests, vetted all manuscripts recommended by the editorial secretary. Thus to be an SPCK author could carry a certain amount of prestige in religious circles, for finding acceptance with them was no easy matter (W. K. Clarke, 173). To be published “by committee” is, however, a painstakingly slow process. If the Tract Committee’s review of a manuscript was positive, they would order it to be set in type and sent on to the Referee Board. Once the sheets had been returned by the bishops, the Tract Committee would review their recommendations and either approve the book for publication or turn it down. If the bishops had given a negative response, there was no recourse but to return the manuscript, already set in type, to the disappointed author. One can imagine that this process was not only time consuming but expensive, and no doubt had some effect on the kinds of payments the society was able to make to its authors. Contracts and publisher’s agreements, however, were the purview of the editorial

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secretary. The Tract Committee’s task was not to determine business transactions but orthodoxy. The SPCK took almost two years to publish Rossetti’s manuscript for “Young Plants and Polished Corners.” At first the Tract Committee seems to have shared some of Macmillan’s perplexity about it. Their minutes show that at meetings held on 27 January and 10 February 1880 the manuscript was twice referred for a second opinion—an unusual proceeding, as the Tract Committee generally either approved a manuscript for the next stage or returned it to the author. In this case the second opinions must have been favorable, for the manuscript was “ordered to be ‘set up’”—that is, set in type and sent on to the Board of Referees—on 24 February. In turn the bishops took more than seven months to reach their decision, and it was not until October that “Young Plants” was “passed for publication” at a meeting of the Tract Committee.6 Publication itself did not occur until October of the following year, although Rossetti wrote to Dante Gabriel in late December 1880 that her book was “in the press” and might “see the light towards Easter” (Letters, 2:256). The business of securing an illustrator for the twenty-one botanical drawings to accompany Rossetti’s emblematic commentaries on plants slowed down the publication process. The necessary expense of these illustrations also seems to have affected the size of the payment the SPCK was willing to give Rossetti for her work. Although the publisher had paid her £40 for the copyright for Seek and Find in 1879, they paid only £30 for Called to Be Saints.7 The drop in pay no doubt offset the increased costs of production.

Modes of Production and Subversive Strategies The SPCK invariably purchased the copyright of its authors, but this does not seem to have posed a problem for Rossetti, as it did in her dealings with Macmillan. This contrast in her approach to religious and secular publication is brought home forcefully in her negotiations for two books published in 1881: Called to Be Saints with the SPCK and A Pageant and Other Poems with Macmillan. Although she sold her copyright for the first to the society without a murmur, she told Macmillan that “copyright is my hobby: with it I cannot part” and refused to sign the contract until she was assured of her rights in her work (Letters, 2:269). For her devotional work she was always willing to do what she resisted for her secular publications—sell her copyright outright. Moreover, she sold her copyright for whatever the SPCK offered—and, considering her reputation, the society did not offer much. According to SPCK historian W. K. Lowther Clarke, the society’s payment for copyright in the second half of the

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nineteenth century ranged from £100 to £400. Those authors “whose names on the title-page would enhance the sale of their books” received supplementary, “ex gratia payments” (186). As one of the most respected female poets of her day, Christina Rossetti’s name on the title page of her SPCK books surely increased sales. It even brought the society top billing in a review by G. A. Simcox in the Academy, which begins, “We are indebted to the Tract Committee of the ‘venerable’ Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” for this most recent publication by the “charming” Christina Rossetti (341). Despite the benefits of her name and fame, however, the society never gave Rossetti any supplementary payments, and offered copyright terms significantly below what Clarke gives as the usual rate of pay. Only the last of Rossetti’s books of devotional prose, The Face of the Deep (1892), received the substantial payment of £100; for the others she was paid £40 or less.8 In selling her copyright, moreover, Rossetti agreed to forgo any further interest in, or control of, her work. The society could make all decisions pertaining to reprints and new issues and assume all profits pertaining thereto. This could entail considerable economic sacrifice, for it was with her devotional writing— particularly The Face of the Deep and Verses (1893)—that Rossetti finally became a “popular” author, with bookshops unable to meet demands on first printing, and the publisher immediately issuing new editions. Rossetti did not receive a penny for Verses, which was by far the best-selling poetry collection of her career: by 1914, 21,000 copies had been sold.9 As the poems were culled from three devotional works for which the SPCK owned the copyright, all the profits from this collection went directly to the publisher. The poet not only seems to have been satisfied with this arrangement, she proposed “the verse-vol. scheme” herself to the SPCK’s editorial secretary, Edmund McClure (FL, 190). She even went so far as to copy out laboriously all the poems from Called to Be Saints, Time Flies, and The Face of the Deep herself, so as “to save all possible expense to the Society.” On learning that the first thousand copies of Verses had sold out ten days after publication, Rossetti is reported to have exclaimed: “I’m so glad for the sake of the Society. You know that it gets all the profits for the promotion of its work” (Bell, CR, 168). And the society could be quite keen to protect its rights to those profits. When William Michael wanted to bring out a complete edition of the Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti with Macmillan in 1904, the SPCK extracted £100 for permission to reproduce the poems from Verses (LWMR, 636–38).10 But Rossetti was apparently very willing to set spiritual gains against material losses. She not only deliberately chose the SPCK as the publisher for her devotional writing; she also wrote her first book for them “with a special eye to the Xtian Knowledge Society” and its audience of “persons who may possibly learn

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something from my book,” as she explained in a letter announcing the imminent appearance of Seek and Find in 1879 (Letters, 2:213). As she had done for Speaking Likenesses, Rossetti was again writing “with an eye to the market,” but this time it was one she knew far better than she did the juvenile market. She had been familiar with the work of the SPCK for decades, for this Christian society was very much a family affair. Cousin Teodorico Pietrocola Rossetti worked for the SPCK on a new edition of Diodati’s Bible in the fifties (WMR, Diary, 74); Christina herself read proof for the society in the sixties (Letters, 1:190, 226); Maria published her Letters to My Bible Class with them in 1870; and the entire female household of Rossetti-Polidori women contributed to the society’s charitable activities in whatever way they could. Frances Rossetti’s Diary (kept in fact by Christina) is full of references to trips to the SPCK offices with her daughter, sometimes “in a cab with Charlotte and Eliza.”11 That “excellent old Aunt Eliza” left the society a legacy of £500 on her death in 1893 (Maser, 100). For her part, Christina supported the society with an annual subscription,12 knowing that its charitable goal of providing good Christian literature at a cheap price to the lower-middle and working classes meant that it had to rely on subscriptions, donations, and legacies over and above its publishing income to remain in operation (W. K. Clarke, 154). When Christina told Dante Gabriel that she was “glad to throw my grains of dust into the religious scale” (Letters, 2:257), she signaled her willingness to sacrifice both public reputation and personal income for the purpose of providing Christian knowledge to the less educated classes targeted by the society as its principal audience (W. K. Clarke, 181). Although many readers of Christina Rossetti’s devotional prose no doubt were, as other critics have suggested, devout middle-class women like herself,13 the history of the SPCK suggests that these books were in fact principally distributed according to a class rather than a gender system of market differentiation. Priced to make them affordable to the lower-middle class—Seek and Find, for instance, sold for only 2s 6d—SPCK books were also, by tradition, “intended to be bought by people who would give them to ‘the poor’” (W. K. Clarke, 181). It was this sense of her audience that led Rossetti to write her “simple work[s],” and to “adapt” them to those who had had less opportunity for a literary education and less leisure for Bible study (Letters, 2:205–6). This perhaps explains why these works are so singularly devoid of literary references but so rich in lengthy passages from Scripture; so careful to connect the Old Testament with the New, collate pertinent references, and provide chapter and verse; so keen to combine authoritative commentary with legendary tradition and personal anecdote; and so scrupulous in avoiding theological controversy. These strategies were no doubt acceptable also to her other, more immedi-

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ate, audience: the Reverend gentlemen on the SPCK’s Tract Committee and the bishops on its Board of Referees. The humble voice adapted in her devotional prose, with its apologetic prefaces and many parenthetical asides asking forgiveness for error and indulgence for independent speculation, seems directed specifically at this group of male readers who had the power to determine if her seeds of wisdom would be broadcast among the populace or discarded with the tares. But, as Joel Westerholm and others have demonstrated, Rossetti’s limited claims for her authority, scholarship, and understanding were disingenuous (13). From the safety of a radical Christian orthodoxy, her devotional prose launches a concerted attack on the economic and patriarchal values of the Victorian middle and upper classes (Harrison, “Sage Discourse,” 91). Most critics mine Called to Be Saints for the author’s personal references or for “source material for the study of jewel and flower images in Rossetti’s poetry” (Westerholm, 13) but dismiss it as having little in the way of cultural critique to offer. What scholars have not noticed is that Rossetti’s subversive strategies in this work are subtly played out in the book’s symbolic structures. With its beautifully ruled pages, floral head- and tailpieces, and large botanical line drawings, Called to Be Saints is, as her first biographer recognized, “more thoroughly and beautifully built up through symbolism than any other of Christina Rossetti’s devotional books” (Bell, CR, 295). Within her symbolic interpretations of both the visible world and the biblical tradition, Rossetti develops a complex system of correspondences. These correspondences serve to praise the weak, the lowly, the “common,” at the expense of the powerful and privileged, thereby mirroring her anticipated audience of women and workers and launching an indirect critique of contemporary Victorian gender and class hierarchies. In her preface (“The Key to My Book”) Rossetti defends herself against the charge of “dwelling too prominently on the servant in lieu of the Master” by invoking the example “of Abigail, who, because she was the King’s bride, protested ‘Let thine handmaid be a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord’” (CS, xiv). Praising servanthood as the quintessence of the Christian faith, Rossetti implies that her own readers, destined to provide service to others under the present conditions of Victorian patriarchy and industrial capitalism, were yet closer to the Master than their own masters, who appeared determined to serve Mammon rather than imitate Christ as Servant. Rossetti further justifies her symbolic approach to expressing spiritual truth by invoking the figure of David as the type of poet.14 Her imaginative “suggestions” are fully justified “so long as with David [her] musings are on God’s works, among the chief whereof is His sinful Saint made perfect.” Furthermore, she feels justified “so long as with St. Timothy”—the type of servant—her “meditations are on charity, faith, purity, which array the Saints of Christ in a robe

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more excellent than the glory of Solomon or the loveliness of a lily” (xiv). Thus empowering herself through the precedents of handmaiden, poet, and humble servant, Rossetti sets out likewise to empower her audience by teaching them that spiritual truth is not the property of “those who are gorgeously appareled and live delicately.” As she points out, “the Gospel records more lessons drawn by our Master from a seed or a plant than from a pearl.” In her own book, therefore, Rossetti promises to “gather simples and try to spell out their lessons” (xv–xvi). In choosing common English wildflowers “familiar to the eye and dear to the heart” (xviii), Rossetti celebrates the commonplace while at the same time enjoining her audience to read quotidian details with a spiritual sight leading to “a more pointed lesson” (xviii). In other words, she wants her readers to learn to read the everyday objects of common experience as emblems of spiritual import. With her great seventeenth-century predecessor, Francis Quarles, Rossetti asks her Victorian audience to consider “what are the Heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphics and Emblems of [God’s] glory?” (Quarles, “To the Reader”). Rossetti not only calls us to be saints, but also to be readers/interpreters of the material world.

Called to Be Saints: A Victorian Emblem Book In A Victorian at Bay Anne Tuell claims that all Rossetti’s devotional works, written “in a simplicity rarely met since the ‘holy facetiousness’ of the seventeenth century,” belong “in the true tradition of the emblem” (58). Strictly speaking, however, it is only the illustrated Called to Be Saints, with its interdependent image and text, that legitimately belongs to the emblem genre. The notion that “for every aspect of creation there must exist the corresponding Divine Archetype” (LS, 13) was basic to Rossetti’s religious view of life and approach to art. Because she had been steeped since childhood in continental and native figural traditions, it is not surprising that her visual imagination should have produced one of the fullest expressions in the nineteenth century of the emblem books so popular in the seventeenth. It is also surely appropriate that a religious publishing house founded in that century should bring out a book whose physical form hearkens back to the days of its origins, when Francis Quarles was one of the most popular poets in the kingdom. Rossetti seems to have shared her predecessor’s view that pictures not only added to a book’s beauty but also encouraged readers “to peep further, that they may seek out their meanings in our annexed illustrations, in which may lurk some sentence or expression, so evidently pertinent to their estates, persons, or affections, as will, at that instant or afterwards, make way for those considerations, which will at last wholly change them.” Like Quarles, Rossetti believed in the power of art to instigate change,

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and it was radical change she was after. Although she may not have shared the evolutionary perspective of Quarles’s Victorian biographer, who saw “[o]ur forefathers in the seventeenth century, so far as regarded their intellectual capacities,” as “but children of a larger growth” (“Memoir” in Quarles, xxi), Rossetti may well have seen her own audience of indifferently educated women and workers in a similar light. The pictures in Called to Be Saints would add beauty to their lives, interest to their reading, and spur to their interpretive and imaginative powers. If her emblem book truly “worked,” her readers would find matter pertinent to them that would inspire a new vision of the temporal world and its conditions and result in a new way of living. Reprinted in response to the demand for seventeenth-century devotional works initiated by the Oxford Movement, Quarles’s Emblems, Divine and Moral is clearly one of the sources for Rossetti’s Called to Be Saints, which uses a similar organization of picture, motto, scriptural quotation, poetry, and prose commentaries. Another inspiration, closer to home, is no doubt her favorite Tractarian poet, Isaac Williams. The Baptistery (1842) and The Altar (1847) were each, like Called to Be Saints, “a mélange of verse, prose, and illustrations” (G. B. Tennyson, 163). John Keble’s The Christian Year, which exhibited “the widespread emblematic tendencies of the age” (G. Hönnighausen, 3), is surely a precedent in its figural poetic style if not in image/text interaction, and it also provided the basic structural principle for Rossetti’s book, the church calendar. It is in the sections on stones and flowers that Called to Be Saints truly becomes an emblem book, particularly since the latter are accompanied by precisely rendered botanical drawings of the celebrated flower and, like the Emblems of Francis Quarles, begin with a motto and conclude with an epigraph. The emblematic relationship between the botanical drawings and interpretive commentary in Called to Be Saints is also influenced by the Victorian language of flowers. Sabine Haass and Gisela Hönnighausen have demonstrated the important connections between Victorian flower books and contemporary emblematic tendencies, and the latter has also shown this “language” at work in Rossetti’s prose and poetry. As Jack Goody explains, however, this new literary product of the nineteenth century was not exclusively secular, and its practitioners included “Christian apologists who viewed the meaning of flowers as coming from God rather than man.” Like these writers, Christina found some justification for her botanical emblems “in the use of flowers for worship,” as she does when she praises the holly she allots to St. Stephen’s Day for decorating churches. Like them, too, she found further justification “in the many ‘popular’ names of Christian origin given to plants with curative and other properties” (Goody, 139, 140), as she does when she asks her reader to contemplate the

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familiar name of holly as derived from holy-tree: and thus connecting it with all holy things we note how its blossom shadows forth the hue of innocence, and its leaf the flourishing of hope, and its berry the colour of the blood which is the life; its earthward side is guarded by sharpness, as of self-denial; its heavenward aspect is smooth, as by peaceful contemplation; its leaf fades not, its blossom is comely, its fruit is the crown of its beauty. (CS, 60–61)

By showing her audience how to read the specific details of the common holly plant for spiritual messages, Rossetti is teaching the Tractarian lesson that God’s Book of Nature is open to all who have eyes to see, regardless of their level of income, education, or leisure. Throughout Called to Be Saints she celebrates the “language of flowers” as a silent language for the unlettered. These lessons are reinforced by the botanical images that permit immediate study for the urban reader (fig. 4.1). Thus she praises the iris, which “by its mere intricacies of beauty, . . . without speech or language, declare[s] to us the glory of God” (CS, 335), and the harebell, which “teaches us as by a painted parable the holiness of silence under frets and provocations; a humbly-bowing silence, joined to a face recalling the aspect of heaven” (376). With its motto, “Silence that speaks,” the harebell becomes an emblem for the way the visible world abounds with spiritual messages. Whereas in Speaking Likenesses the narrator aunt describes “bell flowers [that] rang without clappers” (123), here Rossetti praises the “clapperless bell” “which despite all its trembling neither buffet of wind-puffs nor spurning of feet can move from its serenity of silence” (CS, 376). And yet the silent harebell, like all the botanical emblems evoked in Called to Be Saints, is made to speak a spiritual language. In a sense, all these plants and flowers are shown to be so many “speaking likenesses” of their creator in their various graces and attributes for, as Rossetti explains, “all things good are, each in its several degree, the mirror of that Essential Goodness which formed them” (CS, 432). Rossetti’s emblems reflect, “like terrene mirrors” (SF, 24), the glory of the creator, and in this sense Called to Be Saints celebrates the visible, material, world. This celebration is anchored in the botanical drawings which, devoid of frame, decorative embellishment, and signature, provide their own kind of “faithful mirror” (CS, xv). The scientific illustrations follow “truth to nature” in the way of Ruskin’s drawing more than the Pre-Raphaelite artists who followed his dictum, for their purpose is to depict, as closely as possible, what is actually seen by the “natural eye” unadorned by imaginative vision.15 In other words, they offer the heightened realism of Pre-Raphaelite art without its narrative or symbolic import. These latter features, however, are supplied in Rossetti’s accompanying commentaries, which are designed to send the reader back to the

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4.1 “Harebell,” Called to Be Saints (London: SPCK, 1881), 377. By permission of The British Library. BLC Shelf #4823.cc 5.

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image—and the object it represents—in order to reconsider the story it tells and the message it brings in the details of its physical form. It is for this reason that image and text in Called to Be Saints are as interdependent as those found in traditional emblem books. The verbal commentaries require the illustrations to complete the “nature-portraits,” just as the pictures rely on the text “in conveying a . . . pointed lesson” (CS, xviii). While the flower drawings provide a ground for the text’s meaning, this function may not be shared by the book’s other artistic embellishments: the decorated initial letters and headpieces which seem to be merely typographical ornaments. The illustration of the hepaticas for St. Matthias’s Day, for example, works with the text to show “the flower small yet conspicuous, the prettily outlined leaves grouped in clumps” (170). The tailpiece on the facing page—a stock publisher’s ornament of a Scottish thistle—appears to have no immediate connection to the meaning of the emblem (fig. 4.2). On the other hand, the decorated initial letter introducing the commentary on St. Luke’s marigold does seem to refer to “‘the golden crown of Mary’” described in the text (470) and pictured on the facing page (fig. 4.3). This attention to publisher’s ornament may seem like over-reading, but a materialist hermeneutics must attend to all details of a book’s physical form. Particularly when placed in the context of an emblematic text, all visual features invite interpretation, for the images of traditional emblem books “were intended to be read as part of the text,” even though the symbolic significance of the picture might seem arbitrary or contrived (Freeman, ix, 33). The addition of the botanical drawings, so necessary to the successful working of Rossetti’s emblematic commentaries, seems to have been the responsibility of the SPCK rather than of the author. The pictures may even have been taken from the SPCK’s stock of botanical drawings for schoolbooks. The scientific illustrations in their popular The Elements of Botany for Families and Schools do not, however, resemble the style of those in Called to Be Saints. While the society may have had other illustrations of this nature in their stock, it seems more likely that the SPCK commissioned an artist specifically to produce the illustrations for Rossetti’s book. Both Rossetti’s decreased payment and the prolonged production schedule support this inference. The likelihood of an individual commission is reinforced by the drawings themselves, as each one is suited not only to the text but also to the dimensions of the page. The SPCK would not have been averse to hiring an artist for this work, provided it could get one who would do the work cheaply, as it believed “firmly in illustration as important in conveying its message” (Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books, 26). But the society does not seem to have valued the illustrations for themselves and gives no acknowledgment for the artist’s work on the title page.16 This omission was in

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4.2 “Hepaticas,” double-page opening for St. Matthias, Called to Be Saints (London: SPCK, 1881), 170–71. By permission of The British Library. BLC Shelf #4823.cc 5.

keeping with the SPCK’s long-standing policy of withholding an author’s—or artist’s—name unless it was “good enough” to add to the book’s market value (W. K. Clarke, 175). Rossetti’s name had this cachet; the obscure artist’s had not. Both the nature of the drawings and the anonymity of the artist suggest that Rossetti’s unknown collaborator in Called to Be Saints, who sometimes signs with the initials “T.S.” (fig. 4.2), was likely a woman. As Jack Kramer observes, “Anonymous was a woman of flowers.” Many of the drawings in Victorian botany books and magazines were produced by women artists, sometimes with the meager acknowledgment, “drawn by a lady” (46). Both botanical drawing and flower painting were considered ideally suited to women (Irwin, 156). In an article on “Flower Painting” in the girls’ paper Atalanta, for instance, Lady Lindsay models the art for her female readership with lovely line drawings of honeysuckle, cyclamen, forget-me-nots, wild roses, and marguerites, each botanical illustration an attempt to represent “nature’s silent poetry” in all its particularity

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4.3 “Marigolds,” double-page opening for St. Luke, Called to Be Saints (London: SPCK, 1881), 470–71. By permission of The British Library. BLC Shelf #4823.cc 5.

(602). Even the science of botany was considered “especially a feminine pursuit.” The writer of the SPCK’s Elements of Botany connects the study “of the flowers of the field” to femininity by praising it as a particularly beautiful maternal duty as well as an intuitive means to an enlightened spiritual understanding “of the power, wisdom, and goodness” of the Creator (6). This book may indeed have been among Rossetti’s inspirations for her botanical emblems in Called to Be Saints, for she received it from her Uncle Henry in the year before she wrote the manuscript.17 Other inspirations date back to childhood, as in Count Pepoli’s 1839 gift to Maria of the Elements of Drawing and Flower Painting, which she generously shared with her siblings (LDGR, 1:3), and the botany books pored over in the family home, such as Gerard’s Herball and Peter Parley’s Illustrations of the Vegetable Kingdom (Arseneau and Bentley, 56). The latter, like the SPCK botany book, also celebrates the science of botany and the art of flower drawing as particularly appropriate occupations for the “ladies” (lxii).

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Rossetti herself liked to sketch flowers and plants, though she was far from a scientific or botanical illustrator. Nevertheless, her line drawings and watercolors were prized as offerings for fund-raising bazaars, particularly at the All Saints Mission Home in Clifton where Christina and her mother spent a month visiting Maria each summer after she joined the order. Christina typically occupied her holiday time there, as she told William, in “exercising my old craft of painting despicable sprigs on note paper corners, for sale at 1d per sheet,—for the good of the house!” (Letters, 2:89). Such ephemera do not, of course, tend to survive the passing of a century and more, but a small decorated card prepared about the same time as a gift for Frances Rossetti gives an idea of the nature of Christina’s work in this mode (plate 2).18 A careful line drawing in black and red ink on the back of Frances Rossetti’s calling card, its style is decorative rather than scientific. The card features a central cross with a grapevine ascending its vertical post. On either side of the cross stand a rose with many thorns and a lily. Although these symbols for representing love, faith, and purity (as well as Christ and his mother) are found throughout Rossetti’s poetry and prose, the idea for the design did not, apparently, originate with the poet. Rather, as Christina wrote on the back of the card, the design was “Suggested by” her mother and “executed by her C.G.R.”19 The little card, with its symbolic image and intriguing acknowledgment, opens up a view on Rossetti’s devotional writing which has not been much considered: the extent to which her work developed in the context of the daily life of the devout female Rossettis.20 In addition to studying the Bible and holding daily prayers together, these women also discussed matters of faith and interpretation with each other, as we know from Christina’s occasional mention of such conversations in Time Flies: A Reading Diary and in scattered remarks elsewhere. She credited her mother, for example, “from whose words I ought to have imbibed much wisdom, and from whose example many virtues,” with the understanding of one of her most frequently cited scriptures: “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life” (Prov. xiii.12; see TF, 80). Steeped in a figural tradition that enabled her to read with ease the emblematic design Dante Gabriel produced to accompany his birthday sonnet for her,21 Frances Rossetti brought a typological hermeneutics to the reading of biblical texts. For her, “the Cross of Christ Crucified” became “that Tree of Life which satisfied the world’s heartsick hope” (TF, 80) as foretold in the Revelation of St. John (22:2).22 The symbolic design “suggested” by Frances and “executed by her C.G.R.,” which transforms the Cross into the Tree of Life by the addition of the growing vine, seems to represent an image of satisfied desire for the Rossetti women. The decorated card also constitutes a visual encapsulation of the basic mes-

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sage of Called to Be Saints, which Rossetti expresses by using a similar Tree of Life image in “The Key to My Book.” On this “one tree of God’s own planting,” from whose single root all virtues derive, Rossetti places the traditional red rose and white lily as emblems of love and faith, together with her own favorite symbol for hope, the blue harebell (CS, xv).23 The Tree of Life motif on Frances Rossetti’s calling card constitutes a physical trace connecting Rossetti’s devotional work to a family context in which typological and emblematic habits of mind predominated. Rossetti’s principal silent partner in the preparation of Called to Be Saints, however, was not her mother, but her sister Maria. Of all Rossetti’s books written during Frances Rossetti’s lifetime, Called to Be Saints is the only one the author did not dedicate to her mother. Instead Rossetti dedicated it, “In Hope of our Re-union, to the dear and gracious memory of My Sister.” The evidence suggests that Called to Be Saints may have been conceived in collaboration with Maria during Rossetti’s stay with her dying sister at All Saints Hospital in Eastbourne in the summer of 1876, and perhaps developed in subsequent conversations over the fall. Christina must have been working on the manuscript during her sister’s last months because it was in early November 1876—a few weeks before Maria’s death from uterine cancer—that she announced the completion of “a sort of devotional reading-book for the red-letter Saints’ Days” to Alexander Macmillan—completed, that is, except for “a dedication to my Sister” (Letters, 2:109). When Macmillan rejected her devotional work and she turned to the SPCK, it was with a sense of following in her sister’s holy footsteps. As she explained to George Gordon Hake, “My dear sister once made them a present of a M.S., & I (tho’ on no such disinterested terms) like to bear her company” (Letters, 2:213). Rossetti’s acknowledgment, in “The Key to My Book,” of “how deeply and widely I am indebted to the spoken or written words of many” surely alludes in part to conversations with Maria on the subject of the book (CS, xvii). Indeed, Maria must be the innominata “dear friend, to whom my book and I owe much,” who is credited with offering an “edifying train of thought” in Rossetti’s commentary on St. John the Baptist (279) and is referred to in passing at other points in the book. In a way, Called to Be Saints is a love-gift to the departed Maria. With the “simples” she gathers, and the lessons she draws from them, Rossetti hopes to “adorn the shrines of Christ’s friends with flowers, and plant a garden round their hallowed graves” (xvi). Rossetti’s commentary on the emblem of the snowdrop, “Our Lady of February,” which she assigns to the Feast of the Presentation and Purification of the Virgin, seems to have a more than usual degree of personal application (fig. 4.4). Although brief, her description of the snowdrop is one of the loveliest in the book. Like Lady Lindsay, Rossetti obviously found that “Snowdrops are lovely and lovable to us all, not only for their own pure beauty,” but also for their role

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“as Spring’s messengers” and spiritual signs (601). The flower was particularly associated in Rossetti’s mind with Maria, as her birthday was in February. After Maria’s death, Rossetti frequently brought snowdrops to her grave in Brompton Cemetery. As late as 1887 she recorded her special love of the flower in a small pencil sketch of four snowdrops, copied “from nature,” which she enclosed in a letter to William in San Remo, reminding him in a postscript that “last Thursday was Maria’s birthday: She would have turned 60.”24 The appearance of the snowdrop decoration on the verso of Called to Be Saints’s dedicatory page to Maria underscores this association. But as the commentary on the snowdrop emblem makes clear, Rossetti’s connection of this flower with Maria likely went beyond the congruence of its blooming time with her February birthday to include an association with her namesake, the Virgin Mary. Her discussion of the significance of flower names in Called to Be Saints shows that Rossetti took the business of naming very seriously. She had a propensity for reading human names symbolically as well, including her own: “Christina” she saw as a name binding her to the Christian faith.25 Her assignation of the snowdrop as Mary’s flower suggests that she also saw Maria’s name symbolically binding her to the life and attributes of the Virgin. No doubt Maria’s election to take the vows of an Anglican nun reinforced this view of the sister Christina called “one of the dearest and most saintly persons I ever knew” (TF, 213).26 Rossetti’s commentary on the snowdrop praises the plant that “is all coolness and purity, with refined humbleness and patience of hope: at the least, to our thinking” (CS, 148). The “nature-portrait” is, of course, meant to represent the Virgin Mary whose flower it is; but it also seems to serve as a private description of the older sister Rossetti revered for these very virtues of humility, patience, and purity. In the spirit of St. Luke, who by tradition was a painter of “many likenesses of our Lord and of the Blessed Virgin” (452), Rossetti hopes her pen will transmit “her calm and holy spiritual portrait” (470) through the symbolic description of the flower she has assigned to her. Called “Our Lady of February, the Fair Maid of February, and the Purification flower,” the snowdrop, in both “its aspect and its names . . . turn[s] our minds to purity and piety,” according to Rossetti—just as Maria’s name and memory called to purity and piety the sister who loved her. This private association seems to be underscored in Rossetti’s closing remarks about the snowdrop: “and the common soil whence it springs may become for us as a stepping-stone towards heaven” (149). Since in Rossetti’s spiritual system all virtues ultimately derive from the same root, “everything is directly related to God and in a vertical correspondence.” By the same token, however, as Gisela Hönnighausen argues, “all things on earth must also be connected in a ‘lateral correspondence’ and thus become interchangeable” (4). The snowdrop and Maria seem interchangeable in Ros-

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4.4 “Snowdrop,” Called to Be Saints (London: SPCK, 1881), 148. By permission of The British Library. BLC Shelf #4823.cc 5.

setti’s commentary by virtue of their common connection, through the Blessed Virgin, with the divine. As we have seen, Rossetti uses this system of lateral correspondences in Called to Be Saints to connect the human with the vegetable class—the individual Christian or saint with the common English flower. By extension and implication, however, Rossetti’s lateral correspondences call into question the arbitrary social differentiation of human individuals by class and gender. The flowers Rossetti chooses as emblems for the saints are not the lofty lily and rose, which are reserved for Christ, but rather the ordinary flowers of the English countryside. In her determination to demonstrate that saintliness is best represented by the lowly and the commonplace, Rossetti even selects weeds. She

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chooses groundsel and chickweed, for example, “which equally may be esteemed less than the least of all flowers,” to represent the “Holy Innocents, who being saints may yet be called ‘less than the least of all saints’” (CS, 107). Her emphasis on the common also leads her to select nonflowering plants so ordinary that they make no immediate impression on the viewer, such as ferns and grasses. Her choice of the bracken and the maidenhair ferns for St. Michael and all angels underscores her typical preference for the lower of two classes—in the case of the vegetable world, the flowerless rather than the flowering. Perhaps like their virginal human counterparts, flowerless plants such as ferns are nonetheless “endowed with properties nutritious, medicinal, or in some other mode serviceable to man” (CS, 446). Rossetti’s lengthy botanical description celebrating the “almost infinite variety” in “this world of foliage” no doubt derived from empirical observation of the “dwarf forests” she loved (448). She kept “a miniature glass-house containing ferns” in the drawing room of Torrington Square “and as long as she was able to do anything, she saw” to these “especial favourites” herself (Bell, CR, 149). In Speaking Likenesses Ella is praised for taking pains over her painting of a fern, and perhaps Rossetti too sometimes used the occupants of her glass house to “copy from nature.” In her nature-portrait in Called to Be Saints she renders nature with botanical exactness but uses that very precision as a vehicle to impart symbolic lessons about “service and strength” (CS, 449). Moreover, her praise of the common and overlooked constitutes a celebration of the hidden life of many of her readers. When she severs the stalk of “a well-developed frond” of bracken and discovers “markings which (more or less) resemble the figure of the imperial spread eagle,” she is led “to a thought of wings out of sight, and angels unawares” (449). Rossetti’s botanical symbols address the potential beauty, power, and divine destiny of the human class whose barren lives made them analogous to flowerless ferns. “Let us learn something from the grass of the field which God clothes,” Rossetti urges in her preface (xvi). She concludes her book, appropriately enough, with an encomium on grasses, the humble, ubiquitous, plant she selects for All Saints (515–18). As we have seen, Rossetti draws a radical lesson from the grasses and other lowly flowers she studies: that “all virtues have one and the same root” (xv). In her closing remarks she returns to this notion: “From the Grasses no less than from the heavenly host, from mankind at large, even from Apostles, we gather one same reiterated lesson: Angels share one nature with devils, sanctified souls with souls nigh unto cursing, St. Matthias with Judas Iscariot, the very staff of our life with the noxious darnel” (518)—and, by implication, man with woman, master with servant. Rossetti’s system of lateral correspondence implicitly links individuals differentiated by class and gender through their common

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nature in God in a radical leveling that eliminates earthly stratifications in favor of the single hierarchy that matters—that connecting the divine with the earthly, the eternal with the temporal. The interdependence of image and text in Called to Be Saints is part of this message of difference and sameness, for despite their distinct material forms, picture and word are made to spell out a single, reiterated lesson about the nature and meaning of the present world. Rossetti celebrates the beauty of nature only to glorify its creator. She itemizes the physical details of material objects as a means of reaching eternal truth; she levels human distinctions to emphasize a common spiritual purpose and destiny. Thus she values the sapphire, not for its commercial value, but “as a piece of heaven dropped down to earth” which “does indeed link earth to heaven, time to eternity, the old Israel to the new, Eden to Paradise” (40). Similarly she celebrates St. John the Apostle for his “life surely of hope deferred and desire waited for, and eyes that failed for looking upward” (72). This is the life Rossetti calls all saints to in her book. Like her mother, Frances, her eyes are not satisfied with the present, but look forward to the accomplishment of her desire in the fullness of time. “Our face is set to reach Jerusalem,” she writes in the final poem of Called to Be Saints—not on this “rainbow-coloured bubble” (519). And yet, like her seventeenth-century predecessor Quarles, who similarly rejected “This bubble world” in his Emblems (1.4:15), Rossetti paradoxically uses representations of the world’s beauty to teach the lesson that all visible signs are valuable not for themselves, but merely as symbols of the divine. Thus her emblem book provides a spiritual lesson in material form, “earthly pictures with heavenly meaning.”

Emblems and Illuminations In 1893 Eleanor Vere Boyle (E.V.B.), perhaps inspired by the emblematic tradition revived in Rossetti’s Called to Be Saints and the eschatological thrust of much of her work, published A Book of the Heavenly Birthdays. Intended as an aid to daily personal meditation on “the End to which all things draw” (ix), the small book is organized according to a “Kalendar” [sic] with eighteen parts ranging from “I. The Grave” to “XVIII. Death the Friend.” Each section contains a symbolic drawing by E.V.B., a motto, and a number of selected verses on the assigned subject from such poets as Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Procter, William Morris, Walter Savage Landor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and so on. A self-taught watercolor artist and illustrator much admired by Ruskin,27 E.V.B. had long-standing connections with Christina Rossetti and her circle. In 1854 she was proposed, along with her friend Lady Waterford, for the Folio Society, a

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sketching club established by members of the defunct Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their associates (LDGR, 1:180). In 1866 she collaborated with Lady Waterford on illustrations for Rossetti’s poetry.28 But it was not until the end of the century that the Hon. Mrs. Boyle was able to bring out an illustrated book that included excerpts from Rossetti’s poetry and emulated her emblematic technique. In her Book of the Heavenly Birthdays E.V.B. pays homage to the poet’s precedent by reproducing favorite Rossetti devices such as the butterfly rising from its chrysalis. In the drawing facing the excerpted verses from “Passing away, saith the World, passing away”—“At midnight, at morning, one certain day, / The Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay; / Then I answered, ‘Yea’” [sic]—E.V.B. used another favorite Rossetti emblem, the harebell representing hope. Placed in front of the dark tomb, the device took on even more spiritual significance (E.V.B., 24–25).29 Just as the religious poetry of John Keble and Isaac Williams inspired Rossetti to draw symbolic pictures in the margins of her personal copies of their books, so too did her own devotional writing excite the visual imagination of other devout women. While E.V.B. had the name and professional status to disseminate her visual response to Rossetti in the international marketplace—A Book of the Heavenly Birthdays being published simultaneously in London and Chicago—other women in England and America quietly enshrined their responses in works of art not intended for such wide distribution. Although it is impossible to know how many of these private works of illustration were made, some at least have survived. Two of these—one from each end of Rossetti’s career—are by women skilled in the medieval art of illumination; another is by a floral painter inspired by the Victorian language of flowers and a deep love for the poet. The calligraphy and miniature painting of these women’s decorated pages connect them to another, alternative tradition of illustration practiced by Rossetti herself and countless other Victorian women. Embodying a personal response in a material form, such private acts of illustration combine a decorative function with a hermeneutic effect. Alice Donlevy, an American woman artist who wrote and lectured on the art of illumination (Petteys), privately published Consider: Outlines for Illumination for limited circulation in 1866. This was the same year that Rossetti’s “Consider” appeared in the January issue of Macmillan’s Magazine, so Donlevy must have been one of the poem’s first readers.30 Donlevy’s “book” comprises five illuminated plates: one for the title and one for each of the four verses of Rossetti’s poem. The first word of each stanza, “Consider,” is isolated in large, ornamented calligraphy at the top of the page. The lettering, borders, and decorations differ for each page; in each case these ornamental details make specific reference to

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the stanza they ornament. The plate for the first stanza, for instance, responds to Rossetti’s “Consider / The lilies of the field, whose bloom is brief; / We are as they, / Like them we fade away, / As doth a leaf ” (Donlevy, plate 2)31 by depicting at least six kinds of lilies to consider: calla lilies, tiger lilies, water lilies, lilies of the valley, Easter lilies, and day lilies (plate 3). The border surrounding the plate for stanza 2 incorporates a medallion of two small birds above the words “Consider / The sparrows of the air, of small account,” while the subsequent two plates develop variations on the lilies and birds theme. Like Lady Lindsay, or indeed like Rossetti herself, Donlevy seems equally inspired by the material particularity of the natural world and by the spiritual message contained in its beauties. Clearly, Donlevy has understood the Tractarian lesson Rossetti reiterated throughout her career that “Flowers preach to us if we will hear” (CP, 1:76). It is unlikely that Rossetti ever saw Donlevy’s illuminated pages, but she may have seen those prepared by an anonymous artist sometime after the publication of The Face of the Deep. In the center of a small notebook with a blue marbled cover preserved in the Troxell Collection at Princeton University are four illuminated pages of text taken from Rossetti’s last devotional work. The pages before and after these remain blank—it is a workbook rather than a publication—and there is nothing to indicate either the owner of the book or the calligrapher (if different).32 Unlike Donlevy’s Consider, this is a work in progress. The ruled lines for the calligraphic script below the lettering on the fourth plate suggest that the original plan might have been to include more words from Rossetti’s text, while the amount of surrounding white space suggests that further embellishment was also planned. Another difference is that while Donlevy’s pages are really decorated calligraphy, these hearken back to the missal style of illumination, and include detailed miniature paintings as well as decorative ornaments for the lines of black and red gothic lettering. The date of the work is also unknown. As The Face of the Deep went into seven printings, all that can be certain is that the text was illuminated sometime after the first edition appeared in May 1892. The selection includes lines of prose as well as verse. The unknown illuminator seems to have been attracted, like E.V.B., to endtime themes, but also, like Alice Donlevy, to Rossetti’s iterated message of reading spiritual messages in natural phenomena. The first page is composed of a citation from the Revised Version of the Revelation of St. John cited and commented upon in The Face of the Deep: “I am the First and the Last, and the Living One; and I was dead” (FD, 43). The last illuminated page contains the quotation that concludes the commentary on these verses, “There is hope in thine end” (44). The two illuminated pages between these prose sections contain the poem that immediately precedes

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this commentary, introduced by the text “Let us encourage ourselves though he slay us yet to trust in him, by help of some of those parables of nature familiar to us all which speak of life reborn from lifelessness, or from death or from decay: a leafless tree, a chrysalis, a buried seed, an egg”: The twig sprouteth, The moth outeth, The plant springeth, The bird singeth: Tho’ little we sing to-day Yet are we better than they; Tho’ growing with scarce a showing Yet, please God, we are growing. The twig teacheth, The moth preacheth, The plant vaunteth, The bird chanteth, God’s mercy overflowing Merciful past man’s knowing. Please God to keep us growing Till the awful day of mowing. (42)33 Luminous watercolors in a fairy-tale style of illustration, the miniatures literally light up the text with their glowing colors while the chosen subjects provide another kind of illumination with their parallel narrative and symbolism. The third page of the notebook, for instance, is decorated around two boxes of text, separated by an inset picture, with three other miniatures distributed around the page (plate 4). The elaborate calligraphic design culminates at bottom right in a detailed botanical drawing of ripe flowers and seed pods, with a bird pictured flying above. The decoration relates to the singing bird and springing plant of Rossetti’s verse but also connects to the large illumination at the top of the page, which depicts the biblical parable of the sower, thus providing a hermeneutic context for the poem. In the miniature, a blackbird with his beak agape follows a man sowing seeds in a field. Another bird alights at his feet to eat the scattered seeds, while two more watch from a distance. The presence of the birds reinforces the poem’s likening of plant and animal life to human experience while at the same time recalling Christ’s story about the seeds that “fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up” (Matt. 13:4). By evoking the parable whose message is that God’s word is scattered freely but growth

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depends on receptivity, the unknown illuminator throws light on a biblical association implied, but not directly alluded to, in the verbal text. As in Called to Be Saints, Rossetti’s poem both likens and differentiates all growing things: “Tho’ little we sing to-day / Yet are we better than they; / Tho’ growing with scarce a showing, / Yet, please God, we are growing.” The second miniature on this page presents two cowled monks seated on the ground, illustrating the text’s point about spiritual differences in the midst of temporal commonalities. In the next inset picture, located just above the text block beginning “The twig teacheth,” the illuminated scene depicts an old man with a scythe to recall the lesson that after growth comes “The awful day of mowing.” The final picture represents a night scene, with a single figure walking toward a house from which one light shines. Reminiscent of Rossetti’s “Up-Hill,” in which a traveler seeks “for the night a resting-place” and is assured “You cannot miss that inn” (CP, 1:65–66), the scene reinforces the text’s underlying message of the spiritual pilgrimage necessary to reach the promised “hope in thine end.” Possibly the most personal of all pictorial responses to Rossetti’s work is found in a unique copy of Time Flies owned by Lisa Wilson, Rossetti’s closest friend in the last years of her life, and an aspiring poet and flower painter. In May 1885 Lisa called on Rossetti to collect the copy of Time Flies the poet had promised her after receiving her admiring messages (Marsh, CR, 538). The friendship that subsequently developed between the two women was communicated, in part at least, by the symbolic language of flowers. Rossetti wrote “To my Fior-di-Lisa” (CP, 3:347) for her friend, a short set of verses “casting Lisa as a lily and herself as a rose—their respective flower emblems” (Marsh, CR, 538). Labeled “On the Creation of her Book to my Fior-di-Lisa,” the holograph poem was later—presumably when the book returned to her possession upon Rossetti’s death—pasted in the front of the book of decorated verses that Wilson had given to her friend in 1892.34 This book of verses, like Wilson’s personal copy of Time Flies, is decorated with watercolor drawings of flowers that obviously speak a personal language of their own to the two women. On the dedication page (“To Christina, my dearest friend”) Wilson painted a beautiful spray of forget-me-nots beside the epigraph taken from “Monna Innominata”: Yet while I love my God the most, I deem That I can never love you overmuch; I love Him more, so let me love you too; Yea, as I apprehend, love is such I cannot love you if I love not Him, I cannot love Him if I love not you. (CP, 2:89)

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As this excerpt from Rossetti’s sonnet sequence suggests, Lisa’s verses are love poems to the older woman with whom she also shared a devout faith. The emblem of the forget-me-not, first seen on the dedication page, appears again in this volume beside verses particularly expressive of the poet’s love for her own unnamed “Lady.” Lisa takes this deeply personal emblem from Rossetti’s commentary in Time Flies for 8 July on the forget-me-not as the most apt “flower for love-lore.” As she did in Called to Be Saints, Rossetti reads the physical features of this common English flower for their symbolic meaning: It expresses a lofty affection, inasmuch as its corolla is heavenly blue; but this is picked out with pink, to stamp it as human and homely. It suggests how good stands not still, but goes on to become better; for its buds are prevalently pink, its expanded blossoms chiefly blue. Its centre is golden, love being a great giver and giving of its best. While by a crowning touch of appropriateness, its blossom stalk has a habit of dividing into a double spike of bloom. Thus showing us two that make up but one. “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (TF, 130).

The close relationship between these two women is marked by the recurring sprays of forget-me-nots with which Wilson decorated both Time Flies and her own verses. Their deep sympathy and understanding are also evident in her addition of a sheaf of harebells beside Rossetti’s entry for 27 April on her mother’s interpretation of the scripture “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life” (TF, 80). Like E.V.B., Wilson has adopted Rossetti’s private symbol for hope. Whereas the harebell in the Victorian language of flowers generally stands for submission or grief (Greenaway, 21), Rossetti always claimed “hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth” (CP, 2:22). Even in her “Tree of Life” design on Frances Rossetti’s calling card, Christina had included a harebell depending from each bar of the cross’s horizontal beam (plate 2). As a “fair blue [object] within our reach,” the harebell, for Christina, acted as a terrene mirror reflecting a spiritual image (SF, 24). The devout women who responded to her teachings produced “earthly pictures with heavenly meanings” that demonstrated they had heard her message that “all creation would teach us spiritual lessons and gladden us by heavenly meanings, if we cherished” love as the interpreter (TF, 65). As Wilson wrote in the margin of Time Flies on the date of Rossetti’s death, 29 December 1894: “The law of Love was ever on her lips. Love is her last message to us who love her: Love eternal.”35 Lisa Wilson’s watercolor drawings for Time Flies convey a message shared by other illustrators of Christina Rossetti’s devotional work, from “T.S.’s” botanical drawings for Called to Be Saints and E.V.B.’s symbolic vignettes for her Heavenly

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Birthdays to Alice Donlevy’s ornamented calligraphy for “Consider” and the unknown artist’s illuminated miniatures for The Face of the Deep: “Flowers preach to us if we will hear” (CP, 1:76). What makes Wilson’s work unique is that she alone of all these illustrators had a relationship with the author. The other artists all produced their work without personal knowledge of, or contact with, Rossetti. In this sense, they are harbingers of the twentieth-century illustrations of Rossetti’s work that began to appear in the marketplace as soon as the expiration of copyright after her death made her visual imagination legally available to dozens of professional artists and enterprising publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.

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5 The Religious Rossetti For in Miss Rossetti we recognize the completest consecration of woman’s gifts of poetry to the highest uses. —Rev. B. F. Westcott

Remembering Christina Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. (CP, 1:37)

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HERE is no blue plaque outside the house on Torrington Square where Christina Rossetti died 29 December 1894. But if one goes into a bookstore run by The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge a hundred years and more after her death, her name is preserved in the computer database. The Rossetti offered for sale by her former publisher is not, however, a reprint of one of her devotional books, or even a reissue of her popular Verses of 1893. Instead, the bookstore agent offers a small

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illustrated book published by the Souvenir Press in their “inspirational books” series. In this context the title seems particularly resonant: Remember Me When I Am Gone Away. This is how Rossetti is remembered by the SPCK: as a souvenir article to be sold for £5.00. As the author of a popular poem traditionally read at memorial services across Great Britain. But not as the author of devotional works that have stood the test of time. The society had a different future planned for her. Capitalizing on its possession of copyright in her work, the SPCK began promoting the souvenir Rossetti soon after her death. Her Tractarian propensity to write on festivals in the liturgical year provided a rich resource, for the religious publisher had always specialized in Season Tracts and publications related to the Church Calendar (Allen and McClure, 458). As time went on, the Rossetti oeuvre became a regular industry of prizes and gifts, for by the early twentieth century the society’s new publications consisted mainly of reward books produced for Day and Sunday Schools (W. K. Clarke, 196). Often, the society used visual images—for reasons which will become clear, the term “illustrations” is not entirely appropriate—to enhance its publishing objective. Its goal was simply, in the words of SPCK editorial secretary and historian William Kemp Lowther Clarke, “propaganda, or promoting knowledge of the faith” (210) through the sale of books.1 To that pious end the society was willing to reproduce Christina as a contemporary Christian saint and her literary works as devotional tracts.

Santa Christina In the January 1912 issue of the Bookman, Rossetti’s sometime acolyte, the Irish poet Katherine Tynan, wrote a eulogistic article entitled “Santa Christina.”2 Far from being something new, this canonization had in fact been announced in the publications of the SPCK soon after Rossetti’s death. Capitalizing on the attention given to their author in the little industry of posthumous memorials and appreciations, the SPCK commodified a Rossetti whose saintly life would be associated with her devotional work. Thus her life and her work were marketed together as part of their evangelical publishing agenda. This project was inaugurated with the SPCK’s publication of Ellen Proctor’s Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti in 1895 and the Reverend Westcott’s Appreciation of the Late Christina Georgina Rossetti in 1899. Published under the direction of the Tract Committee,3 these short elegiac works had the sanction of the Established Church built into the very architecture of the books themselves. The Christina Rossetti they constructed was used by the SPCK to promote both the sale of her works—especially her last publication, The Face of the Deep (1892)—and the


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marketing of the spin-off publications the society produced from it and other of her devotional writings. In keeping with biographical convention, Proctor’s A Brief Memoir opens with a frontispiece portrait of the memorialized subject (fig. 5.1). But the engraving entitled “Portrait of Miss Rossetti” is actually a detail, as the fine print acknowledges, “Taken from . . . ‘The Girlhood of the Blessed Virgin’ [sic], by D. G. Rossetti.” This is a curious choice for a frontispiece. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, is not a portrait of Christina at all, but rather a painting of the Virgin using his sister as a model. Richard L. Stein has commented on how the use of family members and friends as models in PreRaphaelite painting created “a constant undercurrent of private allusion in their work” (182). Here the picture, refashioned for its new context, has reversed the relationships, foregrounding the personal and relegating the religious subject matter to an allusive, subsidiary role. The detail excludes all the iconographic features that make this work a religious painting of Christ’s mother in the house of her parents. St. Anne, St. Joachim, the little angel with the books representing the seven joys of Mary, the lily, the dove, all are gone—even the halo over the Virgin’s head has been cropped. What remains is the profile portrait of a seriousfaced teenaged girl at work with her needle—a portrait of Christina Rossetti at seventeen. Despite the new configuration, however, the detail cannot help but retain traces of its original context as a religious painting. Moreover, by eliminating the name of Mary, the inaccurate caption, “The Girlhood of the Blessed Virgin,” permits an implicit association between the “Miss Rossetti” of this “portrait” and the “Blessed Virgin” of the original work. With this frontispiece she becomes “Santa Christina” indeed. One hardly needs the confirmation of Proctor’s ensuing text to learn that the Memoir’s “tribute to her saintly life” has direct bearing on “the religious character of her works” (11–12). The detail from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin represents a saintly Christina to her Christian reading public, but the saint depicted is more along the lines of the Victorian “Angel in the House” than the inspired handmaid of the Lord. D. G. Rossetti deliberately altered the traditional iconography representing the Virgin reading a book and meditating piously by depicting his Mary embroidering a lily under the supervision of St. Anne (Peterson, 210–11). Linda H. Peterson has argued compellingly that when Dante Gabriel refigured the Virgin “as seamstress rather than reader” he simultaneously represented his culture’s “exclusion of women as active readers of, and writers about, the sacred scriptures.” His Virgin is aligned with the domestic rather than the hermeneutic tradition. Christina’s devotional writings, Peterson argues, challenge her brother’s representation of the Virgin Mary by metaphorically restoring “the book to Mary’s hands” and by explicitly modeling woman’s role as “faithful reader of the

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5.1 “Portrait of Miss Rossetti, Taken from that in ‘The Girlhood of the Blessed Virgin,’ by D. G. Rossetti,” frontispiece for Ellen A. Proctor, A Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1895).


