When we look back at the Victorian era, we have
this very rigid mental map. Oh, absolutely. We
see the stiff collars, the London fog, the repressed
emotions. And if I ask you to picture a Victorian
poetess, you probably conjure up a very specific
image. Right. Someone safe, maybe a bit fragile,
writing quiet verses in a parlor. Exactly. Someone
devout, writing about flowers and Jesus and not
much else. The angel in the house, as the saying
goes. It's an incredibly sticky archetype. It
frames women of that era as purely domestic,
passive creatures who existed solely to, you
know, soothe the brows of their husbands and
manage the household. Right. And then if I say
the name Rosetti, most people immediately pivot.
They go straight to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Of
course. The wild hair, the wombats in the garden,
the opium, the bohemian king of the pre -Raphaelite
brotherhood. He was a massive personality. He
sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the room, in
any room he was in, really. But today, we are
pushing him to the side. We are focusing on the
other Rossetti, Christina Rossetti. And the reason
we're doing this deep dive is that the pious
spinster image, it's not just incomplete, it's
actively misleading. It's a total misreading
of her character and her work. Because if you
dig into the letters, the biographies, and critically
the reception of her work at the time, you don't
find a passive observer. You find a woman who
was arguably, well, one of the darkest, most
complex, and most technically brilliant poets
of the entire 19th century. I'm really glad you
used the word darkest, because even though she's
the one who wrote some of the Christmas carols
we all sing. Her mind was dwelling in some very
shadowy, very intense places. It's a huge contradiction.
A huge one. And, you know, after Elizabeth Barrett
Browning died in 1861, the critics didn't really
look for a man to replace her as the great poet
of the age. They looked directly at Christina
Rossetti and essentially said, she is the one.
She is the foremost female poet of her day. That's
a heavy crown to wear, especially in that era.
It is. But she wore it differently. She's such
an enigma because she lived at the absolute epicenter
of the coolest, loudest, most revolutionary art
movement in London. The Pre -Raphaelites. Exactly.
Yet she cultivated this persona of silence and
refusal. A quiet rebel is a great way to put
it. She navigated severe nervous breakdowns,
this intense religious extremism, and a really,
really complicated relationship with the concept
of love and marriage. So that is our mission
today. We're going to strip away that saintly
lady veneer. We need to understand how she operated
within the pre -Raphaelite brotherhood, not just
as a pretty face on a canvas, but as a sharp,
insightful critic. A participant, not just a
muse. Exactly. And we're going to deconstruct
the absolute fever dream that is Goblin Market.
I mean, we have to. We could spend the whole
time on just that poem. We really could. And
I really want to understand why she chose loneliness.
Because looking at the source material, it wasn't
an accident. It wasn't because she didn't have
options. It feels like it was a strategy. A strategy
of self -preservation. That's a great way to
frame it. She was protecting something. We have
a lot of ground to cover. Biographies, letters,
publication history, the poetry itself. Let's
start at the very beginning. The Rossetti Hothouse.
because she wasn't just born into a standard
British middle -class family, was she? Oh, not
even close. If you walked into 38 Charlotte Street
in London around, say, 1835, you wouldn't feel
like you were in England. You'd feel like you
walked into a political salon in Naples. Really?
That's specific? Absolutely. Christina was born
there in 1830, the youngest of four. Her father,
Gabriello Rossetti, wasn't just a dad. He was
a political exile, a revolutionary. Okay, so
the sources describe him as a poet and a carbonero.
A revolutionary. Yes. He was from the Abruzzo
region of Italy. He had to flee in 1824 because
his poetry was a little too supportive of the
revolutionary cause against the Bourbon monarchy.
So he lands in London, manages to become a professor
of Italian at King's College, and turns his home
into this magnet for every Italian exile scholar,
artist, and revolutionary passing through the
city. So the house is just buzzing with politics
and poetry and Italian accents. Constantly. Christina
is growing up with Dante Alighieri effectively
being the fifth child in the family. She was
steeped in it from birth. Essentially. And Petrarch.
The house was loud, intellectual, and bilingual.
And then you have her mother, Frances Polidori.
And this is where the literary pedigree gets
really gothic. Okay, I'm ready. Francis was the
sister of John William Polidori. Wait, Polidori.
That's Lord Byron's physician, right? That Polidori?
The very same. The man who was there at the Villa
Diodati in 1816 during the year without a summer,
the night Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein.
No way. Yes. Polidori actually wrote The Vampire
during that same trip, which basically invented
the modern aristocratic vampire genre. So on
her father's side, you have Italian political
revolutionaries. Right. And on her mother's side,
you have... The guy who literally invented the
vampire. That explains a lot about the tone of
Christina's work, doesn't it? It explains everything.
The passion, the darkness, the morbidity. It
wasn't a normal childhood. Far from it. And the
siblings, Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and
Maria, they were a powerhouse quartet, as one
biographer puts it. Incredibly bright, competitive,
creative, and very, very close. They even had
nicknames for each other. They called themselves
the Two Storms, which were Dante and Christina.