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scriptures” (Peterson, 212, 214). If so, Christina’s rebuttal was subverted after her death by her publisher’s marketing strategy, which sought to align its author with domestic virtues and feminine saintliness rather than to promote her writing as worthy meditations and commentaries on the scriptures. In the frontispiece to Ellen Proctor’s Memoir, published a scant six months after the poet’s death, we have the first indication of how the SPCK would use images to represent a very particular Christina Rossetti to its readers. She is to be valued as a model of exemplary womanhood—one whose beauty of person corresponds to the beauty of her life, which in turn is reflected in the beautiful writings that came spontaneously from her pure heart. Rossetti herself avoided use of the author’s portrait as frontispiece, preferring to have an illustration of text introduce her books’ contents. After her death, however, the volumes produced by the SPCK and those by Macmillan under the editorship of William Michael Rossetti typically went to press accompanied by a picture of the author. The effect in both cases was to align the work with the life, framing the writing as personal effusions. The frontispiece portrait, moreover, was never a photograph of the writer in advanced age, but rather a reproduction of one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s drawings of his sister in her younger years, thereby adding the wider association of Pre-Raphaelitism to the representation. Just as, in Pre-Raphaelite art, the body of the beautiful woman represented the beauty of the soul,4 so too did Christina Rossetti’s ethereal style of physical beauty become a visual symbol of her spirituality in the frontispiece portraits that proliferated after her death. And it was, after all, her spirituality that the SPCK was marketing in its religious publications. In aligning the woman with the work, the SPCK especially favored representations of Christina in the role of the Blessed Virgin. In its new edition of Verses in 1925, for example, the society once again selected “The Girlhood of the Virgin” (sic) as frontispiece. This caption, which not only avoids naming Mary but even drops the epithet “Blessed,” seems even more deliberately adaptable to the virgin model herself, especially in light of the book’s visual context. The edition also included (facing p. 19) a reproduction of “Christina Rossetti with Her Mother,” taken from D. G. Rossetti’s crayon drawing of 1877. As an introduction to the section “Christ Our All in All,” this picture seems an arbitrary choice at best, and does not function in any sense of the word as an “illustration.” The logic of the SPCK’s choice of pictures, however, should not be understood in terms of traditional illustrative practices but rather in the context of advertising— using pictures to promote a salable image of the author. The link between “The Girlhood of the Virgin” and “Christina Rossetti with Her Mother”5 is both material and symbolic. Both are pictures of mothers and daughters, and both use Frances and Christina Rossetti as models. Taken together, the pictures emphasize

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Christina in her domestic role as daughter and in her spiritual role as silent vessel of a message more powerful than she. This representation of the saintly virgin is underscored in the introduction by SPCK editorial secretary William Kemp Lowther Clarke when he writes that the verses “represent the mind of a saintly woman who knew that she would soon be with the Beloved for whose sake she had eschewed earthly loves.” Emphasizing that Rossetti’s (limited) qualifications for attracting devout readers derive from her love and faith rather than her knowledge of scripture, W. K. Clarke maintains that “the outpourings of her pure heart in Verses will always be cherished by the devout” (“Introduction” to Verses 1925). Just as the Virgin Mary has, in Dante Gabriel’s picture, been deprived of her book, so too has Christina, in this SPCK publication, been deprived of her hermeneutic activity and reduced to a loving, pure-hearted virgin who seems “like a ‘Mediaeval saint’” (ibid.). This image of Rossetti had been under construction since her death, and was prefigured in the Bishop of Durham’s Appreciation in 1899, in which he praised her for the “purity [that] is a woman’s characteristic endowment” and that allowed her to strengthen faith with intuitive insight (Westcott, 13). By 1925, however, such simple faith had fallen out of fashion, and even the SPCK secretary seems to think that “none but the religious-minded are likely to care much for these particular poems” (“Introduction” to Verses 1925). The long habit of seeing Rossetti’s devotional verses as the simple outpourings of a devout heart blinded W. K. Clarke—and many other twentieth-century readers—to the obvious technical achievement and aesthetic merit of these poems. Indeed, it is only recently that Christina Rossetti’s devotional poetry has begun to claim some of the same attention lavished on her secular poetry.6

Tracts for the Times The SPCK adapted Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Annunciation, which also used Christina as model, as the frontispiece illustration for its first spin-off volume, W. M. L. Jay’s arrangement of Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep,” published in England and America in 1899.7 Here again the image is used, not so much to illustrate a text, as to construct a particular, commodified, Christina. Nevertheless, the pretense of illustration is implied by the caption—“Clothe us as thy lilies.” Taken from Christina’s poetry, the caption is accompanied by the appropriate page number so that the reader can turn to “‘Consider the Lilies of the field’” on page 151 and sort out whatever visual-verbal correspondences suggest themselves. The main associative link, of course, is the lily. But the association is weak, because the lilies in picture and poem have such different ranges of


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allusion. In Dante Gabriel’s Annunciation the lily held by the angel is an emblematic representation of the God this Virgin will bear, as well as of her own innocent conception of him. In Christina’s lyric, the lilies represent the penitent Christian submitting entirely to God’s care as according to Christ’s teaching in the Gospel of Matthew (6:28–29). The divergence between picture and word, however, is perhaps accounted for by the explanation given for the frontispiece on the list of illustrations: “(The sitting figure is said to be a likeness of Christina Rossetti).” In this context, the petition in “‘Consider the Lilies of the field’”— “Clothe us as Thy lilies of a day, / As the lilies Thou accountest fair” (CP, 2:325)—becomes directly applicable to the writer herself. The pure-hearted virgin of the SPCK’s fashioning becomes the lily, accounted fair—the beautiful, saintly woman shown in the frontispiece in the guise of the Virgin Mary. An amalgam of poetry and prose from The Face of the Deep (1892) together with selected pieces from Time Flies (1885) and Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems (1875, 1876),8 W. M. L. Jay’s Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” offers extracts of Rossetti’s work for devotional purposes. Only five years after her death, Jay is already lamenting that Rossetti’s “prose works are less known” than her devotional poetry—even, apparently, to her devout audiences, whether in England or America. Jay hopes to make Rossetti’s work more accessible by reformatting some of her “beautiful, inspiring, and comforting thoughts that are often hidden away among much matter for which an unleisured reader would have no time, and which a desultory one might find unattractive. Thus they become ‘Reflected Lights’” (iii, iv). Perhaps Jay’s English publisher, the SPCK, might also have hoped that her “Reflected Lights” would provoke new interest in Rossetti’s devotional books, particularly The Face of the Deep. Certainly the Appreciation of the Late Christina Georgina Rossetti that the society published in the same year as Reflected Lights unabashedly promotes the writer’s last devotional work. Calling her “pre-eminently the spiritual poet of our age,” the Reverend B. F. Westcott, Lord Bishop of Durham, singles out The Face of the Deep for special praise as “from first to last an interpretation of the many voices of earth by one whose ears were opened” (22, 15). Regardless of whether the SPCK’s spin-off, Reflected Lights, achieved the goal of increasing sales of The Face of the Deep, it certainly produced its own. Reflected Lights remained on the publisher’s list for twenty-five years. Jay’s book is divided into twenty sections, most of which have some pictorial matter. Extracts from Rossetti’s works are grouped into headings such as “The Light of Love,” “The Light of Faith,” “The Light of Hope,” “The Light of Patience,” and so on. The black-and-white reproductions embellishing the work are taken from heterogeneous, unidentified, sources. These pictures are not the

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response of an artist to the text they accompany—they are not, in other words, illustrations. Rather, they represent the editor’s (or publisher’s) selection of existing images considered appropriate to their context and purpose. The arbitrary connection between picture and word that results from such an approach to book illustration is embodied in the volume’s physical make-up, which can only be described as incoherent in terms of its visual-verbal relations. The reproductions are printed on glossy paper and inserted into the text at regular intervals, regardless of whether the place of insertion is proximate to the represented text itself or not. Thus a picture inserted in “Light through Shadows” may actually be intended to illustrate a text that occurs many pages later in the section “Light from Nature.” An attempt at integration is made by printing the caption, taken from Rossetti’s poetry or prose, directly under each picture, and providing the page reference for this text. Because the distance between picture and text is sometimes as much as a hundred pages, however, the already tenuous connection between picture and word becomes even more disjunctive. Representing a hodgepodge of sources, styles, and artists, the images no doubt derive from the SPCK’s picture repertoire, reused and recycled from other publications, but without any credit or acknowledgment. As Paul Goldman observes, the SPCK believed “firmly in illustration as important in conveying its message,” but did not consider the pictorial content of its books worthy of significant investment (Victorian Illustrated Books, 26). Thus the society was quite willing to use the same illustration in more than one publication as opportunity and convenience dictated (P. E. Morgan, 72). The value of the picture for the SPCK was not so much aesthetic (except insofar as increased attractiveness made a book more salable) as religious. Images could enhance a text’s devotional atmosphere and effect. First of all, a familiar image of a religious scene such as a picture of the Nativity or one of Christ’s parables immediately conferred a religious aura on the text it embellished. Secondly, a less familiar image, perhaps taken from an artistic rather than a religious source—such as D. G. Rossetti’s Annunciation—could be manipulated, in its new context, to add another level of symbolic meaning. As a producer of illustrated books, the SPCK was most often a “Grangerite” publisher. As Andrew Lang explains in The Library (1892), “This is the technical name for people who ‘illustrate’ books with engravings from other works” (20fn)—a method the SPCK found commercially viable for its operations. The effect of this repositioning of images in new contexts is similar to that found in fifteenth-century woodcut books, in which stock pictures were often recycled more or less indiscriminately. As Marian Rothstein comments, such images do not illustrate the text, though picture and word “may share common ground.” Rather, the recycled pictures are used either thematically—whereby a


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shared theme links the visual and the verbal—or disjunctively. Images used thematically are also, according to Rothstein, commemorative. That is, their power depends on the reader’s ability to recall the picture’s earlier use or original context (99, 101). In other words, the recycling of a publisher’s stock of printed images in new publications introduces another range of intertextual and contextual meaning to the illustrated book. A picture’s commemorative function can also work disjunctively by introducing elements alien to its new textual context. In its recycling of stock reproductions, the SPCK’s selection of imagery to accompany Rossetti’s texts seems intended to work, in Rothstein’s terms, thematically and commemoratively. This is certainly true of the frontispieces chosen for the 1925 edition of Verses and W. M. L. Jay’s Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep,” which operate by invoking their original context as religious paintings of the Virgin Mary in order to convey a particular image of Christina Rossetti as woman and writer. A similar purpose and effect are evident in the literal representations of scripture taken from stock SPCK religious tracts or Sunday School material and used in a number of its Rossetti spin-offs. In Reflected Lights, for example, a plate entitled “The Wise Men” (facing p. 48, but to illustrate p. 145) has for its caption an excerpt from Rossetti’s meditation in Time Flies beginning “Popular tradition fixes the number of Wise Men at three. Did those three alone see the star? Presumably not . . .” (Reflected Lights, 145). The accompanying image is a file picture of the three wise men standing on a high plateau looking out at a comet. Its familiarity works commemoratively to recall to the reader/viewer’s memory the story of the Magi following the star to see Christ the Infant King. In other words, it illustrates the “popular tradition” rather than Rossetti’s nuanced commentary on the story, in which the Magi are taken as types of wise men who see in the starry heavens “the glory of God” (Reflected Lights, 146). Such an image in a book published under the direction of the Tract Committee shows how Rossetti’s works became reformatted as virtual tracts for the SPCK. A publication produced with a specific devotional and/or evangelical purpose, a tract is a work calculated to engage the reader with eye-catching illustrations and a modicum of edifying text. Even an extended work such as Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” (251 pages in length) meets these criteria, with its mishmash of pictures and its abbreviated and rearranged selections designed for those readers who might not have time, inclination, or patience to work their way through Rossetti’s lengthy exegesis on the Apocalypse. As Joel Westerholm observes, W. M. L. Jay’s extracts, without the context of the scriptures for which they originally provided commentary, become “merely a set of aphorisms on ‘The Light of Love,’ ‘The Light of Encouragement,’ ‘Light from the Cross,’ ‘Light Here and There,’” and so on (14). In this publication context,

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Rossetti the “Tractarian hermeneut” (Kachur) has been effectively silenced, while Santa Christina, model Christian woman and exemplar, is upheld to a new audience for her piety and faith. The make-up of Reflected Lights as a whole reinforces this aspect of the book’s message, for many of the secular images selected to embellish the “Lights” are female figures representing spiritual, psychological, or emotional states. Strangely out of keeping with the stock Sunday School images used to ornament other “Lights” such as “The Widow’s Mite” or “The Rich Young Man Turned Away Sorrowful,” these pictures are reproductions of (unattributed) profane artwork pressed into religious service. For example, the illustration entitled “One sorrow more,” for Rossetti’s lyric, “‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth’” (CP, 2:327–28), shows a woman in profile striking a melodramatic pose with her hand on her forehead and her clothes in disarray, but her face strangely serene (fig. 5.2).9 In its original context, the picture could very well be an illustration for Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” The octagonal picture (or mirror?) behind the woman depicts a knight on horseback, while the open doorway shows a distant castle (Camelot?). In short, the picture bears little direct relation to Rossetti’s poem, which counsels long-suffering patience for daily trials, ending Bear up in anguish, ease will yet be sweet; Bear up all day, for night has rest in store: Christ bears thy burden with thee, rise and greet One sorrow more. (CP, 2:328) The relationship of the image and its text in this situation borders on the disjunctive. If pressed too hard, the connection of the figure to the Tennysonian tragic heroine whose entire world cracks apart works against the dominant keynote of its new textual environment. Thus the commemorative function of the picture’s evocation of the Lady of Shalott story seems to have no immediate purpose beyond the thematic association of women with sorrow and death. This generalized atmospheric effect obtains in most of the pictures of women chosen to accompany Rossetti’s texts. The plate selected for Rossetti’s “Lift up thine eyes to seek the invisible,” for example, likewise depicts a woman in a pose reflective of the lyric’s dramatic stance. Here, rather than steeling herself to face “one sorrow more,” the woman in profile raises her eyes upward. This composition of a woman with abundant hair and strong jaw, holding a branch of cherry blossoms and standing enclosed in claustrophobic space, evokes a PreRaphaelite context in which the sensuous woman represents spiritual or symbolic attributes. In its new position as the “illustration” for a devotional sonnet enjoining the penitent “to choose the still unseen” glories of the afterlife over

5.2 “‘One sorrow more,’” Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” by Christina Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1899), 74.

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quotidian actuality, the picture seems somewhat out of keeping. Perhaps the reader is meant to take the beautiful woman and her sheaf of blossoms to represent the “glorious beauties” of the saints (CP, 2:285). It is more likely, however, that—like the frontispiece reproduction of the Annunciation and other secular art pieces in the volume—the picture was not selected to “illustrate” anything more than a general association of feminine beauty with spirituality. Then, as now, images of beautiful women could sell just about anything. In 1903 the SPCK published another spin-off from Rossetti’s works, this one more specifically in keeping with its practice of bringing out publications for devotional or evangelical purposes around the time of festivals in the Christian year. Published under the direction of the Tract Committee, Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent from the Works of Christina Rossetti exhibits the standard features of devotional publishing, with its ruled pages, black letter titles, and gothic wood engravings. The division of the book into the five weeks of the Lenten season, ending with the Sunday before Easter, enables prayerful devotion. Each of these sections comprises a collection of excerpts from Rossetti’s poetry and prose; the latter include meditations, reflections, prayers, and commentaries appropriate to the season. A tract-style illustration introduces and faces each section, accompanied by a caption taken from scripture. The six unattributed engravings, which are not all by the same hand or even executed in the same style, are file pictures of the events leading up to, and including, the Passion. The title page is silent about who compiled the selections, chose the scriptures, and selected the illustrations, and there is no introductory or prefatory matter. Presumably Redeeming the Time represents the work of the editorial secretary, Edmund McClure, working in conjunction with the Tract Committee. The illustrations that face each of the textual divisions for the weeks of Lent enhance the book’s air of solemn devotion. Black-and-white wood engravings, the illustrations depict such familiar Passiontide themes as the Agony in the Garden, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Entombment. These events in the life of Christ do not, of course, accord temporally with the five-week time sequence the book follows. Thus the pictorial series initiates its own, separate chronology. Similarly, the poems, meditations, and verses selected from Rossetti’s devotional writings do not always accord specifically either with the attributed week in the Lenten season or with the accompanying illustration and scripture. Rather, they provide a context of prayerful humility and devotion presumably intended to prepare the reader’s mind for meditation on the meaning of Christ’s suffering. The First Week in Lent, for example, opens with a picture of Christ praying alone in the garden, surrounded by angels, with the scriptural caption, “Angels Came and Ministered unto Him” (fig. 5.3). On the facing page are two prose


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5.3 “The Angels Came and Ministered unto Him,” Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent Compiled from the Works of Christina G. Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1903), 12. Reproduced courtesy of Princeton University Library.

pieces and a poem. The text begins with a call to Christian humility and repentance, both appropriate virtues for the season. Then follows a poem, “O Lord I am ashamed to seek Thy Face,” from The Face of the Deep. Essentially a prayer itself, the sonnet asks Christ to “Call me Thy sinner unto penitence” (CP, 2:183). The prose prayer that follows, taken from another section of The Face of the Deep, asks the Holy Spirit to “purge our eyes to discern and contemplate Thee; until we attain to see as Thou seest, judge as Thou judgest, choose as Thou choosest; and having sought and found Thee, to behold Thee for ever and for ever” (13). The compiler has selected passages linked thematically in order to direct devotion in precise ways. The pictures do not illustrate these texts, but work commemoratively to recall the events of the Passion to the reader’s mind in order to incite the appropriate spirit of penitence and prayer. The illustration and scripture thus simply provide the devotional context for Lenten meditation; this is no emblem book with pictura, text, and motto all working together. Instead, the dialogue here is contrapuntal. Just as there are two time sequences developed in the series of pictures and the textual divisions, so too, the reader is made aware, are there two time lines for the Christian: the temporal and the eternal. Hence the title, Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings

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for Lent, simultaneously emphasizing the present, with its daily duty of prayer, and the proleptic view of the Apocalyptic future, when Time shall be “redeemed” along with the fallen world. Christina would no doubt have liked this use of her writings, and would also have approved the book’s solemn blue-black covers, devoid of any insignia except the monogram, SPCK. She may, however, have felt slightly less comfortable with the bold advertisements at the back of Redeeming the Time, which focused very materially on the present world by providing a list of “Works by Christina G. Rossetti,” together with their size, format, and price. W. M. L. Jay’s Reflected Lights, for example, is offered in post 8vo cloth boards at 2s 6d, while the latest edition of Verses is available in the same format for 3s 6d. Time Flies, surprisingly, is not listed, but Called to Be Saints, Letter and Spirit, Seek and Find, and The Face of the Deep are all available from the publisher at any of the SPCK’s depots in London, Brighton, Manchester, and New York. By this time in the SPCK’s history, the society was publishing in the neighborhood of twelve million pieces annually, of which about one fourth were tracts (Allen and McClure, 198). Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” and Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent share tract-like formats and features, but they belong to the SPCK’s extensive religious book publications. Although moderately priced, they were too valuable as material objects to be dispensed freely like SPCK tracts. Their attractive designs, however, made them ideal for another kind of giving by both individual consumers and institutions. Their combination of unimpeachable contents, aesthetic appeal, and affordability made them particularly appropriate for charitable purposes in workhouses and hospitals and for prizes to be awarded by clergymen and teachers to deserving students. The latter was an important enough aspect of the early twentieth-century book trade to generate a whole separate industry in the making of reward books.

Gifts and Graces: Rossetti as Reward The SPCK was by far the biggest producer of reward books. Usually small, if not miniature books (typically 4½ x 2¾ inches), with an illustrated paper cover doing duty as frontispiece, these tiny texts were given away at Sunday and Day Schools to reward everything from diligence and punctuality to consigning so many verses of scripture to memory (P. E. Morgan, 70, 72). At this distance, it is impossible to know whether the small spin-offs generated by the SPCK Rossetti industry in the early twentieth century were meant specifically for school prizes, or, more generally, as gift books. Two things, however, are certain: first, that the SPCK’s publishing business consisted principally of producing prize books at this time (W. K. Clarke, 196); and second, that the society pub-


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lished a number of small books made up of Rossetti’s poetry or prose, generally ornamented with an illustrative frontispiece or title page. Some of these are clearly appropriate gifts to mark specific sacred events in the life of the Church. Church Seasons in Verse, for example, seems designed as a gift or prize to present either during the Christmas season or on a child’s first communion. A miniature book in red yapp suede measuring about 3 x 4 inches, Church Seasons in Verse is a kind of abbreviated Christian Year, with Rossetti’s verses on Church festivals arranged in liturgical sequence from Advent through Trinity Sunday. The book is decorated rather than illustrated, with printer’s devices in the shape of angels separating the poems. In keeping with the SPCK practice of aligning the woman with the work, the book opens with a frontispiece portrait of Rossetti, engraved after Dante Gabriel’s chalk drawing of 1877. With her brooding eyes and inscrutable face, the poet seems already transposed above all earthly cares. The Church Seasons in Verse belongs to the Miniature Meditative Series produced by the SPCK around 1911. In other books in this series the publisher opted for reproductions of paintings rather than frontispiece portraits of the author, using the selected pictures to underscore the symbolic theme of each tiny book. Thus A Poet’s Prayers is prefaced with The Angelus, after Millet, while Gifts and Graces: Thoughts from the Writings of Christina Rossetti has G. F. Watts’s Hope for its frontispiece, and Angels opens with a detail of an angelic figure blowing a trumpet “After Fra Angelico.” As might be expected, this last also uses angel heads as printer’s devices to conclude the sections. Otherwise, however, the books are not illustrated. Dainty 32mo books with gilt-edged pages, they were produced in two price ranges: 6d for cloth covers and 1s for leather, and no doubt made ideal gifts or prizes even for those on limited budgets. Even gifts for spiritual occasions have a material existence and need to be bought and sold in the worldly marketplace. Behind every gift book produced by the SPCK is a marketing plan to promote sales and widen distribution. The prefatory notes found in A Poet’s Prayers and Gifts and Graces amount to promotional material urging the worth not only of the book in question but also of other, related, SPCK publications. The preface to A Poet’s Prayer, for example, deliberately evokes the Reverend Westcott’s Appreciation of the Late Christina Georgina Rossetti as well as Rossetti’s own The Face of the Deep (both still for sale at SPCK depots). The editor confers Church sanction on the present work and advertises previous SPCK publications by quoting the bishop’s evaluation of Rossetti as “‘pre-eminently the spiritual poet of our age’” before going on to praise her “rare gift of framing short prayers or collects, many of which are scattered throughout the pages of her latest work, The Face of the Deep.” After naming this “latest work,” the unknown writer (probably the editorial secretary) goes on to admit that the “beautiful compositions are here collated in the hope

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of making them more widely known”—in other words, to promote the flagging sales of The Face of the Deep itself. This agenda is even more explicit in the prefatory note to Gifts and Graces. Here the SPCK presents Rossetti in a way that should be familiar by now, as “‘one of the most beautiful souls in the great company of saints.’” Her “spiritual gifts,” the editor goes on to say, are “most strikingly revealed in ‘The Face of the Deep,’” and “If this little book should, perchance, help in some measure to direct attention to this mine of the beautiful thoughts of the gifted author, its purpose will have been fulfilled” (7–8). The “purpose” of the Miniature Meditative Series, then, was to sell more copies of The Face of the Deep, and perhaps other Rossetti works on the SPCK list. And the reasoning is sound. Give people a taste of her poetry and prose in small, manageable doses—the method was first established by W. M. L. Jay in 1899 with Reflected Lights—and they will become Rossetti readers. This is how sanctity is sold and Christian knowledge propagated. The SPCK cultivated the Rossetti industry until just after the First World War. But by 1921 England’s third oldest publishing house10 was in serious economic trouble, with losses of over £17,000 and its business affairs in disarray (W. K. Clarke, 200). Together with other presses the society faced printing charges 200 percent higher than prewar levels (Norrie, 23), but also had its own specific problems to address. The editorial secretary (W. K. Clarke from 1915 to 1944) and the Tract Committee (renamed the Religious Literature Committee) discovered the hard way that, as Clarke put it, the “criteria of pre-war success no longer applied” (199). The society needed to clear its moribund backlist and begin publishing new titles. Thus its printing records begin to show the gradual deletion of Rossetti titles and associated works from its publishing list. The society removed Westcott’s Appreciation in 1919, Proctor’s Memoir and Redeeming the Time in 1921, Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” in 1924, and, eventually, all of Rossetti’s devotional works except Verses, which was reissued in a new edition with two plates in 1925.11 Even in this publication, Clarke seems curiously apologetic about bringing Rossetti before the reading public, saying that her poetry “is apt to alienate a generation” more healthy and less morbid than she was (“Introduction” to Verses 1925). And so, reading the current market with some care, the SPCK began to slacken its little Rossetti industry. But there was still a place, it seemed, for Rossetti in its Christmas Booklets series in 1933, when Christmas Verses by Christina G. Rossetti became the first of four illustrated booklets for the season, each inscribed “With Best Wishes from——” inside the cover to promote the gift-giving idea.12 A small book of only sixteen pages, with a black-and-white illustration or decoration for each of the seven poems, the miniature volume made a seasonal splash with its colorful paper wrapper depicting the three wise men adoring the infant Jesus. Inside, a


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color frontispiece of Mary in a blue gown holding a blonde cherubic Christchild in a field of white lilies has as its caption, “Lily herself, she bore the one fair lily,” taken from its facing poem, “Herself a rose.” Like all the pictures in this gift book, the frontispiece image has been selected by the publisher to accord thematically with Rossetti’s Christmas poem. The familiar scenes from the Christmas story, either unsigned or variously initialed, are taken from the SPCK’s large stock of pictures relating to the Nativity. As late as 1933, then, the publisher was still following its Grangerite practice of injecting stock pictures into new contexts. Gift books need pictures in order to sell, and the cheapest way to obtain these is to recycle images that seem applicable, rather than to commission an artist to illustrate the poetry. In the midst of the heavy losses it was experiencing as a result of the Depression, the society needed to cut its costs and boost its sales in whatever way it could. And the publishing strategy was successful. The SPCK survived the Depression and by 1959 its combined publishing and bookselling operations were bringing in close to one million pounds a year (W. K. Clarke, 218). Approaching the SPCK’s Rossetti publications from the perspective of a materialist hermeneutics supports Maura Ives’s contention that “the economic goals of the publisher are evident in every aspect of the text,” as “each part of a book tells its own story about the book’s production, and has its own part to play in the history of its reception” (274–75). It is evident that adding images to Rossetti’s texts was a way for the SPCK to manipulate markets by constructing an author who would appeal to a very specific segment of the reading public: devout Anglicans attracted to the notion of woman as a pure example of simple faith and the power of love over knowledge. The problem with this sweetly sad and saintly Rossetti was that the image’s appeal was time limited. By 1925, with the reissue of Verses, the SPCK knew it had a marketing problem and was facing a rapidly diminishing audience. By the time the society published Christmas Verses in 1933—its last Rossetti spin-off—it was no longer selling the woman and the work as one package. For the first time, the little gift book had no biographical detail in the way of frontispiece portrait or prefatorial remarks to align the verses with the life of the writer. The poetry was sold solely by the packaging— colored wrappers, gift tag, pictures—rather than by any association with Santa Christina. It is not only readers, but also authors, who are made by what makes the book. Studying a writer’s posthumous life in the pages of the works that her publisher produced under her name allows us to map a distinct biography and trace a genealogy of meanings. Both memory and meaning are, after all, very material. Our cultural memory of Christina Rossetti is shaped by the productions in which she has appeared—by their covers, frontispieces, title pages,

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illustrations, prefaces, typography, advertisements, prices. These physical details tell stories that place the work in specific social contexts replete with people and events that are ineluctably part of the entire signifying system that makes a book. Our understanding of Christina Rossetti and her devotional work has been severely limited by a critical neglect of the bibliographic and historical conditions under which her writings were produced and received, both in her lifetime and after her death. Without a material investigation of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and its publishing practices, and an understanding of its institutional forms and mediational structures, the meaning of Rossetti’s devotional writings remains insubstantial. This brief study of how the SPCK used its copyright to develop marketing strategies that would sell the woman and the work in one devotional package has shown how Rossetti was produced in the religious marketplace of the early twentieth century. But the posthumous Rossetti was produced for secular markets too, from juvenile picture books to expensive belles lettres. And with each change in the conditions of production, a different Rossetti materializes before our eyes.

6 The Children’s Rossetti Perhaps there is no pleasure the modern “grown-up” person envies the youngsters of the hour as he envies them the shoals of delightful books which publishers prepare for the Christmas tables of lucky children. —Gleeson White, “Children’s Books”

Books with Pictures and Books for Children: A Brief History

A

LTHOUGH the combination of image and text in religious publishing is as old as the medieval scriptorium, illustrated books published specifically for children have a much more recent history. With the arrival of the printing press, books with pictures continued to be published for devotional purposes, but the market widened to include everything from literary romances to scientific treatises. In the seventeenth century some educational books with pictures, such as John Comenius’s Sensualium Pictus (1657), began to be published for the instruction of the young; for entertainment, children shared with adults crudely illustrated chapbooks (Bator, 149). But although Bishop Comenius recognized that “‘pictures are the most intelligible books that children can look upon’” (qtd. in Lanes, 45), publishers were slow to see the commercial possibilities inherent in his insight. It was not until the eighteenth century that books of entertainment began to be published specifically for a defined juvenile market. After the success of John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in 1744 (Darton, 1),

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the publishing industry began systematically to institute a division of the trade directed at a segment of the population with neither independent purchasing power nor advanced literacy. From the start, these books for children used pictures to appeal to their semiliterate audience, Newbery borrowing this device from his main competition, chapbooks. Ultimately, illustrations became such “an indispensable feature of children’s books” that an entirely new genre was created: the picture book, a form that continues to dominate twentieth-century juvenile publishing (Shavit, 167). As consumer objects designed to appeal to the middle-class purchaser wishing to give pleasure (and perhaps instruction) in the nursery, illustrated books for children have always had a dual audience. Thus, as Sheila Egoff points out, “the genre which seems to be the simplest actually is the most complex, deploying two art forms, the pictorial and the literary, to engage the interest of two audiences (child and adult)” (248). Jacqueline Rose has pointed out that literature for children “became an independent commercial venture” at the same time that childhood itself was being conceptualized and constructed as a social and psychological phenomenon by philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau (8). The technological advances of the nineteenth century combined with an increasingly institutionalized awareness of childhood as a separate stage of life (subdivided again by distinctions of age and gender) to make children’s publishing one of the “boom” industries of the Victorian period (Meyer, 13). It was not, however, until the 1860s, when Routledge began publishing his Toy Books, that children’s books became what they are today: “big business” (McLean, 62). From mid-century on, every Christmas season was dominated by the sale of lavishly illustrated gift books directed at middle-class consumers. By 1890, and continuing through to World War I, the season had stretched to a three-month marketing extravaganza, peaking in October (Eliot, 34). Bolstered by technological developments that permitted the publication of full-color plates on a diversified scale ranging from expensive gift books to “cheap imitations . . . in garish lithography and on execrable papers” (Houfe, Fin de Siècle, 138), and promoted by a highly developed publishing industry with a sophisticated system of marketing and distribution, the first Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration had begun.1 Faced with a flood of many different kinds of children’s books at the end of every year, the review industry devised a way to categorize them according to the number and function of the illustrations. Writing for the Christmas market of 1900, an Academy reviewer proposed the following system of classification: “Picture Books” are those “which make their principal appeal through their pictures, and are aimed at quite small children”; “Story Books,” on the other hand, are books aimed at older and more literate children, aged about seven to thirteen. Although illustrated, these books make their main appeal “through the story”


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rather than the pictures. Finally, the term “Tales for Boys and Girls” applies to those books “which make the story everything, and give the artist only a minute opportunity, or none at all,” but which still fall short of the adult category of “romance proper” (“Books for Children,” 558). With some variation, this system of classification remained in general use throughout the century that this Academy review ushered in.2 The association between children’s books and books with pictures became institutionalized at the same time that the public conception of what constituted juvenile literature solidified. As F. J. Harvey Darton puts it, “a child’s book—for ‘boys,’ ‘girls,’ and ‘babies’—now must have illustrations. If not, it is a grown-up book” (311). Out of this cultural context an entire industry devoted to the production of illustrated books for the juvenile market developed, interacting in increasingly complex ways with other institutions and becoming itself an international big business. Such a powerful commercial body, responsible for distributing imagery to the masses, is a social force with the ability to determine meaning as well as audience. Perhaps more so than any other kind of publication, children’s books inscribe their readers in their bibliographic features, including weight and kind of paper; type, size, and distribution of letterpress; the nature and number of illustrations; and the design of the cover and title page. This close link between production and reception is complicated, however, by juvenile literature’s dual audience. The book must be produced in such a way as to appeal to the purchasing adult—parent, teacher, librarian—while being ostensibly directed toward another audience altogether, the child reader. Thus the production of each children’s book simultaneously entails the construction of the child for whom the book is made. Twentieth-century publishing for children marks a shift in marketing, from a focus on the home to a dependence on institutional purchasing (Alderson in Darton, 321) and a new internationalism. As compulsory elementary education became entrenched, public libraries for children sprang up across Britain and North America, creating a need not only for school texts but also for reading material of all kinds. The 1920s saw the establishment of juvenile departments in publishing houses, the inauguration of an award system for children’s book publication, and the institutionalizing of a critical apparatus for the study of children’s literature (especially in its educational context) with the launching of the Horn Book magazine (Heins, 527). Meanwhile, the vague association between books with pictures and books for children solidified. By the 1930s, aided by developments in photo-offset lithography that made it possible to produce larger editions at cheaper rates (Lanes, 50), children’s picture books dominated the field of book illustration. As the century developed, publishers and their art editors began to take into account the preferences of teachers, librarians, .

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reviewers, and prize-giving agencies. Libraries and schools became the principal consumers of children’s books, with 70–90 percent of the contemporary market for juvenile publications going direct to libraries—a publishing anomaly not shared by any other sector of the book trade except scholarly works (Vanier, 60). National and international awards such as the prestigious Newbery, Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and Hans Christian Andersen Medals have prompted a large and competitive children’s-book publishing industry on a worldwide scale (Haviland, 415). By the mid-1960s a second Golden Age of children’s books had arrived, this time extending to both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States “the allotment of federal moneys to schools and libraries” enabled strong institutional support of children’s book publishing (Haviland, 88–89). In Britain a phenomenon known as the “‘librarian’s book’”—or, more generally, “the ‘better book for children’”—emerged out of an extended network of professional associations and critical reviewing (Eyre, 337). New promotional methods, such as Book and Library Weeks, and a highly developed system of international festivals, awards, and co-publishing gave a further boost to the industry (Haviland, 89). The awards system, together with the phenomenon of children’s publishing as international big business, has resulted in the contemporary predominance of the picture book in juvenile publishing. Increasingly, this form appears to be a showcase for the artist’s talents rather than a cooperative art form, thus raising once again the issue of the picture book’s dual audience. By the end of the twentieth century, students of children’s literature grew concerned that adults might be “selecting for themselves and not for the child,” and that “pictures—as art— [had] pushed texts into the background” (Haviland, 169). Despite the dominance of the picture book specifically and the illustrated book generally within the field of children’s literature, critics have paid scant attention to illustration. Literary critics have steered clear of analyzing a representational form whose methods of communication lie outside their field of expertise, and specialists in art have tended to ignore the picture book completely (Nodelman, 1). Peter Hunt identifies the need for “a new metalanguage to describe” the complexities of the picture-book genre (131), while Perry Nodelman similarly calls for “the invention of a new kind of criticism” that gives equal attention to picture and word as they work “in consort with each other” (2). While I am in full agreement that the hybrid form of the illustrated book requires a methodology that addresses both art forms equally, I am less certain that picture and word are always “in consort.” I would therefore add that this innovative criticism must take into account differences as well as similarities, and that it be based not on a comparative method but a dialogic one. It should treat picture and word not as the creative productions of a single artist and author working in the isolation of studio and study, but as the material products of a


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publishing industry within a specific cultural context. This new criticism should be historically aware, taking into account the physical forms and bibliographic features of children’s books as well as all the social apparatuses involved in their production and reception.3 In short, as I hope to demonstrate with my analysis of the “Children’s Rossetti” constructed by the publishing industries of the twentieth century, the field of juvenile literature would be well served by a materialist hermeneutics. Christina Rossetti lived and published in England’s Golden Age of illustration, the sixties. She died just as the first Golden Age of children’s books—which reached its peak in 1905–14 (Dalby, 7)—was getting underway. Her early publications, illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, had a strong influence on the artists who illustrated her work after her death. As Louise Seaman Bechtel remarks, the illustrators of the twentieth century “inherit[ed] a brief tradition that perhaps began with the illustrated books of the 1860s” (173). Given the artists’ familiarity with illustrators of the books of the sixties, it is surely not surprising that so many of them should illustrate the poet who published her work in illustrated form during that formative period. What is, perhaps, less expected is that the children’s book industry should embrace Rossetti’s work so wholeheartedly: apart from Sing-Song, Speaking Likenesses, and a few scattered lyrics for juvenile magazines, Rossetti was not a writer for children. But in the twentieth century, a new Christina Rossetti was manufactured in the pages of the many books and anthologies that reproduced her work for the juvenile market. Recast in a new bibliographic context, sometimes truncated, translated into prose, or retitled, almost always accompanied by pictures, Rossetti’s poetry was reformulated for successive generations of children. Doves and Pomegranates: Poems for Young Readers by Christina Rossetti— selected and arranged by librarian David Powell, introduced by critic Naomi Lewis, illustrated by children’s artist Margery Gill, and published in London by the Bodley Head in 1969 at the height of the second Golden Age of children’s books—demonstrates well some of the standard institutional methods for converting adult poetry into verse for children.4 Although the book contains some of Rossetti’s Sing-Song lyrics, it is mainly composed of poems extracted (often in abbreviated form) from Poetical Works (1904). As Lewis explains in her introduction, “Today we think that it is not necessary to write special verses for young or old; a true poem has something for all readers” (Doves, 12). Lewis might well have added that it is publishers and their production staff, not writers, who determine the audience by the way the poetry is presented and formatted—by the way they make the book. Rossetti’s poetry for adults, mixed indiscriminately with her nursery rhymes, becomes poetry for “young readers” in Doves and Pomegranates by virtue of its packaging.

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Ornamented with line drawings in Margery Gill’s “sketchy linear style” (Peppin, 123), the ninety-six pages of Doves and Pomegranates attract the eye by a judicious use of white space and picture. No poem extends over more than two pages, and the ample margins and textual decorations ensure that the verses will not look dense or difficult. A long poem like Goblin Market, for instance, appears under the new title “Come Buy, Come Buy,” its 567 lines reduced to 31, and its complex layers of meaning to a mere nursery-rhyme jingle of pleasant sounds. Stripped of narrative context, the goblins’ opening cry to “Come buy our orchard fruits” (CP, 1:11.1–31) becomes little more than a mouth-watering list of tasty treats. Rossetti’s poem is further reconfigured by its textual context. The compiler, David Powell, has arranged the poems in the collection into four sections presumably of interest to “young readers” (or the parents and librarians who choose for them)—“Birds, Beasts and Fishes”; “Out of Doors”; “Love Human and Divine”; and “Another World Than This.” The extract of the first 31 lines from Goblin Market appears in the section titled “Out of Doors” along with other originally adult-directed poems such as “Spring Quiet,” “Winter: My Secret,” and “Golden Glories.” Verses taken from Sing-Song in this section include “Minnie and Mattie,” “What is Pink?,” “The Wind,” and “The Moon.” In this new bibliographic environment the renamed and reduced Goblin Market becomes nothing more than a vendor’s cry to entice children into the pleasures of poetic sound. Other poems, too, are given new meanings along with their new forms as they are reproduced for the young readers. Rossetti’s second long narrative poem, The Prince’s Progress, is reduced to its final 59 lines and renamed “Bride Song.” Its placement in the section “Love Human and Divine” puts it in the same company as such Rossetti verses for adults as “A Birthday” (from which Doves and Pomegranates takes its title), “An Echo from Willow-wood” [sic], and “A Pause.” The only Sing-Song piece included in this section is “Crying, my little one?” Although selecting the opening lines of Goblin Market or the final ones of The Prince’s Progress may seem like a logical way to abridge a poem for juvenile consumption, Powell also uses other, more radical forms of constructing children’s verses from Rossetti’s adult pieces. For instance, Powell converts a devotional poem—“‘To what purpose is this waste?’” (CP, 3:208–12)—into a children’s poem by extracting a single stanza from a lengthy narrative emphasizing faith and judgment.5 Powell renames the new twelve-line lyric (the original poem is 134 lines) “Other Eyes Than Ours” and places it in the “Birds, Beasts and Fishes” section (Doves, 22; CP, 3:210.78–89). The decorative tailpiece, consisting of a bee among roses, completes the simplification and alteration of Rossetti’s extended consideration of the purpose of life. In giving his rationale for presenting these poems to the child audience,


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Powell states in his “Compiler’s Note” that “the only poems of Christina Rossetti now in print—apart from those reproduced in anthologies—are the rhymes for young children, Sing-Song, first published in 1872” (Doves, 13). Thus it is clear that before the advent of feminist criticism in the academy and the appearance of the first volume of R. W. Crump’s variorum edition of Rossetti’s Complete Poems in 1979 reclaimed her adult work for academic study, the “Children’s Rossetti” dominated the twentieth-century marketplace. The process by which this came about, and the significance of this for Rossetti scholarship, children’s literature, and publishing history, provides the focus for my study of the conversion of Goblin Market to a children’s picture book and the construction of Sing-Song as a twentieth-century classic.

Goblin Market: The Process of Becoming Juvenile Literature In children’s books, as in other forms of literary production, “readers are made by what makes the book” (Macherey, 70). A school textbook produced in England at the turn of the century defined not only a general audience (children), but also a specific sector of the juvenile population (say, eleven-to-fourteen-yearold girls of middle-class origin). For this reason, Goblin Market was constructed as a poem for children at precisely the same time—and by the same set of discursive practices—that “the child” was being differentiated according to age, sex, and class in the British education system. Thus the issue of what is children’s literature always brings with it the accompanying problematic of what is “the child.” And, as Jacqueline Rose observes, “there is no language for children which can be described independently of divisions in the institution of schooling, the institution out of which modern childhood has more or less been produced” (7). The construction of the child, and of a literature for her, will always be overwritten by “grown-up” economic and educational institutions, as well as by the historical contexts and material conditions out of which these structures develop. The questions, “what is good for the child?” and “what can be produced for the child?” are closely connected ideological and commercial concerns. Goblin Market gained entrance into the realm of children’s literature with its appearance in class readers at the end of the nineteenth century. After the British Education Act of 1870 created a new demand for school textbooks, publishers responded by working in collaboration with teachers to bring out printed matter designed for use at different levels of instruction. It was a highly competitive market, for the Act allowed freedom in choosing textbooks, and publishers were keen to take advantage of the potential mass sales. By commissioning practicing teachers to produce textbooks for use in the new Board Schools, publishers

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assured themselves of sales to at least one district, and trusted that the merit of the book itself—and its packaging—would widen distribution possibilities. Thus there has always been feedback, as Roy Yglesias points out, “from classroom to publishing house” (377). Between them, the institutions of education and publication have produced a child—and a book for that child—at every stage of development and level of literacy. Matthew Arnold’s campaign to develop culture and taste by introducing British literature into the curriculum resulted in the publication of poetry anthologies specifically designed for elementary school pupils. The children’s task was to memorize passages of poetry and explain the allusions (Altick, 159–61). Poetry had therefore to be selected for school “readers” at different levels of difficulty, and producers of school books soon began to mine the work of Christina Rossetti and her contemporaries for likely texts. Goblin Market’s appearance in a Board School textbook, however, was delayed until just before World War I. By that time its viability as a children’s book had been adequately tested in the market, first in a private high school, and then in a series of illustrated books put out by a variety of publishers for the juvenile gift-book market. Goblin Market first appeared in a class reader directed to privileged middle-class girls attending a high school in Clifton. In November 1886 Rossetti received a letter from Macmillan asking permission to reproduce the poem in a school textbook the firm was then in prospect of bringing out with the assistance of Miss M. A. Woods, headmistress of the Clifton High School for Girls.6 Noting that there had been abridgments to the verses reproduced in A First School Poetry Book (Macmillan, 1886), Rossetti gave her permission to reproduce Goblin Market in A Second School Poetry Book (1887) only on condition that no “portion whatever is to be omitted” (RML, 154). Practically speaking, a school textbook necessarily has a dual readership: the teacher and the student. Mary A. Woods drew on her teaching experience as well as her own favorite reading material when she published her anthologies of poetry for the classroom. Justly praised for the originality of her selections, Woods must also be credited for the insight that led her to select Goblin Market as a poem that adolescent girls—as opposed to the seven-to-eleven-year-olds targeted in her First School Poetry Book—would enjoy. With Rossetti’s permission, Woods first published Goblin Market in A Second School Poetry Book for use in “the Middle Forms of High Schools, i.e. . . . girls from eleven to fourteen or fifteen” (Woods 1887, v). Some years later, however, when she divided her Second Poetry Book into two parts, the first for the Lower Middle Forms (girls aged eleven to thirteen) and the second for Upper Middle Forms of High Schools (girls aged thirteen to fifteen), Woods reserved Goblin Market for the oldest students. It seems a reasonable conjecture that practical classroom experience mo-


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tivated Woods to present Rossetti’s poem to the more mature pupils as the group who would most appreciate it. While this appearance in a school textbook marks Goblin Market’s debut as children’s literature, it is equally clear that a definite sector of the juvenile population has been targeted: middle-class girls on the threshold of sexual maturation and womanhood. In this first child-directed publication, Goblin Market hovers uncertainly on the borderland of childhood. When Macmillan brought out Woods’s school readers, he was capitalizing on the enormous growth in the children’s market prompted by the expansion of education and the attendant growth of literacy following the Education Act of 1870. By the time that the 1902 Education Act was passed, extending state aid to secondary schools, the firm of Macmillan, together with the Glasgow-based publishing house of Blackie and Son, had become a major force in the educational market. In A Short History of the Firm published in 1959 to celebrate Blackie’s 150th anniversary, Agnes Blackie credited “the decision, taken in the eighteen seventies, to embark on educational publishing” as a radical move with a “revolutionary” effect, as it “proved to be the central stem from which the other modern branches were to grow” (64). Macmillan, too, was continually expanding his educational list with marked success; a century after the 1870 Act, some of the firm’s classical texts, in original binding, were still in use in the schools (Norrie, 33). Both Macmillan and Blackie and Son published a Goblin Market for use in instructing the senior pupils—that is, those aged eleven to fourteen—in elementary Board Schools, thus reserving the poem, as Mary Woods had done, for the oldest students. Blackie and Son brought out Goblin Market, edited by Edith Fry, a teacher of English at St. Monica’s School, Epsom, in 1912 as part of their “English Classics” series for senior pupils. Two years later Macmillan brought out a three-part Children’s Rossetti, designed for use in graduated classrooms. The Junior Children’s Rossetti, consisting of nursery rhymes mostly taken from Sing-Song, is intended for use as a primer by the youngest children in the school. The Intermediate version of The Children’s Rossetti includes “Nature Poems for All the Year and Poems for Some Holy Days,” and is directed to children aged about seven to ten. Goblin Market appears in the third volume of selected narrative poems and lyrics for Senior classes. Like Woods’s anthology—and like the Goblin Market edited by schoolteacher Edith Fry for Blackie’s—The Children’s Rossetti indicates its textbook status by its glosses on hard or unusual words and its elucidations of allusions and abstruse meanings. At the same time, Macmillan’s Children’s Rossetti and Blackie’s Goblin Market designate the child reader in another, nonverbal way: by the presence of illustrations. The inclusion of pictorial matter raises the issue of the material ways by which a juvenile audience is written into a book. Size of

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type, margins, and spacing are some of the visual signs used to designate readerships. The dimensions of the book, the sturdiness of the paper, and the style of jacket design are also important. But no single visual sign proclaims “children’s book” with the same compelling authority as the presence of pictures. At the same time, the presence of pictures in these school texts may also indicate an institutionalized methodology for the instruction of working-class children. Since age groups in the two systems overlapped, elementary and secondary schools did not so much represent sequenced stages of instruction as signal division into separate streams. The working-class child left school at fourteen to begin a life of manual labor, while the middle-class child (together with some working-class children on scholarships) received an extended education in order to prepare for university and a professional career. The approach to language and literacy differed in elementary and secondary schools, with elementary education focused on “natural” language and secondary education on “literary” language. The approved teaching method in elementary schools relied on the visual image to convey meaning (J. Rose, 118–22). Thus it is not surprising to see both Macmillan and Blackie use the visual imagery in their publishing stock—illustrations by Arthur Hughes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Florence Harrison7—to augment the appeal of their books to the teachers and pupils of elementary schools. Given the Board’s stress on “childish” language and “simple” style, moreover, the short, skipping lines of Goblin Market, and its fairy-tale genre, no doubt made the poem seem an especially appropriate choice to these educational publishers. And their instincts proved sound. Macmillan confidently published ten thousand copies of each level of his Children’s Rossetti.8 Blackie found Goblin Market to be one of the firm’s most popular school books, far outnumbering in print runs and sales such other English Classics in the series as, for example, Matthew Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman or Tennyson’s A Dream of Fair Women.9 In addition to its appearance in the classroom, Goblin Market also became juvenile fare by entering the nursery through the illustrated gift books so popular at the time. Publishers found the combination of pictures and fairy tales a particularly good seller, so “time-honored fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and fables” were newly illustrated for each year’s Christmas season (Meyer, 14). Rossetti’s Goblin Market became one of these “time-honored fairy tales” surprisingly quickly, but not in its original form. The first known publication of Goblin Market in an illustrated trade book for children occurred in a collection of tales from the poets retold in prose by Constance E. Maud, published by John Lane in 1903 with illustrations by Henry Ospovat. The Academy reviewer of 1900 would have classified Maud’s Heroines of Poetry as a “Story Book,” for the pictures are limited to a frontispiece for each tale and the main attraction is clearly the stories


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themselves. Given the female focus of the title, the Academy critic might have differentiated even further, and called it a “Story Book for Girls”—an area of the market that publishers knew was insufficiently provided for.10 As the first illustrated Goblin Market published after Rossetti’s death, Heroines of Poetry is a very significant publication. Henry Ospovat (1877–1909) honors his Pre-Raphaelite predecessors by paying homage to both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Laurence Housman in his design for the poem (fig. 6.1). Ospovat departs from D. G. Rossetti in selecting “White and golden Lizzie stood” as his subject for the frontispiece, but retains some of the earlier design’s patterning and the goblins’ human hands (see fig. 2.1). The Housman influence is evident in details such as the landscape, Lizzie’s Shaker-style bonnet, and the goblins’ flowing robes (see fig. 2.8). But Ospovat adds something new. He is the first illustrator to give human or gnome-like facial features to some of the goblins. This mixed presentation of humanoid and bestial becomes standard fare in subsequent illustrations of the poem for children, aligning the poem visually with more familiar British fairy tales of hobgoblins and sprites. In her explanatory notes to the poem for Blackie’s Goblin Market for senior students, Edith Fry found it necessary to provide both an etymology and a genealogy for Rossetti’s goblins in order to account for their nature and appearance (29–30). Goblin Markets produced as Christmas gift books, however, did not have recourse to such editorial apparatuses and relied instead on visual presentation to recall the mischievous “bogie” or “Redcap” to the child’s mind. In the background of his composition Ospovat includes a “Redcap” in the act of throwing an apple at Lizzie (see fig. 6.1, top left corner). In translating Rossetti’s 567-line poem intended for adults into a twochapter prose tale for children, Constance Maud also honors her predecessor while introducing new features specific to the audience she builds into her book. The reformulation is evident in the new title Maud gives Rossetti’s Goblin Market: “The Good Sister.” Thus Lizzie, not Laura, becomes the focus of a story selected to represent one of the “heroines of poetry” to young girls. The narrative is not about Laura as either a fallen woman or a disobedient child, but rather about Lizzie as a loving sister and courageous rescuer. What is interesting here is that Maud, like Rossetti herself, keeps the age of the sisters somewhat vague, while Ospovat—like D. G. Rossetti and Housman—portrays Lizzie as a young woman. Later interpreters of Goblin Market for juveniles present the heroines of the tale as children, thereby deliberately mirroring the intended audience in the representation. With its well-presented tales, strong illustrations, and generally attractive appearance, Heroines of Poetry might have seem destined for commercial and critical success. That it was not offers an object lesson in the vicissitudes of publishing

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6.1 Henry Ospovat, frontispiece for “The Good Sister” in Heroines of Poetry, by Constance E. Maud (London: John Lane, 1903), 202.


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and the increasingly important role played by the institutional networks associated with the trade. Timing, in this industry, is all. Maud’s story shows that if a book—regardless of merit—does not reach the appropriate marketing and distribution system by the appropriate date, it can be as if it were never published. Heroines of Poetry began its publishing career promisingly enough. Maud’s manuscript was read by a professional reader for John Lane and recommended without hesitation for publication. This recommendation was based not only on Maud’s interesting selection of heroines and charming narrative style (compared favorably with Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare), but also on the proven marketability of her previous work for the firm (two books on Wagner).11 Lane signed a contract with Maud stipulating that Heroines of Poetry would be published in October 1902 for the Christmas market, but the book did not come out until the end of November. As Maud complained in a letter to Lane—citing the opinion of booksellers, librarians, and reviewers whom she had consulted— “the book as you know was simply killed by the failure to appear in proper time.” So strongly entrenched was the three-month Christmas sales season by this time, with the whole distribution system dependent on an October release, that booksellers simply refused to take books brought out so late in the season.12 Inexplicably, the book fared no better the following year. Although John Lane followed the publishers’ practice of forward-dating a publication so that it could be offered as a new book for two successive Christmas seasons, something went amiss with Heroines of Poetry. Instead of being aggressively promoted it appears to have languished for two years in a row. In the end, the book became a contentious issue between Maud and her publisher, and she finally put her case into the hands of the lawyer for the Society of Authors, who thereafter represented her.13 Where is the child in this long line of adult contacts—publisher’s reader, illustrator, bookseller, librarian, reviewer, and solicitor for the Society of Authors? She exists merely as a marketing strategy—a commercial possibility—and as a concept: the intended reader. Commerce and culture construct the child anew in each reissue of a “classic.” When Christine Chaundler brought out My Book of Stories from the Poets after World War I, her format closely followed that established by Constance E. Maud at the turn of the century. She converted well-known poems by British authors into prose tales to make them more accessible to children (Chaundler, My Book of Stories, ix), each story introduced by a full-color illustration. Despite the similarities of format, however, Goblin Market itself was re-presented along very different lines. The intervening years had seen destruction of unimagined dimensions. The faith in the essential goodness and original innocence of humanity evident in Maud’s tale of “The Good Sister” does not seem to have been available to Chaundler.

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In the process of converting Rossetti’s poetry to prose Chaundler inculcates a moral at every opportunity, lest Rossetti’s fairy tale seem to celebrate, rather than forbid, pleasure, or encourage in any way association with evil in the world. The child reader is warned at the outset of the story that “though the goblin fruit was so beautiful to look at, the village people did not dare to buy it. . . . For the goblin fruit was poisonous and brought terrible grief and harm to the unwary person who ate of it” (Chaundler, My Book of Stories, 1–2). It is only after this meaning is established that the protagonists, Lizzie and Laura, are introduced. In contrast, Maud’s tale begins by elaborating the idyllic life of “perfect harmony” in which the two “little maids” live—a world without rules or menace, “with nobody to say ‘Don’t’” (Maud, 203). Far from living in harmony with themselves and nature, however, Chandler’s sisters live in an antagonistic world of good and evil in which they themselves are divided into naughty and nice categories. When Laura tastes the antidote on her sister’s face, the real cure is not (as it is in Rossetti’s original poem and Maud’s earlier prose translation) the fruit juice itself. Rather, it is contrition for naughtiness: “And overcome with grief and remorse she pressed Lizzie to her, and kissed her again and again, while for the first time since she had eaten of the forbidden fruit, tears of penitent sorrow fell from her eyes.” As her lips touch the “magic juices,” Laura realizes “how foolish and wrong she had been to taste goblins’ fruit, and with cries and tears she paced up and down the room, until at last she fell unconscious to the floor” (Chaundler, My Book of Stories, 10). Suitably punished and remorseful, Laura is allowed full recovery, for as a children’s author Chaundler was well aware that happy endings were necessary to stories “if you want to sell them” (The Children’s Author, 14). When, in 1934, Chaundler wrote The Children’s Author: A Writer’s Guide to the Juvenile Market, she shared from her “own experiences in the juvenile market, the kinds of stories which I have found to be most in demand, and the publishers and editors who demand them” (11). Chaundler’s focus here, one may note, is pragmatically on the demands of grown-ups in a commercial enterprise, not on the imagined or projected wishes of the hypothetical child reader. And “the easiest kind of story to sell” for the six-to-ten-year-old market (i.e., for the Story Book rather than the Picture Book market), according to Chaundler, is the imaginative fairy tale (20). Furthermore, this genre permits the author a certain degree of creative autonomy. Whereas in Picture Books the author may have to produce text to accompany existing pictures (15), in Story Books an artist is commissioned to produce illustrations to accompany the author’s text. Chaundler recommends leaving the choice of artist to the publisher unless both artist and author “[know] the ropes well” (16).


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It is difficult to know the degree of collaboration between Chaundler and her illustrator, A. C. Michael (fl. 1903–1928), in My Book of Stories from the Poets. Michael did illustrate other works by Chaundler, so the two may have approached their publisher, Cassell, as a team.14 In any case, it is clear that Michael’s illustration for Chaundler’s rewritten tale materially assists in the work of converting Rossetti’s poem into a fairy tale for children and in making it a marketable Christmas commodity. The combination of fairy tales and color plates were a sure sell. Michael follows the tradition established by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in using “Buy from us with a golden curl” as the subject for his frontispiece, but his representation of the scene differs to accord with the implied audience, which is clearly young (plate 5). Wearing the familiar fairytale garb of a white blouse, black-laced bodice, long skirt, and apron, a heartclutching Laura faces a troop of little men (not animals) with pointed caps, oversize feet, short tunics, and broad belts. With few emendations, the plate could easily be renamed “Snow White meets the seven dwarfs.” In this way, Goblin Market is contextualized within a fairy-tale world of stock characters and predictable plots for the nursery. The extent to which the material production of the text—that is, its physical design and the presence of child-directed illustrations—has been the major factor in transferring Goblin Market from the adult to the child’s literary system becomes evident from the fact that, of fifteen illustrated versions produced for the children’s market in the twentieth century, only three (Maud’s, Chaundler’s, and Ellen Raskin’s) altered the text. Ellen Raskin’s adapted version of the poem is an international publication brought out in North America15 in 1970 and a year later in Britain by Rossetti’s original publisher, Macmillan. Its production coincides with the dawn of a new Golden Age of children’s books, brought on by technical advances in printing, sophisticated marketing techniques to widen sales, an increased understanding of the importance of children’s books among parents, librarians, teachers, and publishers, and a new interest in the genre by gifted authors and artists (Bicknell, 58). At the same time, what Brian Alderson calls the “international nostalgia market” prompted the resurrection of Victorian classics, instigating “a complex interaction . . . between the journalistic arbiters of fashion (promoting a mixture of crazes for Victoriana/art nouveau/Jugendstil) and the historians of illustration, the antiquarian book market, and the specialists in reproductive publishing.” Alderson identifies one consequence of this movement as a propensity among “illustrators of the 1970s to adopt a rather self-conscious pastiche style” (“A View,” 23–24). This feature is all too evident in Raskin’s Goblin Market. As she explains in her afterword, Raskin deliberately set out to emulate the Pre-Raphaelite style

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by developing a similar “sharp-focus, hard-outline PRB technique.” Apart from the outlining technique and the abundant hair of Lizzie and Laura, however, Raskin’s version retains little of the Pre-Raphaelite flavor of the original publication (plate 6). In her illustrations, as in her abridgments, Raskin creates a new, sanitized Goblin Market for late-twentieth-century children. According to Zohar Shavit, the business of translating adult texts into children’s books often involves “an adjustment of the text to make it appropriate and useful to the child, in accordance with what society regards (at a certain point in time) as educationally ‘good for the child’ and an adjustment of plot, characterization, and language to prevailing society’s perceptions of the child’s ability to read and comprehend” (113). Christine Chaundler translated Rossetti’s poem for seven-to-ten-year-olds in the 1920s by converting the putatively difficult poetry into comprehensible prose. At the same time, she altered the plot and characterization to inculcate then-current ideologies of sin and remorse, using the tale as an appropriate apparatus for behavior modification in disobedient children. The fairy tale contained a pill. Half a century later, there is no such bitter pill to be swallowed in Ellen Raskin’s adaptation of Goblin Market. On the contrary, Raskin presents children of the 1970s with a carefully censored version of the poem, omitting all references to death and muting any suggestion of sex and violence. What is “good” for the child of the 1970s is not, apparently, a cautionary tale, but rather a happy experience in a fairy-tale world where nobody really dies or gets hurt. Of course, the child targeted in this picture book differs in age as well as cultural context from the reader addressed in either Maud’s or Chaundler’s versions of the poem. Whereas these early productions of Goblin Market were story books aimed at readers, Raskin’s picture-book version—a genre produced as a read-aloud book—is directed to the preliterate. In Raskin’s “updated” version of the poem the moral universe of Christine Chaundler’s fairy-tale world disappears. The goblins are mischievous rather than evil, as Raskin set out to make the goblins “appealing” in order to render “Laura’s temptation more plausible” (“Afterword”). Making the goblins visually appealing, of course, is also a means of downplaying any sense of danger or fear that the language might evoke. In Victorian illustrated versions of the poem (i.e., D. G. Rossetti’s and Housman’s), as Raskin notes, the goblins “had always been drawn as frightening creatures” (“Afterword”), thereby emphasizing the terror of the text. Raskin, however, evidently feels that books for children should not cause any kind of distress. The illustrations in her adaptation of Goblin Market write the contemporary child into the book in two ways: first, by the bibliographic code of the picture book, which features brightly colored watercolors splashed across all page openings; and second, by the visual censorship of violence and danger through the representation of “appealing” goblins. Raskin’s


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goblins are funny little men and animals in bizarre, faintly medieval costumes whose antics appear comic rather than abusive or threatening (plate 6). This visual presentation of meaning combines with an active intervention in regard to Goblin Market’s plot and language calculated to make it suitable, in Raskin’s words, for “the contemporary reader.” Although Raskin claims her emendations are all in the interest of eliminating “outdated Victorian proprieties” (“Afterword”), in fact the 1970s version seems considerably more squeamish than the poem published in 1862. The cautionary story of Jeanie— Who should have been a bride; But who for joys brides hope to have Fell sick and died In her gay prime16 —is erased, as are other suggestions that encountering goblin men might be fatal. When Laura tastes the fruit a second time, there is no suggestion that sense might fail “in the mortal strife,” and the question “Is it death or is it life?” is similarly suppressed. Although representations of death were not only tolerated, but also positively endorsed in Victorian and Edwardian children’s books (Peppin, 12; J. Smith, 91), such images are apparently no longer appropriate for the latetwentieth-century child—on the printed page, at least. Representations on the television, video, or cinematic screen seem to be another matter. Sexuality, on the other hand, has always been more or less taboo in representations for children. But notions of what is sexy are both historically contingent and subject to the different restrictions of verbal and visual media. In 1919 Christine Chaundler had no difficulty in verbally representing the two sisters lying “side by side in their little white bed, their golden heads close together on the pillow” (5). In 1970, however, Ellen Raskin clearly finds a sexual innuendo in this passage unsuitable to children and deletes the lines. Both adapters find Rossetti’s language beyond the comprehension of children in the scene where Lizzie calls upon Laura to “Eat me, drink me, love me.” Chaundler has Lizzie say “never mind my bruises—kiss me and taste the goblins’ fruit once more!” (9–10). Raskin omits this passage altogether, and alters Rossetti’s “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices” to “Hug me, kiss me, taste the juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you” (26; italics added). The accompanying illustration shows an unconscious Laura lying in her sister’s arms as the fruit juices drip off Lizzie’s face like tears (27). Such a visual representation displaces any sexual resonances evoked by the sisters’ embrace by eliminating the kisses altogether. In contrast to the verbal adaptations by Maud, Chaundler, and Raskin, other productions of Goblin Market throughout the twentieth century, in both

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the first and the second Golden Ages of children’s books, rely simply on the visual—physical format and colorful pictures—to designate the targeted audience. Goblin Market has always been a popular choice by juvenile publishers because in both periods of expanded children’s book production illustrated fairy tales have been among the most commercially viable products on the market (J. Rose, 105). Both economic and social factors contributed to this phenomenon. One of the reasons that the first Golden Age reached its peak between 1905 and 1914 was that many Victorian classics went out of copyright in this period. When the copyright on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland expired in 1907, for instance, eight newly illustrated versions were published in the first year alone (Felmingham, 29). Even Rossetti’s Goblin Market, which never achieved the almost cult status of Alice, inspired seven newly illustrated editions in the decade after the copyright expired in 1904, and six other illustrated versions (often in anthologies) between the wars. The “international nostalgia market” of the twentieth-century’s final decades introduced nine new visual versions of Rossetti’s famous poem.17 Of these twenty-two illustrated texts, nearly half were produced for the children’s market—at least ostensibly. The gift-book trade in the early twentieth century, which was so geared to the Christmas sales season, was dominated by previously published texts illustrated by artists who were “either well known or expected to be collectable” (Darton, 310–11). The text, having proved itself a salable commodity, became a vehicle to display the artist’s talents. Thus the gift book always had a potentially dual audience, and the drawing-room table was as likely to be its resting place as the nursery shelf. In the boom days of the gift-book industry, the art department of every publishing house cultivated a stable of illustrators. Many of these artists have now become, if they were not then, coveted collectors’ prizes. Jessie M. King (1875–1949), for instance, the well-known art-nouveau designer of the Glasgow School, designed parchment wrappers for Gowans and Gray for twenty-five years (C. White, 64). One of her first designs for this firm was a cover for Gowans’s International Library edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1907. Willy Pogány (1883–1955) illustrated for George G. Harrap, a publisher who opened his business in 1901 and became active at once in the children’s book trade (Norrie, 58). Pogány illustrated Goblin Market for Harrap as a Sesame Booklet around 1909.18 Margaret Tarrant (1888–1959), who subsequently became one of the most popular and recognizable children’s artists of the twentieth century, working mainly for the Medici Society, illustrated a Goblin Market for Routledge in the early years of her career. Other artists, perhaps less well known to us now, such as Dion Clayton Calthrop (1878–1937) and Alice Ross (fl. 1886–1937), were popular fairy illustrators in their own day. Calthop, who illustrated Goblin Market for T. C. & E. C. Jack in 1906, confessed to having


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“made rather a corner in fairies” in his career as an illustrator (Calthrop, 108). Ross produced book after book of fairy tales for W. P. Nimmo, Hay and Mitchell, including Goblin Market in 1910. Later in the period, single-issue Goblin Markets were less prevalent, but publishers continued to draw on Rossetti’s poem for their large collections of fantasy lore for children. Warwick Goble (1862–1943), one of the Golden Age’s most popular and prolific illustrators, illustrated Goblin Market for Dora Owen’s anthology, The Book of Fairy Poetry, in 1920. This was the last of the artist’s stunning series of sumptuous gift books (Dalby, 93). Capitalizing on the high demand for stories and poems in the fantasy genre in 1938, Odhams Press brought out The Favourite Wonder Book, with contributions by “famous writers” and “over 300 illustrations by well-known artists.” Included in these tales of wonder is Rossetti’s Goblin Market, illustrated with five line drawings by Dorothy M. Wheeler (1891–1966).19 The competition in such a highly profitable industry, limited to an intense three-month sales season, was fierce. Perhaps no artist mastered the potentials of this gift-book market more thoroughly than Arthur Rackham (1867–1939). Indeed, it was Rackham’s production of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1906 for Hodder and Stoughton that, by all accounts, effectively launched the giftbook trade that dominated the publishing industry until the end of World War I (Darton, 310–11). With its fifty full-page color illustrations mounted on art paper, and its publication in both limited and trade editions on both sides of the Atlantic, Rackham’s book established a successful pattern of publication that would serve him well throughout his long career (Hudson, 57). Rackham illustrated many classics for George G. Harrap, in both deluxe and general trade editions, for the British and North American markets of collectors, children, and libraries. His Christmas-season offering for 1933 was Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a publishing landmark that has perhaps had more influence on the poem’s assessment as children’s literature than any other single work. The numerous illustrated versions of Goblin Market published before 1933, in both single editions and anthology reprints, assured Rossetti’s poem a permanent place in the pantheon of children’s literature, but it was Rackham’s version that secured its status as a “children’s classic”—and even, ironically, as a Victorian children’s classic. In the chapter on “Poetry for Children in the Nineteenth Century” in her Critical History of Children’s Literature (1953), Cornelia Meigs identifies Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) as the “one great poem” provided for Victorian children—but then cites, not the original and relevant 1862 edition, but Rackham’s 1933 gift book for Harrap (290–91). It would, of course, be impossible to cite the first edition as a book for children, given the nature of its production and reception as the title poem of Goblin Market and Other Poems.20 But by 1953 when Meigs was writing, Goblin Market had become uncontestedly

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a children’s poem. Furthermore, drawing on Rackham’s version of the poem as evidence of its Victorian popularity may not be as farfetched as it seems on first glance. The truth is, Rackham’s old-fashioned, Pre-Raphaelite style permanently, and erroneously, associated him with the Victorians. He has always been, as Percy Muir puts it, “a post-Edwardian Victorian” (Victorian Illustrated Books, xiv). With Rackham’s gift book we arrive at the central paradox of Goblin Market’s conversion into juvenile literature. The production that caused Goblin Market to be forever enshrined in the annals of children’s literature is also the one whose primary intended consumer was not the child reader but the adult collector. The child in Rackham’s series of Christmas gift books for Harrap in the thirties exists only as a nominal addressee—the hypothetical reader who provides the excuse for adult indulgence in illustrated fairy tales. Contemporary evidence points to grown-ups as the primary consumer for whom these books were marketed. In his memoirs, George G. Harrap is self-congratulatory about the firm’s coup in securing the services of Arthur Rackham in 1928, thereby adding “to our credit as publishers of finely illustrated books.” The commercial viability of these books rests not on the child audience—indeed, the child as potential recipient is not even mentioned—but rather on “the faithful support of the many collectors in England, the United States, and on the Continent who regularly purchase his delightful limited editions” (Harrap, 71). As Rackham himself noted in a letter around this time, “There is such a fashion for publishing only limited editions that my books are in a rather curious position. The ordinary editions do not sell so large a number as of old, and the limiteds are vastly over-applied for” (qtd. in Hamilton, 141). Fully aware of the international and intergenerational nature of his audience, Rackham was hard pressed “to find books that will tempt the public” while at the same time suiting his own “grotesque fantasy.” His publishers, meanwhile, had “to think of vacancies in their lists, and current market conditions, and competitors, etc.” (qtd. in Hamilton, 144). No doubt artist and publisher were equally relieved when Rackham hit upon the idea of illustrating Rossetti’s Goblin Market, for it was definitely a “children’s” fairy tale with adult appeal. The bibliographic features of the Rackham Goblin Market proclaim its dual audience and purpose. The deluxe edition, limited to 410 copies, of which 400 were for sale, all signed by the artist, is bound in ivory vellum—neither the color nor the material appropriate to childish hands. Stamped in gilt on the binding are title and illustrator—but not, significantly, author. This is a book designed to sell by virtue of the artist’s collectibility; the text is incidental, and indeed the large-paper copy seems designed to be looked at rather than read. The general trade edition, on the other hand, is published with paper covers over cloth


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boards, its smaller size and cheaper paper designating its intended juvenile audience and implying that it is meant to be actually read. Apart from these differences in format, however, the general trade and deluxe editions do not vary in either text or illustration. Both are ornamented with numerous black-and-white page decorations and four full-page color illustrations. With their rosy-cheeked maids and comic grotesques in the established Rackham style, three of these color plates—“She clipped a precious golden lock”; “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, / Down the glen tramp little men”; and “Laura would call the little ones”—seem directed to the ostensible child audience. But the fourth illustration—“White and golden Lizzie stood” (plate 7)—seems calculated to appeal to more grownup tastes. Lizzie stands at the center of the picture in a state of dishabille, surrounded by beckoning goblins and their luscious fruit. Unlike other children’s book versions of this scene, Lizzie is neither a child nor an innocent maiden. On the contrary, she is obviously sexually mature, and the positioning of her body suggests invitation and pleasure rather than protest and pain. Rackham’s Lizzie, in short, is “sexy” in a way unusual for children’s books but not for certain kinds of grown-up fare similarly meant to be looked at rather than read. Given his deliberate wooing of the adult collector in his illustrations and his participation in a publishing firm intent on packaging his work in limited editions for lucrative international sales, it is difficult to see why critics have made Rackham such a “touchstone for children’s book illustration” (Adams, 119). But the Rackham touchstone does point out the inherent contradiction of children’s literature: it is produced not only by adults but also for adults. If it does not succeed with the grown-ups who commission, produce, purchase, and review, it will never reach the child reader. It is, in fact, Rackham’s perennial popularity with adults that has given his version of Rossetti’s Goblin Market a permanent place in the juvenile departments of public and school libraries and made it a regular feature of the Christmas sales season in repeated reissues. The Horn Book Magazine gave it the official stamp of approval for purchasing parents, teachers, and librarians when it included a reissue of the Rackham Goblin Market on “The Horn Book’s Honor List” for 1970. The international nostalgia market fed into a revivalist movement prompting publishers to bring out reprints of popular picture books from the past (Alderson, “A View,” 23–24). As Treld Pelkey Bicknell complains, bookshops at the end of the twentieth century were “bulging with continual reprints of books illustrated by Arthur Rackham” and his contemporaries as if nobody “had risen to the ranks of the truly great illustrators since the 1920s” (68–69). Indeed, Rackham’s work might seem almost as central to fin-demillennium Christmas sales as it was in his own day—Goblin Market, for instance, was published in a new paperback edition in 1984 and since reprinted in this inexpensive form. However attractively displayed or priced, this Goblin

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Market reprint does, however, face stiff competition from late-twentieth-century illustrators who learned from the master how to use the juvenile market for specialized, international sales. What makes Rackham truly a “touchstone” in children’s book illustration is that he established so early what were to become the chief characteristics of the picture book at the end of the twentieth century. Typically a reprint of a “classic” author, these books are produced essentially as picture portfolios for the artist’s work, aimed at prize-giving juries, libraries, and collectors. The fact that some major prizes are judged not by the printed page but by the original artwork (Kingman, xii) indicates just how far these “books” have strayed from even the conception of the child audience. And yet, with his promotional strategy of exhibiting and selling his original watercolor drawings at the launch of each new book, Arthur Rackham anticipated even this contemporary phenomenon. Martin Ware’s original etchings for a Goblin Market produced by Victor Gollancz in 1980, for example, were initially exhibited at the Graffiti Gallery in London. An original artist of considerable international acclaim, Ware refuses to call himself an illustrator—despite the fact that he produces prints (etchings) for books—and claims not to take into account the age of the book’s target audience in producing his illustrations.21 Ware appears to view his work as an independent art for which the poem is simply a pre-text and the printed book format an interesting design problem rather than a communicative form. In picture books like Ware’s, the child reader exists only as the publisher’s marketing strategy (Gollancz in fact promoted the book for eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds) and institutional destination. Typically found on the shelves of children’s libraries, Ware’s Goblin Market seems an unlikely purchase for an individual child. With its naked, gnomic goblin men and sexually explicit representation of the relationship between the sisters, this book seems more likely to be purchased by an adult collector who appreciates the artwork than by a parent as a gift for a child (fig. 6.2). Like the Gollancz edition, another Goblin Market published in the 1980s, this time in the United States—by David R. Godine with illustrations by George Gershinowitz—self-consciously inscribes its dual readership in its picture-bookas-art-book approach to the form. Not surprisingly, the blurbs on the back jackets of these editions emphasize their suitability for both adult and child. These books represent the new fin-de-siècle gift book, calculated first to appeal to prize-giving juries, librarians, and collectors and then to children. With its fineart production, the edition illustrated by Gershinowitz especially typifies the late-twentieth-century trend toward dual marketing. As a note on the verso of the last page details (clearly for the edification of the collector): “The typeface is Monotype Dante, designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, cut in its original version

6.2 Martin Ware, “Laura started from her chair,” etching for Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), 42. By kind permission of the artist.

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by Charles Malin, and first used in 1954.” The paper, too, is top quality: “The illustrations were separated & the book was printed by Princeton Polychrome Press on Potlach’s Quintessence supplied by Pratt Paper Company of Boston, Massachusetts.” Gershinowitz’s watercolors and black-and-white line drawings are beautiful works of art with a Pre-Raphaelite, botanical detail very appealing to the eye (plate 8). Sheila Egoff has named “the rise of small presses as one of the most significant publishing phenomena” of the late twentieth century, as many of them are “devoted to the publishing of books for young children” (262). Godine is also committed, however, to producing “books of exceptional design and beauty” for a highly specialized, but lucrative, market (Coser, 47). Thus this small firm is able to do what the large publishing houses of an earlier age did so well: market simultaneously for children and collectors. In the process of becoming children’s literature, Goblin Market has turned full circle and become—as it was in Rossetti’s lifetime—once more a beautiful illustrated book for adults. Egoff has pointed out “the intriguing paradox that the picture book, which appears to be the coziest and most gentle of genres, actually produces the greatest social and aesthetic tensions in the whole field of children’s literature” (248). As this brief history of Goblin Market’s production and reception as a work for children suggests, its numerous producers, complex visual-verbal forms, dual audiences, international interconnections and institutional networks involve Rossetti’s poem in an intricate social web that spins many meanings and produces many audiences.

Sing-Song: The Process of Becoming a Classic Despite the proliferation of multiple versions of Goblin Market in juvenile publishing at peak illustration periods in the twentieth century, it is the nursery rhymes in Sing-Song which have most consistently presented the Children’s Rossetti to an international public. As David Powell, compiler of Doves and Pomegranates: Poems for Young Readers, noted in 1969, the only poetry of Rossetti then in print (outside anthologies) was the Sing-Song verses. Indeed, generations of children on both sides of the Atlantic have been introduced to these rhymes in the home, the classroom, and the library since their first appearance in England and North America in 1871. As early as 1898, Rossetti’s biographer, Mackenzie Bell, spoke of Sing-Song’s international appeal in describing its existence “in numberless nurseries throughout the world” (261). By 1907, Sing-Song had made its appearance on the “List of Selected Books for Children” directed to American parents, teachers, and librarians, in J. Moses Montrose’s Children’s Books and Reading (appendix). In 1914, it was included in the junior volume of Macmillan’s The Children’s Rossetti, and thereby made potentially accessible to classrooms in


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Britain’s colonies and dominions. One popular Sing-Song lyric, “Who has seen the wind?,” became a standard feature of The Canadian Readers, Book II— “authorized for use in the public schools of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia”—ultimately giving the title to a Canadian classic about a young boy growing up on the prairie (W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind, Macmillan Canada, 1947). By the 1950s Cornelia Meigs could observe: “Many who are dealing with children today at home or in the school room find that ‘Who has seen the wind,’ ‘Colour’ [i.e., ‘What is pink?’] and ‘Cherries on a branch’ are among the happiest poetry experiences they can give them” (292). Sing-Song achieved classic status so early, and retained it so long, largely because of a complex institutional apparatus that gave the lyrics the adult stamp of approval. Critics have long agreed that the lyrics in Sing-Song represent the nineteenth century’s only real poetry for children apart from Blake and Robert Louis Stevenson (Darton, 314–15). With the institutional support offered by teachers and librarians, publishers have continued to find a ready market for Rossetti’s verses. Knowing that the principal audience for Sing-Song is children still in the process of gaining literacy, editors of juvenile departments have always published the lyrics with illustrations. Neither the kind nor the function of the pictures, however, has been constant. One trademark of a classic is its extraordinary ability to mutate to accommodate changing cultural conditions. Rossetti’s nursery rhymes have been selected, rearranged, and added to, and Hughes’s illustrations replaced many times, for new generations of children. As the picture-book genre developed, Rossetti’s lyrics began to be used in small spin-off editions, in which an internationally acclaimed artist used a modicum of text to produce books whose visual sequence added another, alternate, story line to the selected Rossetti poem(s). Reflecting the highly visual culture of the late twentieth century, such art-dominated picture books are the products of a highly competitive publishing industry that has flooded the market with the “reillustration of old stories and verses” (Haviland, 170). Like Goblin Market, the lyrics in Sing-Song have proved a gold mine for traders in the nostalgia market. By 1924, when Macmillan of New York brought out Sing-Song and Other Poems for Children, newly illustrated by Marguerite Davis (b. 1889), Rossetti’s nursery rhymes had clearly achieved classic status. The rearranged and selected lyrics were published for four-to-six-year-olds in “The Little Library” series, identified by the publisher as “a group of little classics which have found special favor with younger children, those of long ago and those of to-day.”22 This SingSong does indeed seem to have been very popular, for Macmillan brought out an expanded version of the book two years later (1926), with five more poems and seventeen new illustrations. This expanded edition was in constant publication until at least the 1950s and exists in numerous reprints. One of these reprints (for

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1934) is singled out for special praise by Annie E. Moore in her book for teachers in training, Literature Old and New for Children: Materials for a College Course (1934). Moore’s comments are a telling indicator of how even admired classics must be refashioned for new generations of children, in accordance with the image of the child and childhood each culture constructs. The many references to death in Sing-Song—such a standard feature of both traditional nursery rhymes and Victorian literature—are no longer acceptable for the four-year-old of the 1930s. No note of sorrow must enter the world grown-ups have imaginatively determined to be innocent and light-hearted. Thus Moore commends the Davis edition which, “with a few judicious omissions and some welcome additions from other collections, brings to children a book of pure happiness. The only tombstone left is one of snow erected with proper ceremonial to a ‘song-singing thrush’” (298). In fact the “judicious omissions” include not only all references to death but also those lyrics (discussed in chapter 3) with a political slant, such as “Crying, my little one?” and “I caught a little ladybird,” as well as others with complex symbolism such as “Hope is like a harebell,” “If hope grew on a bush,” and “There is but one May in the year.” The additions include, predictably enough, “An Alphabet,” some Christmas carols, and “To Lalla.” As in Doves and Pomegranates, the selected poems in this collection are rearranged under sections that seem specifically directed to the teacher, parent, or librarian seeking a poem on a specific subject for occasional use: “In the Country”; “At Home”; “Just for Fun”; “Lesson Time”; “Lullaby, Baby!”; “Christmas Carols”; and “Epilogue for Grown-Ups: To Lalla.” As we have seen, however, this view of childhood as a protected space of pure happiness on which no shadows ought to fall is not one espoused by Christina Rossetti or her artistic partner, Arthur Hughes, in the Victorian editions of these nursery rhymes. But in the Sing-Song produced for children in the post–World War I years, Rossetti’s new illustrator and publisher constructed a very different image of childhood, thereby changing not simply the context, but the impact of the poems as well. The publisher’s plan for the books in The Little Library series was to preserve “so far as possible their original make-up” (back jacket flap), and this Sing-Song does follow the 1872 edition closely in size, shape, and format. As in the original edition, the lyrics share the page with a half-page blackand-white line drawing, usually reproduced as a headpiece. Taken together with the frontispiece, these drawings indicate that Marguerite Davis was familiar with Hughes’s illustrations, and was in many cases deliberately revising them for her contemporary audience. The frontispiece (fig. 6.3) shows this imitation and adaptation in process. Like Hughes’s frontispiece (fig. 3.1), Davis’s locates the

6.3 Marguerite Davis, frontispiece for SingSong: A Nursery Rhyme Book and Other Poems for Children, by Christina Rossetti (New York: Macmillan, 1940).

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singing of the book’s songs in an idyllic outdoor world where birds join in the joyous music. But Davis removes the mother from this scene. No adults— punitive, nurturing, or instructional—interfere with the purity of the natural child. The young girl and boy in Davis’s landscape sit alone on a grassy knoll under a tree, singing songs from the book resting in the boy’s lap. The image of childhood constructed by this book of the 1920s is one completely detached from the adult world, occupying a protected, separate space of innocent joy. Marguerite Davis’s Sing-Song was the book through which most American children would have come to know Rossetti’s nursery rhymes before the enterprising publishers of the second Golden Age of children’s books began to bring out finely produced picture books in the late-twentieth-century style. A SingSong produced for post–World War II children by Pied Piper Books in 1945, with illustrations by Marion R. Kohs, did not offer the earlier Macmillan book any real competition. A selection of thirty-seven of Rossetti’s simplest nursery rhymes—with no references to death, sorrow, or social inequity—Verses from Sing-Song is ornamented on alternate pages with black-and-white sketches and full-color drawings, all produced by Kohs in an execrable style of saccharine sentimentality devoid of aesthetic appeal. But when, in the 1960s, the picture book came into its own as a unique hybrid art form distinct from the illustrated book, Rossetti’s verses began to be produced for an international audience attuned to the pictorial as never before. As Joseph H. Schwarcz and Chava Schwarcz comment, illustrators in the second half of the century began to experiment with new forms of composition, arrangement, assemblage, and integration between picture and word, resulting in a more pronounced and respected role for the artist in this hybrid form (4). Describing the picture book as “a serial art form,” the authors claim that it is in this genre that visual and verbal “means of expression and communication work together most intimately, to the point where the cooperation and competition of printed word and picture is so essential that one alone is unable to carry out the full intention of the work” (5). In the reillustration of a “classic” such as SingSong, it is evident that “the full intention of the work” has little, if anything, to do with the (dead) author’s idea for her book. Rather, such a concept only makes sense as it relates to a publisher’s objectives (including plans for marketing and distribution) and an artist’s aims. The latter are particularly complex. Illustrators are motivated by communicative and instructional objectives as they seek to coordinate image and text; by aesthetic challenges as they work to solve artistic and compositional problems; and by career goals as they satisfy self-promotional and competitive requirements in their field. To this set of “intentions” within the industry must be added the social and


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institutional objectives for children’s literature generally. As J. and C. Schwarcz point out, “Teachers, counselors, librarians, institutions, textbooks, curricula, and methods all serve to realize society’s intentions”—that is, to educate the younger generation “toward common values, attitudes, and behavior patterns, for society’s and the individual’s mutual benefit” (10). Thus teacher Dorothy E. Ames, for instance, makes an impassioned plea for the value of poetry—and the lyrics of Sing-Song specifically—in a primary classroom full of low-income, book-impoverished children, by invoking the fundamental truth “‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’” (131). Myra Cohn Livingston praises the sharing of poetry with children in the library, classroom, or home as a counterbalance to the twentieth century’s prevailing commercialism and utilitarianism. Lee Galda and others increasingly cite the picture-book form as “a unique opportunity for children to develop visual literacy”—a skill of tremendous importance, according to Galda, in our “visual culture of television, videos, and computers” (506). With so much social expectation invested in the poetic picture book, the reillustrated classic becomes a particularly charged site of cultural production. To make it work, the artist and publisher must recast the poem’s language, and even its rhythms, in contemporary dress. Two versions of a perennial Rossetti favorite, “What is pink?,” produced twenty years apart, provide an excellent opportunity to see how different material contexts can reshape, as they reproduce, a classic text. In 1971 Jose Aruego, a Filipino-American artist, illustrated What Is Pink? for Macmillan of New York. In 1992 Mary Teichman, a New York printmaker, produced etchings for Color: A Poem, a Harper Trophy Book. While Aruego, as a book illustrator and author, focuses on the printed page and the reading experience, Teichman reflects the new trend in picture books. Like the British printmaker Martin Ware, who produced etchings for Goblin Market in 1980, and like an increasing number of picture-book makers, Teichman is an artist rather than an illustrator. Encouraged by today’s technological and graphic sophistication, contemporary artists have turned to the picture book as an exciting mixed-media form for experimentation. As Selma Lanes comments, “the genre has increasingly become a catch-all for gifted artists whose work is difficult to categorize” (49). Egoff links the “profound alterations in the picture book’s concept and structure” at the end of the twentieth century to a new (she calls it “excessive”) “emphasis on the pictorial” that developed out of “the visual explosion of the 1960s, when images and symbols appeared ready to obliterate other forms of communication” (253). It is not, however, simply the visual culture of the 1960s that is represented in Aruego’s What Is Pink? but also its ideological concerns

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with individual identity and the generation gap. Aruego casts Rossetti’s dialogue poem as a conversation between an inquiring young flamingo, eager for knowledge of the world, and his well-meaning but out-of-touch mother. Aruego takes advantage of the physical form of the picture book by locating each question on the recto, necessitating a page turn to acquire each deferred answer. This results in some deliberate tension between visual and verbal as the two play off against each other. The child reader sees the world through the eyes of the protagonist, the baby flamingo. Each time the young bird asks his mother a question about the nature of the world, he himself—along with the child audience—sees a potential answer. But the mother, who fails to see the world through his eyes, always offers a different response. The first question, for instance—“What is pink?”—is actually a question about self-identity, for the young flamingo is pictured with his long neck curved under his body in order to look at himself. The mother, oblivious to the child’s immediate need and interest, provides him with the standard, Rossetti-ready answer: “A rose is pink / By the fountain’s brink”—much to the young bird’s graphically visible dismay (plate 9). Thus the story continues in two lines—one visual, one verbal—until, at the end, the little flamingo triumphantly answers his own question, relieved that at last his mother can have no opposing reply: “What is orange? // Why, an orange, just an orange!” Quite a different “What is pink?” emerges from Mary Teichman’s Color: A Poem. As the new title suggests, this picture book is designed as “An introduction to colors and poetry, for very young children,” according to the publisher’s information located on the inside page. Teichman does not, like Aruego, seek to add human (or anthropomorphic) interest to Rossetti’s dialogue poem. Rather, the art becomes an end in itself. Each question (“What is pink?”) is isolated on the blank recto of a double-page opening. A large, irregular blob of the appropriate color (pink, red, blue, white, yellow, green, violet, orange) is centered on the facing page. Like Aruego, Teichman uses the page turn to augment the anticipation of the question. Each answer is found on the next double-page opening, with the main clause (“A rose is pink”) on the verso and the qualifier (“by the fountain’s brink”) on the recto. The picture occupying this double-page spread is a close-up of the natural object itemized, printed in glowing colors. The original illustrations, we are told in the publisher’s information, “were prepared as etchings created on four copper plates using a color separation process and printed by hand”—“a process,” according to one reviewer, “that fits the timeless nature of this poem, first published in 1871.” Why this etching process should be particularly appropriate to “What is pink?,” or why the lyric is “timeless,” the reviewer does not explain, although she is very certain that Teichman “brings Christina Rossetti’s classic poem ‘What is pink?’ alive”—as if it were dead and in need of resuscitation for contemporary “primary-grade children”


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(Galda, 513). Galda’s review appears in an article in the Reading Teacher entitled “Visual Literacy: Exploring Art and Illustration in Children’s Books.” According to the review, the function of this picture book and others like it is to educate the child’s visual sense and artistic appreciation—quite a different purpose and effect from Aruego’s What Is Pink? or indeed from those of Rossetti and Hughes described in chapter 3. As we have seen, far from being “timeless,” a book is always a product of its times. Its meaning, like its fabrication, is historically and culturally specific, produced by particular circumstances, institutions, and individuals, for a new reader and purpose, with each publication. If Teichman’s Color seems principally a vehicle for the printmaker’s art, Fly Away, Fly Away, Over the Sea and Other Poems for Children by Christina Rossetti, selected and illustrated by internationally acclaimed illustrator Bernadette Watts, seems a product of mass-marketing more than a book produced with readers in mind. Like all the twentieth-century reprints of Sing-Song discussed so far, the publisher’s blurb claims the verses are “nursery classics,” thereby lending rationale and authority to the republication. Moreover, by casting Rossetti’s verses in a universal, timeless realm “shared by children everywhere” while at the same time praising Watts’s illustrations for making the poet’s “work . . . come alive for a new generation of children,” this publication reinscribes the contradiction noted in the review of Color. Fly Away, Fly Away, Over the Sea lacks both the visual energy and the interpretive recasting evident in Teichman’s work. This book exists primarily as a gallery between boards for Watts, whose selections seem to have been made based on her plans for a double-page opening with shared borders and congruent visual motifs in fuzzy chalk drawings. Walter Lorraine complains of “an exaggerated use of borders in much of today’s illustration, sometimes to the point that the border takes priority over the picture” (6). In this book, not only do the borders overpower the picture, but the tiny bit of text on each page, islanded in the center of multiple frames and decorative elaboration, is reduced to little more than the arbitrary raison d’être of the book (plate 10). Its physical format bespeaks its mode of production. More than any other book examined in this chapter, Watts’s Fly Away, Fly Away is an example of the picture book as big business, a concern of an international co-publishing industry with commercial interests across the English-speaking world. Watts’s illustrations were copyrighted in 1991 by Nord-Süd Verlag in Zurich, Switzerland. The same year, the book—which was printed in Belgium—was published in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by NorthSouth Books, New York, an imprint of Nord-Süd Verlag. Visually attractive and artistically competent, the book nevertheless fails to produce any kind of meaningful interaction between picture and word. The book’s mass production is

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inscribed in its fuzzy interior and bland contents: the pictures could ornament virtually any poem with a natural or domestic setting. There is no productive tension or counterpoint between image and text, no page-turn pleasure of anticipation and gratification. Lacking both a dynamic dialogue and a dramatic sequence, this picture book remains little more than a clever piece of marketing.

Coda: The Grown-ups Reproduce For every child introduced to some form of the Children’s Rossetti there is a grown-up who remembers. Indeed, it is thanks to adult memories of the poems they read as children that the Children’s Rossetti has achieved its longevity. It is the mature illustrator, editor, or publisher who, remembering his or her own experience with Rossetti’s poetry in the home, the classroom, or the public library’s story hour, chooses to reproduce the work for a new generation of children. It is the adult bookstore browser who, coming across an illustrated Rossetti for children attractively displayed on the new books shelf, and remembering a pleasure from the past, purchases the book for the next generation of children who grow up to remember. It is the author remembering a little boy growing up in the dustbowl of the Canadian prairies who finds in the Rossetti lyric learned in the classroom the only words adequate to describe the experience of the wind passing over that vast expanse (Mitchell). It is the illustrator recalling a favorite poem, long out of print, who turns to Goblin Market as the inspiration for a new picture book (Raskin, “Afterword”). It is the playwright who, remembering the poem read to him in childhood by an aunt, produces a fringe-theater Goblin Market “for adults only.”23 It is the literary critic who, remembering her first shock of “‘real’ poetry” on reading Rossetti’s “Who has seen the wind?” at age nine, grows up to become a world-renowned Victorian scholar (Armstrong, 117). And, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is the collector who grew up knowing “many of Christina’s poems by heart” (Maser, 8) who goes on to perpetuate the Rossetti industry by contributing to the demand for books by and about her.

7 Christina for the Connoisseur As an apostle of thoroughness in business and everything else, his books must be as well equipped as books could be: there must be fine bindings, the best paper and printing, and above all there must be pictures. When that was done you might say you had got a book. For rarity and antiquity he cared nothing at all: a sumptuous edition of nursery rhymes was more desirable in his eyes than any Caxton. —E. F. Benson, An Autumn Sowing

The Collector, the Critic, and Cultural Circulation

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NE afternoon in the 1970s an American married couple walked into a bookshop in London’s Pall Mall district in hopes of adding to the man’s collection of Wesleyana. The bookseller, having nothing in this line that the collector did not already own, showed him instead a literary curiosity: a Bible owned first by Maria, and then by Christina, Rossetti. Because he had once been a collector of Bibles, the Wesleyan collector showed a mild interest in the binding. The woman’s interest was much keener, but it centered on the owner rather than the manufacture of the object. On hearing the name of Christina Rossetti, she suddenly became consumed with the desire to possess the Bible. Inspired by a childhood love of the Sing-Song verses so intense that she could still recite many of the poems by heart, the woman became a determined collector of Rossetti books, manuscripts, and associated material (Maser, 5–10). In 1991, the couple contributed some of their large Rossetti collection to the library at Bryn Mawr College and produced Christina Rossetti in the Maser Collection. Containing essays about the collection by both Frederick

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E. Maser and Mary Louise Jarden Maser and reproductions of illustrations in their possession, the book’s primary interest lies in a clutch of the poet’s letters, suitably annotated, and previously unpublished. Bound by the CHM Edition Bookbindery of Andalusia, Pennsylvania, and printed on Mohawk superfine softwhite eggshell paper by the Acorn Press of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in Baskerville and Caslon type, the book is itself a collectors’ item. But it has, of course, another audience: beside the Pre-Raphaelite collector we must place the literary critic as eager consumer of those unpublished letters, and as resolute reproducer of Rossettiana in a scholarly context. The collector and the critic coexist in a cultural economy that determines the value, and hence the circulation, of books old and new. Primarily intent on owning the material object for their own private purposes, collectors nevertheless contribute to the general cultural system by performing the important function of locating and preserving historical artifacts. Furthermore, their involvement in the exchange of goods in the marketplace necessarily requires the associated activity of bibliographic description—not only in sales catalogues but also, ultimately, in institutional records, as most private collections end up in public institutions. A literary scholar is necessarily dependent on the collections of others, both private and public, to do the work of critical analysis. Quite simply, the critic needs books and manuscripts, and the collector has them. Because the Masers became obsessed with the desire to own Christina Rossetti material, my own obsession with locating and examining all possible illustrated versions of her work could be gratified. I could pore over the unique, hand-illustrated Goblin Market produced by E. Cotton in the collection at Bryn Mawr, examine a study by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the title page of The Prince’s Progress in the Maser home in Doylestown, and descend, together with Dr. Maser, into the bowels of the First National Bank in Philadelphia in a futile search through his safety deposit box for Christina’s drawing of her goblins. In Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing, the authors write perceptively that if one approaches publishing from a sociological perspective, the “networks of personal and organizational relations that nourish books” become immediately obvious. These relationships exist both inside and outside the publishing industry and, in combination with technological, economic, and aesthetic factors, they determine the ways books are produced and distributed (Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, 5). Like the house that Jack built, a book is built by a series of personal and material accretions, each with its own separate narrative. Evelyn Cotton, an amateur artist living in Ipswich, purchases or is given a first edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems and laboriously draws pen-andink illustrations for each poem so fine that a bookseller later mistakes them for etchings.1 Seeking publication, but unsure how to proceed, she travels to Lon-

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don to take her book to the admired poet for inspection and advice in late 1892 or early 1893. Christina Rossetti can do nothing to help the artist beyond referring her to Macmillan.2 Either losing heart for the enterprise, or failing to convince the publisher that such an expensive illustrated edition by an amateur lady artist would be worth his financial risk,3 Evelyn Cotton returns home disappointed. Eventually, she presents the book “With her Mother’s Love” as a gift to her daughter, Blanche Rose Cotton. After a limited circulation among members of the Cotton family,4 the book is sold (perhaps in an estate sale) and finds its way into a bookseller’s catalogue in 1958, thereby entering the wider field of cultural exchange on the collectors’ market. The Masers add the book to their private collection in 1984 and donate it to the institutional collection at Bryn Mawr in 1991, where I am able to examine it in 1999. The Cotton Goblin Market is a book with layers of history and multiple stories, most of them unknown, inscribed not only between its covers but also in the trail of documents and records it has generated in the last one hundred years. In a way, it is a “failed” book, or even a non-book, as its projected publication as an illustrated edition with a wide circulation never materialized. Yet it has had its own system of distribution in the marketplace, and, in the networks of personal and institutional relations it has generated, it has also produced a series of publications and a modest array of narratives, of which this is only the latest. As the forgoing narrative suggests and the current chapter seeks to demonstrate, the critic and the collector participate in social and organizational networks which contribute to the production and reception of books and the culture they represent. Far from acknowledging their mutually dependent and complementary functions, however, collectors and critics have sometimes assumed antagonistic positions. In the history of the book, there have traditionally been two competitive systems of knowledge, one interested in the “book as meaning,” the other in the “book as object”—or, as Susan Stewart puts it, in “book as idea versus book as material” (33). In opposing scholarship and connoisseurship, some collectors even go so far as to insist that critics should work with microfilm, and never hold that rare and delicate object, the physical book, in their irreverent hands (Franklin, 2). But books belong to both critics and collectors, and their full meaning as cultural products cannot be adequately explored if the hermeneutic and the bibliographic fields are segregated. Moreover, the opposition between scholarship and connoisseurship is a false one, as the collector and the critic are both connoisseurs—both expert judges in matters of taste—even if their methodologies, desires, and narratives differ. Together, they produce a system in which cultural artifacts can be evaluated, appreciated, exchanged, reproduced, and consumed. Of all books old, beautiful, and rare, few have held the same charm for

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collectors as illustrated editions. Indeed, early work in the field of illustrated books was dominated by bibliophiles and bibliographers. Literary critics have been slow to turn their analytical eyes on this hybrid interdisciplinary form. Even Gordon Ray’s monumental The Illustrator and the Book in England (1976) addresses collectors rather than scholars as the audience most interested in illustrated books. His identification of one hundred outstanding works published between 1790 and 1914 is essentially a collector’s “must have” wish list. Included in this list of prize possessions is Laurence Housman’s illustrated version of Rossetti’s Goblin Market, published in 1893 by Macmillan for the growing market of aesthetic consumers interested in the Book Beautiful.5 In his compendious The Illustrated Gift Book, 1880–1930 Michael Felmingham singles out the Housman Goblin Market as “the most beautiful book of the time” (37)—high praise indeed in a period when the market was overflowing with beautiful books of all kinds. Housman’s was the first of many illustrated Rossettis produced for the adult connoisseur. As we shall see, its production as a luxury collectors’ piece has had long-range effect on both the poem’s critical history and its circulation in a variety of marketplaces. The Christina Rossetti produced in finely illustrated volumes for the connoisseur shares some features—notably pictures—with the children’s Rossetti and the religious Rossetti. But the stakes are higher. The craze for illustrated gift books that distinguished the publishing industry of the early twentieth century also became a measure for the consumer’s degree of “culture.” Writing for the first issue of the Bibliophile in 1908, Mrs. Arthur Bell identified “the ever-growing appreciation of finely illustrated literature” as a mark of “the great advance that has been made in general culture during the last half century” (9). As a collectors’ object, the illustrated book enters the field of cultural production as an artifact desired for its aesthetic value rather than its utility. It is a book not to be read, but to be looked at and displayed.