The passionate ones. Right. And the Two Palms,
which were William and Maria. And the young Christina.
The sources say she wasn't the gloomy recluse
yet. She was the lively one, the stormy one.
Very lively. There's a fantastic anecdote where,
before she could even write, she dictated her
first story to her mother. It was about a dervish
named Hassan. I mean, that just shows the confidence.
She was surrounded by words and stories, so she
just joined in. And she was educated entirely
at home. Entirely. Absorbing everything. Religious
tracks, fairy tales, classics like Keats and
Scott, and a lot of gothic horror novels like
Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. So
she had a rich inner world. But she wasn't a
shut -in. She liked London. Oh, she loved London.
Unlike her parents, who always felt the pain
of exile, Christina felt completely at home.
She visited the zoo, Madame Tussauds. The sources
show she was engaging with the world, curious.
But then we see this massive shift in the 1840s.
A crisis hits the family, and it seems to be
the trauma that defines the rest of her life.
What happened? The whole world fell apart. The
economy of the family completely collapsed. Her
father's health failed catastrophically. He developed
chronic bronchitis. He was losing his sight,
and he was likely suffering from a severe debilitating
depression. He had to give up his teaching post
at King's College. Which means the money stopped
coming in. The main source of income was gone.
Exactly. And in Victorian London, that is a precipice
you do not want to fall over. The slide from
middle class respectability to poverty was terrifyingly
quick. And the family dynamics just inverted.
Completely. The mother, Frances, who had been
managing this intellectual household, had to
go out and start teaching Italian. Her sister,
Maria, who was brilliant in her own right, had
to go out and work as a live -in governess. and
from what i read christina viewed the prospect
of being a governess with absolute horror she
dreaded it It was the standard fate for a refined,
educated woman with no money, but to her it meant
servitude. It meant a total loss of your autonomy,
your time, your intellectual freedom. But she
didn't have to do it. No, and here is the tragedy.
Because she was the youngest and always seen
as the delicate one, she was the one left at
home, left to care for her sick, depressed, and
probably very difficult father while everyone
else was out working to keep the family afloat.
That is an absolute pressure cooker. Yeah. You're
a teenager, you're creative, you're full of this
stormy energy, and you're trapped in a dark house
with a dying parent watching your family slide
into poverty. And the result was, unfortunately,
predictable. At age 14 in 1845, she suffered
a severe nervous breakdown. She had to leave
what little formal schooling she had, and the
lively child just vanished. She became withdrawn,
melancholic, and suffered from a range of physical
ailments for the rest of her life. And this is
where the religion takes hold isn't it? It's
not just a comfort. It becomes an entire operating
system for her life. An operating system is the
perfect analogy. It wasn't just going to church.
This was a specific, intense flavor of Christianity.
She, her mother, and her sister Maria became
deeply involved in the Anglo -Catholic movement.
Sometimes called the Oxford movement or Tractarianism.
Exactly. Can you break that down for us? How
was that different from regular Church of England
services at the time? Think of it as the Church
of England trying to reclaim its Catholic heritage
before the Reformation. It was all about high
ritual, heavy on... symbolism, the importance
of confession, and a very, very intense focus
on personal sin, self -examination, and the path
to redemption. So it's not a casual Sunday faith?
Not at all. It was a rigorous, demanding spiritual
lifestyle. And for Christina, this became the
lens through which she saw everything. Every
earthly pleasure had to be weighed against the
eternal soul. It provided a structure for her
suffering, giving meaning to her pain, but it
also imposed incredible restrictions on her.
So she creates this rigid, ascetic framework
for herself, right as her brother, Dante Gabriel,
is about to launch the most rebellious, colorful,
and sensual art movement in Britain. The Pre
-Raphaelite Brotherhood. established in 1848.
The timing is just incredible. Talk about a clash
of worlds. It's a fundamental split in the Rossetti
siblings. You have Dante and his friends, the
PRB, who are all about nature, bright colors,
truth to life, challenging the stuffy royal academy,
and living this very bohemian, sometimes scandalous
lifestyle. And right in the middle of it is Christina,
the Anglo -Catholic ascetic. It seems like she
would have run a mile away. But she couldn't.
It was her family. And she wasn't just in the
room. She was the face of it. That's the deepest
irony. If you look at the very first PRB paintings,
you are looking at Christina Rossetti. She was
the model for the Virgin Mary, wasn't she? Yes,
in two of Dante Gabriel's earliest and most important
paintings. She's Mary in The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin from 1848. And she's Mary again in Ecce
and Silla Domini, which means Behold the Handmaiden
of the Lord in 1850. So she is literally the
icon of the movement's debut. Literally, when
people thought of the pre -Raphaelite woman in
those first couple years, they were thinking
of her face, those heavy eyelids, the long neck,
that contemplative, serious expression. It's
so strange to think of her as the visual symbol
of revolution. She was... At best, sort of ambivalent
about. Ambivalent is the perfect word. She supported
her brothers fiercely, but she was never seduced
by the lifestyle. She saw the vanity in it. But
this is where the popular narrative usually stops.