Bibliomania: The Useless Book In 1892 Andrew Lang revised and reissued his popular guide for the rarebook connoisseur, The Library, first published a decade before. In his preface to the second edition he noted that “the comparative revival of collecting does really seem to have improved, in some cases, the art of manufacturing books” (xiv). Lang was right to link collection to production. The quiet antiquarian pursuit of collecting old books paradoxically fed into the contemporary culture industry by provoking the publication of a new kind of book. If the bibliophile desired books not for their literary value but “for curiosity, for beauty of type, paper, binding, and illustrations, for some connection they may have with famous people of the past, or for their rarity” (Lang, 2), the contemporary pub-

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lisher could produce new books to satisfy every demand but antiquity. Technological developments gave arts-and-crafts designers the ability to meet the needs of this niche market at the same time that aesthetes with Dorian Gray’s taste for the curious and the rare emerged on the scene. When William Morris established the Kelmscott Press in 1891, he not only showed the publishing world how to produce the Book Beautiful, but also proved that there was a market for expensive books consumed as aesthetic objects and domestic decor. Like Kelmscott Press productions, the gift books published during the revival of fine printing were often works of non-utility in the sense that they were not really built to be read. As “pure object,” the Book Beautiful of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “abandons the realm of use value and enters an ornamental realm of exchange value”—it becomes an aesthetic commodity (Stewart, 35). As such it meets the book collector’s requirements by being “[e]xpensive, ornamental, useless” (Franklin, 1). The late-nineteenth-century revival of collecting described by Lang fed into what his contemporary, decorative artist Walter Crane, noted as “the modern revival of printing as an art” in a number of significant ways. First, as Crane remarks, the period saw an ever-increasing number of books about books, of which Lang’s The Library is but one example. Secondly, the “passion for tall copies and handmade paper; for delicate bindings, and first editions” (153) evoked two material responses from the publishing industry. The first was the issuing of limited edition reprints of prized books from the past in attractive modern garb. The second was the publication of new work by contemporary authors in finely designed books, often offering, in addition to the general trade publication, a limited number of large-paper copies bound in vellum. The most representative edition of the first sort, and indeed the great achievement of the fine printing revival, is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer, illustrated with wood engravings after Edward Burne-Jones’s designs, embellished throughout with William Morris’s borders, titles, and initial letters, and printed in red and black ink in a type specially cut for this edition and known henceforth as the Chaucer type. This enormous folio cannot be read without some “kind of scaffolding” to support it, as Lang comments about the “livres de luxe” produced at this time (102). Publishers were quick to see the enormous commercial potential of Morris’s ideal of the book as an object of beauty. The big book became big business in the years before World War I (Meyer, 37). Other reprints were produced specifically for “the Artist and the Connoisseur, to whom principally the book is intended to appeal,” as the publisher notes in a limited-edition reprint of the Moxon Tennyson, reproduced with the famous Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, printed on handmade paper and bound in white vellum by Freemantle & Co. in 1901. This book unites the fine-printing revival

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with the Pre-Raphaelite renaissance that developed when fin-de-siècle artists like Charles Ricketts began to raid booksellers’ bins for magazines and books featuring the wood-engraved illustrations of the 1860s. As Simon Houfe comments perceptively, “What was markedly different about this revival was its distance from mere connoisseurship or collecting. Artists and publishers were in the forefront, keenly interested in reinvigorating the art of the present through the art of the past” (Fin de Siècle, 14). A man like Ricketts, who was both artist and publisher, had enormous influence in this business of bringing the sixties into the nineties, “for he was not only a dynamic designer and innovator, but a powerful voice in proselytizing and educating” as well (15). It was Ricketts, for example, who changed the direction of Laurence Housman’s career by setting him “to pen-work, with Rossetti and the other preRaphaelites as my main guides both in composition and technique” (Housman, Unexpected Years, 115). The Goblin Market Housman produced shows the results of this tutelage, for it is the fin-de-siècle work “most often cited as being close in feeling to the Pre-Raphaelites,” with evident artistic debts to both D. G. Rossetti and John Millais (Houfe, Fin de Siècle, 23–24). As Forrest Reid comments, “He and Mr. Charles Ricketts are the true successors of the first little group of illustrators of the sixties.” There is an important difference, though: “Where the artist of the sixties thought only of the picture to be inserted, Mr. Housman and Mr. Ricketts—following Walter Crane and Burne-Jones—take also the book itself into consideration, designing initial letters and working out elaborate borders and title pages” (46). Housman’s Goblin Market represents the third kind of publication linked to the social phenomenon of collecting: the finely bound and decorated work of a contemporary author issued in both trade and limited deluxe editions. As an antiquarian traditionalist, Lang objected to the “fashion of buying the first editions of contemporaries” in large-paper copies as a fad that supported an over-hasty “canonization” of living authors, making “relics of their first editions” (xiii–xiv). Lang uses the language of the sacred to explain that the sentimental side of collecting turns books into “literary relics . . . as dear and sacred to the lover of literature as are relics of another sort to the religious devotee. The amateur likes to see the book in its form as the author knew it” (23). It is this kind of pseudo-religious fervor that Mary Louise Jarden Maser invested in the Rossetti Bible. Collecting a living author or artist, however, tends to be somewhat less sentimental and more business-like. The collector is speculating that the author will become “collectible,” and is trying to steal a march on the market by investing in the commodity before it becomes a desirable “relic.” One of the most active collectors of this sort in the late nineteenth century was Charles Fairfax Murray, himself an erstwhile Pre-Raphaelite artist and de-

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signer, and indeed a short-lived illustrator of Sing-Song for F. S. Ellis (see chapter 3). It may have been this brief connection with the author that initiated Murray’s collecting fervor, for a significant portion of his collection of holograph letters consists of correspondence between Rossetti and the Dalziel Brothers relating to Sing-Song and its illustrations.6 As early as 1879—a mere seven years after the publication of Sing-Song—Murray was buying all the Rossetti manuscripts and printer’s copies that he could from the poet (Letters, 2:211). By selling Murray the printer’s copy of Seek and Find for £10 (one-fourth of what she received for the copyright), Christina could trade in herself as a commodity even while virtually donating her work to the SPCK. Indeed, she seems to have been fully aware of her status as a “collectible” at the end of her life, advising William “not to disperse my library to the four winds without careful inspection of copies, lest you should squander unsuspected treasures here and there” (FL, 167). Cognizant of the emerging collectors’ market for “relics,” Rossetti wants to ensure that her beloved brother will get full value for whatever she can leave him on her death. As a writer constantly solicited for autographs, Rossetti well knew the added value of holograph notations in author’s copies. She was also increasingly aware of the demand for first editions, especially those produced by small private presses. In 1882 Rossetti remarked, with both surprise and gratification, that her very first publication—the Verses of 1847 privately printed on Grandpa Polidori’s private press—had appeared in a bookseller’s catalogue listed at five guineas (FL, 108). This was an extravagant price, considering that her most recent volume of poetry, A Pageant and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1881), was then selling for 6s, and even Housman’s limited edition deluxe Goblin Market a decade later sold for only 21s. But as an exceedingly rare volume, Verses of 1847 had become, according to Edmund Gosse in 1882, “the very cynosure of Victorian bibliography” (“Christina Rossetti,” 141). Lucien Pissarro was banking on the bibliophile’s desire for the unique and the rare when he decided to turn the 1847 Verses into a Book Beautiful at his Eragny Press in 1906. Priced at £1 each for the 175 “ordinary” copies printed in Brook type on handmade paper, and at a hefty £5 each for the 10 copies (of which only 8 were for sale) on Roman vellum, the Eragny Press Verses was produced for a small but loyal group of international collectors.7 The son of French impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, Lucien came under the influence of Charles Ricketts soon after immigrating to England with his wife, Esther, in 1890. An original wood engraver, Pissarro undertook an apprenticeship with Charles Ricketts at his Vale Press. As with all artists who came into Ricketts’s orbit, it was not long before Pissarro began “to show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite artists,” although his work always “maintained a French

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character and slightly naive quality, which his father urged him to preserve and nurture” (Urbanelli, 21, 24). In 1894 he and Esther established their own press at their home at the “Brook” in Epping, Essex. Like Morris and Ricketts before them, and like most private presses in this “important and strange phase in the history of books” (Franklin, 10), the Pissarros designed their own type face. Named after their location, the “Brook type” was identified solely with books issued from their press. Unlike Morris or Ricketts, however, the Pissarros were personally involved with all Eragny Press activities. They not only designed the books and engraved the blocks; they also “set the type and blocks together, then painstakingly proofed and editioned all their work.” Not surprisingly, as Lora Urbanelli comments, “[p]roduction was slow and their spoilage rate was high” (29). The combination of high standards and high costs meant that Eragny Press books could never be, like the volumes issued from the Kelmscott Press, a commercial success. In their twenty years of operation, Lucien and Esther Pissarro rarely turned a profit (28), but they did produce beautiful books. The Eragny Press Verses by Christina G. Rossetti Reprinted from G. Polidori’s Edition of 1847 had two main attractions for the contemporary connoisseur, one literary and nostalgic, the other aesthetic and material. In the first place, that “rarest of books,” the 1847 Verses (Gosse, “Christina Rossetti,” 141), had always been out of reach of most readers.8 It had never been reprinted, and William Michael had not selected all of its items for the “Juvenilia” section in his sister’s Poetical Works in 1904.9 The editor, J. D. Symon, could therefore offer the book “as a literary curiosity” with great appeal “to the student of origins,” who would be able to trace the poet’s evolution in “twelve poems which have not been republished elsewhere.” In addition, the Eragny Press edition offered the pleasures of the facsimile reprint: “Even to one literal error and one curious cockneyism (not in rhyme though such also occur), this reprint follows exactly the edition of 1847 printed by G. Polidori, the girl poet’s grandfather” (iii, iv). Thus the coveted but unobtainable Polidori Verses could be possessed in virtual if not original form. The second appeal of the Eragny Press Verses lay in its production value as a private press book. According to Andrew Lang, the products of private presses were always attractive to the booklover, who prized them for their “singular” qualities (111). Built into the very format of this Eragny Press production, then, was matter to appeal equally to critic and collector. Covered in the green Speedwell pattern designed by Esther Pissarro and embellished with two decorated title pages in black and red ink and an ornamented initial page for “The Dead City” designed by Lucien, the Eragny Press Verses presents Rossetti as a symbolist poet manqué. In choosing to illustrate “The Dead City” as the title poem to the collection, Pissarro singles out the piece which J. D. Symon and others have connected to Christina’s later, Pre-

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Raphaelite poetry. At the same time, he acknowledges his debt to the poet’s first artistic collaborator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose illustrations for the title poems of the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress volumes had great influence on the book arts as they developed during the fine-printing revival. By decorating the page as a unit rather than illustrating the poem in a separate picture, however, Pissarro marks his distance from his sixties’ predecessor. Featuring a large initial “O” around the figure of a woman plucking flowers in a wood, Pissarro’s page decoration is an integral part of the poem’s presentation, with the typography for the first stanza appearing in the margins around the inset square (plate 11). The symmetry of the printed page is pleasing to the eye, with the bottom half occupied by the second and third stanzas of “The Dead City,” printed in Brook type, which Colin Franklin calls “‘the most beautiful fount invented in this whole period’” (qtd. in Urbanelli, 30). Framing the whole is a decorative curvilinear border in red and black ink, with the title, “Verses by Christina G. Rossetti,” printed in red between the upper rules. Pissarro intensely admired Rossetti’s use of natural imagery to evoke spiritual values (Beckwith, “PreRaphaelites,” 176) and expressed this in his own medium with trefoil and floral motifs. In his Brief Account of the Origin of the Eragny Press, T. Sturge Moore writes that the beauties of the physical, material object—the book—and the beauties of its literary content are not independent, “nor can they be without loss disassociated; for to starve the eye is to impoverish the spirit” (9). By “reclaiming the book for beauty, and making it a work of art,” Pissarro and other artists of the period set themselves against the “impoverished” modern life they saw around them, with all its technological bustle, haste, and hurry, and claimed a separate place for themselves where “life and history” mattered (6, 7). Moore sees the private presses, with their limited editions and commitment to fine book making, as representing a challenge to the value systems underpinning contemporary trade publishing. Similarly, the activity of collecting, with its desire to preserve the handmade and the rare in an age of mass production, can be seen as a gesture against late industrial capitalism. Paradoxically, however, the act of collecting is based on a capitalist economy of speculation in which supply and demand determine value, just as the business of making books, however fine or rare, is always part of the commerce of cultural production and exchange.

Value Added: Gift Books for Grown-Ups Private press books like those produced by hand in small editions at the Eragny Press obviously appealed to a select market of consumers who combined ample pocketbooks with literary appreciation and bibliographic knowledge. But

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ordinary middle-class consumers in the years before World War I could also indulge a taste for finely illustrated books by purchasing gift books produced by trade publishers. Andrew Lang despised the common collector as a literary upstart and nonreader who, without the true bibliophile’s pedantry, supported the publishing industry’s production of gift books as “drawing-room ornaments” each Christmas season (101–2). The “luxurious Edwardian or post-Edwardian . . . illustrated books for adults” published by firms like Blackie and Son in “large de luxe volumes, often bound in white and gold” (Blackie, 51), were purchased for prominent display in the well-appointed middle-class drawing room as a mark of the owner’s cultivation. Their value lay not so much in their literary contents as in their “get-up” and all that it implied. The Book Beautiful was a necessary object in the Edwardian House Beautiful. With its elegant, ornamented binding and its beautiful color plates, the large folio or quarto became an object of domestic decoration and an item of conspicuous consumption that proclaimed the bourgeois household’s degree of culture to such critics as Mrs. Arthur Bell (see above) and J. S. Hewitt Bates. Writing in the Bibliophile, Bates expressed what seems to have been an established view: “The lover of books is generally a person of culture and taste” (193). In the boom years of the gift-book industry, becoming a person of culture and taste was within reach of most middleclass budgets. At the end of the nineteenth century new photomechanical processes increased the efficiency and decreased the costs of reproducing images in books, while refinements to the three-color printing process permitted publishers to include color plates in their books on an unprecedented scale. Such developments in reproduction methods provided the technological base out of which the enormous gift-book industry grew, feeding the apparently insatiable “public appetite for illustrated material of all kinds” (Felmingham, 1). Produced as luxury items for the Christmas market, these sumptuous volumes were directed at both children and adults. Arthur Rackham’s Rip Van Winkle (1905), for example—his first book to exploit the three-color process—“firmly established him as an illustrator not only with children, but with collectors as well.” Rackham’s practice, beginning with this publication, “of exhibiting and selling the originals of the illustrations at the prestigious Leicester Galleries and issuing signed, deluxe limited editions on special paper” (Adams, 112) revealed the degree to which his art was directed principally to collectors rather than children. Other publishers and artists were quick to capitalize on this lucrative market when it became evident that consumers were willing to pay for such added values as color plates, vellum bindings, handmade paper, and fine typography. Limiting the edition, and offering copies “signed by the artist,” added further value. “After all,” as Susan

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Meyer comments, “rarity signifies value, even in a mass-produced item” (38). Thus trade book publishers could enter the collectors’ market with mass-produced consumer items that nevertheless connoted the cultural values of the rare, the fine, and the well made. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Christina Rossetti became a desirable giftbook commodity in this period. A deceased author whose work was out of copyright, she was an obvious choice for gift books, which were typically “reissues of long-familiar texts . . . produced as a vehicle for the illustrator’s talents” (Felmingham, 2). Moreover, her association with Pre-Raphaelitism made her especially attractive to artists of the day, many of whom were involved in, or influenced by, the Pre-Raphaelite revival. The wonderful richness of color and minuteness of detail of Pre-Raphaelite paintings were perpetuated in many illustrated books produced in the new three-color process; illustrating a PreRaphaelite poet in this way seems a foregone conclusion. In addition, Rossetti’s visual imagination—the evocative symbolism and sensuous detail of her poetry— proved to be stimulating to graphic artists, then as now. Finally, Rossetti’s gender may have had its own, special, appeal to illustrators, for many of the book artists of the early twentieth century were women. As Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn demonstrate in Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the development of provincial art schools at the end of the nineteenth century provided new opportunities for women unavailable at mid-century to the young Christina. By the turn of the century, many of these female artists, trained in schools strongly influenced by the arts-and-crafts movement, became the most visible members of Pre-Raphaelitism’s third phase (118–20). Taking their inspiration, and often their subject matter, from PreRaphaelite art, these women artists developed the decorative arts in such fields as book illustration and stained glass. Nellie Syrett, for instance, took Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress as the subject for her pen-and-ink drawing “Time is short, life is short,” published in The Quarto in 1896, while Margaret Rope won a silver medal in the National Competition for her series of stained-glass panels on the subject of Goblin Market. A reviewer in The Studio praised Rope’s work for having “quite a genuine Pre-Raphaelite flavour” (“The National Competition,” 320). The Pre-Raphaelite flavor of Rope’s work was so true to the originals, in fact, that as recently as 1974 the panels were attributed to such “real” PreRaphaelites as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Hughes (Sewter, 75). Christina Rossetti’s gender-conscious fairy tales seem to have had special appeal to Pre-Raphaelite women artists; everyone from Jessie M. King to Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale produced work inspired by their themes. No illustrator of this period or any other, however—male or female—has illustrated more of

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Rossetti’s poetry than Florence Harrison, a Pre-Raphaelite artist now fallen into relative obscurity. A book artist who worked almost exclusively for Blackie and Son, Harrison had a career stretching from 1907, when she first published her own The Rhyme of the Run and Other Verses with the Glaswegian firm, to 1932, when she likely illustrated a Blackie’s reissue of Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy.10 On the strength of her pictorial work in The Rhyme of the Run and the next year’s In the Fairy Ring, Harrison was invited by art editor Talwin Morris to produce one of Blackie’s most luxurious gift books, The Poems of Christina Rossetti (1910). Whereas her first two books were listed as Blackie Picture Books, the Rossetti volume was one of the firm’s “Fine Art Books,” destined to grace drawing-room tables. Blackies prided itself on bringing out books in a lavish style, “ornamental in even the most beautifully decorated and affluent home,” through their subsidiary, Gresham Books (A. Clark, 132). Formed for the purpose of producing “sumptuous volumes for children and adults in an age accustomed to elegance,” the Gresham Publishing Company underwrote the high costs of the expensive gift book by subscription publishing (Norrie, 32). Meanwhile, Blackie and Son would issue the same gift book under its own imprint in both an “ordinary” and a limited deluxe edition. Obviously, a book published on such a luxurious scale needed to be, as Blackie historian Alan Clark puts it, a work of “immortal literature” (32)—or at least immortal enough to support sales through several seasons. The Blackie firm had tested Rossetti’s degree of immortality in 1906 in its successful Red Letter Poets series, edited by Alice Meynell. The Red Letter Library, which first appeared in 1902, was a series calculated to appeal to consumers of culture by being both beautiful objects and English “classics.” According to Gerald Cinamon, “Many publishers at the turn of the century were producing ‘libraries’ in compact editions, usually bound in leatherette.” Blackie’s Red Letter Library was a particularly “distinguished series, containing the works of such writers as Carlyle, de Quincey, Keats, Shelley, and the Brownings”—and, of course, Christina Rossetti (29). Decorated throughout with running titles and printer’s marks in red ink (hence the series’ name), the Red Letter Library was designed on a scale small enough to slip into a pocket for consumption on a commuter train, but in a manner fine enough to make a statement about the owner’s connoisseurship. If it was, as Wemmick might say, a piece of portable property, a book in this series was definitely a piece of portable aesthetic property: a classic for the cultural au courant. One of the au courant marks inscribing the aesthetic message of this series was the common motif of stylized roses designed by Talwin Morris for the binding of all poetry titles (Cinamon, 29). The stylized roses of this art-nouveau de-

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sign and others either produced by Morris or under his influence are beautiful examples of what came to be known as the “Glasgow style” in early-twentiethcentury decorative arts. A style rooted in the imagery of the aesthetic, arts-andcrafts, and art-nouveau movements, it melds Celtic with Japanese design to produce a surprisingly limited visual vocabulary of “geometric abstraction, stylized roses and foliage, sinuous curves” (5). Blackie’s books produced during Morris’s tenure with the firm (roughly 1893–1909) are characterized by this “Glasgow style” of book decoration—a kind of northern answer to the Beardsley spin-offs then being produced in London. When Florence Harrison became one of Blackie’s book artists, her characteristically Pre-Raphaelite work began to develop features of the Glasgow decorative style under Morris’s influence. This was despite the fact that she did not receive her art training at the Glasgow School of Art where the style was cultivated or, indeed, even live in Scotland while she worked for the firm. Particularly in Harrison’s decorative preliminaries and textual decorations, the sinuous lines and stylized floral motifs declare her debts to Glasgow art nouveau. Her Pre-Raphaelite approach to color, composition, and interpretation, evident in her full-page plates, makes it easy to see why Talwin Morris should propose this relatively unknown woman as the artist for one of Blackie’s most expensive gift books. Morris wrote Harrison in August 1908 offering her a contract of £200 for illustrating a forthcoming edition of Poems by Christina Rossetti. The artist was to provide 24 full-page color drawings, 48 full-page black-and-white drawings, 120 headpieces, “a sufficient number of pen drawings in the text to prevent the pages having an empty look,” decorations for the preliminary matter, endpapers, and a cover design.11 Writing from her studio in Chelsea to accept the contract, Harrison declared she “look[ed] forward to the work with great pleasure” and asked for the size of the drawings required and the index showing the order of poems so that she could begin her work.12 The task she undertook was indeed a demanding one, for Blackie’s Poems by Christina Rossetti had 24 pages of preliminary matter and 372 pages of text, all of which needed to be suitably decorated “to prevent the pages having an empty look,” as Morris put it. In addition, Harrison needed to interpret visually 110 pieces of poetry: 81 “General Poems” and 29 “Devotional Poems.” That Harrison was concerned to design the book as a whole rather than simply illustrate those poems which most appealed to her is evident in her request to the publisher to send the proposed ordering of poems in the volume. Unlike, for example, Burne-Jones’s illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer, which appear in irregular clutches throughout the book, depending on which of the bard’s tales the artist deemed worthy of illustration, Harrison worked to give the book symmetry with a pleasing alternation of color and black-and-white plates at

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spaced intervals. This striving for artistic balance is particularly apparent in Harrison’s modification of the contract. Instead of producing 24 color and 48 blackand-white plates as stipulated, the artist produced 36 of each. Blackie and Son simply had to absorb the cost of the additional dozen color plates, just as they had to wait the two years it took Harrison to complete this enormous commission. The firm was able to recoup some of the costs, however, by recycling Harrison’s plates in their lucrative educational list. Her black-and-white designs for Goblin Market reappeared in a school reader in 1912,13 while both her color and her line work were reused in two books in Blackie’s “Beautiful Poems” series, issued as “Reward Books” in 1923: Goblin Market and Other Poems and Shorter Poems of Christina Rossetti. The cultural circulation of this illustrated commodity exemplifies the close interconnections that exist between the critical and collecting economies. Tested as a Red Letter “classic” for the critical market, Poems by Christina Rossetti was then produced by Blackie and Son as an illustrated gift book for the collectors’ market, and the gift book in turn contributed plates and publishing spin-offs in the educational trade. This circulation is ongoing. When Rossetti once again loomed large on the critical scene in the flurry of academic conferences, exhibits, articles, and books attendant on the centenary of her death, she simultaneously became a commercial commodity for the common collector. In 1994 Gramercy Books brought out a gift book ornamented with Harrison’s textual decorations reprinted in purple ink and a selection of her color plates for late-twentieth-century consumers interested in finely produced illustrated books associated with the Pre-Raphaelite poet. Despite the costs attendant on its production, when Poems by Christina Rossetti was at last advertised as “a sumptuous art book” in the Christmas Illustrated Supplement to the Bookman in December 1910 the publisher must have been well satisfied with his product. A large quarto bound in white vellum cloth with gilt top, the edition de luxe, limited to 350 copies, signed and numbered by the artist, retailed for £2.2s, while the ordinary edition sold for 15s. Critics were generous with their praise. The Times hailed Poems as “A luxurious edition with drawings in colour and line, of great interest,” while the Evening Standard declared: “The illustrator has caught the wistful tone of the Pre-Raphaelite poetess.” The reviewer in Outlook admired the “rich and harmonious” coloring and praised Harrison’s drawing for having “caught to itself something of the inwardness of the poet’s mood” (“Blackie’s New Gift-Books,” 102). Meanwhile, in “Reviews and Notices,” The Studio singled out Poems by Christina Rossetti from a group of Christmas gift books (including Pogány’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner for Harrap) as the one that “catches the spirit of her subject best.” The reviewer sees Harrison’s artistic style as fit housing for Rossetti’s poetry: “the conven-

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tions she employs descend from the pre-Raphaelite conventions, and the preRaphaelite atmosphere is felt throughout the poetry of Christina Rossetti. . . . There is no absence of imagination, and the colour sense shown is worthy of the subject” (254). As the first woman artist to give the poet’s work sustained attention in a commercial book, Harrison’s designs deserve closer attention than they have received. The repeated decorative motifs of hearts, roses, briars, doves, angels, crowns, and musical instruments establish an emotional context for the more elaborate full-page illustrations, which are rendered in a medieval atmosphere in keeping with the style of her Pre-Raphaelite predecessors. But while her artistic debts to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Millais, Arthur Hughes, and Laurence Housman are evident, Harrison is also an original artist. Her visual interpretation presents an overall reading of Rossetti as the poet of loss whose vision remains fixed on a heavenly, rather than an earthly, crown. In an interesting move, she does not choose either of Rossetti’s famous narrative poems, Goblin Market or The Prince’s Progress, for her frontispiece design. Instead, she selects the less well known “A Bird’s-Eye View” to represent the keynote of Rossetti’s work (plate 12). For Harrison, as for other critics such as Jerome McGann, that keynote seems to be Rossetti’s “sense that the world is a scene of betrayal” and her urgent insistence that the reader “distinguish the real from the illusory” (“Christina Rossetti’s Poems,” 97, 98). The beauty of the world—so fleeting, and so terrible—must be renounced in favor of spiritual glory. The Bride of “A Bird’s Eye View” never reaches her waiting Bridegroom, but when the ship she is traveling in sinks, she goes “up to glory” in heaven. This eternal glory contrasts sharply with the transience of earthly love, for the earthly Bridegroom forgets his Bride within a year and marries another (CP, 1:134–36). The implicit message of this and much of Rossetti’s poetry is that death is better than life because it offers a glorious union that transcends all earthly pleasures. Harrison captures this message in both her decorative headpieces and her full-page illustrations throughout the book. A powerful diptych design for “A Royal Princess”—“I, if I perish, perish” (facing p. 72)—conveys Harrison’s view of the moral dilemma explored in much of Rossetti’s poetry. The flaming city, with an angry crowd bearing torches and knives storming the palace, is depicted in the left panel. On the right, the princess, arrayed in rich robes and bedecked in jewels, descends a staircase. She is carrying her golden crown in her hand, ready to relinquish it even as she is ready to offer herself to the angry mob. Behind the staircase is a shrine whose symbolic objects—a cross surrounded by candles and a pot of white lilies— convey the spiritual values which support the princess in her actions. Here, and

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throughout the sequence of illustrations, Harrison implies that Rossetti’s female subjects often represent an aspect of the poet herself. In a headpiece to “A Portrait” (263) Harrison includes the artist’s own miniature portrait of her subject. The dark-haired woman of the text who “gave up beauty in her tender youth” looks remarkably like the young Rossetti as depicted in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (fig. 7.1; compare fig. 5.1). The theme of renouncing earthly beauty and joy is established by the forsaken crown and jewels to the left of the gaunt woman who prefers, in their stead, the crown of thorns in her hand. “Counting all earthly gain but hurt and loss,” she chooses death over life (CP, 1:122). To the right of the figure, the cross and death’s head symbolically depict her choice. Harrison seems to have included the latter object in response to Alice Meynell’s introduction, which she may have read in its earlier version in the Red Letter Library issue of Poems by Christina Rossetti. “Her portrait,” wrote Meynell, “should have been painted with the skull on the table” (Poems 1906, 7; Poems 1910, x). Such a spiritual Rossetti, in love with death and at odds with the material world, is obviously incongruous in a sumptuous gift book produced as a luxury item for conspicuous consumption. Clearly, the form and content of Poems by Christina Rossetti convey conflicting messages. With its gilt-stamped cover in ivory vellum tied up with silk ribbon, the book’s elegant binding declares it to be a decorative object. Inside, the color plates, mounted on gray art paper and protected by tissue guards, convey sensuous pleasure in the richness of their tints, the beauty of their lines, and the sheer extravagance of their number. In this bibliographic environment, the pictures’ actual subject matter is overwhelmed. Under the considerable weight of the over-sized gift book, the illustrations cede their interpretive function to decorative ornamentation. Interpretive illustration depends on its relationship with a text, but this is a book meant to be looked at rather than read. As a collectors’ piece, Poems by Christina Rossetti represents the “total aestheticization of use value” that occurs when a book is valued primarily for its “material quality” (Stewart, 151, 161). At the same time, this enormous quarto—the book weighs about four pounds—declares the poet to be no lightweight on the cultural commodities market. Rossetti for the connoisseur is both weighty and worthy. Blackie and Son’s Poems by Christina Rossetti marks the outer limits of Edwardian gift-book production. Not all gift books of the time, however, were produced as instant “collectibles” for drawing-room display. Some, with their more modest aims built into their quiet bindings and handy size, sought to entice the common reader simply by adding a few black-and-white pictures to increase their attractiveness. Publishers like Charles T. Jacobi, managing partner of the Chiswick Press, were well aware that the “pictorial portion” was a “feature which

7.1 Florence Harrison, headpiece illustration for “A Portrait,” Poems by Christina Rossetti (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1910), 263. Reproduced courtesy of the University of British Columbia Library Special Collections and Archives Division.

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imparts value to a Book” (Jacobi, 31). The inexpensive nature of the trade at this time, combined with a ready market, made producing illustrated books for grown-ups cost-effective as never before or since. Two such works produced for successive Christmas markets were Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti (1907) and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1908), both illustrated by May Sandheim14 and published by Andrew Melrose. Priced at a modest 2s for a cloth binding and 3s for leather, Melrose’s “Crown Classics” series made the cultural commodity affordable to even lower-middleclass book lovers. Perhaps, like Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), other Edwardian clerks also “hoped to come to Culture suddenly” (62) through books and what they represented. Bast sought culture in the pages of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, but others, perhaps less ambitious, might find it in illustrated books of poetry encased in pretty blue or green covers. By the early twentieth century both Victorian poetry and Pre-Raphaelite art had achieved “classic” status. Cultural memory and nostalgia for a lost, irretrievable past were preserved in the material form of the “gilt-and-leather volumes of ‘The World’s Greatest Literature’” produced in a variety of publishers’ series. For Susan Stewart, this republishing of “classics” demonstrates the “bourgeois conjunction of sign and signified” (33). The book-as-object derived meaning and value as cultural commodity. The nature of the illustrations newly designed for these reprints supports Stewart’s contention. The pictures in Melrose’s Crown Classic Rossetti, for example, deliberately work to evoke the poetry’s original Pre-Raphaelite context. Sandheim even chooses similar scenes from Rossetti’s Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress as frontispieces for each volume. Her “Buy from us with a golden curl” (fig. 7.2) seems a deliberate pastiche of D. G. Rossetti’s frontispiece. The animals, though greatly reduced in size, are almost exact replicas of the earlier artist’s cats, owls, and rats (see fig. 2.1). Framed within an archway of trees, with a crescent moon positioned directly over her head, Laura commands the central place, her position and physical size asserting her importance relative to the goblins, who seem little more than props in the scene. Indeed, the eight illustrations in this and the companion volume focus on the singular beauty of women. In true Pre-Raphaelite tradition, each of Sandheim’s sixteen illustrations present the central figure of a woman with abundant hair who dominates the picture space and controls the gaze of the viewer. The grace and beauty of women thus enhance the desirability of this book for Christmas shoppers. Like the Book Beautiful, the beautiful woman is a cultural object to be possessed and consumed.

7.2 May Sandheim, “Buy from us with a golden curl,” frontispiece for Selected Poems of Christina G. Rossetti (London: Andrew Melrose, 1907). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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Porn, Panelology, and Possession If images of beautiful women increase the attractiveness, and hence the desirability, of the gift book for grown-ups, they also represent the foundational base of marketing for another kind of publication for collectors: adult fantasy. Erotica has always, of course, had a special appeal for bibliophiles. Henry Spencer Ashbee, who compiled compendious bibliographies of this material and willed his collection upon his death in 1900 to the British Museum (now the British Library), ensured that this institution would have “one of the finest collections of erotica extant” in the western world (Kearney, 10). Patrick Kearney’s A History of Erotic Literature amply demonstrates the extent to which pictorial matter collaborates with verbal narrative in such material. As his main interest is in literature, however, he does not venture into the realm of popular culture, where erotic imagery assumes an even greater significance. In pornographic magazines and adult comic books, the appeal for collectors lies principally in the visuals. In 1954, when Hugh Hefner decided to create a unique publication for the adult market, he hired a Chicago artist, Art Paul, as art director of what was to become Playboy Magazine and “challenged him to create a new visual standard for magazine illustration. Paul responded by ignoring not only traditional representational illustration, but also all distinctions between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art.” Thirty years later, Playboy had acquired upwards of four thousand pieces of original art in its permanent collection, selections from which were exhibited on tours in North America, Europe, and Asia (Bradbury, front jacket blurb). To be a Playboy subscriber was to possess, in reproduction, avant-garde art. A similar appeal to the collector grew out of the new comic-book culture that developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Set apart from mainstream comics in specialty shops and supported by the social phenomenon of fandom, adult comics appealing to a “connoisseur readership” of collectors more interested in the artwork than the story content developed. Known as “panelology,” comic-book collecting has influenced a craze for “Good Girl Art” (GGA) and even “Good Girl Art and Bondage” (GGAB) (Sabin, 62, 63, 223, 288n). One might think that the connection between the academic critic and the collector of erotic publications would be tenuous, but in fact the reverse is true. Christina Rossetti’s works were not reproduced in the illustrated pages of popular culture publications (other than children’s books) until the critical community initiated a Pre-Raphaelite revival in the 1960s and ’70s. After languishing in critical obscurity from about 1930,15 Rossetti gradually became an object of scholarly interest, first as an associate of the fascinating Pre-Raphaelites, and

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later, with the advent of feminist criticism in the academy, in her own right as a woman writer. It was in the sixties that the late W. E. Fredeman—himself a collector as well as a critic—published the foundational Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. In the same decade, Jeremy Maas hosted the first commercial exhibit of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings for the newly interested collector at his London gallery. By 1984, after “over two decades of ‘academic treatment,’” the Pre-Raphaelites had become such a critical success that the Tate Gallery held the largest exhibit of their work to date (Cherry and Pollock, 481). Meanwhile, illustrators had also rediscovered the Pre-Raphaelites, and new works of fantasy were treated to their style of “elaborate, idealized art” (Whitlark, 59). In erotic publications, this visual reference to Victorian style worked to evoke social memory of a repressed sexual past while celebrating a liberated present. As Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock remind us, the 1960s and ’70s— the decades in which the Pre-Raphaelites became commercially recirculated— represent a sexually charged historical moment: In these decades, the Victorian era became a site for the renegotiation of definitions of sexuality. It was characterized as a period of public virtue and private vice, of sexual hypocrisy, an age of prudery and respectability with a hidden underside of perversion, pornography and prostitution. The Victorian period was thus construed as the Other against which emergent discourses and practices of libertarianism in the 1960s found meaning as “liberation” from a double standard of hypocritical and repressive Victorian morality. The paradigms of the 1960s libertarianism were masculinist—women liberated to have more sex with men—and they were worked over on the terrain of constructed images of the nineteenth century to produce stories of great male lovers and their exotic liaisons with stunning mistresses producing a sexual avant-garde which was claimed to have anticipated (and was used to ratify) the modern “sexual revolution.” (493–94)

In this highly charged narrative of sexual history, D. G. Rossetti became emblematic of the liberated male lover anticipating by a century the free love of the 1960s, while his sister Christina came to represent a repressed Victorian sexuality seething with a perverse underside of desire. It was Goblin Market, of course, that provided the grist for this particular sexual mill. The lush sensuousness of the poem’s imagery, coupled with its representation of gender relations as a predatory politics between grotesque, aggressive males and innocent, suffering females and its positing of an alternative social economy of “sisters,” has had inherent appeal for the post-Freudian imagination. It was Hefner’s Playboy that first circulated the new, sexy, Christina for a middle-class audience of “hip” men who liked their erotica laced with a certain amount of cultural erudition. According to Andrew Ross, the Playboy of this

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era was marked “by quality consumption as defined by the gentlemanly realm of acceptable sexual conduct.” It appealed “to what we could call the educated body”: an audience of “aspiring pre-executive men, for whom its philosophy of ‘fun’ and ‘swinging’ promoted and celebrated the good life” (223, 222). It was for this audience that Playboy’s popular “Ribald Classics” feature was devised. Rossetti’s Goblin Market was introduced as one such “classic” in 1973, billed as a “nursery poem . . . reinterpreted here with a series of erotic and beautiful paintings by Kinuko Craft” (“Playbill,” 3). The quasi-academic editorial introduction to this “Ribald Classic” not only alludes to Lona Mosk Packer’s theory of Rossetti’s illicit and frustrated love for a married man (proposed in her 1963 biography of the poet), but also to a scholarly work not yet in print: Jonathan Cott’s Beyond the Looking Glass: Extraordinary Works of Fairytale and Fantasy, a Victorian anthology “soon to be published by Stonehill in New York.” Presumably, the editor had seen proofs of Cott’s work, thus enabling him to quote the critic’s assessment of Rossetti’s poem: “The most extreme depiction of repressed eroticism in children’s literature.” The editor then translated this academese for his immediate audience: “or, in other words, it might be called the all-time hard-core pornographic classic for tiny tots.” “The lurid sexual fantasies that raged in Miss Rossetti’s unconscious” should be obvious, the editor hints, to anyone giving the poem “just a Freudian glance” (CGR, “Ribald Classic,” 115). To ensure that the sexual implications of Rossetti’s imagery are not missed, Kinuko Craft provides explicit illustrations, which portray Laura’s encounter with the goblins as a pleasurable orgy; the attack on Lizzie as a gang rape; and the final reunion of the sisters as idyllic lesbian love far from the world of men—except the consumer, of course, who possesses the pictures for his viewing pleasure. Playboy is able to construct Goblin Market simultaneously as a “nursery classic” and a “pornographic classic” by evoking both a critical and a visual tradition. From the mid–twentieth century onwards, literary critics influenced by psychoanalytic, and especially Freudian, criticism, had reinvestigated Victorian children’s literature as a medium in which aberrant sexual desires could safely be expressed (Prickett, 102–3). Thus Leslie Fiedler, in his introduction to Cott’s Beyond the Looking-Glass, speaks of “the crypto-sexuality of almost all children’s literature in Victorian times.” Cott reinforces this view, arguing that the fairy tales collected in his anthology “are enjoyed and understood best by ‘adults,’” and identifying Rossetti’s Goblin Market as a work for children particularly redolent with repressed eroticism (xx, xlvii, and 465). Cott has, of course—along with other critics of his generation—created a Victorian children’s Goblin Market that never existed. The identification of genres such as the fairy tale and technologies such as illustration with juvenile literature, coupled with a proliferation of illus-

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trated Goblin Markets for the young in the twentieth century, produced the following syllogism: Goblin Market is a Victorian poem; it is an illustrated fairy tale; illustrated fairy tales are for children; therefore, Goblin Market is a Victorian children’s poem. As evidence, critics offer Laurence Housman’s 1893 illustrated version of the poem which, as we have seen, was not produced for children at all, but for adult collectors. Nevertheless, both Jonathan Cott and R. Loring Taylor reproduce Housman’s illustrations in their anthologies of Victorian children’s literature. Although Playboy’s production of Goblin Market as a “Ribald Classic” appears to have been indebted to Cott’s academic anthology, artist Kinuko Craft shows no evidence of having been influenced by Housman’s designs. Rather, she has turned to the “classic” children’s book version—Arthur Rackham’s—to provide the “tiny tot” visual subtext for her work. Rackham’s images were readily available to her, for his Goblin Market had recently been reissued, appearing on the prestigious Horn Book’s “recommended list” in 1971.16 In her representation of “White and golden Lizzie stood,” Craft obviously alludes to Rackham’s illustration of the same scene (plate 13; compare plate 7). The visual citation of the children’s poem in this adult context offers an added frisson for the Playboy consumer—but only if he recognizes it, of course. Like all postmodern art dependent on pastiche and parody, Craft’s illustration only works to the extent her audience is able to recognize the originals it cites.17 Craft is perhaps banking on the likelihood that, with Rackham’s Goblin Market readily available in reprint editions, anthologies, and collectors’ lists, the image would be a familiar one for her audience. Rackham’s picture-book version of Goblin Market is not the only pictorial intertext to Craft’s illustration. With her sophisticated citation of many strands from Western art’s tradition of visual fantasy, Craft clearly has high expectations for her audience’s wider cultural knowledge. To begin with, by picturing Lizzie surrounded by an array of genital fruit representative of both sexes, Craft draws on what Linda Nochlin calls “one of the prime topoi of erotic imagery: comparison of the desirable body with ripe fruit” (11). At the same time, with her demonic goblins reminiscent of the unsettling fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch, Craft establishes a nightmare setting for her pastiche of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. With her half-turned face and serpentine hair, her right hand held up against her breasts and her left positioned over her pudenda, Lizzie is clearly a perverse stand-in for Botticelli’s famous Goddess of Love: an image of seductive eros and innocent beauty in the process of corruption. In support of the “Ribald Classic’s” editorial framing, the effect of Craft’s visual references is to highlight the perverse underside of the “innocent” Victorian children’s fairy tale. A similar representation of innocence in the process of corruption is evident

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in an adult comic version of Goblin Market illustrated by John Bolton in 1984 for Pacific Comics in the first Pathways to Fantasy issue. Like Playboy’s audience, the readership of adult comic books is predominantly male. Unlike Playboy, however, sales of adult comics depend not so much on the newsstand as on the direct sales market “based on the collector dollar” (Sabin, 175). Bolton, for example, with his specialty in vampire imagery, is a hot commodity on today’s international collectors’ market, with an “Official John Bolton Magazine,” Unmasked—complete with trading cards and vampire poster—produced in Germany for fans in that country and America (Birnböck). As one of the artist’s early works, published in a small magazine that went out of print within its first year of operation, Bolton’s Goblin Market is a highly desirable item among fantasy fans. The influence of Rackham’s “White and golden Lizzie stood” (plate 7) is as evident in Bolton’s version of the same scene (plate 14) as in Craft’s (plate 13). As he explained to Mike Conroy in an interview for Comic Collector in 1992, “much as any writer would research a book that’s relevant to the piece they’re working on, I would tend to do the same. If I’m working on a strip about gnomes, fairies and mushrooms, I would go and look at Arthur Rackham, Du Lac, the British artists at the turn of the Century, to help me with background material. They’ve done it well” (Conroy, 42). As in Craft’s version, the visual reference to Rackham’s children’s-book version of Rossetti’s poem heightens the tension between “innocent” fairy tale and “corrupt” fantasy. Taking the implied eroticism of D. G. Rossetti’s title-page image of the sisters in bed (fig. 2.3) to its sexually explicit conclusion, both Craft and Bolton end their sequence of pictures with an image of the physical love between the sisters after their reunion. If, as Maureen Duffy claims, Dante Gabriel’s original depiction of Lizzie and Laura “is an interesting component of the period’s eroticism akin to the heterosexual male desire to see blue films about lesbians,” latetwentieth-century culture made “this double female image” (288–89) available to fantasists of both genders and sexual orientations. Indeed, feminist scholars have unapologetically reappropriated Craft’s final illustration of the sisters engaged in cunnilingus as the frontispieces for their chapters on Christina Rossetti.18 Clearly, what Sharon Leder calls “the erotic dimension of the sisterly love theme” (66)—and its explicit visualization—is transferable between the pornographic and the academic markets, simply by changing the context rather than the content of the representation. Meaning resides not in the image itself but rather in who possesses and produces it, and for whom. Although Goblin Market was first reproduced as male fantasy material, it proved to be an equally potent source for women’s erotic imagination in both popular culture and academic productions. Margaret Power’s erotic novel Gob-

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lin Fruit (1987) represents an artist figure modeled on Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a perverse sexual predator reenacting the role of Christina’s goblins on an equally perverse, sexually addicted, “Lizzie.” Lauren Wright Douglas’s Goblin Market (1993), one of her lesbian mystery stories in the “Caitlin Reece” series, uses Rossetti’s poem to form the plot of a ring of “goblin men” dealing in drugs and sex and preying on women. Neither of these works is illustrated apart from the cover art, but they seem to have set the stage for a 1997 reissue of Rossetti’s poem retitled Goblin Market: A Tale of Two Sisters, illustrated throughout by reproductions of D. G. Rossetti’s lush paintings of women, and advertised on amazon.com’s lesbian list.19 This book is particularly interesting for the way in which it draws on Pre-Raphaelite associations to establish the context for a poem described on the front jacket flap as a “haunting work of repressed Victorian eroticism” and touted in the back-cover blurb as a “Victorian classic” offering “a lush and startling glimpse into the darkest depths of the Pre-Raphaelite psyche.” With ten full-color reproductions of D. G. Rossetti’s paintings of women, textual decorations taken from Laurence Housman’s Goblin Market reprinted in pale mauve-pink, and endpapers derived from William Morris wallpapers, this “classic keepsake edition” offers a very collectible Christina for the contemporary connoisseur. Unlike the productions by Playboy and Pacific Comics, this work does not rely on any association with children’s literature to give it added erotic charge. Instead, its genesis may be found curled inside the kernel stone of Housman’s textual decoration (fig. 7.3), which makes visual reference to a founding text of feminist criticism a generation before. In 1975—perhaps encouraged by the positive reception of Cott’s Beyond the Looking-Glass, which they had published the previous year—Stonehill Publications brought out a Goblin Market for the collectors’ market that had great influence on critical interpretation of Rossetti and her poem. Ornamented by Laurence Housman’s full-page illustrations and textual decorations printed in fuchsia ink, Rossetti’s poem was encased in a pale green decorator slipcase designed by Paul Bacon. The approving reviews printed on the back, from such predictable sources as the New York Review of Books, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times, also include—not surprisingly, given the apparently cozy relationship between the editor and Stonehill’s production staff—Playboy Magazine. Described once again as “Christina Rossetti’s Haunting Classic of Repressed Victorian Eroticism” (slipcase), this collectors’ item has had an interesting influence on the poem’s critical reception. The lengthy introduction by Germaine Greer shaped early feminist criticism of Rossetti and her work. Greer argued that the fairy-tale form of the poem was a mere facade used to mask the poet’s

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7.3 Laurence Housman, textual decoration for Goblin Market (London: Macmillan, 1893; New York: Stonehill, 1975; San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997). Reproduced courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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“deeply perverse” subject, which included unconscious expressions of infantile sexuality and lesbian desire (viii, xxxv).20 Dolores Rosenblum claims that Greer’s interpretation established for critics who came after her “the pathological progress of the Victorian spinster’s unconscious through hysteria and masochism to this singular instance of sublimation” (67). If so, it would seem that Greer’s early view—no longer fashionable in critical circles—continues to influence how this poem is bought and sold on the commercial marketplace. Down to its mauvey-pink decorations by Housman, Chronicle Books’ Goblin Market: A Tale of Two Sisters is a direct descendent of the Stonehill collectors’ piece.

Pre-Raphaelite Pictures and the Cultural Commodity A study of the production and reception history of Rossetti’s work in the twentieth century demonstrates the extent to which the commercial and the critical markets exist in a symbiotic relationship with each other. The renewal of scholarly interest in Christina Rossetti and her poetry that took place at the end of the twentieth century coincided with an increased output of illustrated editions of her work for juveniles and adults on a scale unprecedented since the PreRaphaelite revival at the turn of the last century. While Rossetti was languishing in critical obscurity in the years leading up to and following World War II, her value as a commercial commodity was at a similarly low ebb. With the exception of illustrated reissues of her nursery rhymes and the occasional small-press run of an ornamented Goblin Market,21 the illustrated Rossetti was not the highly visible commodity in the marketplace that it is today. But when the renewed interest in the Pre-Raphaelites generally was given an additional boost by feminist interest in women writers, Christina Rossetti rapidly became Victorian studies’ hottest property. Starting in the late 1960s, the Pre-Raphaelite pictures that accompanied Rossetti’s first publications and helped shape her original audience’s responses began to be reprinted in academic editions of her work. Facsimile editions of Sing-Song, Speaking Likenesses, and Goblin Market, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes and Laurence Housman, first appeared in academic reprints by Dover (Sing-Song, 1968; Goblin Market, 1983), Stonehill (Goblin Market, 1974 and 1975), and Garland (Sing-Song, Speaking Likenesses, Goblin Market, 1976). The early choice of Housman over Dante Gabriel Rossetti as illustrator for Goblin Market was partly influenced by the physical attractiveness of a fully illustrated edition over one ornamented with only two pictures; and partly, again, by the mistaken belief that the poem was a work for Victorian children. In anthologies produced

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for twentieth-century children, however, publishers preferred Rackham’s illustrations for the poem, as is evident in Anita Moss and Jon C. Stott’s The Family of Stories: An Anthology of Children’s Literature (1986). The original publishing context, however, has come to be increasingly valued as part of the cultural apparatus of Rossetti’s work. Since at least the 1980s, Dante Gabriel’s illustrations for Goblin Market have been chosen by editors of anthologies of Rossetti’s work for students.22 Thus a whole generation of scholars has come to Rossetti’s poem in its original visual-verbal context. The same is not true, however, for The Prince’s Progress, which has been less frequently anthologized, and almost never with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s original designs. In contrast, Rossetti’s illustrated collection of stories for children, Speaking Likenesses, has enjoyed renewed scholarly attention. Arthur Hughes’s illustrations for this work have appeared in academic reprints such as Patricia Demers’s A Garland from the Golden Age (1983), Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher’s Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (1992), and David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood’s Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (1998). All this activity in academic publishing has, in turn, initiated a Rossetti revival in the commercial marketplace in a host of new “souvenir” publications to be sold at art galleries and gift shops. This could not happen until the critical industry had reinstated Rossetti as central to English-speaking culture. But by the mid-1980s—with a Variorum edition of her works in progress, and a coincident rise in critical appraisals of her work—Rossetti was rapidly being propelled into the center of the culture industry. Books like the Aurum Press’s Christina Rossetti in its “Illustrated Poets” series began to be sold in places like the British Library bookstore, their popularity keeping them in print a decade later. Selected and introduced by poet and critic Peter Porter, Rossetti’s poems are ornamented with Pre-Raphaelite pictures chosen from Victorian paintings on similar themes— with the exception of the extract from Goblin Market, which appears in conjunction with Arthur Rackham’s “White and golden Lizzie stood” (facing p. 27). This small, finely produced book is the more recent equivalent of Andrew Melrose’s Selected Poems of Christina G. Rossetti (1907). It offers culture as an affordable commodity and uses Pre-Raphaelite pictures to establish a context for nostalgic pleasure in an irretrievable past. The same might be said for the representation of Rossetti in small illustrated anthologies such as Gail Harvey’s Poems of Nature (1989), with its faux-marbled papers and botanical watercolors, or Sheila Pickles’s Summer’s Cup (1991), a scented book meant to evoke the lost Victorian age through pictures and potpourri. These two collections, however, do not depend on the cachet of the Rossetti name. Other publications—such as Porter’s Christina Rossetti and

hristina for the Connoisseur

Macmillan’s miniature gift book, The Skylark (1991), both illustrated with reproductions of Victorian paintings, or Souvenir Press’s Remember Me When I Am Gone Away (1989, 1999), illustrated with Sam Denley’s line drawings—could not exist if there were not a ready market for illustrated Rossettis in souvenir editions. Preserved by collectors, recorded by archivists, discovered by feminists, promoted and distributed by commercial and academic publishers alike, Rossetti for the connoisseur has proven to be a resilient commodity, available for multiple markets throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

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8 Visualizing Rossetti in Print, Pigment, and Performance The history of the book is the history of many artificers. —Francis Meynell

Reproducing Rossetti

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RACING the genealogy of an author’s illustrated works from their first appearance in print through to their latest edition, reprint, or offshoot, produces an intricate, but fairly straightforward, bibliographic line of descent. The family tree becomes more complicated, however, if we expand conventional concepts of illustration and publishing history to include forms of visual reproduction and public dissemination other than those contained on printed sheets between bound covers. Indeed, in the twenty-first century the illustrated book seems an old-fashioned and somewhat precious form of combining pictures with words. As the proliferation of films based on nineteenth-century novels such as Frankenstein, Great Expectations, and Dracula indicates, cinema has become our culture’s preferred method of visualizing a past author’s works. But big-screen cinema is not a medium that lends itself to visualizing poetry.1 The desktop computer, on the other hand, allowing Internet access to texts and images around the world, has made illustrated works of all kinds available outside specialized libraries and empowered ordinary users to become illustrators themselves. Computer-aided technology, which permits the reader/viewer to duplicate as well as manipulate illustrated texts, has provided a new site for reproducing and

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diffusing personal responses to Victorian poems. As Jonathan Crary observes, we are “in the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective” (1). This rapidly emerging visual culture places us as reader/viewers in a completely new relationship to images and the texts they accompany. The power of the reader to construct and create, disrupt and displace, now exists in a way inconceivable to our predecessors. Until the end of the twentieth century, scribbled annotation and doodling constituted the main form of engaging with the printed page or image. When the Internet first came into widespread use in the early nineties, I typed “Goblin Market” into a (now antiquated) search engine and was led to the home page of a Massachusetts attorney with degrees in psychology, law, and finance, and a passion for Alicia Silverstone. His home page provided a list of “topics of interest” ranging from “The Metaphysics of Skydiving” to “Fine Art,” “Passion,” “Nature,” “Eros,” “Transcendence,” “Eternity,” and so on. These “click-on” sites combined image and text and sometimes a selection of music or voice. The entire text of Goblin Market appeared in the “Eros” section, together with a 19K gif of Christina Rossetti. It was unclear whether the Pre-Raphaelite pencil portrait (by D. G. Rossetti) was provided as part of the erotic ambience of the poem, or simply as a point of information about the poet. There was no commentary. The only other poetry included in the “Eros” section was “Farewell to Eros,” by Clark Ashton Smith. In such a context, what (and how) does the poem, Goblin Market, mean? What does the portrait of the poet signify? How are we to understand the “Virtual Christina” as she is reproduced now in hundreds of websites around the world, academic, personal, commercial? In the digital age, the almost infinite potential of electronic publishing raises new questions about the ways image, text, and book combine, and about the roles that individuals and institutions play in these combinations. Disassociated from the material and yet paradoxically making available, in virtual form, material images and texts otherwise out of reach for many readers, Internet publishing defies the kind of historical mapping that print culture invites and permits. At the same time, however, the Worldwide Web provides virtual access to the archival sources on which analysts of book history depend. As a critic in the twenty-first century trained in historical and theoretical method in the academy of the twentieth and studying the illustrated book of the nineteenth, my own relationship to print culture and the book is necessarily complex and even contradictory. The desire to see, to hold, and to understand, to establish lineages and trace descents, has led me to construct a Rossetti who inhabits various marketplaces—aesthetic, religious, juvenile—in different times and places. My own position in history is evident in

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the way I have reproduced a Rossetti whose message is not separable from, but rather constituted in, the medium of its expression. Although readily available at the touch of a finger and the click of a mouse, the Virtual Christina of the digital universe is not a subject that could be adequately narrated or mapped in the pages of a printed book. Her story (a sequel to this, perhaps) is best told in its own medium. Only a hypertext form of publishing, with its ability to update and expand, could trace and link the Internet image/texts that reproduce Rossetti in this form. Constrained by the exigencies of print, I cannot, therefore, embark on a cyberspace journey mapping the appearances of Rossettian texts and images on the Worldwide Web. This is a book about books, and my focus on illustration and publishing history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will keep me somewhat (though not entirely) closer to the printed page. As my narrative draws to a close, I want to push the boundaries of the book and its province. My concern here is with how Christina Rossetti’s visual imagination sparked the visual imaginations of those working in media traditionally considered outside the sphere of illustration. I also wish to consider how these other reproductions, only peripherally connected to book history, relate to the bibliographic genealogy and materialist hermeneutics established in the preceding chapters. As we have seen, the making of illustrated books is about disseminating and diffusing an author’s words, in combination with interpretive pictorial matter, in material form for public sale. Rossetti’s words, however, have been “illustrated” and “published” in material forms other than the printed book since the early days of her career. The most obvious examples are found in the literary art of the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. A painter who takes a verse from one of Rossetti’s poems as the caption for a painting links the visual artifact to the printed text and makes the caption itself a kind of illustration. The other favored form of visualizing Rossetti’s works, especially a dramatic poem such as Goblin Market, has been to adapt it for the stage, thus adding the visual language of theater— gesture, movement, costume, setting, props, lighting—to the poet’s words. While both paintings and dramatic productions may be considered illustrations in the sense that they embody an artist’s (or group of artists’) visual interpretation of an author’s text, their status as illustration and their method of publication differ significantly, not only from the printed book but also from each other. In the case of an illustrated book, multiple identical copies of the same image and text can circulate throughout the world. The owner of the book—who may live in northern Ontario, South Africa, India, Dublin, or Seattle—can look at the pictures and read the words at will, and in just about any self-chosen location, from the bedroom to the barn to the bar. Such access

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is denied the ordinary viewer of a painting or play. A painting is a unique copy that requires public exhibition and some amount of travel (of the work or the viewer or both) for a viewing limited by both spatial and temporal constraints. A play also imposes its own conditions of time and place on the viewer, who may watch the performance only for a limited number of nights during its run at a particular theater. Furthermore, only those who can afford the ticket and reside within commuting distance of that theater have access to the performance. As Walter Benjamin’s work suggests, however, visual art in the age of mechanical reproduction cannot retain the aura of the original and unique presence. Art reproductions proliferate in magazines, catalogues, books, periodicals, postcards, posters, playbills, and so on, empowering the viewer to own or look at the picture in settings far from the location of the original painting. Indeed, some of the reproductions examined in the last chapter—notably those in Playboy’s “Ribald Classic” version of Goblin Market—originated as large oil paintings, which subsequently went on tour to exhibition locations in Japan and the United States. Meanwhile, the owner of a personal copy of the Playboy issue possessed reproductions of an art stripped of what Benjamin calls its “cult value” and “exhibition value” (1,110) as a result of its proliferation in tens of thousands of copies. Other paintings based on Rossetti’s poems have rarely had this kind of dissemination or notoriety. They have, however, also entered the world of print culture in reproductions that have made them available to the common reader/viewer. Benjamin argues that theatrical productions differ from other works of art in that the live performance insinuates a particular relationship between actor and audience not reproducible in any other form. Filming or videotaping a play cannot reproduce the live performance. Rather, film creates something new by substituting for the freely roving eye of the viewer the controlling eye of the camera (1,113). Thus dramatic productions retain the aura of singularity and authenticity no longer available to two-dimensional visual art. Plays do enter the field of mechanical reproduction and print culture in other ways, however. In the first place, drama is a verbal as well as a visual medium, requiring (usually) a printed script that may subsequently be published. In the second place, drama—like painting—produces many spin-off publications in the form of posters, advertisements, reviews, and academic studies. Because many of these publications combine images and texts in response to Rossetti’s poetry, they comprise a significant branch of the publishing history of her work in illustrated form. Paintings and plays and their by-products are ineluctably a part of the material culture reproducing and receiving Rossetti in particular places and times for particular purposes and audiences.

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Rossetti as Painter’s Muse Just as Rossetti inspired the visual imaginations of a host of illustrators with her sensuous imagery and suggestive symbolism, so too did she become a muse for painters. From the 1860s until World War I, artists used her work as a jumping-off point for their own creativity, or drew on her texts to provide a verbal metaphor for their visual art. Sometimes Rossetti’s poems were given “at full length on the frame,” as was the case with Arthur Hughes’s “capital picture from [her] Birthday” (LDGR, 2:586).2 In this case the viewing public at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1866 needed to relate the image to the printed text and consider how the former represented or illustrated the latter. Other uses of poetic text, however—such as the inclusion of a quotation by way of an epigraph to a title in a Royal Academy catalogue—are more complicated. For example, the Rossetti quotation “Passing away, saith the World, passing away” accompanied Hughes’s painting The Mower for the 1865 exhibit. Described by Ford Madox Brown as “one of the most poetic works Hughes has ever undertaken,” The Mower features the central standing figure of a worker sharpening his scythe in a high meadow. Around him young girls with rosy cheeks pick the wildflowers soon to be cut down (qtd. in Roberts, 154; see also Roberts color plate 37). Between them, these paintings by Hughes define two ways of relating image and text in literary or “poetic” painting. Hughes’s Birthday, with its subject directly based on the poetic text, is a painting performing the traditional illustrative function of representation and interpretation. The Mower, on the other hand, uses the poet’s words to illustrate and illuminate Hughes’s own narrative on a similar theme. The words of Rossetti’s three-stanza poem, which is part of a trilogy of verses entitled “Old and New Year Ditties” (CP, 1:88–89), do not provide the ground for Hughes’s painting. Rather, Hughes is using Rossetti’s poetic line to provide his audience with a verbal directive to the painting’s symbolic meaning. Other artists have similarly used Rossetti captions to provide poetic accompaniment and verbal directive for their visual subject. Marcus Stone (1840–1921), for example, quoted the first three stanzas from Rossetti’s “A Pause of Thought” (taken from Goblin Market and Other Poems 1862) in the 1865 Royal Academy catalogue entry for his painting entitled Old Letters (#619). John Byam Shaw (1872–1919) poignantly used Rossetti’s “Last summer green things were greener, brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer” for his Boer War, 1900.3 Many artists, however (including, as we shall see, Byam Shaw in other paintings), worked in the more illustrative style of literary painting exemplified by Hughes’s Birthday. As the Pre-Raphaelites had led the field in this new way of linking the literary and visual arts, it is not surprising that artists should turn to

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the work of a Pre-Raphaelite poet and associate, Christina Rossetti, for their pictorial subjects. Although painting may seem a solitary art—the work of an artist laboring alone in a studio—in fact its production is arguably as social, if not as collaborative, as the publication of a book. As Oscar Wilde observed in his review of Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” lecture, “An Artist is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage” (qtd. in Whistler, 161). For many artists, the immediate entourage included studio assistants, pupils, and models, while the larger milieu encompassed not only their artistic circle, but also the social, economic, and political environment in which they produced and sold their work. The network of Pre-Raphaelite influence stretched from England to the Continent through connections both personal and professional, aided by the dissemination of photographs of paintings and reproductions of artwork in catalogues and art magazines. Arthur Hughes was not only an illustrator of Rossetti’s books for children and an artist who based at least two of his paintings on her poems. He was also a teacher who trained his nephew, Edward Robert Hughes (1851–1914), in his studio before the latter entered the Royal Academy Schools. Later, Edward Hughes worked in William Holman Hunt’s studio, so his Pre-Raphaelite credentials are impeccable. Both Hughes and Hunt provided the young painter with strong associative links with Christina Rossetti. Arthur Hughes’s interest in Rossetti’s work and admiration for her character must have been evident to his nephew as they painted together. And when Edward later assisted in Hunt’s studio, he helped him complete The Light of the World for St. Paul’s—the painting in which Christina’s facial expression served as the model for Christ’s (W. H. Hunt, 1:254). Thus it seems almost overdetermined that Edward Hughes should find a Muse to inspire his brush in the work of Christina Rossetti. When Edward selected Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi” as the subject for his diploma work for the Royal Watercolour Society4 he departed from his usual lyrical themes to meditate on the human condition of corruptible flesh and grotesque death (plate 15). Like his precursor, Frederick Sandys, who illustrated “Amor Mundi” in the Shilling Magazine in 1865 (see fig. 1.7), E. Hughes places the decomposing corpse in the extreme foreground of the picture plane. However, his “Oh, what’s that in the hollow . . . ?” of 1895 omits the narrative aspect of the Lover and the World gaily oblivious to the “message dumb, portentous” that betokens their inevitable end. Unlike Sandys, he does not embody the poem’s dialogue in two human figures. Instead, he focuses on “the thin dead body which waits the eternal term” in the hollow “where velvet flowers grow thickly” (CP, 1:213–14). Entangled in a thicket of dog roses symbolically inscribing his chained relationship to the World, the dead man ironically recalls the sleeping

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princess from Edward Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series, exhibited in 1890. Unlike the Sleeping Beauty, E. Hughes suggests, this corpse will not be released into life. The painting inspired by Rossetti’s poem seems both perverse and profound, an apt response to the grotesquerie of the poet’s moribund meditation on the way of all flesh. No wonder the artist, recognizing that the subject matter and presentation were not “commercial,” chose this painting to submit to the Royal Watercolour Society as his diploma piece.5 Other artists have also found powerful subjects in Rossetti’s lyrics of love, loss, and temporality. John Byam Shaw, for instance, drew four times on Rossetti’s verses for his subjects. Of the resulting pictures, the most illustrative are Love Strong as Death Is Dead, taken from Rossetti’s “An End,” first published in The Germ; and “But never see my heart is breaking for a little love,” taken from “L.E.L.”6 Described in a Studio article in 1921 as “beautiful and poetically suggestive,” Love Strong as Death Is Dead represents a mourning woman and a man with a spade standing by the grave of the dead Cupid (Salaman, 46). Shaw’s “But never see my heart is breaking for a little love” depicts the speaker of the poem, decked “with silks and jewelry,” reclining on a sofa, half-turning her face to the wall as she contemplates her loneliness (CP, 1:153–54).7 Neither picture is exceptionally imaginative or interpretive, but each does convey both the poetic details and something of the atmosphere of Rossetti’s verses. Even more to the point, both were reproduced, together with critical commentary, in The Studio, an art magazine with both national prestige and international circulation.8 Shaw’s interest in Rossetti’s work is most significant for the influence his subject matter might have had on his associates. Inspired himself by the illustrators of the sixties and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Shaw founded (with Rex Vicat Cole) a School of Art at Campden Hill that perpetuated the influence (Houfe, Dictionary, 297). Dion Clayton Calthrop (1878–1937), a fairy painter who illustrated Goblin Market in 1906,9 worked as Shaw’s studio assistant (Peppin, 66). Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (1871–1945), who taught at Shaw’s Art School, painted a watercolor based on A Royal Princess illustrating the lines “The dove that must not coo, eagle that must not soar” for an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in October 1911.10 Specializing in Pre-Raphaelite-style paintings on literary heroines, Brickdale found an inspiring subject in Rossetti’s determined and heroic princess.11 Other painters, too, found the combination of power and vulnerability with feminine beauty and solitude irresistible. In 1899 Hugh Riviere (1869–1956), for example, took A Royal Princess as the subject for his Royal Academy Exhibition piece, The Lonely Life (Cat. #53). Contrasting the sad princess on her solitary throne with the bevy of gossiping maidens behind her (fig. 8.1), Riviere empha-

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sizes her need for human connection and life experience by quoting Rossetti’s opening triplet: I, a princess, king-descended, decked with jewels, gilded, drest, Would rather be a peasant with her baby at her breast, For all I shine so like the sun, and am purple like the west. (CP, 1:149)

8.1 Hugh G. Riviere, The Lonely Life. Royal Academy Pictures 1899, 187. Repro. of oil painting 65 x 39. Photographic reproduction courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

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Reprinted in the Royal Academy Pictures produced as a supplement to the Magazine of Art, Riviere’s painting, along with Rossetti’s text, was available in reproduction to a wide audience of art and poetry lovers. The international exchange of art publications such as catalogues and magazines at the fin de siècle extended the audience for Rossetti’s poetry to artistic circles on the Continent. The young Symbolist artist Fernand Khnopff (1858– 1921), for example, was The Studio’s Brussels correspondent, and wrote numerous articles for its “Studio Talk” column on the subject of Belgian art. Already attracted to, and influenced by, the work of the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti, through his personal connection with BurneJones, Khnopff became drawn to Christina’s verses as well. In a single year he painted two works based on the same poem: “Who Shall Deliver Me?” It is worth quoting Rossetti’s poem in full because Khnopff ’s two paintings on this theme are very different from each other conceptually, and because both interpret the original text freely: God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care. All others are outside myself; I lock my door and bar them out, The turmoil, tedium, gad-about. I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all? If I could once lay down myself, And start self-purged upon the race That all must run! Death runs apace. If I could set aside myself, And start with lightened heart upon The road by all men overgone! God harden me against myself, This coward with pathetic voice Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys:

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Myself, arch-traitor to myself; My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe, My clog whatever road I go. Yet One there is can curb myself, Can roll the strangling load from me, Break off the yoke and set me free. (CP, 1:226–27) The verses elaborate a familiar Rossetti theme of self-loathing, sin, and suppression, expressed in the voice of a solitary self struggling to renounce the hollow pleasures of the world. Khnopff ’s two responses to this text are both highly personal and idiosyncratic. In 1891 the Belgian artist painted one picture sharing the poem’s title, Who Shall Deliver Me? and another taking a single line as its title, I Lock My Door upon Myself. In the eponymous painting, Khnopff applies Rossetti’s theme of self-disgust to a favorite Pre-Raphaelite subject, that of the fallen woman in the snares of a sensuous life. He does so, moreover, by evoking a specifically Pre-Raphaelite intertext for his painting. According to Susan Casteras, Khnopff ’s Who Shall Deliver Me? specifically alludes to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Found with such visual echoes as “[a] red-haired protagonist, urban backdrop with a brick wall, and gutter” (“Pre-Raphaelite Legacy,” 46).12 Khnopff shared with D. G. Rossetti a predilection for painting picture after picture conveying “the Pre-Raphaelite ideal female.” Like his admired predecessor, Khnopff sometimes used his sister as model for his paintings. In his case, however, the paintings of the auburn-haired Marguerite amounted to a “nearobsession,” in excess even of D. G. Rossetti’s own repeated paintings of Jane Morris (Casteras, “Pre-Raphaelite Legacy,” 44; West, 73). Marguerite provides the principal subject of both of Khnopff ’s visual responses to Christina’s “Who Shall Deliver Me?” In the haunting I Lock My Door upon Myself (plate 16)—a painting that some contemporary Belgian reviewers criticized “for being too Pre-Raphaelite” (Casteras, “Pre-Raphaelite Legacy,” 45)—Khnopff employs a complex visual symbolism akin to that used in D. G. Rossetti’s own early paintings of his sister, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation. Without the easily identifiable narrative context supplied by biblical story, however, Khnopff ’s floral emblems and symbolic winged figures construct a personal symbolism much more difficult to read. Critics have responded to the hermeneutic problem posed by Khnopff ’s symbols not by seeking correspondences between the visual image and the poetic text from which it takes its subject, but by turning to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art and poetry for explanation. According to Sarah Phelps Smith, I Lock

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My Door upon Myself expresses “the artist’s (poet or painter’s) self-imposed isolation from the world,” probably alluding, she suggests, to Dante Gabriel’s poetic fragment, “I shut myself in with my soul, / And the shapes come eddying forth,” as well as to his “Hand and Soul,” with its representation of the soul as a beautiful woman. Although the visual symbols of the piece—the poppy beside the statue of Hypnos, denoting Sleep, and the three stalks of day lilies in the foreground—might be difficult for the contemporary viewer to interpret, she argues that “the essence of the subject—the enclosure of the artistic soul in its own world—was probably made clear enough by the painting’s title” (62). But the title, I Lock My Door upon Myself, makes no reference to either soul or art, and alludes to Christina’s work, not her brother’s. By a convoluted associative path, which ignores the potentially illustrative status of Khnopff ’s work, Smith has completely bypassed Christina’s text to get to Dante Gabriel’s writing. In painting two works based on Christina’s “Who Shall Deliver Me?,” however, Khnopff might reasonably be assumed to be responding specifically to Christina’s poetry, not her brother’s. Indeed, his visual symbols offer an engaged, though highly personalized, reading of her verses. The strong vertical and horizontal lines of the wall forming the background emphasize the extent to which others have been barred from this woman’s private inner space (plate 16). The barrier on which she rests her elbows seems to respond to the speaker’s question “but who shall wall / Self from myself, most loathed of all?” Arresting the viewer with her glazed, unseeing look, the woman seems locked in a situation from which she cannot extricate herself, unable to “start self-purged upon the race / That all must run!” Behind her, the poppy and statue of Hypnos seem to allude to drug-induced ways of attaining “ease, and rest, and joys.” In front of her, the three stalks of day lilies suggest the life that she might reach out to instead. Although Khnopff ’s visual response to Rossetti’s “Who Shall Deliver Me?” offers a secular reading of a religious poem, it nevertheless illustrates compellingly the speaker’s mood of bitter reproach and near despair, while also capturing something of her weak gesture toward hope. In visualizing lyric poetry, the artist must convey the mood of the piece, evoke its imagery, and give flesh and substance to the speaking voice. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti remarked when he began his illustration career in 1855, lyric poetry could easily lead an artist into a misprision of the poet’s work; with narrative poetry, one was on much safer ground (LDGR, 1:239). Other artists have also found the anecdotal element of narrative poetry, with its clear characterization, setting, and event, most conducive to inciting the Muse. Thus it should come as no surprise that the Christina Rossetti poem chosen for a pictorial subject more often than any other has been her narrative fairy tale, Goblin Market. In 1900 E. Gwenllian James showed a Goblin Market at the Royal Academy

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8.2 Frank Craig, Goblin Market. Reproduced in “Royal Academy Exhibition 1911,” The Studio 53 (1911): 28. Photographic reproduction courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

Exhibit; the following year, Hilda Koe displayed another painting on this subject, and 1901 also saw the reproduction of Amelia Bauerlë’s half-page etching of Laura and the goblins in The Studio. In 1911 Frank Craig (1874–1918) exhibited a Goblin Market at the Royal Academy Exhibition (fig. 8.2). A circular painting with lush botanical detail in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, it depicts—as have most illustrations of Christina’s poem since Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first “Buy from us with a golden curl”—Laura’s encounter with the goblin men. Reprinted in a review article on the exhibit in The Studio, Craig’s Goblin Market would have reached a broadly based and sophisticated audience of the magazine’s subscribers, who “regarded themselves as part of a European movement” (Houfe, Fin de Siècle, 5). After war had ravaged Europe on an unprecedented scale, however, Goblin Market retreated from the cosmopolitan art scene to reside in the protected space of children’s books and adult collector items. By World War II, illustrator E. H. Shepard could be so certain of an audience virtually raised on Rossetti’s poem that he could use it in his satiric Punch piece on war rations, “Gobbling Market” (fig. 8.3).

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8.3 E. H. Shepard, “Gobbling Market,” Punch or The London Charivari, 11 March 1942, 189. Reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London.

Rossetti as Dramaturge Shepard might well have expected his 1940s audience to be familiar with Rossetti’s Goblin Market, for the poem’s descriptive language was part of British schoolchildren’s lexicon throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It was part of their visual culture, too, thanks not only to illustrated gift books and school texts but also to dramatic adaptations on the stage. The poem was first

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published as a theatrical script in the Girls’ Realm Annual in 1913 in an adapted form prepared by E. Hynes. Such a publishing context suggests that the dramatic adaptation was meant principally for family theatricals, much as Rossetti had planned her own “The Months: A Pageant” “as a drawingroom acting piece” (Letters, 2:292). Hynes’s adaptation of Goblin Market may also have found its way into the schoolroom, of course, just as “A Pageant” did. A letter from a teacher in South Carolina in July 1882 (less than a year after A Pageant and Other Poems was published in America by Roberts Brothers) reports that two performances of “A Pageant of the Months” played with great success “in a little old town of two thousand white people.”13 No doubt there were other performances of this piece in schools in both England and the United States, as well as productions at other venues on a grander scale. William Michael records at least one “far more conspicuous performance of The Pageant of the Months . . . carried out in June 1904 in the Albert Hall, London.” A benefit for the Society for Preventing Cruelty to Children, the production “was a brilliant spectacle, with multitudes of performers for the recitations, music, & dancing.”14 Like “A Pageant,” Goblin Market has been adapted for a variety of stages, from the modest schoolroom to the brilliant public spectacle “with multitudes of performers.” In 1921, the Reverend Maurice Bell of Wheatley Vicarage, Oxon., adapted the dramatic version of Goblin Market published earlier in the Girls’ Realm Annual. Bell “considerably rearranged” E. Hynes’s version to bring the dramatic action “in closer accordance with the Poem,” and to add “Incidental Music” (Maurice Bell, 1). The addition of music (and, often, dancing) became standard to theatrical adaptations of Rossetti’s poem. In visualizing her poetic lines for the stage, adapters have used all the theatrical means at their disposal to make this most sensuous of poems a sensuous experience for the audience. In addition to music, song, and dance, dramatic adaptations of Goblin Market have also used masks and even puppetry to convey the goblins, while lighting and narrative interludes often help to make transitions in time and space. Costume, setting, and props, of course, establish the characters in a realized world. The Reverend Bell followed the iconography for representing Lizzie and Laura that had been developed in illustrated Goblin Markets by dressing Lizzie in blue (as befits the Marian imagery associated with her) and giving Laura red accessories (to mark the errant woman). Bell’s use of animal masks for the goblins, which became a standard feature on the stage, had been anticipated by Laurence Housman in his proposed illustration scheme for the book in 1893.15 Offering an element of the grotesque and a range of bestial or subhuman features, masks can convey Rossetti’s amorphous goblins in ways analogous to the text’s multivalent and ambiguous language. It is likely that Bell’s Goblin Market was meant for small-town productions

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by local theater groups; would-be producers are instructed to send an “Acting fee of 3/6, payable for each and every performance,” to the Hon. Sec. Village Drama Society, Kelly, Lifton, N. Devon (1). The script of course may have been noticed by a provincial schoolteacher and introduced into the classroom by that means. But by 1930 such enterprise was no longer necessary. Goblin Market was a standard part of the dramatic curriculum, appearing in Plays for Middle Forms edited by Reed Moorhouse for “The King’s Treasuries” Series (No. 184) and published in both London and Toronto. There is a certain irony in Goblin Market’s appearance in a series named for Ruskin’s “King’s Treasuries” lecture from Sesame and Lilies. In this lecture the man who told Dante Gabriel Rossetti that his sister’s Goblin Market was unpublishable took it upon himself to advise men (literally) about what and how to read in order to take possession of a powerful patriarchal kingship. Now Rossetti’s verses, “full of . . . quaintnesses and offences” (WMR, Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism, 258), were part of England’s National Treasury of intellectual wealth and spiritual power. The Queen of the Pre-Raphaelites had escaped the Garden Ruskin assigned to women in his pendant lecture, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” to enter the world of men and their books. In his “Notes” to the play, Moorhouse actually presents Rossetti’s Goblin Market in Ruskinian terms as “a poem-sermon” valuable for its moral teaching about “the facts of temptation and the beauty of sacrifice” (234). Moorhouse turns the poem into a one-act play, retaining Rossetti’s poetic lines with only a few abridgments and alterations, but compressing the events. Twice during the action a Story-teller provides a narrative to deal with the notion of passing time: first after Laura realizes she can no longer hear the goblins and begins to fade away “Day after day, night after night”; and second after Laura’s dramatic recovery, when the Story-teller steps forward to complete the tale that stretches into “Days, weeks, months, years, / Afterwards, when both were wives, / With children of their own” (Moorhouse, 229, 233). Moorhouse says, “The piece should stage well,” but notes that the range of “curiosity, desire, fear, despair, love, and courage” needed from the actors will make the play “a rare exercise for the ambitious performers” who take on “the leading roles of Laura and her sister.” Moorhouse visualizes his production in terms of grotesque goblins and passionate though innocent maids. The addition of the troll music from Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite, he suggests, and perhaps some of the folk melodies of Sibelius would help establish the appropriate atmosphere for this “fairy (or goblin) fantasy” (234). Like illustrated book versions of the poem for children, Moorhouse’s Goblin Market brings out the moral and the fantastic elements of Rossetti’s work in order to make it accessible to the young performers and their audience in the school auditorium. Dramatic adaptations of the play for adult audiences after

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World War II have retained an interest in the fantastic but have focused, like the illustrated versions of the poem for mature book buyers, on the psychological, sexual, and social possibilities suggested by Rossetti’s poem. All of these productions add music and movement, and sometimes dance, to the scripts, some virtually eliminating dialogue altogether in favor of visual and kinetic expression, modifying the number of characters and the nature of their interaction. For these late-twentieth-century adapters, the text of Rossetti’s Goblin Market is a starting point only. Unlike Hynes, Bell, and Moorhouse, these playwrights, producers, composers, and choreographers are not so much interested in reproducing Rossetti’s lines in dramatic form as they are in interpreting the poem in their own visual language. Most of these would probably concur with the view expressed by director Nick Hedges, who adapted the poem for a fringe theater production in 1995: Our intention in remaking Goblin Market for the stage was never to turn the poem into a play, nor to simply demonstrate the narrative dramatically, but rather to “theatricalise” the world of the poem. . . . We have endeavoured to achieve a theatrical language as rich and sensual as Rossetti’s poetry, pregnant with symbolism both explicit and ambiguous, playful and disturbing by turns.16

The Goblin Market production most dependent on visual expression through the complete elimination of verbal language is a dance version of the poem choreographed by Christopher House, a gifted Canadian dance creator, for the Toronto Dance Theater. Premiering in Montreal at Expo 86, House’s Goblin Market visualized Rossetti’s poem in a manner “at once playful and suggestive of spoiled innocence,” according to reviewer Patricia Hluchy. In green costumes decorated with vegetation to suggest their earthy origins, four goblins corrupt a single maiden (described by Hluchy as “an imprudent girl”) with their magic fruit. Condensing the action to encompass only the encounter between seductive goblins and an innocent maid, thereby eliminating the “there is no friend like a sister” theme, this dance production seems to have reproduced the kinetic energy and sensuous pleasure of Rossetti’s poem but not its symbolic resonances.17 Next to the Toronto Dance Theater performance, Nick Hedges’s fringe theater Goblin Market for the Battersea Arts Center in London (BAC) is the production most dependent on visuals alone to express its interpretation of Rossetti’s poem. The cast of two women and one man worked without a script. They prepared for the production by reading Rossetti’s poem, looking at PreRaphaelite paintings, and listening to tapes of children reciting skipping games. Relying on mime, dance, puppetry, and music, this dramatization incorporates only two lines of text, both as voice-overs rather than spoken dialogue. The first

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textual citation, “twilight is not good for maidens,” occurs in the opening scene and the second—a combination of Rossetti’s “For there is no friend like a sister” and “honey to the throat but poison to the blood”—comes at the end. Thus it is a largely silent production, punctuated only by Gord Winston’s specially composed music and some traditional skipping songs. Fascinated by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, especially the double image of two young girls in Victorian art, Hedges produced a postmodern play that makes parodic allusion to such works as John Millais’s Autumn Leaves. As the lights in the theater go up, two girls like those in Millais’s painting are seen raking leaves. Gradually, their raking reveals sheets, pillows, and blankets and they make up a bed and begin to undress each other. With the principal interest, unlike the Toronto Dance Theater’s production, on the relationship between the sisters, the grotesque goblin—part actor, part puppet—becomes starkly representative of dark, uncontrollable forces of desire and violence, while Lizzie and Laura embody the human possibilities of love, trust, innocence, and passion. Hedge’s adaptation also, of course, focuses squarely on the issues late-twentieth-century fantasy illustrators found so fascinating in Rossetti’s poem: predatory male violence against women, sisterly solidarity, and lesbian love.18 In his review for What’s On, a London listings magazine, Roger Foss described the production as “a strangely seductive piece of visual and physical theatre that sticks firmly in the mind long after seeing it, especially if you’ve always thought of Rossetti as a devotional writer of children’s verses.” Hedges’s visualization of Goblin Market obviously had the power to unsettle accepted images of both the children’s Rossetti and the religious Rossetti as constructed in twentiethcentury school texts and illustrated books for children. According to the director, some patrons returned to the seventy-five-seat theater as often as six or seven times to see the production, as if they craved, Laura-like, more and more of this exotic, forbidden pleasure. Billed as “an erotic, adult fairytale,” this fringe theater production warned its audience that this was not going to be the Goblin Market they remembered from childhood, but rather a performance “unsuitable for children” and containing “nudity” (fig. 8.4).19 An American Goblin Market written by Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon, with music by Pen, which premiered at the Vineyard Theater in New York in 1985,20 concentrates even more specifically on the relationship between the sisters by eliminating the goblins from the script entirely. A two-woman show, this play is staged in a nursery where a pair of mature women relive a childhood experience from an adult perspective. Like Hedges, Pen and Harmon make no attempt to be literal in their reproduction of Rossetti’s poem for the stage. However, their adaptation combines text with images in a much more traditional way than the

8.4 Poster for Nick Hedges’s production of Goblin Market (Battersea Arts Center, London, 1995). Photograph by Nobby Clark, depicting Laura (Zoe Waites) and Lizzie (Polly Wiseman).

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fringe theater production. Their script relies on dialogue drawn from Rossetti’s poem, with the addition of musical numbers sung by the two actors both solo and in duet. In contrast to Hedges’s attempt to “bring alive the world of a PreRaphaelite painting” in his production, Pen and Harmon insist that “neither the visual nor the acting style needs to be true to [the Victorian] period.” Rather, the production “should be a contemporary and selective vision of what we imagine the period to be” (“Authors’ Notes,” 5). Reproducing Rossetti always entails a selective vision of what a contemporary producer imagines the Victorian period to be. As we saw in the late-twentiethcentury illustrated versions of the poem for the adult collectors’ market, the Victorian period we have imagined and reproduced for ourselves is always highly sexualized, pulsating with repressed desires and perverted pleasures. Polly Pen, who describes Goblin Market as “the most orally fixated poem in the English language,” claims the poem “had haunted [her] since college, when ‘An English teacher gave it to our class at Ithaca.’” The play she created out of the poem is, in turn, described by Nan Robertson in her review for the Times in 1986 as a “haunting toy opera set to a lushly erotic Victorian poem by Christina Rossetti.” Thirteen years later a production of Pen and Harmon’s musical in Minneapolis was advertised as “classic Victorian erotica that serves fruit as a stand-in for sex as two virginal sisters are seduced by lewd goblins.”21 Defining ourselves against a visualized Victorian Other provides reassurance about our own sophistication, our own position of knowledge and power. As John Simon observed in his review of the Circle in the Square production for New York in 1986, “The sexually repressed seem to hold endless fascination for the sexually liberated” (107). Simon locates his evidence for Rossetti’s sexual repression in the dream she recorded in the 1850s as a message from God enjoining her “to paint the . . . subject as a picture—contingent duty, perhaps. Of course I never became competent (WMR, Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism, 48–49): Yes, Christina was a troubled creature who would dream of nocturnal churchyards where sheep with “innocent expressions, one especially heavenly,” were grazing, “amid them . . . a Satan-like goat lying, with a kingly look and horns,” and also dogs, “one with a flattering face, a second with head almost entirely turned away, but . . . sensual and abominable”—a Freudian field day. (Simon, 108)

Far from representing a pictorial subject in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition of symbolic religious painting as found in William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, Christina’s dream provides Freudian symbols to be interpreted for their representation of unconscious desires.22 Evidently a psychiatrist manqué, Simon objects to some aspects of the Pen/Harmon production on the grounds that “[f ]or all the

8.5 Playbill for the Circle in the Square production of Goblin Market, by Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon, adapted from the poem by Christina Rossetti (New York, 7 April 1986).

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latent aberrations that have been imputed to Goblin Market, “narcissism”— which he sees in the two actors’ evident self-love—is “not one of them” (108). Thus for every reader a different misprision, for every reproducer an alternate “right reading.” In presenting Rossetti’s Goblin Market on the stage, late-twentieth-century producers found a rich resource in the poem’s visual history in illustrated books. The playbill for the Circle in the Square production of Goblin Market in April 1986, for example, was obviously inspired by George Gershinowitz’s watercolors for the picture-book version of the poem produced three years earlier by David R. Godine of Boston (fig. 8.5). The naked goblin men with bestial heads attached to male bodies make clear intertextual reference to this earlier publication. The hummingbird sucking from a large flower is also lifted directly from Gershinowitz’s iconography (see plate 8). In its new context, the visual symbol becomes a displaced signifier for the “oral fixation” Pen finds so dominant in Rossetti’s poem and which she wishes to reproduce in her production. The most lavishly produced version of Goblin Market for the stage to date, a Trestle Theater Company production in January 1995, was also inspired by an illustrated book. American composer Aaron Jay Kernis had wanted to create a musical Goblin Market ever since he “first found the Dover reprint of it (with piquant illustrations by Laurence Housman) tucked away in a small college bookstore in Maine” in 1989. When the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) invited him to compose a work, he “felt that the ideal situation for a setting of Goblin Market had arrived.” Kernis believed a British production was essential because of the poem’s embeddedness in British culture: “the text has been well beloved in England, but is barely known in America.”23 Although Kernis had, “from the beginning, envisioned the work utilising the additional dimension of theatre, mime, dance, puppets or video,” his actual contribution was restricted to the aural. The Trestle Theater Company, a small-scale theater touring group, collaborated to create the visual side of the production. Distinguished by their use of puppets, masks, mime, and dance, the company creates a “visual theatre” that may even be, according to Joint Artistic Director Toby Wilsher, a “new writing.”24 With its goal of providing a kind of “entertainment for the eyes and ears, that stimulates the intellect through the use of text, movement and music,” the Trestle Theater’s Goblin Market is not only a “new writing” but a new form of illustration operating live in three dimensions. The production—“Devised by the entire company,” as the playbill announces—stages Goblin Market as a confrontation between two sisters and two brothers who perform the action in mime to Kernis’s score as a narrator “speaks Christina Rossetti’s poem above the music” (Fallows). As represented by puppetmaker Andy Lawrence, the goblins

8.6 Playbill taken from the program for the Trestle Theater Company production of Goblin Market, composed by Aaron Jay Kernis, for the January 1995 tour of England. By kind permission of the Trestle Theater Company.

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were to bring out the poem’s “unnerving menace” by representing “a dark timeless force, mingling with the undergrowth, ready to trick, corrupt, pervert.” On stage this “dark timeless force” took on a particularly twentieth-century manifestation. According to reviewer David Fallows for the Guardian on 19 January 1995, this enacted Goblin Market presented “a story of teenage pregnancy, delinquency, drugs and AIDS, while at the same time keeping components of the original ethos with girls in sheer white dresses and long hair.” White dresses and long hair, it seems, provide an invitingly blank screen. Effectively, such costumes are the visual components needed to conjure up our selective and imagined vision of the Victorian past. As with all interpreters of texts and images, this (re)viewer was also an active producer of meaning, not simply a passive recipient of a theatrical company’s vision of the poem. As director Wilsher observes, “the power of the masks is their subtle use of gesture that suggest rather than dictate [sic], leaving much for the audience to interpret and distil through their own experience.”25 Despite the production’s genesis in the composer’s encounter with Laurence Housman’s illustrated version of Rossetti’s poem, and the puppetmaker’s acknowledgment that his inspiration came from Arthur Rackham, the Program designer chose to juxtapose images of the goblin puppets with details taken from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s frontispiece, thereby introducing yet another illustrative context for the work (fig. 8.6). Grotesque, misshapen men with large noses and ears, these puppet goblins bear no resemblance to D. G. Rossetti’s urbane animals, though their features do betray a lineage springing from the Rackham fairy tradition and continued in the work of British illustrator Brian Froud.26 The detail from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s frontispiece shows Lizzie departing from the scene but looking back at the goblins as she does so (see fig. 2.1). Resituated in this new context, she appears to be looking back at Andy Lawrence’s oversize goblin heads framing the playbill. This postmodern paste-up invokes the Pre-Raphaelite past by drawing on selected images and recombining them with contemporary ones. Visualizing Rossetti always reproduces the old with the new because material culture works in vertical as well as horizontal ways, overlaying chronological lines of development with the dense layers of history embodied in physical artifacts.

Coda: Bibliography as Biography Like Aaron Jay Kernis’s Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History had its genesis in my coming across a copy of Laurence Housman’s illustrated version of the poem about a decade ago. The powerful, claustrophobic, grotesque illustrations haunted my own visual imagination and

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initially induced contradictory responses. My first thought was “this is not Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” My second was “this is wonderful art and compelling interpretation.” Embarking on what took on the nature of an archeological dig, I began to construct a genealogy, first for Goblin Market, and then for all illustrated versions of Rossetti’s work I could find—her own occasional drawings, pieces of ephemera such as the illuminated tract I discovered in Lisa Wilson’s Verses,27 lavish gift books such as Florence Harrison’s illustrated Poems, fantasy comic books, Symbolist paintings, and postmodern plays. Along the way I learned the truth of Francis Meynell’s observation in 1946: “Printing . . . is a mass art, but it is also a personal experience” (9). Every book has a story to tell, every reproduction connects the printed page to a network of makers and users with their own stories and histories. By seeing bibliography as this kind of living social process, we can reinvigorate all our readings of images and texts, finding traces of the reproducible past in the material objects of our present.

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Notes

I n t ro d u c t i o n 1. See, however, my “Poetry and Illustration,” chapter 22 in A Companion to Victorian Poetry. 2. Jerome McGann, however, has made the argument that the developments of modernism grow out of the renaissance of printing at the end of the nineteenth century in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. For relevant work in twentieth-century publishing, see Claire Hoertz Badaracco’s Trading Words: Poetry, Typography and Illustrated Books in the Modern Literary Economy; Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923; and Joseph Grigely, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism. 3. See Patricia Anderson and Richard Altick for good accounts of the contribution the SPCK and other religious publishing houses made to the democratization of printed images and texts in Victorian society. 4. The SPCK publications for children were, of course, profusely illustrated. See Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books, 33–34. 5. As Antony H. Harrison has demonstrated so persuasively, Tractarianism and PreRaphaelitism were not opposing influences, but “compatible, indeed deeply related,” ones (CR, 69). 6. I regret that Kate Flint’s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination came out too late in the process of bringing my book through the press to assist me in defining and contextualizing CGR’s visual imagination. 7. See Harrison, CR, for an overview of contemporary reviewers’ recognition of CGR’s PreRaphaelite word-painting (27–28). 8. Commonplace, a collection of short stories published by F. S. Ellis in 1870, was not illustrated. 9. My understanding of the book as a social event or act requiring a materialist approach to the business of interpretation is indebted throughout this study to Jerome J. McGann’s work in textual studies and sociohistorical criticism, particularly The Textual Condition. 10. Norman Feltes led the way in reading Victorian novels for the historical and ideological features marked in their modes of production. His work on the “commodity-text” in Modes of Production of Victorian Novels has been particularly helpful in my study of Rossetti’s single work of illustrated fiction, Speaking Likenesses (see chapter 3). 11. The term, “materialist hermeneutics,” and the model for the case-study approach are indebted to Jerome McGann’s The Textual Condition (see especially 15–16). 12. Albert, however, refers only to Dante Gabriel’s designs for Rossetti’s first volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, and negatively contrasts D. G. Rossetti’s engraved title page to the publisher’s printed title page in order to assert that “it was exactly this kind of visual disharmony that Morris wanted to avoid in his own books” (94). 13. Both Jan Marsh and Antony H. Harrison have written on Rossetti’s determination to establish a publicly recognized poetic career for herself in the 1850s and 1860s. See Marsh’s biography

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of the poet as well as her article, “Christina Rossetti’s Vocation: The Importance of Goblin Market”; and Harrison’s Christina Rossetti in Context, especially chapter 1, “Christina Rossetti and the Poetic Vocation.” 14. The Dalziels, however, did not follow Rossetti’s direction. 15. Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth (170). Edmond is not the first scholar to make this assertion. His source here could well have been either Odette Bornand, editor of The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, who states categorically that Goblin Market was intended to be a tale for children (33), or Stanley Weintraub, who, in Four Rossettis: A Victorian Biography, makes the extraordinary claim that Goblin Market became “a Victorian nursery classic” on publication (103). But scholars have repeated this fallacy for years. For the rebuttal of this error, see Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “Modern Markets for Goblin Market.” 16. Taylor’s point that Rossetti did not originally write Goblin Market for children is clear from its original placement in a volume of poems published for an adult audience. The author’s own view of the work as a piece for adults is emphasized in a letter of 7 March [1862] in which Rossetti declines to participate in a book for children because “it so happens that children are not amongst my suggestive subjects” (Letters, 1:159). CGR’s remark strongly suggests that she herself did not think of Goblin Market, which was published the following month by Macmillan, as a children’s poem. 17. See, for example, John Mackay Shaw’s five-volume Childhood in Poetry, a catalogue which indexes periodical and anthology citations of poetry either about or for children in the nineteenth century. Shaw’s only citations for Goblin Market are the 1862 and 1893 editions. Knowing CGR’s tenacity about copyright privileges and authorial control over her work, and her particularly trenchant refusal to allow any of her narrative pieces to appear in abridged forms in anthologies, it seems virtually impossible that CGR’s Goblin Market was even occasionally, let alone frequently, included in Victorian children’s books. That development did not occur until the Edwardian period (see chapter 6).

Chapter 1 1. For accounts of the typological approach of the early Pre-Raphaelites, see Herbert Sussman, Fact into Figure; George Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows; Lothar Hönnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition; and Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites; for an exploration of CGR’s specific application of this approach in her own poetry, see Linda Peterson, “Restoring the Book.” 2. For details about Victorian women’s opportunities for, and experience of, art education, see Deborah Cherry’s chapter 3 in Painting Women, “An Education in Difference or an In/Different Education? Art Training for Women”; and Sara M. Dodd, “Art Education for Women in the 1860s: A Decade of Debate” in Clarissa Campbell Orr’s Women in the Victorian Art World. 3. Packer suggests that Scott’s dating may be faulty, and that the more likely time for his observation of CGR at FMB’s Camden town school is spring of 1851 (CR, 64). 4. In July 1853 WMR wrote to FMLR about one of CGR’s paintings: “Christina’s head of the servant was very good: a great advance (I think, tho’ Gabriel does not), in feeling for, as well as use of, colour, & in general handling” (ADC box 13, folder 3). 5. DGR was certainly aware of CGR’s attempts to develop her artistic abilities at this time. In search of an appropriate backdrop for Found in 1853, he wrote FMLR in Frome: “I suppose Christina’s pictorial eye will by this time have some insight into the beauties of brick walls—the preferability of purplish prevailing tint to yellowish, etc.” (LDGR, 1:156).

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6. FMLR’s grim prediction was correct, though perhaps her small faith in women’s artistic talent was less justified. In fact it was Anna Mary Howitt’s suffering from the prejudices associated with her “lady artist” status that prevented her from becoming the professional painter she aspired to be. When John Ruskin wrote to her about her large canvas, Boadicaea Brooding Over Her Wrongs (1856), “What do you know about Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant’s wing,” Howitt suffered a mental collapse that effectively ended her painting career (Marsh, “Art, Ambition and Sisterhood,” 40). 7. FMLR to DGR, 23 July 1853, ADC box 3, folder 17; and DGR to AM, 4 April [1862], Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. 8. The Whitwick Manor Collection contains an oil on canvas of Christ Carrying the Cross that has been attributed to CGR; a painting on the wall of a house in Frome has also been attributed to her. Neither of these attributions has been verified by experts. The Whitwick Manor oil, which I have examined, shows skill in oils and knowledge of anatomy likely beyond CGR’s ken. 9. I am indebted to Linda Schofield’s generous sharing of the research notes she took in the late Imogene Dennis’s library in Woodstock for this list of titles. The books were dispersed at Mrs. Dennis’s death and I have been able to locate and look at only two of Rossetti’s self-illustrated copies: John Keble’s The Christian Year (through the kind permission of Mrs. Susan Plowden); and Maria Rossetti’s A Shadow of Dante (through the kind permission of Mr. Nicholas Rossetti). In my discussion of the remaining works, I have had to rely on descriptions of the illustrations made by Linda Schofield (in manuscript), Gwynneth Hatton (in her unpublished thesis), and WMR (in his “Notes” to Rossetti’s poems). Mary Sandars includes a decorated page from Rossetti’s copy of Isaac Williams’s The Altar in The Life of Christina Rossetti (211), but this is the only reproduction of Rossetti’s book illustrations that I am aware of other than the Shadow of Dante drawings included with Mary Arseneau’s article in The Culture of Christina Rossetti and the Christian Year drawings included in Diane D’Amico’s “Christina Rossetti’s The Christian Year.” 10. Though exegetical, A Shadow of Dante may not be precisely a devotional book, except that both Maria and Christina approached Dante’s work from a religious point of view. 11. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the verses of Keble’s Christian Year are taken from the E. P. Dutton edition (n.d.) and will be cited parenthetically by page number. 12. “The World” was written in 1854 and “Amor Mundi” in 1865. 13. CGR did not illustrate her own devotional poetry. Her illustrations for Goblin Market and Other Poems stop at page 51, “Spring,” well before the beginning of the devotional section, while Verses does not have any strictly devotional poems though some, of course, express religious themes. 14. As Sabine Haass points out, the Victorians used these terms more or less interchangeably, for “emblem,” at this time, was not used in its old generic sense, but rather in the generalized notion of sign, symbol, and type (247). CGR uses “emblem” in this generalized sense throughout her devotional prose. 15. Gabriele Rossetti was a well-known Dante scholar, and all four of his children published something on the Italian poet in their maturity. The elder Rossetti’s reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, however, was as a political rather than a religious allegory. See Arseneau’s “‘May My Great Love Avail Me’: Christina Rossetti and Dante” in The Culture of Christina Rossetti (22–45). 16. The holograph poem is found in a copy of Verses illustrated with drawings by DGR in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (hereafter abbreviated HRC). 17. I am indebted here to Linda Schofield’s research notes on CGR’s marginal illustrations for

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Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), which have supplemented the brief remarks made by WMR in his “Notes.” 18. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of CGR’s poems are taken from CP and will be cited parenthetically by volume and page number and, for longer poems, line number. 19. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of Sing-Song are taken from the Dover reprint edition. 20. As I argue in chapter 3, AH used CGR’s sketches as the basis for his designs, so that her suggestions for the image/text relations in her book of nursery rhymes were largely realized. 21. Maryan Ainsworth (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art) and Jerome J. McGann (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost) have written insightfully about the importance of the double work to DGR’s aesthetics. 22. Properly speaking, CGR made her poetic debut in the Athenaeum in 1848, with the publication of “Heart’s Chill Between” and “Death’s Chill Between.” As more than a decade elapsed before CGR appeared again in a national magazine (The Germ, where she published poetry in 1850, had limited distribution), one may see her coming out in Once a Week as the actual onset of her successful poetic career. “Maude Clare” was, in fact, her second publication in this magazine. Once a Week published “The Round Tower at Jhansi,” unillustrated, in August 1859; “Maude Clare” appeared in November. However, as “The Round Tower at Jhansi” appeared under the name “Caroline G. Rossetti,” “Maude Clare” is perhaps more appropriately seen as her official introduction to the public. For an analysis of “Maude Clare” in “its original published context” in Once a Week (an analysis which typically overlooks its illustrative context as a poem printed with a picture by John Millais), see Andrew Maunder’s article. 23. CGR to M. H. Spielmann, editor of the Magazine of Art, letter dated 27 August [1888], HRC. 24. In the days before international copyright, periodical publications had to appear first in Britain for an author to secure British copyright (Nowell-Smith, International Copyright, 82). 25. For details of this affair, see Troxell, Three Rossettis (172); RML (144–48), and Packer, CR (356–58). 26. R. W. Crump says the composition dates for “Brother Bruin” and “A Christmas Carol” are unknown (CP, 2:397, 399), but the former must have been written before October 1885 (when CGR sold the copyright to Wide-Awake), and the latter before July 1884 (when she first wrote to AM to offer him the “Carol” and to tell him about the copyright issue with Wide Awake) (RML, 144). 27. CGR received £5.2.8 for “Brother Bruin” in October 1885, as recorded in the accounts book she kept from 1874 to 1894 (ADC box 10, folder 1). 28. CGR’s concerns about securing British as well as American copyright were well founded. At least one of her nursery rhymes from Sing-Song, “O Lady Moon,” was reprinted, apparently without her knowledge, in St. Nicholas Magazine in December 1884. The magazine provided no acknowledgment of the poem’s previous publication by either Routledge in London or Roberts Brothers in Boston, and CGR recorded no payment for this publication in her accounts book (ADC box 10, folder 1). 29. CGR published two other poems in Atalanta, “A Candlemas Dialogue” in February 1888, and “A Goodly Heritage” in October 1890. Although the table of contents claims that “A Candlemas Dialogue” is illustrated, some change in plans must have occurred during the publication process, for the poem appears without decoration of any kind, as does the latter poem.

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30. CGR published “Christmas Carols” in the Century Guild Hobby Horse no. 5 (January 1887): 1 and “There is a budding morrow in midnight” in new series vol. 4 (1889): 81. 31. Letter dated 27 August [1888] in a group of five ALS to the Magazine of Art in the Rossetti Collection at the HRC. 32. Although Spielmann sent CGR printers’ proofs for “An Echo from Willowwood” in September 1888, the poem was not illustrated until August 1890, suggesting that until Charles Ricketts joined the art staff at the Magazine of Art, Spielmann was unable to find an appropriate illustrator for the sonnet. See five ALS to the Magazine of Art in the Rossetti Collection at the HRC. 33. Letter dated “Wednesday” in a group of five ALS to the Magazine of Art in the Rossetti Collection at the HRC. 34. CGR to AM, letter dated 26 September 1893 in the Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 542975.

Chapter 2 1. Letter from LH to AM, 1 January 1895, Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55010. 2. See chapter 7. 3. In traditional emblem books, of course, the relationship is reversed, with the picture providing the “text” whose meaning the poetry interprets. 4. Moxon appears to have been responsible for selecting Daniel Maclise, J. C. Horsley, C. Stanfield, William Mulready, T. Creswick, and John Millais. Millais alone of his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues was a Royal Academician. How William Holman Hunt and DGR received their commissions is less clear, though it appears that they were the poet’s personal choice, perhaps on the recommendation of his friend Millais. Tennyson also asked that Moxon invite Elizabeth Siddall, but the publisher declined (Hagen, 103). 5. The integration of printing style with illustration style was not achieved until the fineprinting revival of the fin de siècle. The stock publisher’s title page for both Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems is unpleasantly at variance with the decorated title pages designed by DGR for these volumes. 6. See Alastair Grieve for a symbolic reading of DGR’s cover design in terms of CGR’s poem (83). 7. DGR to AM, 30 August 1861; and DGR to AM, 4 April [1862], Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. 8. The correspondence cited is related to a projected edition of Joseph and His Brethren in 1860; like so many Pre-Raphaelite proposals for illustrated books, this one never materialized. DGR’s two previous illustration projects, The Music Master and the Moxon Tennyson, were combined efforts with other artists, so his contributions were not such a marketable commodity as they were in the single-illustrator Goblin Market and Other Poems. In any case, these works were produced at a time when his name did not have the renown it had acquired by the sixties, so Macmillan’s Goblin Market volume must be seen as the first book to take advantage of the painter’s fame. 9. DGR to AM, Monday [October–December 1861?], Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. 10. DGR to AM, 4 April [1862], Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. 11. In engraving the title-page vignette for Goblin Market and Other Poems, W. J. Linton neglected to cut the jawline of the foremost woman, giving her an extraordinarily thick neck. The

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jawline was inserted for the second printing when the plate was given to Kate Faulkner for correction (Fredeman, “Woodman,” 16). 12. This seems to have caught DGR by surprise. He had assumed that Roberts Brothers would publish only CGR’s poetry, not his woodcuts, in their American edition. See his letter to AM dated 30 January 1866 (RML, 61). 13. For a comprehensive survey of DGR’s unpublished illustrations and unrealized proposals, see W. E. Fredeman, “‘Woodman, Spare That Block’: The Published, Unpublished, and Projected Illustrations and Book Designs of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” 14. The unique copy of CGR’s Verses Dedicated to Her Mother (1847) with inserted illustrations by DGR is lodged in the HRC. The dating is provided by WMR, who writes on the flyleaf that the drawings “cannot (I think) be later than 1847,” a supposition supported by the relative immaturity of the designs. 15. The printer’s sheets and artist’s drawings appear to have been bound up together some years later, perhaps at the time of CGR’s presentation of the volume to FMLR in July 1854. Alternatively, CGR may have had the drawings bound in with the printed pages still later, when she gave the book to WMR in September 1890 on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday; or WMR may himself have had this work done. A note in his hand written on the flyleaf and signed and dated 1905 indicates that he has reserved “another drawing of the series, Lady Isabella, wh. as it was not bound in & was rather too big for the volume, I keep elsewhere.” Located in the HRC. 16. This extra-illustrated presentation copy of David Main’s A Treasury of English Sonnets is in a private collection. I am grateful to Nicholas G. Rossetti for his kindness in allowing me to examine the volume. A study for this illustration is located in the Prints and Drawings Department of Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (Catalogue no. 328.’04). The illuminated sonnet is reproduced in H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life. 17. A notice in the Artist (1 February 1890) announcing the sale of a letter from CGR telling “Gabriel his drawing is too good to illustrate her sonnets, for which her own attempts will have to do” (53), prompted CGR to explain to WMR that the sonnet and letter referred to “have to do with the David Maine [sic] volume of sonnets.” CGR to WMR, 12 December 1889, ADC box 6, folder 4. 18. See my discussion of CGR’s marginal illustrations for Verses, chapter 1. 19. For the revival of the emblematic and typological traditions in Victorian England, and their attendant hermeneutics, see Lothar Hönnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition; Richard L. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation; Herbert L. Sussman, Fact into Figure; and George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows. 20. See Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books, for a general introduction to the origins and forms of Renaissance emblem books; Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, for a discussion of the emblematic tradition in the context of literary pictorialism and English poetry in the eighteenth century; and Karl Josef Höltgen, Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context, for developments of this tradition through to the Victorian period. 21. Unless otherwise noted, all future citations of Goblin Market are taken from this source, and will be cited parenthetically by line number(s). 22. Unless otherwise noted, all future citations of The Prince’s Progress are taken from this source, and will be cited parenthetically by line number(s). 23. For a selection of readings of Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress that explicate the intertextual allusions, see, in addition to Arseneau (“Incarnation and Interpretation” and “Pilgrim-

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age and Postponement”), Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time; Harrison, CR; Linda H. Peterson, “Restoring the Book”; Joan Rees, “Christina Rossetti: Poet”; and Dawn Henwood, “Christian Allegory and Subversive Poetics: Christina Rossetti’s Prince’s Progress Reexamined.” 24. As CGR wrote to Edmund Gosse, 1 June 1893, neither Goblin Market nor The Prince’s Progress is an allegory: every detail was not meant to be explicable. See Ashley B 1366, BLMS. 25. I am also indebted to Jan Marsh’s unpublished manuscript on the Portfolio Society. 26. AM did not even receive the manuscript for consideration until early April (RML, 49). 27. It is not clear whether this sketch was for a possible third illustration for the book (to which DGR makes passing reference nearly a year later), or if it was simply a preliminary drawing for the title-page vignette, produced before settling on the caption “The long hours go and come and go.” The latter is, I think, more likely, as the composition would be much the same with either of these lines from the opening stanzas of the poem. See LDGR, 2:589. 28. Twenty-two studies of The Prince’s Progress designs are located in the Prints and Drawings Department of the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery and another exists in the Maser Collection. These seem to be the complete set remaining upon the artist’s death, judging by the Catalogue of Rossetti Drawings Charles Fairfax Murray produced in 1883 (Charles Fairfax Murray Collection, HRC). Maryan Wynn Ainsworth reproduces some of these preliminary drawings in “‘The Prince’s Progress’: Works from 1863 to 1871,” and concludes that his experiments were in the interest of expressing the psychological states of the characters (74). See also Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné. Surtees dates the first two designs December 1865, but the correspondence between the siblings makes clear that DGR had provided CGR with preliminary woodcuts at least by 6 March 1865, when she asks for two alterations to the frontispiece, and possibly as early as 10 February 1865, when she thanks him “for the 2 valued prospective cuts” (Letters, 1:230, 226). 29. The intervening tissue guard detracts from the effect of the double-page opening. For a discussion of DGR’s double-page openings in the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress volumes, see W. E. Fredeman, “‘Woodman.’” Although Fredeman is uncertain if DGR intended this doubleopening effect, the visual links between frontispiece and title page in both books make this plan seem a deliberate one to me. In this DGR would have been ahead of his time, for the double-page opening was not fully developed, in theory and practice, until the book artists of the nineties— such as Walter Crane, William Morris, Charles Ricketts, and Laurence Housman—established it as a standard for fin-de-siècle fine book design. LH’s use of the double-page opening in his designs for Goblin Market in 1893 is discussed later in this chapter. 30. WMR’s Diary, 23 February 1867, ADC box 15, folder 1. See also Marsh, CR, 362. 31. This was likely Messrs. Kegan Paul, who had written CGR late in 1892 with a proposal to bring out an illustrated edition of Goblin Market for the next Christmas market. See FL, 191. 32. CGR to G. L. Craik, 28 March 1893, in BLMS Add MS 54975. The lady in question is likely Evelyn Cotton, who illustrated a printed copy of the 1862 Goblin Market with marginal drawings. This unique copy of Goblin Market, ornamented profusely with Cotton’s illuminations throughout, is housed in the Christina Rossetti Collection of Mary Louise and Frederick E. Maser, Bryn Mawr College. Two pages of Cotton’s artwork are reproduced in the Dictionary of Literary Biography entry for Christina Rossetti, but without attribution. For details about this book see the introduction to Christina Rossetti in the Maser Collection (15). 33. Throughout this section, “Macmillan” refers not to Alexander Macmillan, who did not take an active part in the publishing firm during the nineties, but to the firm. The correspondence

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with CGR, as one of the firm’s long-standing authors, was conducted by the senior partner, George Lillie Craik, whom CGR would have known since the sixties when he joined Macmillan’s. The correspondence with LH was shared between the junior partners, George and Frederick Macmillan. 34. See LH to AM, letter dated 5 March 1893 in the Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55010. 35. Charles Ricketts’s narrow upright format for John Gray’s Silverpoints, often cited as the first example of the saddle-book design, was produced at almost exactly the same time as LH’s Goblin Market. In The Art Nouveau Book in Britain, John Russell Taylor argues that LH’s format was “virtually his invention,” as its publication coincided so closely with Silverpoints as to preclude influence (108). 36. See LH to AM, letter dated 13 December [1893] in the Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55010. 37. George A. Macmillan to LH, 6 March 1893, Macmillan General Letter Books, folio 1308, BLMS Add MS 55439. 38. See Rodney Engen for a biography of LH, and L. Janzen Kooistra, The Artist as Critic (chapters 5, 6, and 7) for an analysis of the ways in which his art was produced out of a specifically defined subject position. 39. LH to George A. Macmillan, 18 April 1893 and 12 May 1893, Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55010. 40. See the holograph autobiographical fragment by LH in the Laurence Housman Papers, Seymour Adelman Collection (box 10) at Bryn Mawr College. 41. See especially Aubrey Beardsley’s use of similar sexual symbolism in the chapter headings he designed for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Dent, 1893–94). 42. The composition of the central figure tormented by a circle of grotesque beasts is reminiscent of Martin Schongauer’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. 43. LH was drawn to the notion of a female deity. He illustrated Goblin Market immediately after completing his illustrations for George Meredith’s Jump-to-Glory Jane (London: Swan, Sonnenschein, 1892), in which he also focuses on the image of the female Christ in his representation of Jane. For an analysis of LH’s illustrations for this text, see L. Janzen Kooistra, Artist as Critic (149–52).

Chapter 3 1. The letter to an unknown recipient is likely addressed to the Dalziel Brothers. As CGR refers to repacking and returning some plates on the subject of children as well as another series by Birket Foster, it seems likely that the letter deals with two separate gift-book projects. In 1863 the Dalziels brought out, under the Routledge imprint, Pictures of English Landscape by Myles Birket Foster. Although Tennyson had been approached to write letterpress for the plates, he declined and the commission was given to Tom Taylor. It is possible that CGR may have been solicited about this job. The project involving Ingelow and Greenwell and including poetry on the subject of children must have been Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, brought out under the Routledge imprint in 1865 with thirty-five illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton and featuring original poems solely by women poets. 2. Sing-Song was listed in the Routledge Catalogue for 1872 at the published price of 5s, with the wholesale price being 3s 7d. See Routledge Archive #215, The Archives of Routledge and Kegan Paul, University College, London. To put the cost of the book in terms relative to earning, the

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story of a struggling young man of lower-middle-class origin who later became one of the country’s foremost publishers is instructive. In his early days working as an usher in a Glasgow School (c. 1836), the publisher AM had a mere 5s a week to live on (Graves, 15). As Alderson points out, with the weekly wage of workmen in the 1860s and 1870s averaging less than £1, children’s books were commodities for the middle classes. 3. For a fascinating object lesson in the way in which the children’s-book market constructs the child, see Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan. 4. AM to CGR, 17 February 1870, folio 691 in General Letter Books (8 September 1869–23 May 1870), Macmillan Papers, BMLS Add MS 55390. 5. AM to CGR, 15 February 1870, folio 672 in General Letter Books (8 September 1869–23 May 1870), Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55390. 6. AM to CGR, 17 February 1870, folio 691 in General Letter Books (8 September 1869–23 May 1870), Macmillan Papers, BLMS, Add MS 55390. 7. DGR was actually following William Morris to F. S. Ellis; the publisher had brought out The Earthly Paradise in 1868 and 1870. A. C. Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, ornamented with a cover designed by DGR, was published by Ellis in 1871. 8. F. S. Ellis published CGR’s book of short fiction, Commonplace, in May 1870. He was unable to bring out a combined edition of Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress, however, because AM refused to relinquish his rights in the books. 9. Alice Boyd exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Academy, and the Dudley Gallery. See Clayton, 37–41. 10. William Bell Scott to Alice Boyd, 26 August 1867, Penkill Papers box 2, folder 7, University of British Columbia Library Special Collections. 11. For information on the Graphotype process, see J. Carpenter, “Concerning the Graphotype”; Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustration, 12 n. 17; and Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution, 95–98. 12. Alice Boyd to F. S. Ellis, 10 June 1870. F. S. Ellis Papers, UCLA Library Special Collection no. 425, box 2, folder 4. I am grateful to Andrew Stauffer for alerting me to this correspondence. 13. Alice Boyd’s Day Diaries note the reception of a letter from F. S. Ellis on 4 June 1870, remarking, “He is for giving up CGR’s book” (Penkill Papers box 7, folder 9, University of British Columbia Library Special Collections). A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, etc. at Penkill Castle, Ayrshire lists a collection of manuscript poems for Sing-Song by CGR, as well as 85 pen and pencil drawings, 9 proofs of the drawings, and 3 letters from F. S. Ellis to Miss Boyd (Penkill Papers box 5, folder 4, University of British Columbia Library Special Collections). The present whereabouts of the drawings and proofs are not known, but Packer reprints some letters from Ellis to Boyd in RML. Alice Boyd’s side of the correspondence is housed in the F. S. Ellis papers in the Special Collections of the UCLA Library. In her letter of 15 June 1870 to the publisher, Boyd says she had prepared 66 designs for the book when production was halted (UCLA Special Collection 425, box 2, folder 4). Some of the 85 drawings noted in the Penkill Castle Catalogue as part of the Sing-Song lot may be misattributed, though it is conceivable that Boyd may have continued work on designs for the rhymes for her own pleasure after the commission was canceled. 14. I have been assisted in my understanding of issues relating to copyright by Simon Nowell-Smith’s helpful discussion in International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria. 15. WMR’s Diary, 17 February 1867, ADC box 15, folder 1. 16. AH’s painting, The Dove, had “A Birthday” inscribed “at full length on the frame”

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(LDGR, 1:586), and another of his pictures, The Mower, quoted her lines “Passing away, saith the World, passing away,” in the exhibition catalogue (Roberts nos. 68 and 56). 17. The illustrations referred to appear in Sing-Song p. 76 (“the ring of elfs” for “In the meadow”); p. 79 (“the apple tree” for “The wind has such a rainy sound”); p. 73 (“the three dancing girls” for “Sing me a song”); and p. 72 (“the crow soaked grey” for “If a mouse could fly”). The drawing that departs most significantly from CGR’s sketch is the fairy ring AH designed for “In the meadow—what in the meadow?” CGR’s manuscript sketch is simply a sheaf of flowers, while AH’s design adds narrative content and emphasizes the joy of the wild world outside the domesticated garden. This is one of AH’s most original interpretive designs in the whole collection. It is also reminiscent of his design for “The Fairies” in Allingham’s Music Master. 18. William Bell Scott to Alice Boyd, 19 November 1871, Penkill Papers box 2, folder 10, University of British Columbia Library Special Collections. 19. This review was solicited by DGR. An unpublished letter from DGR to Westland Marston, dated 21 November 1871, tells Marston that DGR has arranged for the publisher to send him a review copy of Sing-Song because DGR is sure Marston “will like it thoroughly,” and because the Athenaeum is the proper place to provide “sympathetic nurture” to “a fledgling” work such as this. He also draws Marston’s attention to the illustrations by Hughes, which he says “are to my mind beyond all praise.” The Christina Rossetti Collection of Mary Louise and Frederick E. Maser, Bryn Mawr College. 20. Although dated 1872, Sing-Song was in fact published at the end of 1871. The forward dating, typical of Victorian publishing practices, permitted publishers to capitalize on two consecutive Christmas markets. 21. See Sidney Colvin’s review of all these books in a single article in the Academy. 22. The affinity between CGR’s Sing-Song and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience was recognized immediately by contemporary readers such as DGR and Sidney Colvin. Critics who have discussed the Blakean tradition carried on in CGR’s nursery rhymes include Roderick McGillis; Sharon Smulders (Revisited); Antony H. Harrison (Victorian Poets); U. C. Knoepflmacher (Ventures); R. Loring Taylor; and Virginia Sickbert. 23. See, for instance, Roderick McGillis and Virginia Sickbert, who make no mention of the contribution of the pictures to the reading experience in their otherwise excellent analyses of SingSong. 24. See, for example, Barbara Garlitz, who sees the illustrations as passively reflective of CGR’s contents and (like the verses) uncritically duplicating the stock themes and conventions of children’s literature; and Lila Hanft, who conflates image and text to the extent that she develops an argument about the poet’s “maternal ambivalence and infanticidal urges” by using AH’s illustrations of angels as evidence for Rossetti’s symbolic connection of angels to motherhood and death. 25. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Sing-Song are taken from the Dover reprint edition (1968), and will be noted parenthetically by page number. 26. See Matt. 25:40. 27. In this famous letter to Augusta Webster (c. 1878–79) CGR is responding to Webster’s invitation to support the suffrage campaign. Although CGR did not, in the end, offer her support, her letter shows her “shooting ahead of her instructeresses” in her argument that married women should be the last women excluded from the vote, “for who so apt as Mothers . . . to protect the interests of themselves and of their offspring?” This is the context for her comment on the power of maternal love. 28. CGR wrote many poems for adults on the theme of illegitimate children. See especially “The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,” spoken in the voice of the child (CP, 1:164–78).

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29. This theme is not limited to CGR’s writing for children, but is found throughout her corpus. As McGann comments, “The central moral problem in a symbolically ordered world involves distinguishing between what seems and what is,” and CGR frequently places her poetic characters in situations which demand that they “distinguish the real from the illusory” (“Christina Rossetti’s Poems,” 98). 30. I am indebted to Jan Marsh for recognizing this pun. See CR, 460. 31. The iconography of Punch varies. His large nose is essential, but the headgear is not consistent. Perhaps the most familiar of his hats is the jester’s cap with bells, but he also frequently appears, especially in the mid- to late Victorian period, in a three-cornered hat. From the late eighteenth century onward, Judy wore the eighteenth-century mob cap. See Robert Leach, The Punch and Judy Show: History, Tradition and Meaning; and Michael Byrom, Punch and Judy: Its Origin and Evolution, for historical overviews of the tradition and meaning of the characters, costumes, and dialogue of this puppet show. 32. Smulders is the only critic I am aware of who has recognized these figures as Punch and Judy and commented on how the illustration “actuates the element of conflict latent in the poem.” See “Sound and Structure,” 14. 33. The Punch and Judy show as it developed in Victorian England was established by an English version performed by an Italian puppet master, Giovanni Piccini, who was active until his retirement in 1828 at the age of eighty-two. The first published script of the show, based on Piccini’s productions, was brought out at this time by John Payne Collier with illustrations by George Cruikshank (Byrom, 11; Leach, 9); in connection with CGR’s sketch for Sing-Song, it is of interest to note that Cruikshank gives Punch a tricornered hat rather than the jester’s cap with bells. It is possible, given the fact that the Rossetti household was open to Italian émigrés of all descriptions, that Piccini may even have been an occasional visitor to the family home. However, WMR’s description of the puppet show which performed regularly outside 50 Charlotte Street suggests that the Rossettis—or at least FMLR, who was principally responsible for childcare, and who had perhaps more straitlaced views on such matters than her husband—saw such entertainment as “infra dig” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, 37). Given CGR’s well-known respect, amounting to adulation, of her mother’s views, it seems likely that, at least as an adult, she shared FMLR’s dim view of this type of entertainment. 34. CGR added the new quatrains in two privately owned copies of Sing-Song. The one I have examined was presented with the dedication “To my beloved Mother, Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti” in 1872. The annotations in this volume include some Italian translations written beside the English lyrics; some new poems written on the front and back flyleaves; and the addition of new stanzas for “Clever little Willie wee,” “I caught a little ladybird,” “I have a little husband,” “I have a Poll parrot,” “The dear old woman in the lane,” and “A peach for brothers, one for each” (now beginning “The peach tree on the southern wall”). There is no dating to indicate when CGR added the new quatrains, but if the Italian translations were for her mother’s pleasure, some, at least, of these additions must have been made when FMLR was still alive, that is, before the book returned to CGR’s possession on her mother’s death in 1886. Certainly they had been added by July 1888, for at this time CGR wrote about the revisions to WMR: “With an eye to its future I have concocted a priceless Singsong with marginal additions” (FL, 167). I am grateful to Mr. Roderic O’Conor for his kindness in permitting me to examine this book. 35. For an analysis of this ubiquitous trope in Victorian painting, see Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art. 36. So far as I am aware, U. C. Knoepflmacher is the only critic to have noticed that the two new stanzas “provide an unforeseen sequel to Hughes’s drawing” (Ventures, 351). Sharon Smulders,

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however, does note that the added quatrains alter the nursery rhyme’s affinities with “Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home” to develop it into “a women’s rights poem” (“Sound and Structure,” 16). 37. William Allingham responded to AH’s illustration for “The Fairies” in his Music Master volume of 1855 by saying “this is an inspiration, direct from Mab, and makes the poet half jealous of the painter as they walk arm in arm” (qtd. in Roberts, 14). 38. AM to CGR, 3 February 1874, folio 85 in Letter Book for 1874, Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55395. 39. AM to CGR, 18 April 1874, folio 466 in the Letter Books for 1874, Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55395. 40. Macmillan’s support is also evident in his publication of Grant Allen’s “The Ethics of Copyright” in his magazine in 1880. 41. See Patricia Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, for a good account of this publisher’s interest in illustrated magazines and books. 42. U. C. Knoepflmacher has developed the most sustained discussion of the relationship between AH’s illustrations and Tenniel’s in Ventures into Childland; but see also his “Avenging Alice”; Maurie McInnis’s “Allegorizing on Their Own Hooks”; and Kate Flint’s “Arthur Hughes as Illustrator for Children.” 43. In a letter to Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti dated 24 May 1874 AH mentions that he is in daily expectation of the proofs so that he can begin his commission (ADC box 7, folder 2). 44. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Speaking Likenesses are taken from Kent and Stanwood’s Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, and will be given parenthetically by page number. 45. Citations of the captions from the list of illustrations are taken from Speaking Likenesses (1874). 46. The title-page wording to which CGR objected was “With pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes.” She disliked the awkwardness of this, and would have preferred “With (so many) illustrations” (Letters, 2:30). 47. The Apple of Discord and the Judgment of Paris refer to the disruption caused by the goddess Discordia at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Angry that she had not been invited to the wedding, Discordia rolled a golden apple, inscribed “For the Fairest,” into the assembly of gods and goddesses. Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera each claimed the apple as rightfully hers, and Paris was called upon to make a judgment and award the apple. He gave it to Aphrodite, thereby indirectly causing the Trojan War, for after this Hera was determined to destroy Troy. 48. For a fine discussion of North Wind as presented by MacDonald and AH, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland, chapter 7. 49. In deploring “The Lowest Room,” DGR told his sister that it exhibited the “falsetto muscularity” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (LDGR, 3:1380). 50. It has, however, been reprinted, in part or in whole, in various academic anthologies, most recently in SP. 51. For analyses of Speaking Likenesses as cultural critique see, for example, Roderick McGillis; Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, Forbidden Journeys; Julia Briggs, “Hearing the Lesson”; Sharon Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited; Pamela Gilbert; Wendy Katz; and Kathryn Burlinson. 52. See also Burlinson, who writes about consumption, ideology, and social disruption in Speaking Likenesses by examining the function of the grotesque in the Rossetti/Hughes collaboration.

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Chapter 4 1. The Christmas anthology never materialized. 2. See also Letters, 3:257. Although he did not illustrate CGR’s work, Shields was a great admirer of it. He produced a chalk drawing for A Royal Princess on the subject of CGR’s poem in 1870 (Mills, 145); a few years later she reciprocated by sending Shields suggestions for his designs for the Duke of Westminster’s chapel at Eaton Hall, which the artist believed manifested “a clear beautiful power of vision in the writer” (Bell, CR, 108–9). 3. AM to CGR, 9 November 1876, General Letters Book for 1876, folio 708, Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55400. 4. AM to CGR, 13 November 1876, General Letters Book for 1876, folio 753, Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55400. 5. McClure later became the SPCK’s first historian. See W. O. B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1698–1898. 6. Minutes of the Tract Committee, 1876–1880, SPCK Archives, Cambridge University Library. 7. See CGR’s Account Book 1874–1894, ADC box 10, folder 1. 8. Ibid. The SPCK paid Rossetti £40 for Seek and Find (1879); £30 for Called to Be Saints (1881); £26 for Letter and Spirit (1883); £40 for Time Flies (1885); and £100 for The Face of the Deep. 9. W. K. Clarke, introduction to 1925 reprint of Verses. 10. WMR contributed £50 of the stipulated £100 fee out of his royalties, as Macmillan was only willing to pay half of what the SPCK required. See LWMR, 638. 11. The Diaries of Frances Maria Lavinia Rossetti, ADC box 6, folder 16. 12. In February 1894 CGR canceled her subscription to the SPCK, and returned the payment for The Face of the Deep, because the society had published a work which seemed to countenance vivisection, Our Secret Friends and Foes. She was not alone in her protest; according to W. K. Clarke, “Fifty members of the Society, including three Bishops, objected” to the book, “and a number of resignations from the Society followed” (185, 186). The rift seems to have been healed in October of that year, when Rossetti apparently renewed her subscription. 13. See, for example, Harrison, “Sage Discourse,” Colleen Hobbs and Joel Westerholm. Diane D’Amico and Robert Kachur argue for a progressively less gender-specific audience in CGR’s works but do not consider issues of class. Each of these arguments is based on textual evidence and cultural context rather than the material evidence of publishing history. 14. David as the type of poet or artist was popular with both Tractarians such as John Keble and Pre-Raphaelites like DGR and Thomas Woolner (Landow, 139). 15. See Sussman, 4–5, for a discussion of the connections between Pre-Raphaelite art and nineteenth-century scientific drawing. 16. There are no references to the illustrations for Called to Be Saints in extant CGR-related documents or in the SPCK archives I have been able to access during their transition from SPCK headquarters in London to Cambridge University Library. 17. CGR received The Elements of Botany from her Uncle Henry in June 1875 and completed Called to Be Saints in November 1876. 18. One piece at least of CGR’s “painting[s] of despicable sprigs on note paper corners” has survived in a private collection (Maser, 25). The ordinary piece of stationery is decorated in the upper left corner with a watercolor design featuring a brown/gold bird with a crowned head on a

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branch of green leaves with three purple fruit. I am grateful to Frederick E. Maser for giving me access to his collection. 19. The back of the decorated card has “Mrs. Rossetti” and her Albany Street address printed on it. CGR has written “Suggested by” above the printed “Mrs. Rossetti,” and added “& executed by her C.G.R. August 1875.” The London address has been stroked out and “All Saints Mission House—Clifton” added in CGR’s hand. The card is in the Fredeman family collection. I am grateful to the late W. E. Fredeman for giving me access to his collection. 20. Mary Arseneau has led the way in this regard. I am very grateful for her insights in our much-valued CGR conversations over the years. 21. See chapter 2 and Letters, 2:228. 22. In a personal copy of Time Flies in which CGR provided marginal attributions for all personal references, she identifies the one who conveyed this insight to her as “Mamma.” Autograph copy in the HRC. 23. See, for example, “Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth” (SS, 17). 24. CGR to WMR, 21 February 1887, ADC box 6, folder 3. Partly reprinted in FL, 161–62. CGR’s sketch of the snowdrops is in the Fredeman family collection. Under the flowers CGR has scribbled, “I doubt whether you will make out my copy from nature,” but in the letter cited above she clarifies that she was not sketching en plein air, but rather drawing in the house from snowdrops brought to her by her servant, Harriet. 25. CGR to Rose Donne [6 January 1884], Gordon Hake Papers, BLMS Add MS 49470. 26. Identified as MFR in the autograph copy of Time Flies in the HRC. 27. See Ellen Clayton’s long section on E.V.B. in English Female Artists for a contemporary’s high view of her work. 28. WMR’s Diary, 17 December 1866, ADC box 15, folder 1. 29. See CP, 1: 89–90 for the complete and correct text of “Passing away, saith the World, passing away.” The poem was first published in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). 30. “Consider” was first published in Macmillan’s Magazine 13 (January 1866): 232, and was not reprinted until it was included in the combined Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems in 1875. 31. Following the poem as printed in Macmillan’s Magazine, Donlevy’s text is slightly different from the revised version Rossetti published in the 1875 edition, reproduced in CP, 1:218. 32. The illuminated manuscript is located in the Troxell Collection box 1, folder 11, Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. There is no record to indicate the manuscript’s provenance or how Janet Camp Troxell acquired it. 33. The poem was published under the title “‘Are ye not much better than they?’” in Verses 1893 and is reprinted in CP, 2:332. 34. The book is now in possession of Mrs. Eveleyn Whinney, Lisa Wilson’s god-daughter’s daughter. I am very grateful to Mrs. Whinney’s kindness in allowing me to examine the material in her collection. 35. Lisa Wilson’s annotated copy of Time Flies, now in possession of Mrs. Eveleyn Whinney.

Chapter 5 1. William Kemp Lowther Clarke took over as editorial secretary of the SPCK on Edmund McClure’s retirement in 1915. He was thus the society’s second editorial secretary, continuing in that role until 1944. He also followed his predecessor in writing a history of the SPCK, thus bringing McClure’s Two Hundred Years: The History of The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,

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1698–1898 (co-written with W. P. B. Allen) into the second half of the twentieth century with his A History of the S.P.C.K. in 1959. 2. The article was suitably housed in an illustrated environment. The whole issue, including the cover and Presentation Plate Portrait Insert, was profusely illustrated with Rossetti-related material in the form of work by DGR, AH, and Florence Harrison (for the latter, see chapter 7). Family portraits also proliferated. 3. For a full discussion of what it meant to be published “Under the direction of the Tract Committee,” see chapter 4. 4. See chapter 5, “‘The Soul’s Beauty’: The Pre-Raphaelite Image of Woman,” in John Dixon Hunt’s The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination. 5. The caption to this reproduction is also inaccurate, giving Mrs. Rossetti’s name as “Mary Lavinia Rossetti” rather than “Frances Mary Lavinia.” 6. Jerome J. McGann’s tide-turning article in Critical Inquiry (1983), “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti” (reprinted in Victorian Women Poets, 1995), refocused critical attention on this long-neglected aspect of her work. More recently, Diane D’Amico has written the first extended study of CGR as a woman poet of faith in Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time. 7. The American edition was published in New York by E. P. Dutton. The Preface is signed “W.M.L. Jay. New York, 1899.” W. M. L. Jay was the pseudonym of Julia L. M. Woodruff, an American author more or less contemporary with CGR (born April 1833) who wrote and edited books from a Christian and devotional perspective. 8. In her preface W. M. L. Jay says that she drew poetic selections from CGR’s “first volume of poems” (iv). However, one of the extracts is taken from “The Lowest Room,” which was not published in book form until the 1875 edition of Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems in England and the 1876 edition of Poems in the United States. As an American author, Jay is presumably working with the 1876 Roberts Brothers’ Poems. The extract in question comprises the last four stanzas of “The Lowest Room” (beginning “Not to be first: how hard to learn”) and appears in the section “The Light of Humility” (Reflected Lights, 61). 9. “One Sorrow More” faces page 74, but is meant to illustrate the text found on page 160. Thus, it illustrates the same page as “The Widow’s Mite,” which is found facing page 88, but is meant to illustrate page 160, according to the caption (though not, of course, the same poem as “One Sorrow More,” but rather the prose meditation on wealth and poverty which follows it). Page 160 appears in the section entitled “The Light of Sacrifice,” but the illustration for “One Sorrow More” is inserted in “Light of Wisdom” and that for “The Widow’s Mite” in “The Light of Encouragement,” thus showing once again the book’s visual-verbal incoherence. 10. England’s two other ancient publishing houses are, of course, the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge (Norrie, 13). 11. Printing Record Q-Z, SPCK Archives, University of Cambridge Library. Unfortunately, the archive is incomplete and it is not possible to track the publishing history of all Rossetti titles. 12. The other books in this series are as follows: Booklet 2: Poems for Christmastide (a collection including poems by Ben Jonson and Martin Luther); Booklet 3: A Christmas Vigil and At the Crib (poems by W. E. Lytens); and Booklet 4: Good King Wenceslas: The Story of the Carol (includes the carol by J. M. Nealse, and the legend in prose as retold by T. Hare).

Chapter 6 1. The Golden Age of illustration, as discussed in chapters 1 to 3, is generally the period known as the “sixties.” The illustrated books of the sixties were typically for the adult market,

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though the children’s book illustrations of Arthur Hughes are always included under its rubric. The “Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration,” on the other hand, was a later development, predominantly Edwardian rather than Victorian, represented mainly by gift books with color plates for juveniles. 2. See, for example, the definitions provided by various contributors to Bator’s Signposts to Criticism of Children’s Literature; the chapter on “Illustrators and Illustration” in Haviland’s Children and Literature; Egoff ’s chapter on “Picture Books” in Thursday’s Child; and Lanes’s chapter on “The Picture-Book Explosion” in Down the Rabbit Hole. 3. In Criticism, Theory and Children’s Literature, Peter Hunt similarly argues for the importance of the publishing industry in the transmission of children’s literature. His focus on the publisher as key, however, prevents him from giving due regard to the importance of illustration. 4. Other titles in this “poetry selections for young readers series” include William Blake, A Grain of Sand (with Blake’s illustrations); Edmund Blunden, The Midnight Skaters (illustrated by David Gentleman); John Clare, The Wood Is Sweet (illustrated by John O’Connor); Emily Dickinson, A Letter to the World (illustrated by Prudence Seward); Robert Frost, You Come Too (illustrated by Cécile Curtis); Robert Herrick, The Music of a Feast (illustrated by Lynton Lamb); and Edward Thomas, The Green Roads (illustrated by Bernard Brett). 5. CGR herself recycled this very stanza, revised and retitled, in Time Flies (1885) and later in Verses (1893), where it appears under the title “These all wait upon Thee” and begins “Innocent eyes not ours / Are made to look on flowers” (CP, 2:314). However, Powell’s text is taken from “To what Purpose is this Waste?” as published in PW (305–7). 6. It is possible that CGR knew Mary Woods and her High School. CGR knew Clifton and environs well, as MFR did school work for the All Saints Sisterhood there after she joined the order (see Letters, 2:85), and CGR and FMLR spent a number of summers in the area visiting her. 7. The Children’s Rossetti for Junior Pupils is illustrated by AH’s drawings for Sing-Song. The Children’s Rossetti for Senior Pupils is illustrated by DGR’s two plates for Goblin Market. Blackie’s Goblin Market is illustrated with two full-page black-and-white plates and a frontispiece by Florence Harrison, who illustrated Poems of Christina Rossetti as a Blackie gift book in 1910 (see chapter 7 for a discussion of this work). 8. See Editions Books 15 December–24 January 1916 in the Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 55921. 9. The sales entries in Blackie’s Records for Educational Books in the Blackie’s Archives at the University of Glasgow Business Archives Center indicate that the Goblin Market school book was in constant production from 1912, when 1,100 copies were sold, to 1924–25, when 2,200 copies were sold (UOD61 413 fols. 20–21). Comparable figures for The Forsaken Merman show 1,020 copies sold in 1914 and 580 in 1924–25, while the 1,060 copies of A Dream of Fair Women sold in 1908 dwindled to a mere 40 in 1924–55. 10. As Alan M. Clark observes in the Catalogue to the Exhibition marking 150 Years of Publishing: Blackie and Son 1809–1959, “Girls were not so well catered for [as boys], till after about 1900, and one suspects that before that date they often read their brothers’ books” (44). See also Edward Salmon, Juvenile Literature As It Is and F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England. 11. John Lane Archive box 70, Reader’s Reports, “MA–MC,” HRC. 12. Letter from Constance E. Maud to John Lane, 20 October 1903, John Lane Archive box 32, HRC. 13. Letters from Constance E. Maud to John Lane dated November 1903 and 19 December

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1903, and typescript letter dated 2 December 1903, forwarded to Lane via the Society of Authors, detailing Maud’s grievances. John Lane Archive box 32, HRC. 14. See also My Book of Beautiful Legends, retold by Christine Chaundler and Eric Wood, with twelve illustrations in color by A. C. Michael (London: Cassell, [1916]). 15. Raksin’s adapted picture-book version of Goblin Market was published in 1970 in new York by E. P. Dutton and simultaneously in Toronto and Vancouver by Clarke, Irwin and Company. 16. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of Goblin Market are taken from CP, 1:11–26. 17. Not all of these, as we shall see in chapter 7, were for children. 18. See Robin Greer, “The Published Illustrations of Willy Pogány,” for a full bibliographic list. 19. I am grateful to Geoffrey Beare for alerting me to Wheeler’s work. 20. See chapter 3 for a discussion of the production and reception of Goblin Market in the Victorian period. 21. Personal correspondence of Martin Ware to Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 3 July 1993. 22. Taken from the back jacket flap of a 1940 reprint. 23. Biographical information derived from a telephone interview with Nick Hedges, 9 May 1995. In April 1995 Hedges produced Goblin Market as “an erotic, adult fairytale” at the Battersea Arts Center, London. See chapter 8.

Chapter 7 1. On the title page of this unique copy of Goblin Market and Other Poems appears the inscription “And with Etchings by E. Cotton”—a notation that has misled some booksellers. It seems likely that Cotton simply prepared this as a sample title page for her prospective illustrated edition, which never materialized. The drawings, which appear on almost every page, are very fine illustrations in pen and ink that employ some etching techniques, such as cross-hatching, to establish contrasts. Cotton’s amateur status and probable lack of formal training are betrayed in her expectation that the drawings would be reproduced as etchings in an age of photomechanical reproduction. The Christina Rossetti Collection of Mary Louise and Frederick E. Maser, Bryn Mawr College Library, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), copy 4. 2. In a letter to George Lillie Craik, 28 March 1893, CGR writes that “The idea of an illustrated Goblin Market seems so far prevalent that not very long ago I was applied to on the subject from another quarter in case the text had been at my exclusive disposal,—and before that an illustrated copy was submitted to my inspection by a lady who was aiming at a Publisher and whom I of course referred to your Firm” (Macmillan Papers, BLMS Add MS 54975, f. 103). CGR does not identify the “lady” and E. Cotton does not date her holograph drawings. However, it seems likely that the lady with the illustrated copy c. 1893 was indeed the Evelyn Cotton whose extra-illustrated Goblin Market and Other Poems is now housed in the Maser Collection at Bryn Mawr College. 3. I have been unable to locate any letters or documents relating to a proposal for an illustrated Goblin Market by E. Cotton in the Macmillan Papers, BLMS. 4. Inscriptions on flyleaf. 5. See chapter 2 for an analysis of this work. 6. The Charles Fairfax Murray Collection, Miscellaneous Correspondence, HRC, contains this collection of ALS, now published in Letters. See especially letters dated 26 April 1871 and 3

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August 1871 to the Dalziel Brothers, and one dated 10 June 1875, incorrectly labeled “to Charles Fairfax Murray”; the more likely recipient is the Dalziels (Letters, 1:369, 375; and 2:45–46). 7. Eragny Press Prospectus, inserted in the Eragny Press Verses (1906) housed in the Troxell Collection, Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. 8. Verses of 1847 remains a coveted, rarely obtainable prize, priced to suit its rare status. See the narrative entitled “Disappointment and Triumph” detailing the Masers’ attempts to acquire a copy of the Polidori publication for their collection (Maser, 10–13). 9. Concerned that, as CGR’s heir and executor, his private property was being tampered with when he saw the Eragny Press announcement of their upcoming publication in the Athenaeum in July 1906, WMR wrote Macmillan to inquire about this possible violation of copyright (LWMR, 651). But the reprint had, as the title page announced, been “made by arrangement with Messrs. Macmillan.” 10. Brigid Peppin gives the active dates for Florence Harrison as 1877–1925; Michael Felmingham and Simon Houfe (Dictionary of British Book Illustrators) give 1887–1914. Harrison seems to have started exhibiting her paintings in the late eighties (The Dictionary of British Artists lists her as exhibiting work at the Royal Academy between 1887–91; see Johnson and Greutzner). Later she seems to have worked almost exclusively in the more lucrative field of gift-book design. No bibliography of artists includes Mopsa the Fairy (1932) among Harrison’s list of illustrated books, but the work seems almost certainly to have been done by her, as it is in her style and signed with her initials. 11. Talwin Morris to Florence Harrison, 24 August 1908, Blackie’s Archives, University of Glasgow Business Archives Center. 12. Florence Harrison to Mr. [John Alexander] Blackie, 22 August 1908, Blackie’s Archives, University of Glasgow Business Archives Center. 13. For a discussion of this work see chapter 6. 14. May Sandheim (fl. 1907–1908) does not seem to have illustrated any other books, or to have exhibited at any of the annual shows. She is not listed in any dictionary of artists or illustrators of the period. 15. See R. W. Crump’s Christina Rossetti: A Reference Guide; Edna Kotin Charles’s Christina Rossetti: Critical Perspectives; and Jane Addison’s “Christina Rossetti Studies, 1974–1991: A Checklist and Synthesis.” From the 1930s to the 1970s there was a paucity of critical writing on CGR. 16. See chapter 6 for a discussion of the production and reception of the Rackham Goblin Market. 17. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, for a sustained discussion of interart quotation and audience recognition and interpretation in postmodern art. 18. See Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth, and Sharon Leder, The Poetry of Exclusion. 19. In an interesting coincidence, Power’s Goblin Fruit and Chronicle Book’s Goblin Market: A Tale of Two Sisters both use a detail of DGR’s Proserpine holding her bitten pomegranate for their cover art. 20. Greer’s chapter on CGR in Slip-Shod Sibyls, “The Perversity of Christina Rossetti,” largely repeats her Stonehill Introduction of 1975, but she retreats from her earlier suggestion of sex between the sisters. Instead, she claims that the unconscious desire CGR expresses is incestuous, and directed toward DGR: “Homosexuals may make superficially convincing cases that the poem is about the greater virtue of physical love between sisters, and those who believe that het-

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erosex is fundamentally distorted and sadistic will want to agree with them. All of us, however, have grown up with the unexpressed incest taboo” (387). 21. In 1931 Silver Unicorn Press published a beautiful limited edition of one hundred copies of Goblin Market, produced by Sheila Thompson (1908–96) on a handpress in red and black ink with woodcut vignettes. In 1947 Aneirin Talfan Davies (1909–80) translated Goblin Market into Welsh. Marchnad y Corachod was illustrated by Mary Harvey (fl. 1947) with six black-and-white illustrations and numerous page decorations. 22. See, for example, Jerome H. Buckley’s The Pre-Raphaelites (1988); Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (1988); and Carolyn Hares-Stryker’s An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings (1997).

Chapter 8 1. As I write, I have just received notice of a producer eager to make a feature-length film on CGR, so perhaps she will be visualized on the big screen after all. 2. This work seems to have dropped out of sight after the 1866 R.A. exhibition. Its present whereabouts are unknown (see Roberts, 164). 3. John Byam Shaw file, Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 4. WMR incorrectly identifies this work as an oil painting (PW, 485). 5. The information on Edward Hughes in this paragraph is taken from the E. Hughes file in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 6. See also “The Spring spreads one green lap of flowers which Autumn buries at the Fall,” which represents Spring and Fall as allegorical figures engaged in symbolic departure and burial respectively (Witt Library file on John Byam Shaw, Courtauld Institute of Art, London). 7. An S. Pickett exhibited a watercolor painting based on “L.E.L.” at the Royal Academy Exhibit of 1893 (#1156) with the quotation “Perhaps some angels read it as they move, / And cry to one another full of ruth, / ‘Her heart is breaking for a little love.’” I am grateful to Jan Marsh for providing this information. 8. “But never see my heart is breaking for a little love” was reproduced in an unsigned article entitled “Some Pictures by Byam Shaw” in The Studio in 1898. Love Strong as Death was reproduced in an article by Malcolm Salaman on Lord Leverhulme’s private collection in The Studio in 1921. 9. See chapter 6. 10. No. 26 in an Exhibiton at the Leicester Galleries called “Watercolors Illustrating Idylls of the King by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ARWS.” Only about half of the thirty-seven items actually illustrated Tennyson’s verses. I am grateful to Jan Marsh for locating this buried reference. 11. Information on Brickdale in this paragraph is taken from Casteras and Peterson, 53. 12. Though incomplete, DGR’s Found was, according to Casteras, already well known in Europe in the late nineteenth century (“Pre-Raphaelite Legacy,” 46). Sarah Phelps Smith dates the Belgian knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites from the 1880s. In 1891, moreover, an exhibition of photographs of paintings by DGR and Burne-Jones, which Khnopff was sure to have seen, was held in Brussels (61). 13. Corinne Harrison to CGR, 10 July 1882, ADC box 10, folder 8. 14. WMR’s holograph note accompanying letter from Corinne Harrison to CGR, 10 July 1882, ADC box 10, folder 8. 15. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Housman’s plan for masking the goblins and CGR’s response to it.

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16. BAC (Battersea Arts Center) flyer circulated at performances of Goblin Market, adapted and directed by Nick Hedges, BAC 4–29 April 1995. 17. Information taken from a review article by Patricia Hluchy in McLean’s Magazine. I am grateful to Marie Stewart of North Bay for giving me this reference. 18. The information in this paragraph is derived partly from a telephone interview with Nick Hedges on 9 May 1995, and partly from viewing a videotape of the production prepared for promotional purposes. 19. BAC Poster. See Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “Goblin Market as a Cross-Audienced Poem: Children’s Fairy Tale, Adult Erotic Fantasy” (193–96) for an analysis of other aspects of this production. 20. After a successful run at the Vineyard Theater, the play was moved a few months later to The Circle in the Square, where it had another successful run in the spring of 1986. The most recent production of this adaptation that I am aware of occurred in Minneapolis in September 1999 at the Old Arizona Studio. I am grateful to Antony H. Harrison for alerting me to this production. 21. Advertisement in the Star Tribune, Friday, 17 September 1999. See also Rohan Preston’s review of this production in the Saturday Tribune on 11 September. The production, put on by the Nautilus Theater company, played at the Old Arizona Studio in Minneapolis from 11–26 September 1999. 22. For a discussion of this dream and its implications, see chapter 1. 23. It was serendipitous that Kernis’s musical premiered in January 1995; the composer had not been aware that the centenary of Rossetti’s death was 29 December 1994 when he undertook the commission. 24. Information in this paragraph is taken from the production notes included in the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Trestle Theater Company’s double-bill program for The Soldier’s Tale and Goblin Market for their 12–22 January 1995 tour. See “A Note on Goblin Market” by Aaron Jay Kernis, composer and “What’s in a Name?” by Toby Wilsher, joint artistic director, Trestle Theater Company. 25. Ibid.; and “Of Goblins, Puppets and Mystery,” by Andy Lawrence, puppet maker, from the same source. 26. Puppetmaker Andy Lawrence acknowledges his indebtedness to Rackham and Froud (as well as Bosch, Breugel, and Dadd) in “Of Goblins, Puppets and Mystery” (Ibid.). 27. The illuminated card was printed by Mowbrays with a poetic text by CGR. It was tucked into a copy of Lisa Wilson’s Verses (London: Bliss, Sands and Co., 1896) dedicated “To the sweet and gracious memory of Christina G. Rossetti who Honoured me with the name of Friend.” I am grateful to Mrs. E. Whinney for generously giving me access to her private collection.

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Index

Academy, The, 99, 101, 146, 198, 199, 28 n. 21 Albert, Samuel D., 9, 275 n.12 Albert Hall, 263 Alciati, 65 Alderson, Brian, 203, 209 Alighieri, Dante: Divine Comedy, 39, 277 n. 15 Allen, Grant: “The Ethics of Copyright,” 286 n. 40 Allingham, William, 93 The Music Master, 58, 77, 98, 284 n. 17, 286 n. 17 All Saints Hospital, 157 All Saints Mission House, 156, 288 n. 19 All Saints Sisterhood, 290 n. 6 Altick, Richard, 2, 196, 275 n. 3 Ames, Dorothy E., 217 Andersen, Hans Christian. See also Hans Christian Andersen Medal The Emperor’s New Clothes, 116 Anderson, Patricia, 2, 4, 275 n. 3 Andrew Melrose (publisher), 238, 248 Angel in the House, 137, 173 Anglican Church (High Church), 5, 34, 66, 144, 158, 187. See also Calendar, Church; Oxford movement; Rossetti, Christina: influences on work of; Tractarianism anthologies academic, 15, 242, 243, 248 for children, 193, 196, 197, 206, 207, 212, 243, 247, 248 of poetry, 2, 91, 142, 195, 197, 207, 212, 248, 276 n. 7 Argosy, The, 45 Arnold, Matthew, 196 The Forsaken Merman, 198, 290 n. 9 Arseneau, Mary, 68, 155, 277 n. 9, 277 n. 15, 280 n. 23, 288 n. 20 Artist, The, 280 n. 17 Art Journal, The, 57, 67 art nouveau, 54, 203, 205, 231, 232, 233, 282 n. 35 arts-and-crafts, 225, 231, 233 art schools Byam Shaw’s School of Art, 256 Glasgow School of Art, 233 North London School of Drawing and Modeling, 23, 24 Royal Academy School of Art, 22, 23, 255

Aruego, Jose: What Is Pink? 217–18, 219, plate 9 Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 240 Atalanta, 45, 52, 154, 278 n. 29 Athenaeum, The, 45, 75, 101, 126, 130, 278 n. 22, 284 n. 19, 292 n. 9 Auerbach, Nina, 248 Aurum Press, 248 Bacon, Paul, 245 Badaracco, Claire Hoertz, 275 n. 2 Barlow, Jane: The End of Elfintown, 84 Barringer, Tim, 276 n. 1 Bates, J. S. Hewitt, 230 Battersea Arts Center (BAC), 265, 291 n. 23, 294 nn. 16, 19 Bauerlë, Amelia: Goblin Market, 261 Beardsley, Aubrey, 233, 282 n. 41 Bechtel, Louise Seaman, 193 Bell, Mrs. Arthur, 224, 230 Bell, Mackenzie, 2, 41, 148, 212 Bell, Rev. Maurice: Goblin Market, 263–64, 265 Benjamin, Walter, 253 Bentley, David, 72 bibliography, 226, 271, 272. See also book, books bibliomania, 223 bibliophile, 224, 227, 230, 240. See also collector Bibliophile, The, 224, 230 Bicknell, Treld Pelkey, 209 Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, 270, 294 n. 24 Blackie, Agnes, 197 Blackie and Son (publisher), 13, 197, 198, 199, 230, 232, 233, 234 Beautiful Poems series of, 234 as educational publishers, 197, 198, 199, 290 n. 7, 290 n. 9, 290 n. 10 as gift book publishers, 230, 232, 233, 234–36 Red Letter Library of, 232, 234 Blake, William, 5, 26, 34, 41, 42, 43, 100–102, 104, 106, 213, 284 n. 22 A Grain of Sand, 290 n. 4 influence on CGR of, 5, 26, 34, 41, 42, 43, 102, 106, 284 n. 22 Songs of Experience, 42 Songs of Innocence and Experience, 41, 42, 102 Blunden, Edmund: The Midnight Skaters, 290 n. 4

311

312

index

Bodley Head, The (publisher), 193 Bolton, John: Goblin Market, 244, plate 14 book, books. See also illustrated books; publishing advertising of, 7, 10, 63, 175, 184, 185, 188, 233, 244, 252, 267 architecture of, 67, 172 art of, 52, 83, 84, 223 bibliographic codes of, 7, 9, 14, 15, 203 bibliographic description of, 221 bibliographic features of, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 191, 193, 194, 207 as a commodity, 2, 7, 62, 128, 133, 134–35, 138, 202, 205, 275 n. 10 as a cultural product, 2, 216, 222, 223, 228 de luxe editions of, 206, 207, 208, 224, 225, 226, 229, 231, 233 design of, 9, 10, 11, 52, 60 bindings and cover for, 4, 7, 9, 60, 66, 84, 142, 184, 185, 187, 191, 205, 207, 220, 223, 224, 227, 229, 231, 232, 235, 237, 244. See also vellum decorations and ornaments for, 7, 15, 84, 87, 153, 162, 163, 194, 208, 232, 233, 244, 246, 293 n. 21 illustrations for (see illustrated books; illustration) initial letters for, 153, 224, 225 distribution and circulation of, 2, 3, 7, 139, 162, 185, 190, 196, 200, 215, 221, 222, 23 as domestic décor, 224, 229, 231, 235 history of, 2, 7, 8, 9, 14, 89–90, 222, 227, 246, 249, 250, 251 large paper copies of, 224, 225 limited editions of, 207, 208, 224, 226, 228, 229 linguistic codes of, 7, 8, 14, 15, 43, 82 as object, 2, 6, 14, 15, 61, 184, 190, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 228, 237 physical format of, 4, 11, 84, 89, 184, 208, 213, 218 and construction of audience, 7, 14, 205, 209, 227 and construction of author, 1, 187–88 and construction of meaning, 7, 9, 14, 43, 66, 222 as status symbol, 2, 229, 231, 237 typeface for, 4, 7, 12, 60, 191, 198, 210, 224, 225, 228, 229 book artist (illustrator), 17, 230, 232 Book Beautiful, 4, 223, 224, 226, 229 book buyers (consumers), 2, 4, 59, 90, 91, 130, 133, 138, 184, 190, 191, 192, 223, 228, 229, 231, 233, 264. See also class; collector Book-Lover’s Magazine, The, 90 Bookman, The, 234 Book of Common Prayer, 143 Book of Nature, 32, 151

book trade, Victorian, 1, 9, 11, 13, 17, 133, 184, 192, 205, 206. See also publishing Bornand, Odette, 276 n. 15 Bosch, Hieronymus, 243, 294 n. 26 Botticelli: The Birth of Venus, 243 Boyd, Alice, 98, 100, 283 n. 13 as illustrator for Sing-Song, 94–95 as a painter, 94, 283 n. 9 Boyle, Eleanor Vere A Book of the Heavenly Birthdays, 161–62 watercolors for “Maiden Song,” 83, 162 Brett, Bernard, 290 n. 4 Breugel, Pieter, 294 n. 26 Brickdale, Eleanor Fortescue, 231, 256, 293 n. 10 Briggs, Julia, 138, 139 British Museum, 240 Britten, W.E.F.: “The Way of the World,” 44 Brook type, 228, 229 Brown, Ford Madox, 4, 23, 52, 94, 97, 100, 254 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 232, 286 n. 49 Browning, Robert, 232 Bryn Mawr College, 221, 222, 223 Buckley, Jerome H., 293 n. 22 Burlinson, Kathryn, 135, 286 n. 52 Burne-Jones, Edward, 225, 226, 233, 258, 293 n. 12 Briar Rose, 256 Caldecott Award, 192 Calendar, Church Advent, 185 All Saints, 143, 160 Christmastide, 185, 186, 187 Feast of the Presentation and Purification of the Virgin, 157 Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, 35, 37 fig. 1.6 Fourth Sunday after Advent, 32, 33 fig. 1.4, 34 Lent, 13, 182–84 Passiontide, 182, 183 Septuagesima Sunday, 30, 31 fig. 1.3 St. Matthias’s Day, 153 St. Stephen’s Day, 150 Trinity Sunday, 185 calligraphy, 162, 163, 164, 167 Calthrop, Dion Clayton: Goblin Market, 206–7, 256 Canadian Reader, The, 213 Carlyle, Thomas, 232 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson), 83, 138 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 63, 98, 128 Alice Underground, 98 control over illustrators of, 98 influence of CGR’s books on, 60–61 influence on CGR of, 128, 129, 138 Phantasmagoria, 60 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 98, 101, 128

index

Casteras, Susan P., 23, 79, 259 Catholic World, 74 Century Guild Hobby Horse, The, 52, 279 n. 30 chapbooks, 189, 190 Chapman, George: A Triad, 83 Chapman and Hall (publisher), 62 Chaucer type, 225 Chaundler, Christine The Children’s Author: A Writer’s Guide to the Juvenile Market, 202 My Book of Beautiful Legends, 291 n. 14 My Book of Stories from the Poets, 201–3, 204, 205 Cherry, Deborah, 23, 241 Chester, Tessa Rose, 15, 101 child, children. See also children’s books construction of, 16, 195, 213 construction of literature for, 15, 16, 116, 190, 193, 194, 195, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211, 241, 246 and literacy, 42, 92, 100, 119, 190, 196, 197, 203, 212, 216 magazines for, 3, 4, 49–50 making of books for, 2–3 and sexuality, 15, 16, 205, 265 children’s books. See also fairy tales; markets: juvenile; nursery rhymes; picture books; poetry: for children; Rossetti, Christina: as a children’s writer; school books adult collector of, 207, 208, 209, 211, 229 bibliographic features of, 13, 191, 192, 197–98, 203, 205, 207 classification of, 190–91, 195, 201, 290 n. 3 construction of childhood by, 190, 191, 213, 215 construction of child reader for, 13, 16, 191, 194, 195, 200, 201, 203, 204, 207, 209, 283 n. 3 by age, 92, 190, 195, 196–97 by class, 92, 139, 190, 195, 196, 197, 198, 282 n. 2 by sex, 92, 135, 190, 195, 196, 197, 199 cost of, 92, 282 n. 2 criticism and theory of, 192–93, 195, 290 n. 3 dual audience of, 42, 99, 102, 191, 196, 201, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 229 as gifts, rewards, and prizes, 1, 91, 130, 133, 135, 139, 185, 190, 199, 205, 206, 231, 262, 263 Golden Age of first, 190, 193, 203, 206, 290 n. 2 second, 192, 193, 202, 203, 205, 215 history of, 15, 97, 100, 189–90, 219 illustrations in/for, 14, 15, 16, 38, 42, 93, 94, 99, 100, 102, 106, 190, 191, 192, 197–98, 199, 205, 209, 212, 215, 218–19 as international big business, 133–34, 190, 192, 206, 208, 209, 211, 215 nostalgia market for, 202, 205, 208, 212

prizes and awards for, 192, 210 relation to institutions of, 191–92, 195, 196, 199–200, 202, 209, 211–12, 216, 218 representation of death in, 203, 204 representation of sexuality in, 15–16, 203, 204, 209, 241 representation of violence in, 203 timelessness of, 218 children’s literature. See child, children: construction of literature for; children’s books; picture books; school books Chiswick Press, 9, 236 Christ, 30, 41, 42, 77, 90, 106, 108, 148, 156, 159, 177, 178, 179, 254 Christ Church, 5 Christian Warfare against the Devill World and Flesh, The, 35, 36 fig. 1.5 Christmas, 10, 50, 52, 60, 62, 63, 84, 84, 91, 101, 128, 130, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 198, 199, 201, 203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 214, 230, 234, 238. See also market: Christmas Christmas Illustrated Supplement (The Bookman), 234 Cinamon, Gerald, 232 Circle in the Square, 268, 270, 294 n. 20 Clare, John: The Wood Is Sweet, 290 n. 4 Clark, Alan M., 232, 290 n. 10 Clarke, Irwin and Company (publishers), 291 n. 15 Clarke, W. F., 49 Clarke, William Kemp Lowther, 145, 146, 172, 176, 186, 287 n. 9, 288 n. 1 class. See also Rossetti, Christina: class critique of and the education system, 195, 196, 198 lower-middle and working-class consumers, 3, 4, 147, 237 middle-class child/children, 60, 92, 99, 111–13, 135, 137, 139, 190, 195, 198 middle-class consumers, 2, 3, 4, 59, 99, 116, 119, 147, 190, 198, 229, 240 working-class child/children, 3–4, 139, 198 classic as cultural object, 231, 244 formation/designation of, 14, 195, 200, 206, 209, 212, 233, 237, 241 mutation for changing cultural conditions of, 212, 215–16, 242, 244, 267 Clayton, Ellen, 283 n. 9, 288 n. 27 Cole, Rex Vicat, 256 collectible, 205, .207, 208, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 235, 244, 246, 260 collecting. See also collectible; collector; market: collectors’ and book production, 223–24, 225, 227, 229–30 as capitalist speculation, 225, 226, 228

313

314

index

collecting (cont.) and the cultural system, 221–22, 223, 233, 239–40, 248 in the nineteenth century, 15, 223, 224 pseudo-religious discourse of, 225 and value of author’s holographs, 226 and value of limited/ first editions, 226, 228 collector, 15, 205, 207, 209 219, 220–22, 223, 233, 239, 240, 242, 260. See also collectible; collecting; market: collectors’ Collier, John Payne, 285 n. 33 Collins, Jeffrey Laird, 47 Colvin, Sidney, 99, 101, 284 n. 22 Comenius, John: Sensualium Pictus, 189 comic books, 239, 243, 244, 272 Comic Collector, 244 commodity-text, 135, 138, 275 n. 10 connoisseur, 8, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 231, 235, 239, 244, 248 Conroy, Mike, 244 consumers. See under class. See also book buyers copyright, 7, 283 n. 14. See also publishing: Victorian; Rossetti, Christina: copyright sales by American, 50, 96, 278 n. 28 expiration of, 7–8, 167, 206, 231, 278 n. 26, 278 n. 28 international, 50, 278 n. 24 Cott, Jonathan, 15, 242, 243, 245 Cotton, Evelyn E., 222–23, 281 n. 32, 291 n. 1, 291 n. 2 Craft, Kinuko: Goblin Market, 242–43, 244, plate 13 Craig, Frank: Goblin Market, 261, 261 fig. 8.2 Craig, Isa, 45, 46 Poems: An Offering to Lancashire, 45 Craik, George Lillie, 83, 84, 143, 281 n. 32, 282 n. 33, 291 n. 2 Crane, Walter, 225, 226, 281 n. 29 Crary, Jonathan, 251 Creswick, Thomas, 59, 279 n. 4 Cruikshank, George, 285 n. 33 Crump, R. W., 195, 278 n. 26 culture. See also popular culture; print culture; visual culture circulation of, 221–22, 223, 231, 233, 239–40, 243, 247, 248 as a commodity, 2, 222, 223, 229, 231, 237, 247 twentieth-century, 15, 200, 212, 213, 216, 239, 243, 247, 249, 250, 252, 261, 269 Victorian, 4, 15, 16, 58, 119, 155, 173, 196, 223 Curtis, Cécile, 290 n. 4

D’Amico, Diane, 30, 277 n. 9, 289 n. 6 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante Darton, F. J. Harvey, 16, 101, 191 Davies, Aneirin Talfan: Goblin Market, 293 n. 21 Davis, Marguerite: Sing-Song, 213–16, 215 fig. 6.3 Delaney, J.G.P., 52 Demers, Patricia, 248 Demon Lover, The, 47 Denley, Sam: Remember Me When I Am Gone Away, 172, 249 de Quincey, Thomas, 232 Dickinson, Emily: A Letter to the World, 290 n. 4 Dijkstra, Bram, 74 Discordia, 137, 286 n. 47 Dodge, Mary Mapes, 49 Dodgson, Charles Luttwidge. See Carroll, Lewis Donlevy, Alice: Consider: Outlines for Illumination, 162–63, 167, 288 n. 31, plate 3 Douglas, Lauren Wright: Goblin Market, 245 Dowling, Linda, 4 Dudley Gallery, 83, 283 n. 9 Duffy, Maureen, 244 Du Lac, Edmund, 244 Durham, Bishop of. See Westcott, Reverend B. F. Edmond, Rod, 276 n. 15, 292 n. 18 Education Act(s), 91, 195, 197 Egoff, Sheila, 190, 212, 217 Elements of Botany for Families and Schools, 153, 155, 287 n. 17 Elements of Drawing and Flower Painting, 4, 155 Ellis, F. S. (publisher), 43, 93–96, 97, 227, 283 n. 7, 283 n. 8, 283 n. 12, 283 n. 13 emblematic and figural traditions, 5, 30, 25, 38, 39, 41, 47, 54, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 87, 144, 145, 149, 150, 153, 156, 161, 177. See also language of flowers: Victorian emblem books Renaissance and seventeenth-century, 4, 35, 57, 65, 66, 67, 69, 149, 150, 153, 156, 161, 183 Victorian, 35, 39, 57, 66–70, 144–45, 149–53, 157, 161, 162 Engen, Rodney, 282 n. 38 E. P. Dutton (publisher), 291 n. 15 Eragny Press, 227–29, 292 n. 7, 292 n. 9 erotica, 239, 240, 267. See also fantasy; pornography Eve, 72, 90 Evening Standard, The, 234

Dadd, Richard, 294 n. 26 Dalziel Brothers, 282 n. 1, 292 n. 6 and CGR’s Sing-Song, 11–12, 55, 96–97, 128, 227, 276 n. 14 bankruptcy of, 55, 97

fairy tales. See also fantasy as a children’s genre, 4, 15, 116, 199, 200–1, 202, 203, 207, 241, 242, 243, 247 demand for, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206 The Emperor’s New Clothes, 116

index

Red Riding Hood, 130 The Sleeping Beauty, 75, 255 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 202 fallen woman, 108, 199, 258 Fallows, David, 270, 272 fantasy. See also erotica; fairy tales; pornography for adults, 13, 69, 239, 243–44, 272 for children, 13, 15, 99, 126, 128, 129, 130, 133, 135, 137, 138, 206, 241, 243, 263 illustrative tradition of, 13, 240, 242, 265 Faulkner, Kate, 280 n. 11 Felmingham, Michael, 224 Feltes, Norman, 133, 275 n. 10 feminine, the, constructions of, 23, 35, 47, 69, 74, 75, 77, 79, 124, 135, 155, 175, 182, 255 feminist, 75, 85, 90 feminist criticism, 23, 195, 240, 243, 244, 246, 248 Festivals. See Calendar, Church Fiedler, Leslie, 242 figural tradition. See emblematic and figural traditions; typology Flint, Kate, 275 n. 6 flower painting, 4, 154, 155, 156, 165 Folio Society, 161 Forster, E. M.: Howards End, 238 Foss, Roger, 266 Foster, Myles Birket: Pictures of English Landscape, 282 n. 1 Foucault, Michel, 16 Franklin, Colin, 229 Fredeman, W. E., 11, 241, 280 n. 13, 281 n. 29 Freemantle & Co. (publishers), 225 French Gallery, 83 Freudian criticism, 241, 242, 268 Frost, Robert: You Come Too, 290 n. 4 Froud, Brian, 272, 294 n. 26 Fry, Edith, 197, 199 Galda, Lee, 217, 219 Garlitz, Barbara, 284 n. 24 Gay, John, 4 Gentleman, David, 290 n. 4 Gerard’s Herball, 155 Germ, The, 1, 11, 77, 98, 256, 278 n. 22 Gershinowitz, George: Goblin Market, 210, 212, 270, plate 8 gift books. See also SPCK: Reward Books of for children, 184, 187, 190, 198, 199, 206, 207, 261, 272 for collectors, 2, 15, 84, 207, 223, 224, 228–29, 230–35 Gilbert, Pamela, 286 n. 51 Gill, Margery: Doves and Pomegranates, 193, 194 Girls’ Realm Annual, 263 Gladstone, William, 83 Glasgow School of Art, 206, 233 Glasgow Style, 233

Goble, Warwick: Goblin Market, 207 Godine, David R. (publisher), 210, 212, 270 Goldberg, Gail Lynn, 72 Goldman, Paul, 9, 46, 178 Gollancz, Victor (publisher), 210 Good Words for the Young, 99 Goody, Jack, 150 Gosse, Edmund, 227, 281 n. 24 Graffiti Gallery, 210 Grangerite, 178, 187 Gray, John: Silverpoints, 282 n. 35 Greenaway, Kate, 40, 166 Greenwell, Dora, 91, 282 n. 1 Greer, Germaine, 245, 247, 292 n. 20 Gresham Books (publisher), 232 Grieg, Edward: Peer Gynt, 264 Grieve, Alastair, 279 n. 6 Guardian, The, 272 Haass, Sabine, 39, 150, 277 n. 14 Hagstrum, Jean, 66, 280 n. 20 Hake, George Gordon, 157 Hanft, Lila, 284 n. 24 Hans Christian Andersen Medal, 192 Harmon, Peggy, 266, 268 Harper’s, 100 Harper Trophy (publisher), 217 Harrap, George G., 206, 207, 208, 234 Harrison, Antony H., 5, 6, 41, 42, 106, 148, 275 n. 5, 275 n. 7, 275 n. 13, 281 n. 23, 284 n. 22, 287 n. 13, 294 n. 20 Harrison, Corinne, 293 n. 13, 293 n. 14 Harrison, Florence as a book designer and illustrator, 57, 232, 233, 289 n. 2, 292 n. 10, 292 n. 11, 292 n. 12 Goblin Market (school book), 197, 198, 290 n. 7 Goblin Market and Other Poems, 234 In the Fairy Ring, 232 Mopsa the Fairy, 232 Poems by Christina Rossetti, 13, 232, 233–36, 273, plate 12 The Rhyme of the Run and Other Verses, 232 Shorter Poems of Christina Rossetti, 234 Harvey, Gail: Poems of Nature, 248 Harvey, Mary: Marchnad y Corachod, 293 n. 21 Haskins, C. C., 49 Hedges, Nick: Goblin Market, 220, 265–66, 268, 291 n. 23, 293 n. 16 Hefner, Hugh, 240, 241 Heimann, Amelia, 24 Herrick, Robert: The Music of a Feast, 290 n. 4 High Church. See Anglican Church; Oxford movement; SPCK Highgate Penitentiary, 74 history of the book. See under book, books Hluchy, Patricia, 265 Hodder and Stoughton (publisher), 207

315

316

index

Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, 282 n. 1 Hönnighausen, Gisela, 5, 39, 150, 158 Hönnighausen, Lothar, 35, 65 Horn Book, The, 191, 209, 243 Honor List of, 209, 243 Horsely, J. C., 59 Houfe, Simon, 226 Houghton, Arthur Boyd, 85 House, Christopher: Goblin Market, 265 Housman, Laurence as book-art critic, 85, 99–100 as a book artist and illustrator, 84, 226, 281 n. 29, 282 n. 35. 282 n. 38 of George Meredith’s Jump-to-Glory Jane, 84 of Jane Barlow’s The End of Elfintown, 84 and CGR’s Goblin Market, 56, 84, 85, 86, 87–90, 224, 226, 227, 243, 245, 246 fig.7.3, 247, 263, 270, 273, 293 n. 15 reception of, 15, 90, 243 response of CGR to, 57, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 293 n. 15 title page, 87, 88 fig. 2.7 “White and golden Lizzie stood,” 87, 89–90, 89 fig. 2.8 influence on later artists of, 199, 204, 235, 243, 245 influences on his art, 57, 84, 85, 99, 226, 270, 272, 282 n. 40 and the Pre-Raphaelite revival, 56, 84, 85, 90, 226 proposal to design CGR’s Prince’s Progress of, 56–57 Howitt, Anna Mary, 24, 277 n. 6 Hughes, Arthur as an art teacher, 254 association with Pre-Raphaelites of, 11, 46, 98, 99, 230, 254 as an illustrator, 46, 96, 98 of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, 99, 286 n. 48 of William Allingham’s The Music Master, 98, 284 n. 17, 286 n. 37 and CGR’s Sing-Song collaborative partnership for, 11–12, 98, 99–100, 102, 121–25, 129, 218 illustrations for: “All the bells were ringing,” 120; “Angels at the foot,” 104–5, 104 fig. 3.2; “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?” 110 fig. 3.7, 111; “A diamond or a coal?” 111, 113, 114 fig. 3.9; “An emerald is as green as grass,” 111, 113, 115 fig. 3.10, 116; frontispiece, 102–4, 103 fig. 3.1, 105; “I caught a little ladybird,” 120, 122–25, 125 fig. 3.17, 285 n. 36; “If a pig wore a wig,” 116, 118 fig. 3.12, 119; “I have but one rose in the world,” 42–43; “I have

a Poll parrot,” 120–22, 121 fig. 3.15, 285 n. 36; “Motherless baby and babyless mother,” 107–8, 107 fig. 3.4; “A motherless soft lambkin,” 106–7; “Our little baby fell asleep,” 105–6, 105 fig. 3.3; “There’s snow on the fields,” 111, 112 fig. 3.8; “Three little children,” 106; “Wee wee husband,” 119–20, 120 fig. 3.14 reception of, 99, 100–101, 102, 284 n. 19, 284 n. 22, 284 n. 23, 284 n. 24 recycling of his illustrations in reprint editions, 198, 246, 247, 290 n. 7 response of CGR to, 12, 100, 120–22, 124, 284 n. 17, 285 n. 34 selection as illustrator for, 12, 97–98 and CGR’s Speaking Likenesses illustrations for, 129, 130, 286 n. 42, 286 n. 43; “The Apple of Discord,” 135, 136 fig. 3.21, 137, 138; “The boy with the great mouth full of teeth grins at Maggie,” 135; “The cross fairy deprives Flora of her strawberry feast,” 130; “Flora and the children in the enchanted room,” 130, 131 fig. 3.18, 135; “Maggie drinks tea and eats buttered toast with Granny,” 133, 134 fig. 3.20; “Maggie meets the fairies in the wood” (frontispiece), 132 fig. 3.19, 133; titlepage vignette, 133 recycling of his illustrations in reprint editions, 246, 247 selection as illustrator for, 12, 126, 128–29 influence on other illustrators of, 99, 193, 212, 213, 234 as a painter The Dove (A Birthday), 83, 98, 253, 283n. 16 The Mower, 98, 253 view of CGR, 98 Hughes, Edward Robert: “Oh, what’s that in the hollow. . .?” 255–56, 293 n. 5, plate 15 Hunt, Leigh, 22 Hunt, Peter, 192, 290 n. 3 Hunt, William Holman The Hireling Shepherd, 22 The Light of the World, 255 Moxon Tennyson, 58, 59, 279 n. 4 The Scapegoat, 21, 22, 268 Hutcheon, Linda, 292 n. 17 Hynes, E. Goblin Market, 263, 265 iconography. See symbols illumination, 85, 161, 162, 163, 164 illustrated books. See also children’s books; gift books; illustration; picture books for adults, 162, 172, 212, 230, 238 for children, 133, 134, 135, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 216, 264, 266

index

as collectibles, 208, 224, 230 (see also collecting; collectibles; gift books) costs of, 63, 92, 93, 94, 95, 126, 145, 178, 234, 238 of the 1860s, 65, 67, 84, 193, 226, 251 first-editions of, 2, 11, 14, 63, 76 interpretation of, 8, 69, 179, 102, 193, 252 of the 1890s, 15, 52, 54, 56, 84, 226, 270 and print culture, 58, 252 production and reception of, 6, 7–8, 10, 13, 58, 69, 76, 252 and reprints, 2, 14 (see also under publishing) semiotic system of, 6, 7, 43, 187–88 social/collaborative production of, 7, 14, 58, 83, 90, 188, 193, 205, 211, 215, 222, 225, 254, 272 in the twentieth century, 10, 94, 224, 231, 234, 270 in the twenty-first century, 250 illustrated newspapers, 2, 3, 4 illustrated periodicals, 2, 3, 4, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 253 illustrated tracts, 1, 3, 4, 140, 172, 179, 182, 184 illustration. See also illustrated books; reproductive processes; visual-verbal relations for children’s books, 13, 15, 190–91, 192, 197, 204, 209 function of aesthetic, 11, 15, 162, 176, 183–84, 206, 217, 218, 236 atmospheric, 172, 180, 182 audience designation, 6, 13, 14, 15, 17, 135, 189, 190–91, 197–98, 203, 204, 213, 240, 242–43, 244, 245, 247, 248–49 commemorative, 179, 180 complementary/dialogic, 28, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 54, 57, 58, 65, 67–68, 69, 82, 85, 87, 100, 101, 102, 105–7, 113, 116, 119, 120, 124, 125, 135, 151, 158, 162, 216, 218 didactic, 50, 107–8, 113, 154, 178, 179, 182, 183, 189, 216, 217, 218 explanatory, 20, 42, 65–66, 137 hermeneutic, 31, 34, 44, 57, 58, 68, 82, 149, 150–51, 153, 162, 178, 236 marketing, 10, 11, 12, 14, 59–60, 61, 62–63, 64, 84, 172, 175–76, 177, 178, 179, 182, 184, 185–86, 187, 206, 210, 219–20, 225, 230, 238, 247, 279 n. 8 representational, 42, 43, 58, 143, 151, 154 thematic, 178, 179 visual pleasure, 45, 62, 189, 190, 191, 209, 210, 211, 213, 217, 219, 224, 225, 229, 230, 240, 242–44 Golden Age of, first, 6, 9, 46, 56, 58, 193 second, 56, 83

integration of, 9–10, 59, 61, 65–66, 67, 178, 180, 216, 218, 219–20, 226, 229, 233–34, 279 n. 5 market value of, 11, 28, 59, 60, 62–63, 128 as painting, 162, 252, 260 Pre-Raphaelite approach to, 6, 10, 11, 13, 28, 30, 34, 46, 50, 52, 54, 58, 59, 84–85, 98, 129, 152 as readings of the text, 31, 32, 47, 68, 69–70, 72, 75, 76–77, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89–90, 101, 113, 135–38, 235, 236 as theater, 252, 270 image and text. See visual-verbal relations Ingelow, Jean, 91, 96, 161, 282 n. 1 Mopsa the Fairy, 232, 292 n. 10 Ives, Maura, 187 Jack, T. C. and E. C. (publisher), 206 Jacobi, Charles T., 236 James, Gwenllian: Goblin Market, 260 James Parker (publisher), 139, 142 Jay, W.M.L. (pseud.): Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep,” 13, 176–82, 181 fig. 5.2, 186, 289 n. 7, 289 n. 8, 289 n. 9 Jervis, Swynfen, 24 John, Saint the Apostle, 161 the Baptist, 157 writer of Revelations, 35, 156, 163 Jopling, Joseph: Lady Maggie, 83 Judgment of Paris, 137, 286 n. 47 Kachur, Robert, 287 n. 13 Kate Greenaway Award, 192 Kearney, Patrick, 240 Keats, John, 180 Keble, John The Christian Year, 8, 34, 38, 150 CGR’s illustrations for, 28, 29–35, 31 fig. 1.3, 33 fig. 1.4, 37 fig. 1.5, 277 n. 9 influence on CGR of, 5, 8, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 150, 162 Kegan Paul (publisher), 281 n. 31 Kelmscott Press, 4, 9, 11, 225, 228 Chaucer of, 225, 233 Kent, David, 248 Kernis, Aaron Jay: Goblin Market, 270–72, 271 fig. 8.6 Khnopff, Fernand I Lock My Door upon Myself, 258–60, plate 16 Who Shall Deliver Me? 258–59 King, Jessie M.: Goblin Market, 206, 231 Kingsley, Charles: The Water-Babies, 139 Knoepflmacher, U. C., 102, 122, 129, 138, 248, 285 n. 36, 286 n. 42, 286 n. 48 Koe, Hilda: Goblin Market, 261 Kohs, Marion R.: Verses from Sing-Song, 216 Kramer, Jack, 154

317

318

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lady artist. See women artists Landor, Walter Savage, 161 Landow, George, 5 Lanes, Selma, 217 Lang, Andrew: The Library, 178, 224, 225, 226, 228, 230 language of flowers,Victorian, 5, 39, 15–51, 157, 159, 162, 165, 250 Lawrence, Andy, 270, 272, 294 n. 26 Lear, Edward: More Nonsense, 270, 284 n. 21 Leder, Sharon, 244, 292 n. 18 Leicester Galleries, 230, 256, 293 n. 10 Leighton, Lord: Summer Moon, 74 Leverhulme, Lord, 293 n. 8 Lewis, Naomi, 193 librarian, children’s, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 203, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 217 library, 192, 212, 217, 220 Lindsay, Lady, 154, 157, 163 Linton, W. J., 279 n. 11 literacy, 91, 190, 196, 197, 198, 213. See also visual literacy Little Library, The, 213, 214 liturgical year. See Calendar, Church Livingston, Myra Cohn, 217 Locke, John, 190 Lorraine, Walter, 219 Los Angeles Times, 245 Lucy, Charles, 23 Luke, Saint, 153, 158 MacDonald, George At the Back of the North Wind, 99, 128, 137, 139, 286 n. 48 Princess and the Goblin, The, 101, 128, 284 n. 21 Macherey, Pierre, 13, 14 Maclise, Daniel, 59 Macmillan, Alexander (publisher) and Called to Be Saints, 142–43, 144, 145, 157 contracts of, 63, 76, 97, 126, 127, 128 and control over book production, 9, 10, 57, 61, 63–64, 76, 93, 127, 130 and copyright, 50, 93, 95, 126–27, 130, 139, 145, 286 n. 40, 292 n. 9 and Goblin Market combined edition of, 54, 126, 127 1893 edition illustrated by LH of, 15, 56, 83–86, 224, 227 first edition of, 10, 56, 62, 63, 72, 203, 214, 276 n. 16, 279 n. 8, 2 second edition of, 64, 126 proposed illustrated edition of (E. Cotton), 223 and Lewis Carroll, 60–61 and A Pageant and Other Poems, 50, 145, 227, 291 n. 2 and Poems: New and Enlarged Edition, 50 and Poetical Works, 146

and posthumous publications of CGR by, 175, 292 n. 9 and The Prince’s Progress, 10–11, 12, 56, 63, 64, 75, 76, 93 LH’s proposed illustrated edition (1895) of, 56–57 and Sing-Song manuscript vetting of, 92–93 revised, enlarged edition (1893) of, 55, 97, 121 and Speaking Likenesses, 12, 92, 126–130, 133, 135, 138 and Victorian publishing, 9, 10, 13, 57, 61–62, 63 Macmillan, Frederick, 282 n. 33 Macmillan, George, 84, 85, 282 n. 33 Macmillan and Company as an educational publisher, 197 The Children’s Rossetti, 197–98, 212 A First School Poetry Book, 196 A Second School Poetry Book, 16, 196 Little Library series of, 213, 214 as a picture-book publisher Goblin Market (1971), 203 Sing-Song and Other Poems for Children (1924), 213 The Skylark (1991), 249 What Is Pink? (1971), 217 Macmillan’s Magazine, 16, 45, 61, 75, 162, 288 n. 30, 288 n. 31 Magazine of Art, The, 44, 45, 52, 54, 258, 278 n. 23, 279 n. 31, 279 n. 32, 279 n. 33 Magi, the, 179 Main, David: A Treasury of Sonnets, 65, 280 n. 16, 280 n. 17 market. See also publishing antiquarian, 203, 224 Christmas, 9, 60, 62, 63, 84, 91, 101, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138, 139, 143, 185, 186, 190, 198, 199, 201, 203, 207, 208, 209, 229, 230, 233, 234, 238, 281 n. 31, 284 n. 20 collectors’, 15, 203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 231, 233, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 268 (see also collecting, collectors) international, 2, 10, 50, 97, 133–34, 162, 191, 192, 203, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 216, 219, 227, 244, 256, 258 juvenile, 3, 8, 91–92, 129, 133, 137, 147, 188, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 196, 202, 206, 209, 210, 247, 251 (see also children’s books, picture books) poetry, 2, 59, 61, 63, 146, 187 religious, 8, 239–40, 143, 172, 175, 176, 178, 184, 188, 190, 251, 289 n. 10 (see also SPCK) Marsh, Jan, 75, 81, 231, 275 n. 13 Marston, Westland, 284 n. 19

index

Martin, Eliza: Life Is Not Good, 83 Mary (B.V.), 153, 158, 173, 175, 177, 179, 187, 236, 259 Mary Poppins, 133 Maser, Frederick E., 96, 147, 220, 221, 222, 223, 281 n. 32, 288 n. 18, 292 n. 7 Maser, Mary Louise Jarden, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 292 n. 8 material culture. See visual culture materialist aesthetic. See under Rossetti, Christina: aesthetic of materialist hermeneutics, 13, 14, 15, 17, 101, 153, 187, 193, 252, 275 n. 9, 275 n. 11 Maud, Constance E. Heroines of Poetry, 199–201, 290 n. 12, 290 n. 13 prose version of Goblin Market, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205 Maurice, F. D., 144 McClure, Edmund, 144, 146, 182, 287 n. 5, 288 n. 1 McGann, Jerome, 8, 14, 61, 76, 82, 235, 275 n. 2, 275 n. 9, 275 n. 11, 285 n. 29, 289 n. 6 McGillis, Roderick, 284 n. 23 McInnis, Maurie, 135 Medici Society, 206 Medusa, 135, 136 fig. 3.21, 138 Meigs, Cornelia, 207, 213 Meredith, George, 62 Jump-to-Glory Jane, 84, 282 n. 43 Meyer, Susan, 231 Meynell, Alice, 232, 236 Meynell, Francis, 250, 273 Michael, A. C. My Book of Beautiful Legends, 291 n. 14 My Book of Stories from the Poets, 203 “Buy from us with a golden curl,” 203, plate 5 Millais, John Autumn Leaves, 226 influence on other artists of, 226, 235 “Maude Clare,” 44, 45, 278 n. 22 Moxon Tennyson, 59, 279 n. 4 The Music Master, 59 Millet, Jean-François: The Angelus, 185 mode of production (capitalist), 7, 13, 133, 134–35, 219, 275 n. 10 Montrose, J. Moses, 185 Moore, Annie E., 214 Moore, T. Sturge, 229 Moorhouse, Reed: Goblin Market, 264–65 Morgan, Charles, 9, 10, 63 Morris, Jane, 259 Morris, Talwin, 232, 233 Morris, William, 4, 8, 9, 11, 93, 161, 225, 228, 245, 275 n. 12, 281 n. 29, 283 n. 7. See also Kelmscott Press Moss, Anita, 248 Mowbrays (publisher), 294 n. 27

Moxon Tennyson, 10, 57, 59–60, 61, 63, 67, 77, 98, 101, 225 Muir, Percy, 91, 208 Mulready, William, 59 Murray, Charles Fairfax as collector of CGR, 226–27, 281 n. 28 as illustrator of Sing-Song, 94, 226 Nautilus Theater, 294 n. 21 Newbery, John: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 189, 190 Newbery Prize, 192 Newsweek, 245 New York Review of Books, The, 245 Niles, Thomas, 96 Nochlin, Linda, 243 Nodelman, Perry, 192 North London School of Drawing and Modeling, 23, 24 North-South Books (publisher), 219 Norton, Mrs., 16 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, 23, 231 nursery rhymes 11, 38, 41, 42, 50, 94, 96, 99, 193, 197, 198, 214, 221. See also poetry: for children “Ladybird, Ladybird,” 123, 286 n. 36 Mother Goose, 100 “Old Mother Hubbard,” 119 O’Connor, John, 290 n. 4 Odhams Press, 207 Old Arizona Studio, 294 nn. 20, 21 Once a Week, 44, 45, 95, 278 n. 22 Ospovat, Henry: Goblin Market, 198, 199, 200 fig. 6.1 Our Secret Friends and Foes, 287 n. 12 Outlook, 234 Owen, Dora: The Book of Fairy Poetry, 207 Oxford movement, 5, 150. See also Tractarianism Oxford Union murals, 98 Pacific Comics, 244 Packer, Lona Mosk, 242, 276 n. 3 panelology, 240. See also comic books Parley, Peter: Illustrations of the Vegetable Kingdom, 155 Pascoe, Charles E., 126 patriarchy, 148 Pattison, Robert, 16 Paul, Art, 240 Pen, Polly: Goblin Market, 266, 268–70, 269 fig. 8.5 Pepoli, Count, 4, 155 Peterson, Linda, 173 Piccini, Giovani, 285 n. 33 Picket, S. L., 293 n. 7 Pickles, Sheila: Summer’s Cup, 248

319

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picture books, 1, 13, 15, 91, 92, 188, 195. See also children’s books; illustrated books as art book, 192, 210, 213, 217, 218 borders in, 219 criticism of, 192–93 double-page opening in, 204, 217, 218 dual audience of, 91, 190, 191, 192, 210 as a genre, 190, 191, 195, 201, 210, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219 market for, 91–92, 190, 191, 192, 202, 209, 212, 213, 216, 219, 220 page turn in, 218, 219, 220 and pre-literate child, 92, 190, 204 as a serial art form, 216 Pied Piper Books (publisher), 216 Pissarro, Camille, 227 Pissarro, Esther, 227–28 Pissarro, Lucien, 57, 227–28, 229 Pistrucci, Fillippo, 4, 66 Playboy Magazine, 13, 240–43, 244, 245, 253, plate 13 poetry. See also anthologies; market; nursery rhymes for children in the classroom, 194, 213, 217, 218, 220 conversion from adult to juvenile literary system of, 193, 199, 201–2, 203, 204, 207, 220 conversion into prose of, 199, 201–2, 204 religious, 146, 162, 176, 177, 186 Pogány, Willy Goblin Market, 206, 291 n. 18 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 234 Polidori, Charlotte, 147 Polidori, Eliza, 147 Polidori, Gaetano, 39, 65, 227, 228, 292 n. 8 Pollock, Griselda, 241 popular culture, 119, 240, 244 pornography, 13, 240, 241, 242, 244. See also erotica; fantasy Porter, Peter, 248 Portfolio Society, 39, 75, 281 n. 25 Powell, David, 193, 194, 195, 212 Powers, Margaret: Goblin Fruit, 244–45, 292 n. 19 Poynter, E. J., 52 Pratt, Ella Farman, 50 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 5, 11, 22, 44, 65, 98, 162 Pre-Raphaelites approach to illustration of, 6, 10, 11, 13, 28, 29, 30, 34, 46, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 79, 84–85, 98, 129, 151 and the emblematic tradition, 35 exhibition of art of, 241, 293 n. 12 influence on illustration of, 6, 3, 13, 50, 52, 54, 85, 199, 204, 208, 212, 225, 226, 227, 231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 241, 255, 261, 272

paintings by, 21, 26, 142, 173, 248, 252, 252, 255, 256, 258, 265, 268 as poets, 9, 11, 64, 93, 229 representation of women by, 75, 175, 180, 238, 259, 289 n. 4 revival at end of the 19th century of, 52, 54, 56, 83, 84, 85, 90, 226 revival in the 1960s of, 240–41, 247 sacramental symbolism of, 6 typological approach of, 22 visual-verbal interests of, 10, 11, 12, 28, 29, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 52, 58, 59, 61, 65, 66, 83, 84, 96, 98, 100, 142, 254–55 women artists of, 231 presses, small and private, 39, 212, 222, 227, 228, 229, 247, 292 n. 7, 292 n. 8, 293 n. 21 print culture, 4, 58, 250, 252 printers, 7, 9, 58, 130, 227 devices of, 153, 185, 232 Procter, Adelaide, 161 Proctor, Ellen: A Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti. 172–73, 175, 186 publishers’ series, 213, 232, 234, 238 publishing. See also book trade; market sociology of, 7, 222 technological developments of, 2, 189, 203, 230 twentieth-century academic, 248, 249 of children’s books, 190, 191, 192, 198–200, 202–3, 204, 206, 207, 210, 212, 213 of educational books, 213, 234, 264 of gift books, 224, 225, 226, 229, 230, 232, 234, 238 of illustrated reprints, 14, 93–94, 198, 203, 206, 207, 208, 210, 213–14, 216, 219, 234, 238, 248 institutional support of, 191, 192, 196, 203, 210, 212, 213, 217 internationalism of, 177, 184, 192, 203, 206, 208, 209, 212, 219, 264, 291 n. 15 on the Internet, 251–52 marketing and distribution of, 191, 192, 201, 210, 212, 216, 222 relation to review system of, 190–91, 192, 201, 209, 253 of religious works, 13, 171–72, 175, 177, 178, 179, 182, 186, 187, 188 three-month sales season of, 201, 207 of trade books and limited editions, 207, 208, 209, 225, 226, 229, 230, 231, 275 n. 1 Victorian. See also book trade: Victorian and book design, 8, 9, 10, 60, 61, 275 n. 12, 279 n. 5; illustration of proven sellers, 6, 9, 59; use of many artists, 59, 279 n. 4 of children’s books, 91, 92, 134–35, 138, 190

index

and contracts for authors, 63, 76, 93, 95, 97, 126–28, 139, 144, 145, 146 of educational works, 195–96, 197–98 fine printing revival of 56, 225, 229, 279 n. 5, 275 n. 1 forward dating practice of, 201, 284 n. 20 and international copyright, 50, 96, 278 n. 24, 278 n. 26, 278 n. 28, 283 n. 14 of periodicals, 43, 44, 45, 49, 52 of poetry, 2, 62, 63 and power of publisher, 10, 12, 57, 62, 63, 92, 126–27, 133, 146 of religious works, 12, 134, 139, 142, 144–46, 162, 275 n. 2, 27 5 n. 3 three-month sales season of, 190, 201 of trade books, 9, 12–13, 60, 128, 139, 198 Punch, 261, 262 fig. 8.3 Punch and Judy, 119–20, 123, 285 n. 31, 285 n. 32, 285 n. 33 Quarles, Francis, 4, 30, 56, 65, 69, 149, 150 Emblems, Divine and Moral, 70, 71 fig. 2.2, 79, 81 fig. 2.6, 150, 161 Quarto, The, 231 Rackham, Arthur and CGR’s Goblin Market “Laura would call the little ones,” 209 “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,” 209 “She clipped a precious golden lock,” 209 “White and golden Lizzie stood,” 209, 243, 244, 248, plate 7 influence on other illustrators of, 243, 244, 272, 294 n. 26 and international collectors’ market, 208–9, 230 Peter Pan in Kensington Garden, 207 Rip Van Winkle, 230 as a touchstone for children’s book illustration, 209 Raskin, Ellen: Goblin Market, 13, 203–5, 220, plate 6 Ray, Gordon, 224 Reader, The, 75 Reading Teacher, The, 219 Reid, Forrest, 226 reproductive processes etching, 1, 210, 217, 218, 222, 261, 291 n. 1 graphotype, 95, 283 n.11 lithography, 190, 191 photomechanical process(es), 230, 291 n. 1 three-color process, 230, 231 wood engraving/woodcuts, 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 29, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 69, 75, 95, 96, 99, 178, 182, 225, 279 n. 11, 280 n. 12, 281 n. 28 Revelation of St. John, 35, 156, 163 Ricketts, Charles

“An Echo from Willowwood,” 52–54, 53 fig. 1.9 influence on other book artists of, 52, 226, 227, 228 influences on, 54, 57, 226 Silverpoint, 282 n. 35 Riviere, Hugh: The Lonely Life, 256–58, 257 fig. 8.1 Rivington, Reverend, 83 Roberts Brothers (publishers), 64, 93, 96–97, 126, 263, 278 n. 28, 280 n. 12 Robertson, Eric S.: English Poetesses, 81, 82 Robertson, Nan, 268 Rope, Margaret, 231 Rose, Jacqueline, 190, 195, 283 n. 3 Rosenblum, Dolores, 247 Ross, Alice: Goblin Market, 206 Ross, Andrew, 241–42 Rossetti, Christina abridgments to poems by, 13, 194, 196, 204, 264, 276 n. 17 aesthetic of materialist, 8, 9, 11, 17, 28, 29, 38, 66, 67, 82, 142 sacramental, 5, 6 visual-verbal, 6, 8, 11, 28, 43, 44, 45, 61, 67, 76, 82, 126 (see also Rossetti, Christina: visual imagination of ) as an artist (see also Rossetti, Christina: and illustration) artistic aspirations of, 21–24, 26 art training of, 4, 22–24 book illustrations for The Altar, 28, 29, 277 n. 9 for L’Arpa Evangelica, 28, 29, 38 for The Christian Year, 8, 28, 29–38, 31 fig. 1.3, 33 fig. 1.4, 37 fig. 1.6, 277 n. 9, 277 n. 9 for Goblin Market and Other Poems, 8, 28, 38, 40–41, 277 n. 9, 277 n. 13, 277 n. 17 for Seek and Find, 28, 33 for Sing-Song, 12, 28, 38, 40, 41–43, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101–2, 104–8, 107 fig. 3.5, 109 fig. 3.6, 111, 113, 116, 117 fig. 3.11, 119–20, 120 fig. 3.13, 122–24, 123 fig. 3.16, 125, 278n. 20, 284n. 17, plate 1 for A Shadow of Dante, 28, 39, 277 n. 9, 277 n. 10 for “Sonnets are full of love,” 65, 280 n. 17 for Verses Dedicated to my Mother, 28, 38–40 paintings attributed to, 26, 277 n. 8 paintings by, 8, 21, 22–23, 24, 26, 28, 38, 40, 65, 156, 276 n. 4, 276 n. 5, 287 n. 18 portraits by, 4, 24, 26, 276 n. 4, 276 n. 5 of FLMR, 25 fig. 1.1

321

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Rossetti, Christina, as an artist, portraits by (cont.) of WMR, 27 fig. 1.2 scrapbooks of, 2–4 sketches by, 4, 8, 22, 24, 26, 28, 40, 42, 43, 156 “Tree of Life” design of, 156–57, 288 n. 19, plate 2 wallpaper design by, 4 as artist’s model, 5, 33, 173, 175, 176, 255, 259 as artist’s muse, 65, 77, 254, 255, 260 and authorial control, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 43, 45, 46, 54, 57, 61, 63, 64, 82, 83, 84–85, 92, 93, 94, 127, 128–29, 146, 276 n. 17 Bible owned by, 221 and birds and animals, 30, 49, 74, 86, 107–8 (see also Rossetti, Christina: and vivisection) centenary of, 234, 294 n. 23 as a children’s writer, 3, 41–43, 49, 50, 91, 139, 140, 193, 276 n.16, 276 n. 17, Christian faith and devotional practice of, 5, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38, 142, 156, 158 class critique of, 107–8, 111, 116, 138–39, 148, 159–60 classification as a classic of, 207–8, 210, 232, 234, 238 as a commodity, 1, 224, 227, 231, 247, 249 construction as saint of, 175, 176, 177, 180, 185, 187–88 and copyright expiration of, 7–8, 167, 206, 231 in illustrated magazines, 50, 278 n, 26, 278 n, 27 in religious publications, 139, 145–46, 147, 172, 188, 287 n. 8, 287 n. 12 in trade publications, 50, 93, 95, 96, 126, 127, 128, 129, 138, 139, 145, 146, 188, 227, 276 n. 17 critical reception of, 14–17, 240–41, 247, 248 as a devotional writer of poetry, 13, 33, 139–40, 142, 176, 177, 178, 180, 186, 194, 260, 266 of prose, 6, 30, 32, 33, 108, 139–40, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 156, 162, 163, 172, 173, 177, 186 DGR as favorite illustrator of, 45, 57, 65, 83, 100 and flowers and plants, 30, 137, 149, 156, 157, 159–60, 163 (see also Rossetti, Christina: prose: Called to Be Saints, flower symbolism in) use of language of flowers by, 5, 39, 40, 150, 151, 165, 166, 167 personal floral symbolism of convolvulus, 39–40 ferns and grasses, 160 forget-me-not, 39, 165–66

harebell, 137, 142, 151, 157, 162, 166 heartsease, 39 hepaticas, 153 holly, 150–51 iris, 151 lily, 30, 149, 156, 157, 159, 165 marigold, 153 rose, 30, 39, 42–43, 156, 157, 159, 165, 187 snowdrop, 157–58, 288 n. 24 home life of, 3–4, 39, 156–57 illness of, 11, 12, 97 and illustration (see also Rossetti, Christina: as an artist) approach to, 28, 30, 34–35, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 54, 58, 67, 98, 100, 101 commitment to publishing her work with, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8–12, 29, 38, 43, 44, 45, 52, 55, 57, 62, 64, 66, 67, 76, 82, 83, 93, 96, 97, 101–2, 128, 142 view of purpose of, 6, 12, 28, 29, 34, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 54, 57, 58, 64, 66, 67, 102, 149–50, 151 influences on work of Anglican worship, 5, 34, 66, 150 DGR, 5, 22, 52, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65–66, 67, 75–76, 82, 86, 93, 94 emblematic and figural traditions, 5–6, 30, 35, 38, 39, 41, 65, 66, 67, 149, 150, 156 FLMR, 24, 64, 147, 156, 157, 161, 166 Isaac Williams, 5, 29, 30, 38, 150, 162 John Keble, 5, 8, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 150, 162 John Ruskin, 5, 6, 39, 66 MFR, 147, 156, 157–58 Pre-Raphaelites, 1–2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 43, 44, 45, 46, 58, 61, 65, 67, 98, 100, 142 Tractarianism, 5, 6, 29, 30, 34, 150, 151, 163, 172, 180, 275 n. 5 William Blake, 5, 26, 34, 41, 42, 43, 102, 104, 106, 284 n. 22 library of, 4, 28, 227, 277 n. 9 and naming, 150–51, 158 paintings of poems by, 83, 252, 253–61 poetic vocation of, 3, 11, 26, 32, 44, 275 n. 13 popularity of, 57, 61, 64, 96, 97, 138, 146, 171, 172, 198, 206, 213, 244, 248 portraits of, 4, 175, 185, 236, 251, 289 n.2 used as frontispieces, 173–77, 174 fig. 5.1, 182 posthumous memorials of, 172–73, 175, 176, 177, 185, 186 Pre-Raphaelite association of, 6, 8, 11, 28, 45, 46, 61, 83, 94, 98, 100, 142, 173, 229, 231, 234, 235, 238, 240–41, 245, 247, 248, 251, 252, 256, 259, 264, 266, 268, 272

index

publication in periodicals of in illustrated magazines, 43, 44–47, 52–54, 98 in juvenile magazines, 3, 45, 49, 50, 52, 193 and her publishers the Dalziels, 11, 12, 96, 97, 128, 276 n. 14, 282 n. 1, 292 n. 6 F. S. Ellis, 43, 93–95, 96, 97, 227, 275 n. 8, 283 n. 8 James Parker, 139, 142 Macmillan, 9, 10, 12, 50, 54–55, 56, 57, 64, 84, 86, 92–93, 126–30, 134, 135, 139, 142–43, 145, 157, 175, 223 Roberts Brothers, 64, 93, 96–97, 126, 198, 203, 213 SPCK, 3, 12, 13, 134, 139, 143, 144–45, 146–47, 148, 153–54, 155, 171, 172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 184–88 and Punch and Judy shows, 119–20, 285 n. 33 relation with Lisa Wilson of, 165–66 symbolism of (see also under Rossetti, Christina: and flowers and plants) emblematic purposes of, 12, 38, 39, 66, 67, 149–50, 151, 161 religious iconography of, 35, 66 system of spiritual correspondences of, 148, 149, 151, 158–59, 160–61, 165, 167 use of typology by, 22, 38, 41, 66, 68, 69, 76, 77, 156–57 view on female suffrage of, 284 n. 27 visual imagination of, 6, 8, 13, 17, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 38, 41, 46, 55, 81, 83, 86, 141, 149, 162, 167, 231, 252, 254, 275 n. 6 and vivisection, 287 n. 12 word painting of, 6, 45, 275 n. 7 Rossetti, Christina: poems “All the bells were ringing,” 120, 122 “An Alphabet from England,” 3, 49–50, 51 fig. 1.8, 214 “Amor Mundi,” 35, 46–47, 48 fig. 1, 7, 254, 277 n. 12, 293 n. 4, plate 15 “Angels at the foot,” 104–5, 104 fig. 3.2 “A Bird’s-Eye View,” 235, plate 12 “A Birthday,” 64, 83, 98, 194, 253, 283 n. 16 “Brother Bruin,” 3, 50, 278 n. 26, 278 n. 27 “Burial Anthem,” 39 “A Candlemas Dialogue,” 278 n. 29 “Charity,” 39 “Cherries on a branch,” 213 “A Christmas Carol” (“A Holy Heavenly Chime”), 50, 278 n. 26 “Christmas Carols,” 214, 279 n. 30 “Clever little Willie wee,” 285 n. 34 “Consider,” 162–63, 167, 288 n. 30, 288 n. 31 “Crying, my little one?” 108–11, 109 fig. 3.6, 110 fig. 3.7, 194, 214 “The Dead Bride,” 38 “The Dead City,” 228–29, plate 11

“Dead in the cold, a song-singing thrush,” 214 “The dear old woman in the lane,” 285 n. 34 “Death’s Chill Between,” 278 n. 22 “A diamond or a coal?” 111–13, 114 fig. 3.9 “The Dying Man to His Betrothed,” 39 “An Echo from Willowwood,” 52–54, 53 fig. 1.9, 194, 279 n. 32 “An emerald is as green as grass,” 111–13, 115 fig. 3.10, 116 “An End,” 256 “The End of Time,” 39 “Exultate Deo,” 52 “A frisky lamb,” 42, plate 1 “From the Antique,” 138 Goblin Market. See also under Rossetti, Christina: collections; illustrated reprints and spin-offs academic reprints of, 15, 243, 245, 247, 248 for adults, 13, 15, 194, 199, 203, 212, 220, 224, 242–44 as a children’s poem, 13, 15–17, 194, 197, 199, 203, 204–5, 206–7, 209, 212, 220, 243, 248, 276 n. 16, 276 n. 17 as a children’s prose story, 198, 199, 201–2, 204 as a classic, 207–8, 210, 232, 243 for collectors, 15, 207, 208, 209, 210–12, 224, 226, 244, 245, 247 illustrations of by Bolton, 244, plate 14 Calthrop, 206–7, 256 by CGR, 8, 28, 38, 40–41, 277 n. 9, 277 n. 13, 277 n. 17 by Craft, 242–43, 244, 253, plate 13 by DGR, 9, 10, 45, 54, 56, 60, 61, 63–64, 67, 68, 69–70, 70 fig. 2.1, 72–75, 73 fig. 2.3, 86, 87, 90, 133, 204, 229, 244, 261, 272 by Gershinowitz, 210, 212, 270, plate 8 by Goble, 207 by Harrison, 197, 198, 234, 290 n. 7 by Harvey, 293 n. 21 by Housman, 56, 84, 85, 86, 87–90, 88 fig. 2.7, 89 fig. 2.8, 224, 226, 227, 243, 245, 246 fig. 7.3, 247, 263, 270, 273, 293 n. 15 by King, 206, 231 by Michael, 203, plate 5 by Ospovat, 198, 199, 200 fig. 6.1 by Pogány, 206, 291 n.18 by Rackham, 207–8, 209, 230, 243, 244, 248, plate 7 by Raskin, 13, 203–5, 220, plate 6 by Ross, 206 by Sandheim, 238, 239 fig. 7.2 by Shepard, 261, 262, 262 fig. 8.3 by Tarrant, 206 by Thompson, 293 n. 21

323

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Rossetti, Christina: poems, illustrations of (cont.) by Ware, 210, 211 fig. 6.2, 217 dramatic productions of for adults, 220, 252, 264, 265–72, 267 fig. 8.4, 269 fig. 8.5, 271 fig. 8.6, 294 n. 20, 294 n. 21, 294 n. 23 for children, 263–64 on the Internet, 251 paintings of, 252, 253, 260–61, 261 fig. 8.2 in school texts, 16, 195, 196–98, 199, 290 n. 7, 290 n. 9 theme of reading and interpretation in, 68 sexual interpretations of, 13, 15–16, 72, 74–75, 87, 205, 241–47 religious interpretations of, 69, 70, 72, 87, 89–90 Victorian production history of, 15, 16, 83–85, 90, 276 n. 16, 176 n. 17 Victorian reception history of, 16–17, 57, 69, 72, 74, 75, 60–61, 63, 81–82, 86 “Golden Glories,” 194 “A Goodly Heritage,” 278 n. 29 “Heart’s Chill Between,” 278 n. 22 “Hear what the mournful linnets say,” 49 “Herself a Rose,” 187 “At Home,” 40–41 “Hope is like a harebell,” 166, 214, 288 n. 23 “Hurt no living thing,” 49 “Husband and Wife,” 46 “Hymn after Gabriele Rossetti,” 29 “I caught a little ladybird,” 120, 123–24, 123 fig. 3.16, 125 fig. 3.17, 214, 285 n. 34, 285 n. 36 “If a mouse could fly,” 284 n. 17 “If a pig wore a wig,” 116–19, 117 fig. 3, 118 fig. 3.12 “If hope grew on a bush,” 214 “If the sun could tell us half,” 49 “I have a little husband,” 285 n. 34 “I have a Poll parrot,” 120, 121 fig. 3.15, 122, 285 n. 34, 285 n. 36 “I have but one rose in the world,” 42–43 “In an Artist’s Studio,” 79 “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children,” 284 n. 28 “In the meadow—what in the meadow?” 284 n. 17 “L.E.L.,” 256, 293 n. 7, 293 n. 8 “Lift up thine eyes to seek the invisible,” 180 “Lo! Newborn Jesus,” 52 “Love Attacked,” 39 “The Lowest Room,” 138, 286 n. 49 “Maggie a Lady,” 83 “Maiden Song,” 83 “Maude Clare,” 44, 45, 278 n. 22 “Minnie and Mattie,” 194 “Monna Innominata,” 165–66

“The Months: A Pageant, “ 263 “Motherless baby and babyless mother,” 107–8, 107 figs. 3.4, 3.5 “A motherless soft lambkin,” 106–7 “O Lady Moon,” 194, 278 n. 28 “Old and New Year Ditties,” 254 “Our little baby fell asleep,” 105–6, 105 fig. 3.3 “Passing away, saith the World, passing away,” 83, 162, 254, 283 n. 16, 288 n. 29 “A Pause,” 194 “A Pause of Thought,” 254 “A peach for brothers, one for each” (“The peach tree on the southern wall”), 285 n. 17, 285 n. 34 “A Portrait,” 236 The Prince’s Progress biblical allusions and typology in, 76–77, 79, 81 illustrations for by DGR, 9–10, 45, 46, 60, 62, 67, 68, 69, 76–79, 78 fig. 2.4, 79–81, 80 fig. 2.5, 92, 133, 229, 238, 248 proposed by Housman, 56–57 by Sandheim, 238 by Syrett, 231 reconfigured for children, 194 theme of reading and interpretation in, 68 “The Prince who arrived too late,” 75 “Remember me when I am gone away,” 171–72 “Rose,” 39 “The Round Tower at Jhansi,” 278 n. 22 A Royal Princess, 235, 256–58, 257 fig. 8.1 “Sing me a song,” 100, 284 n. 17 “The Skylark,” 249 “The Solitary Rose,” 39 “Sonnets are full of love,” 65 “Spring,” 277 n. 13 “Spring Quiet,” 194 “There is a budding morrow in midnight,” 279 n.30 “There is but one May in the year,” 214 “There is one that has a head without an eye,” 42 “There’s snow on the fields,” 111, 112 fig. 3.9 “These all wait upon thee,” 290 n. 5 “Three little children,” 106 “To Lalla,” 214 “To My Mother on Her Birthday,” 39 “‘To what purpose is this waste?’” 194 “A Triad,” 83 “The twig sprouteth,” 164–65 “Up-Hill,” 61, 72, 165 “The Way of the World,” 44 “Wee wee husband,” 119–20, 120 figs. 3.13, 3.14 “What is pink?” 194 (see also Rossetti, Christina: illustrated reprints and spinoffs)

index

“Who has seen the wind?” 213, 214, 220 “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,” 180 “Who Shall Deliver Me?” 258–60, plate 16 “The wind has such a rainy sound,” 194, 284 n. 17 “Winter: My Secret,” 194 “The World,” 35, 277 n. 12 “Yet while I love my God the most, I deem,” 165–66

Published Collections: The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 195 Goblin Market and Other Poems design of, 9–10, 60, 67 DGR’s collaboration with CGR on, 58, 60 DGR’s cover design/bindings for, 9, 60 DGR’s proposals to illustrate, 83–84, 222–23 as an emblem book, 57, 66–69, 70, 72, 82 as a first-edition illustrated book, 6, 9, 11.14, 63, 90, 207 illustrations for by CGR, 8, 28, 38, 40, 86 by DGR, 9, 10, 15, 45, 56, 60, 61, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 90, 133, 204, 229, 272, 279 n. 5; frontispiece (“Buy from us with a golden curl”), 64, 67–68, 69–70, 70 fig. 2.1, 72, 86, 87, 203, 261, 272; proposed frontispiece (“A Birthday”), 64; title page (“Golden head by golden head”), 64, 67–68, 72, 73 fig. 2.3, 74–75, 244 publishing history of advertisements for, 83 contract and payments for, 63, 126 and delayed publication, 9, 63 and Macmillan, 5, 6, 9, 10, 61–62 reception of, 57, 69, 72, 74, 75, 81–82, 86 second edition of, 64 Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems, 54–55, 126, 127, 177, 254 A Pageant and Other Poems, 50, 65, 145, 227, 263 Poems (Roberts Brothers) 64, 96 Poems: New and Enlarged Edition, 50 The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, 146, 193, 228 The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, 83 design of, 60, 67 DGR’s collaboration with CGR on, 46, 58, 60, 75–76, 82 DGR’s cover design/bindings for, 9, 60 DGR’s illustrations for, 9–10, 15, 45, 46, 56, 60, 62, 65, 66, 67, 69, 76–77, 92, 133, 140, 229, 238, 248, 279n. 5, 281 n. 27, 281 n. 28, 282 n. 29

frontispiece (“You should have wept her yesterday”), 46, 68, 77–79, 78 fig. 2.4, 222 proposed third illustration, 76, 281 n. 27 studies, 76, 79, 222, 281 n. 28 title page (“The long hours go and come and go”) 68, 79–81, 80 fig. 2.5 as an emblem book, 57, 66–69, 76–77, 79, 82 as a first-edition illustrated book, 6, 9, 11 publishing history of advertisement of, 10, 63 contract for, 76 delayed publication of, 10–11, 63 and Macmillan, 9–10, 56, 75, 76 sales of, 92 reception of, 57, 69, 75, 81–82 Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, 91, 126, 134, 195 audiences for child reader/viewer of, 3, 42–43, 92, 106, 111, 113, 116, 119 dual audience of, 42, 99, 102 CGR’s Italian translations of, 285 n. 34 as a collaborative work, 11–12, 97, 98, 99–100, 101–2, 125–26 design of, 101–2 as a first-edition illustrated book, 6, 12, 55, 121, 122 illustration of by AH, 11–12, 42–43, 96, 97–100, 101–26, 128, 129, 213, 214, 278 n. 20; “All the bells were ringing,” 120; “Angels at the foot,” 104 fig. 3.2; “Crying, my little one?” 110 fig. 3.7, 111; “A diamond or a coal?” 111, 113, 114 fig. 3.9; “An emerald is as green as grass,” 113, 115 fig. 3.10, 316; frontispiece, 102–4, 103 fig. 3.1; “I caught a little ladybird,” 120, 122, 123–24, 125 fig. 3.17; “If a mouse could fly,” 284 n. 17; “If a pig wore a wig,” 116, 118 fig. 3.12, 119; “I have a Poll parrot,” 120–22, 121 fig. 3.15; “I have but one rose in the world,” 42–43; “In the meadow—what in the meadow?” 284 n. 17; “Motherless baby and babyless mother,” 107–8, 107 fig. 3.4; “A motherless soft lambkin,” 106–7; “Our little baby fell asleep,” 105–6, 105 fig. 3.3; response of CGR to, 12, 100, 120–22, 124, 284 n. 17, 285 n. 34; “There’s snow on the fields,” 111, 112 fig. 3.9; “Three little children,” 106; “Wee wee husband,” 119–20, 120 fig. 3.14; “The wind has such a rainy sound,” 194, 284 n. 17 by Alice Boyd, 94–95, 100, 283n. 13

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Rossetti, Christina, published collections, SingSong, illustration of (cont.) by CGR, 12, 28, 38, 40, 41–43, 99, 101, 102, 104–6, 107–8, 107 fig. 3.5, 108, 109 fig. 3.6, 111, 113, 116, 117 fig. 3.11, 119, 120 fig. 3.13, 122, 123 fig. 3.16, 124, 278 n. 20, 284 n. 17 by Charles Fairfax Murray, 94, 226 proposed illustrators for, 97 publishing history of contracts and payments for, 12, 93, 95, 97, 128 and copyright, 93, 95, 96, 126 and the Dalziel Brothers, 11, 12, 96–97, 226 and F. S. Ellis, 93–95, 96, 97 and Macmillan, 92–93, 97 price of, 282 n. 2 publishing date of, 284 n. 20 revised edition of (1893), 54, 55, 97, 100, 121, 122, 124, 126, 285 n. 34 and Roberts Brothers, 93, 96–97 and Routledge, 11, 96 second edition (American) of, 97 reception of, 96–97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 128, 134, 211, 212, 284 n. 19, 284 n. 22, 284 n. 23, 284 n. 24 relation to Blake’s Songs of, 41–42, 102, 104, 106, 284 n. 22 themes and motifs in angels in, 102, 104–6 class issues in, 108, 111, 113, 116 death in, 105–6, 107 gender issues in, 119, 122–24 representation of mother/child relation in, 106, 107–8, 111 social commentary in, 102, 107, 108, 111–19 spiritual messages in, 104, 108 twentieth-century production and reception history of (see also under Rossetti, Christina: illustrated reprints and spin-offs) in academic facsimiles, 247 in children’s books, 193–95, 211, 212, 213–15, 215 fig. 6.3, 217–20, plates 9, 10 as a classic, 195, 212–13; in school books, 197, 213, 214, 217 Verses (SPCK 1893) as CGR’s best-selling collection, 146 reprints of, 171, 175, 176, 179, 184, 186, 187 Verses Dedicated to My Mother (1847) CGR’s illustrations for, 28, 38–40, 66 DGR’s illustrations for, 65, 277 n. 16, 280 n. 14, 280 n. 15 and twentieth-century collectors, 292 n. 8 and Victorian collectors, 227, 228, 229, 292 n. 8

Rossetti, Christina: prose works Annus Domini, 139, 142, 143 Called to Be Saints audience for, 146–47, 148, 149, 150, 151, 287 n. 13 as a devotional reading book, 143–44 as an emblem book, 144, 145, 149–53, 157, 165–66 as a first-edition illustrated book, 6, 12, 55, 142 first title for, 142, 144, 145 flower symbolism in, 144, 148, 149, 150–60, 166 illustrations in, 150, 151, 153–55, 166, 287 n. 15, 287 n. 16 “Harebell,” 152 fig. 4.1 “Hepaticas,” 154 fig. 4.2 “Marigolds,” 155 fig. 4.3 “Snowdrop,” 159 fig. 4.4 and MFR, 157–59 publishing history of and Macmillan, 142–43, 144, 157 production of, 144–45 reprints of, 146, 184 sale of copyright for, 145–46, 147, 287 n. 8 and the SPCK, 143, 144–45, 146–47, 148, 153–54, 155 social criticism and spiritual lessons in, 148, 149, 151, 160–61, 165, 166 stone symbolism in, 144, 148, 150 Commonplace, 94, 95, 275 n. 8, 283 n. 8 Face of the Deep, The, 32, 35 illuminated manuscript for, 163–65, 167, plate 4 reprints of, 13, 163, 172, 176–82, 184 sale of copyright for, 146, 287n. 8, 287n. 12 sales of, 146, 172, 177, 184, 185, 186 Letter and Spirit, 184, 287 n. 8 Maude, 5 Seek and Find, 141, 144, 147, 184, 227 CGR’s marginal illustrations for, 28, 33–34 sale of copyright for, 145, 287 n. 8 Speaking Likenesses academic reprints of, 247, 248, 286 n. 50 audience for, 3, 91, 92, 126, 133, 134–35, 137, 139, 147, 193 and Carroll’s Alice books, 128, 129, 138, 286 n. 42 as a Christmas book, 126, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138, 139 as a commercial commodity, 128, 133, 134–35, 139 and the fantasy genre, 126, 128, 129, 151 anti-fantasy elements in, 129, 130–31, 133, 134 as a first-edition illustrated book, 6, 12, 55 flower references in, 147, 160

index

gender issues in, 135, 137, 138 as an illustrated book captions for pictures in, 130, 133, 286n. 46 illustrations by AH for, 128, 129, 130, 286 n. 42, 286 n. 43; “The Apple of Discord,” 135–38, 136 fig. 3.21, 286 n. 47; “The boy with the great mouth full of teeth grins at Maggie,” 135; “The cross fairy deprives Flora of her strawberry feast,” 130; “Flora and the children in the enchanted room,” 130, 131 fig. 3.18, 135; “Maggie drinks tea and eats buttered toast with Granny,” 133, 134 fig. 3.20; “Maggie meets the fairies in the wood” (frontispiece), 130, 132 fig. 3.19, 133; power of the picture in, 135, 138; title-page vignette, 133 publishing history of first title for, 126, 129, 130 and Macmillan, 92, 126, 127, 128, 129–30, 135, 138, 139 and Roberts Brothers, 126 sale of copyright for, 126–28, 130, 139 sales of, 128, 138, 139 selection of AH as illustrator for, 12, 126, 128–29 and the SPCK, 134 reception of, 138, 139 social critique in, 138–39, 286n. 51, 286n. 52 struggle for control in, 127, 134–35, 138 Time Flies, 146, 156, 166, 177, 184 CGR’s annotated copy of, 288 n. 22 cover design for, 66, 142 Lisa Wilson’s personal illustrated copy of, 165, 166 Rossetti, Christina: illustrated reprints and spin-offs Angels (SPCK), 185 The Children’s Rossetti (Macmillan), 197–98, 212–13, 290 n. 7 Christmas Verses by Christina G. Rossetti (SPCK), 186–87 Church Seasons in Verse (SPCK), 185 Color: A Poem (Teichman), 217, 218–19 Doves and Pomegranates: Poems for Young Readers (Bodley House/Gill), 193–95, 212, 214 Fly Away, Fly Away, Over the Sea and Other Poems for Children by Christina Rossetti (North-South/Watts), 219–20, plate 10 Gifts and Graces: Thoughts from the Writings of Christina Rossetti (SPCK), 184–86 Goblin Market (Blackie’s English Classics/Harrison), 197, 198, 290 n. 7 Goblin Market and Other Poems (Blackie/Harrison), 234 Goblin Market: A Tale of Two Sisters (Chronicle), 245, 247

Goblin Market (Godine/Gershinowitz), 210, 212, 270, plate 8 Goblin Market (Gollancz/Ware), 210, 211 fig. 6.2, 217 Goblin Market (Gowans/King), 206, 231 Goblin Market (Harrap/Pogány), 206, 291 n. 18 Goblin Market (Harrap/Rackham), 207–8, 209–10, 230, 243, 244, 248, plate 7 Goblin Market (Macmillan/Housman), 56, 84, 85, 86, 87–90, 88 fig. 2.7, 89 fig. 2.8, 204, 246 fig. 7.3, 263, 270. 273, 293 n. 15 and collectors, 224, 226, 245, 247 and emblematic tradition, 87 as a fin-de-siècle gift book, 15, 56, 84, 85, 90, 224, 243 LH’s illustrations for, 84, 85, 86, 87–90, 246 fig. 7.3, 263, 293 n. 15 CGR’s response to, 57, 84, 85, 86, 90, 293 n. 15 decorations for, 84, 246 fig. 7.3 title page for, 87, 88 fig. 2.7 “White and golden Lizzie stood,” 87, 89–90, 89 fig. 2.8 publishing history contract for, 84, 85 and Macmillan, 83–84, 85, 86 price of, 227 reprints of, 15, 243, 245, 247, 270 response of CGR to, 57, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 293 n. 15 reception of, 90 Goblin Market (Macmillan/Raskin), 13, 203–5, 220, plate 6 Goblin Market (Routledge/Tarrant), 206 Goblin Market (Silver Unicorn/Thompson), 293 n. 21 Goblin Market (Stonehill/Housman), 245, 247 Goblin Market (T. C. and E. C. Jack/Calthrop), 206–7, 256 Goblin Market (W. P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell/Ross), 206 Marchnad y Corachod (Harvey), 293 n. 21 Poems by Christina Rossetti (Blackie/Harrison) binding of, 232–33, 234, 236 contract for, 233, 234 decorations for, 233, 235 design of, 232, 233–34, 236 as a gift book, 13, 232, 233, 234, 236, 273 illustrations by Harrison for “A Bird’s-Eye View” (frontispiece), 235, plate 12 “A Portrait,” 235, 237 fig. 7.3 “A Royal Princess,” 235 reception of, 234–35 reprints of, 197–98, 234, 29 0 n. 7, 290 n. 9 A Poet’s Prayers, 185

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Rossetti, Christina: illustrated reprints and spin-offs (cont.) The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (Melrose/Sandheim), 238 Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent (SPCK), 13, 182–84, 186 Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep” (SPCK), 13, 176–82, 184, 186, 289 n. 7, 289 n. 8, 289 n. 9 Remember Me When I Am Gone Away (Souvenir/Denley), 172, 249 Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti (Melrose/Sandheim), 238, 239 fig. 7.2 Shorter Poems of Christina Rossetti (Blackie/Harrison), 234 Sing-Song and Other Poems for Children (Macmillan/Davis), 213–16, 215 fig. 6.3 The Skylark (Macmillan), 249 Verses by Christina G. Rossetti Reprinted from G. Polidori’s Edition of 1847 (Eragny/Pissarro), 228–29, plate 11 Verses from Sing-Song (Pied Piper/Kohs), 216 What Is Pink? (Macmillan/Aruego), 217–19, plate 9 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel admiration for Blake of, 5, 26 article on in Magazine of Art, 52 as an artist, 5, 258 The Annunciation, 176–77, 182, 259 art training of, 22, 23 chalk portrait of CGR by, 185 drawing of CGR and FLMR by, 175 fame as, 11, 22, 62, 63, 279 n. 8 Found, 259, 276 n. 5, 293 n. 12 The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 173, 174 fig. 5.1, 176, 236, 259 Proserpine, 292 n. 19 and artistic control, 10, 57, 60, 76 as a book artist and illustrator of Allingham’s The Music Master, 98 “The Maids of Elfen-Mere,” 58, 77 approach to illustration of, 9, 10, 30, 56, 57–58, 60, 61, 64, 65–66, 67–68, 69, 76–77, 79, 81, 260 attitude to engravers of, 58, 60 and CGR’s American publications, 64–65, 96, 280 n. 12 of CGR’s “Amor Mundi,” 45 on CGR’s art and artistic aptitude, 22, 24, 26, 43, 276 n. 5 as CGR’s favorite illustrator, 45, 57, 65, 83, 100 of CGR’s Goblin Market and Other Poems, 9, 10, 15, 45, 56, 60, 61, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 90, 133, 204, 229, 272, 279 n. 5 design for, 9–10, 60, 67 frontispiece (“Buy from us with a golden

curl”) for, 64, 67–68, 69–70, 70 fig. 2.1, 72, 86, 87, 203, 261, 272 proposed frontispiece on “A Birthday” for, 64 second edition corrections for, 64, 279 n. 11 title page (“Golden head by golden head”) for, 64, 67–68, 72, 73 fig. 2.3, 74–75, 244 and transactions with Macmillan, 62–63, 64 of CGR’s “Maude Clare,” 44 of CGR’s The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, 9–10, 15, 45, 46, 56, 60, 62, 65, 66, 67, 69, 76–77, 92, 133, 140, 229, 238, 248, 279 n. 5, 281 n. 27, 281 n. 28, 282 n. 29 design of, 9, 60, 67 frontispiece (“You should have wept her yesterday” ) for, 46, 68, 77–79, 78 fig. 2.4, 222 proposed third illustration for, 76, 281 n. 27 studies for, 76, 79, 222, 281 n. 28 title page (“The long hours go and come and go”) for, 68, 79–81, 80 fig. 2.5 and transactions with Macmillan, 76 of CGR’s Verses of 1847, 65, 277 n. 16, 280 n. 14, 280 n. 15 earnings as an illustrator of, 61 influence on other book artists and illustrators of, 54, 57, 58, 84, 87, 90, 193, 199, 203, 229, 231, 235, 258 of the Moxon Tennyson, 57, 58, 59, 60, 98 “The Lady of Shalott,” 77 “Sir Galahad,” 67 of own work, 61 “A Sonnet is a Moment’s monument,” 65–66, 156, 280 n. 16, 280 n. 17 of Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, 283 n. 7 and CGR’s poetry, 40, 47, 75, 83, 264 and CGR’s Sing-Song arrangement of review for, 284 n. 19 dealings with F. S. Ellis over, 93, 94 view of Hughes’s illustrations of, 100 as collaborator with CGR, 9, 10, 11, 46, 54, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 75–76, 82, 83, 86, 142, 229 correspondence with CGR regarding noncollaborative publications, 128, 145, 147 and the double work of art, 43, 278 n. 21 and the emblematic tradition, 65–66, 67, 69, 70–72, 79, 156 home life and family relations of, 4, 5, 22 influence on CGR of, 5, 22, 52, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65–66, 67, 75–76, 82, 86, 93, 94

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intertextual methodology of, 69, 76, 77, 79 and the Pre-Raphaelites, 5, 10, 11, 30, 44, 45, 46, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 65, 67, 98, 231, 241, 245, 258 in twentieth-century representations, 241, 245, 292 n. 20 as a writer “The Blessed Damozel,” 79 Dante at Verona and Other Poems, 61 Early Italian Poets, 61 “Hand and Soul,” 77, 260 The House of Life, 52 “Jenny,” 72 Poems, 93 Rossetti, Frances Lavinia attitude to women artists of, 24, 26 gift of decorated card to, 156–57, 166, plate 2 gift of sonnets to, 65–66 influence on CGR of, 24, 64, 147, 156, 157, 161, 166 portrait by CGR of, 24, 25 fig. 1.1 portraits with CGR of, 175, 289 n. 5 presentation copy of Sing-Song of, 285 n. 34 Rossetti, Gabriele, 277 n. 15 L’Arpa Evangelica, 28, 29 Rossetti, Lucy Madox, 52, 286 n. 43 Rossetti, Maria Francesca and the All Saints Sisterhood, 156, 157 Bible owned by, 221, 226 Elements of Drawing owned by, 4, 155 influence on CGR of, 147, 156, 157–58 Letters to My Bible Class, 147 A Shadow of Dante, 28, 39, 277 n. 9, 277 n. 10 and the SPCK, 147, 157 Rossetti, Teodorico Pietrocola, 147 Rossetti, William Michael and CGR’s art, 22, 24, 26, 83, 156, 158, 276 n. 4 on CGR’s biography, 1–2, 4, 22, 41, 83, 263, 280 n. 14, 285 n. 33 and CGR’s business transactions, 12, 97 as CGR’s editor, 175 Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, 146, 228 as CGR’s heir, 28, 227, 285 n. 34 as CGR’s literary executor, 56, 287 n. 10, 292 n. 9 CGR’s presentation copies to, 86, 280 n. 15 portrait of by CGR, 26, 27 fig. 1.2 and the Pre-Raphaelites, 5, 52, 67, 98 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 190 Routledge (publisher) as publisher of Dalziel Fine Art Books, 282 n. 1 as publisher of Sing-Song, 11, 96, 278 n. 28, 282 n. 2 as publisher of Tarrant’s Goblin Market (1912), 206 Toy Books of, 190

Royal Academy Exhibition of, 254, 256, 260–61, 283 n. 9, 292 n. 10 Royal Academy Pictures, 258 School of Art of, 22, 254 and women pupils, 23 Royal Scottish Academy, 283 n.9 Royal Watercolour Society, 255 Ruskin, John, 21, 151, 161, 264 attitude to Ann Mary Howitt’s work of, 277 n. 6 influence on CGR of, 5, 6, 39, 66 Modern Painters, 5, 238 Sesame and Lilies, 264 view of CGR’s poetry of, 264 Salaman, Malcolm, 293 n. 8 Saler, Elizabeth, 49 Salmon, Edward, 16, 133, 290 n. 10 Sandars, Mary, 277 n. 9 Sandheim, May The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, 238 Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti, 238, 292 n. 14 “Buy from us with a golden curl,” 239 fig. 7.2 Sandys, Frederick “Amor Mundi,” 46–47, 48 fig. 1.7, 255 “Husband and Wife,” 46 Schongauer, Martin, 282 n. 42 school books. See also under publishing illustrations in 153, 199, 234, 262 means of designating readers of, 195, 196–98 in the twentieth-century institutional system. 191–92 in the Victorian education system, 192, 193 schoolchildren, 16, 184, 196, 197, 198, 234 schools. See also art schools Board, 91, 196, 197 Day, 172, 180 elementary, 193, 197, 198 high, 193 plays in, 262–65 private, 193 public, 213 secondary, 197, 198 Sunday, 13, 172, 179, 180 schoolteachers and children’s books, 191, 203, 212, 213, 214, 217, 219, 263, 264, 268 and reward books, 184 and text books, 195, 196, 197, 198 Schwarcz, Chava, 216, 217 Schwarcz, Joseph H., 216, 217 Scott, William Bell, 24, 79, 94, 100 Scribner’s (publishers), 49 Scribner’s Monthly, 45, 100 Seward, Prudence, 290 n. 4

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sexuality changing definitions of, 15, 241 and children, 15, 16, 205, 265 (see also under child, children; children’s books) lesbian, 74, 75, 242, 244, 245, 247, 266 symbols of labyrinth, 79 toad, 47 and the Victorians, 15, 241, 242 of women, 15, 79 Shavit, Zohar, 204 Shaw, John Byam art school of, 256 Boer War, 1900, 254 “But never see my heart is breaking for a little love,” 256 Love Strong as Death Is Dead, 256 “The Spring spreads one green lap of flowers which Autumn buries at the Fall,” 293n. 6 Shaw, John Mackay, 276 n. 17 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 161 Shepard, E. H.: “Gobbling Market,” 261, 262, 262 fig. 8.3 Shields, Frederic cover for Time Flies by, 142 painting of A Royal Princess by, 287 n. 2 Shilling Magazine, The, 45, 49, 255 Shipley, Reverend Orby, 142 Sibelius, 264 Sickbert, Virginia, 108, 124 Siddall, Elizabeth, 24, 279 n.4 Silver Unicorn Press, 293 n. 21 Simcox, G. A., 146 Simon, John, 268 sister arts, 43, 58, 65, 66, 82, 98, 280 n. 20. See also visual-verbal relations Sleeping Beauty, The, 75, 256 Smellie, Alexander, 238 Smith, Clark Ashton, 251 Smith, Sarah Phelps, 259, 260, 293 n. 12 Smulders, Sharon, 102, 107, 285 n. 32, n. 36 Society for Preventing Cruelty to Children, 263 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, The. See SPCK Society of Authors, 201, 290 n. 13 Solomon, 149 souvenir books, 172, 248, 249 Souvenir Press, 172, 249 SPCK (The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) audience of, 3–4, 147, 151 book prices of, 147, 184 bookstores of, 4, 172 and CGR copyright payments to and publication of, 139, 145, 146, 227, 287 n. 8; Called to Be Saints, 12, 143, 145, 148, 287n. 8, 287 n. 16; The Face of the Deep, 146, 172, 177,

183, 184, 185, 186, 287 n. 8; Seek and Find, 145, 147, 184, 287 n. 8; Time Flies, 184, 287 n. 8; Verses (1893), 146, 175, 184, 186 deletion of books by from list of, 186 posthumous construction of, 172, 175, 176, 177, 180, 185, 187–88 publisher of memorials to: An Appreciation of the Late Christina G. Rossetti, 172, 176, 185, 186; A Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti, 172–75, 174 fig. 5.1, 186 recycling of work by, 13, 172; in Christmas Booklets, 186–87, 289 n. 12; in Redeeming the Time: Daily Musings for Lent Compiled from the Works of Christina G. Rossetti, 13, 182–84, 183 fig. 5.3, 186; in Reflected Lights from “The Face of the Deep,” 13, 176–82, 181 fig. 5.2, 184, 186, 289 n. 7, 289 n. 8, 289 n. 9; in Reward Books, 172, 184–86 editorial secretary of, 144, 146, 176, 182, 185, 186, 287 n. 5, 288 n. 1 as educational publisher, 153, 172 as High Church publisher, 144 publishing purpose of, 3–4, 172 Referee Board of, 144, 148 Tract Committee of, 144–46, 148, 179, 182, 186 and illustration children’s books of, 134, 275 n. 4 stock imagery of, 13, 172, 178, 179, 182, 187 use of pictures by, 4, 153 Reward Books of, 184–86 Rossetti family connections with, 147, 157 tracts of, 4, 172, 179, 184 twentieth-century reorganization of, 186, 187 as a Victorian publisher, 12 author payment policy of, 145–46 circulation practices of, 4, 275 n. 3 Spielmann, M. H., 52, 279 n. 32 St. Nicholas Magazine, 3, 45, 49, 278 n. 28 Stanfield, C., 59 Stanwood, P. G., 248 Star Tribune, 294 n. 21 Stein, Richard L., 173 Stephens, Frederick G., 52 Stephens, Henry L.: “An Alphabet from England,” 50, 51 fig. 1.8 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 213 Stewart, Susan, 223, 238 Stone, Marcus: Old Letters, 224 Stonehill (publisher), 242, 245, 247, 292 n. 20 Strahan, Alexander, 128, 286 n. 41 Studio, The 231, 234, 256, 258, 261, 293 n. 8 Surtees, Virginia, 281 n. 28 Sussman, Herbert, 38

index

Swinburne, Algernon, 11, 93 Songs before Sunrise, 283 n. 7 symbolist, 42, 228, 252, 258, 273, 276 n. 1 Symon, J. D., 228 Syrett, Nellie: “Time is short, life is short,” 231 Tarrant, Margaret: Goblin Market, 206 Tate Gallery, 241 Taylor, John Russell, 282 n. 35 Taylor, R. Loring, 15, 102, 243, 276 n. 16 Taylor, Tom, 282 n. 1 Teichman, Mary: Color: A Poem, 217, 218–19 Temptation of St. Anthony, The, 282 n. 42 Tenniel, John, 98, 101, 128, 286 Tennyson, Alfred A Dream of Fair Women, 198 Idylls of the King, 293 n. 10 “The Lady of Shalott,” 77, 180 profits from sales of illustrated edition of Poems of, 60 in school texts, 198 views on illustration of, 45, 57, 58, 59, 282 n. 1 Tennyson, G. B., 29, 30, 34 Thomas, Edward: The Green Roads, 290 n. 4 Thompson, Sheila: Goblin Market, 293 n. 21 Times, The, 134, 234, 245, 268 Timothy, Saint, 148 Toronto Dance Theater, 265–66 Toy Books, 190 Tractarianism. See also Oxford movement analogical mode of thought of, 5, 29, 30, 34, 151, 163, 180 doctrines of Reserve and Analogy of, 34 and the emblematic tradition, 30 influence on CGR of, 5, 6, 29, 30, 34, 150, 151, 163, 172, 180, 275 n. 5 poetry of, 6, 29, 30, 150, 172 sacramentalism of, 5, 6 tracts. See illustrated tracts Trestle Theater Company, 270–72, 294 n. 24,n. 25 Troxell, Janet Camp, 63, 278 n. 25, 288 n. 32 Tuell, Anne, 149 Tynan, Katherine, 172 typology, typological, 5, 22, 38, 39, 41, 47, 66, 68, 69, 76, 77, 87, 89–90, 148, 156, 164, 276 n. 1. See also Pre-Raphaelitism; Rossetti, Christina: symbolism of; Tractarianism type of Christ, 90, 105 type of the poet, 148 type of the servant, 148 Unmasked, 244 Urbanelli, Lora, 228–29 ut pictura poesis, 72. See also visual-verbal relations

Vale Press, 227 Vaughan, William, 59 vellum, 208, 225, 227, 230, 234, 236 Victoria, Queen, 28 Victorian Other, 268 Vineyard Theater, 266, 294 n. 20 visual culture, 2, 4, 5, 8, 66, 212, 217, 249, 250, 252, 261, 271 visual imagination of CGR, 6, 8, 13, 17, 21, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 38, 41, 55, 81, 83, 86, 141, 149, 167, 231, 252 of DGR 81, 86 of other artists, 46, 57, 162, 252, 254, 259, 272, 275 n. 6 visual literacy, 217, 219 visual-verbal (image/text) relations. See also illustrated books; illustration; PreRaphaelites; Rossetti, Christina: aesthetic of aesthetic of, 6, 11, 28, 34, 35, 43, 44, 45, 61, 67 in cinema, 250 and collaborations, 6, 44, 45, 57, 67, 76, 82, 83, 84, 100, 102, 119, 126, 142, 216, 260 coordination of, 10, 275 n. 12 disjunctive relations of, 176–77, 178, 179, 289 n. 9 format of, 3, 61, 67, 212, 248 on the Internet, 251 and poetry/painting, 252, 253 and the Pre-Raphaelites, 5, 28, 29, 32, 45, 75 in reprints, 14 and the role of the perceiver in, 251 in theater, 252, 253, 263, 265, 270 vivisection. See Rossetti, Christina: and vivisection Ware, Martin: Goblin Market, 210, 211 fig. 6.2, 217 Waterford, Lady, 83, 161–62 Watson, Jeanie, 16 Watts, Bernadette: Fly Away, Fly Away, Over the Sea, 219–20, plate 10 Watts, G. F.: Hope, 185 Webster, Augusta, 284 n. 27 Weintraub, Stanley, 276 n. 15 Westcott, Reverend B. F., 171, 172, 176, 177, 185–86 An Appreciation of the Late Christina Georgina Rossetti, 172, 177, 185–86 Westerholm, Joel, 148, 179 Whalley, Joyce Irene, 15, 101 What’s On, 266 Wheeler, Dorothy M.: Goblin Market, 207 Whistler, James McNeil, 255 White, Gleeson, 52, 90, 133, 189 Wide-Awake, 3, 45, 50, 278 n. 26 Wilde, Oscar, 255

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Williams, Isaac The Altar: CGR’s illustrations for, 28, 29, 38, 277 n. 9 The Baptistery, 38, 150 influence on CGR of, 5, 29, 30, 38, 150, 162 Wilsher, Toby, 270, 272, 294 n. 24 Wilson, Lisa, 165–66, 273 Winston, Gord, 266 women, representations of, 35, 47, 74, 77, 79, 87, 89–90, 175, 176, 180, 182, 187, 238, 240, 241, 245, 264 women artists, 23, 26, 32, 154, 155, 162, 165, 231

woodcut books, 178–79 woodcuts. See reproductive processes wood engraving. See reproductive processes Woods, M. A., 290 n. 6 A First School Poetry Book, 196–97 A Second School Poetry Book, 16, 196–97 Woolner, Thomas, 287 n. 14 W. P. Nimmo, Hay and Mitchell (publishers), 207 Yglesias, Roy, 196