She was the sister who sat for the paintings.
It's a footnote. But she was writing for them,
too. She absolutely was. The PRB had a literary
journal called The Germ. Which is a terrible
name, by the way. A truly awful name. It sounds
infectious, like you need to wash your hands
after reading it. And it didn't last long, did
it? No, only four issues. It was a commercial
disaster. But Christina published seven poems
in it. She used a pseudonym, Ellen Allen. But
anyone in their circle would have known it was
her. So at 20 years old, she's in print, right
alongside her famous brother and his friends.
Right. So she wasn't just a muse. She was a creator.
And frankly, if you read the journal now, modern
critics often argue her contributions were the
strongest and most mature pieces in the whole
publication. And she wasn't just a creator. She
was a critic, a very sharp one. I want to dive
into that poem in the artist's studio because
when I read this, I felt like I was witnessing
a very polite, very poetic murder. It is a devastatingly
sharp piece of analysis. It was written in 1856.
So by this time, her brother Dante Gabriel is
completely obsessed with Elizabeth Siddle, who
was his primary muse and future wife. And he
is painting her over and over and over again
as a saint, as a tragic heroine, as a lover.
And Christina's watching this happen. She's in
the studio. She walks into the studio, sees all
these canvases, and she writes, One face looks
out from all his canvases. One self -same figure
sits or walks or leans. She describes how how
he paints the woman as a queen, a nameless girl,
a saint, an angel. But then the poem pivots.
It pivots hard. She says the artist feeds upon
her face by day and night. Feeds upon her face.
That's not romantic language. That is predatory.
It's almost vampire language going back to her
uncle. It is. It's about consumption, not adoration.
And then she delivers the killing blow, the lines
that just stop you in your tracks. She says he
paints her not as she is, but as she fills his
dream. Wow. Not as she is, but as she fills his
dream. One of the most profound critiques of
the male gaze ever written. She is saying that
this so -called pre -Raphaelite worship of women
isn't actually about the women at all. It's about
male artistic ego. It's narcissism. The artist
is just projecting his own fantasy onto a silent
object. Precisely. He doesn't love the woman.
He loves his own artistic vision of the woman.
He's feeding his own dream, not seeing her reality.
And she's calling out her own brother. For erasing
the humanity of the woman he claims to love.
That must have been incredibly tense. Incredibly.
And she could only write that because she was
on the inside. She knew what it felt like to
be the face on the canvas, to be told to sit
still and look holy while the men discussed art
with a capital A. She's asserting that the muse
has eyes and a mind and she's judging the artist.
It completely upends the power dynamic. That
creates such a tension in her life. She's part
of this revolutionary group, but she's also the
moral conscience sitting in the corner taking
notes. And that tension, that internal pressure,
it just... explodes in 1862 when she publishes
her own collection goblin market and other poems
this is the big one this is the moment she steps
out of everyone's shadow and weirdly her brother
dante gabriel illustrated it Which is fascinating,
isn't it? Because his illustrations are incredibly
sensual. The frontispiece shows the two sisters
in bed together, and the title page shows the
goblins swarming Lizzie. He really leaned into
the strange, seductive, and slightly sinister
vibe of the title poem. Okay, we have to talk
about Goblin Market. If you are listening to
this and you haven't read it, you need to stop
and find it online. It is, it's wild. It's unlike
anything else. It's a narrative poem, it's quite
long, and it's about two sisters, Laura and Lizzie,
who live together in a cottage. And every evening,
they hear these goblin merchants selling fruit
down by the river. Come by our orchard fruits.
Come by, come by. It's one of the most famous
and hypnotic opening sequences in Victorian poetry.
The goblins themselves are described as these
animalistic creatures. One has a cat's face,
one's like a rat. And the fruit they're selling.
It's not just apples and pears. No, it's this
lush, exotic, overwhelming list. Plump, unpecked
cherries, wild, freeborn cranberries, pineapples,
blackberries, apricots, strawberries. The description
is pure sensory overload. It's meant to be intoxicating.
And Laura, the curious sister, is entranced.
But they have no money. So she pays with the
lock of her golden hair and a tear. Which is
already a massive red flag in any fairy tale
logic. You never, ever give a goblin a piece
of yourself. Your hair, your name, anything.
It's a huge mistake. Yeah. And she eats the fruit.
And the poem describes it as this ecstatic, almost
transcendent experience. She sucked and sucked
and sucked the more fruits which that unknown
orchard bore. But then she goes home, and the
next day she begins to waste away. She's suffering
from a terrible withdrawal. She longs for more
fruit, but she can no longer hear the goblins
cry. He's aging rapidly, her hair turns gray,
and she's clearly dying. The fruit has acted
like a poison or a powerful addiction. So the
other... Sister Lizzie, the good, cautious sister,
decides she has to save Laura. She goes to the
goblins to get fruit for her. Right. but she's
smart she takes a silver penny she's going to
conduct a proper transaction she wants to buy
the fruit and take it home but the goblins aren't
interested in commerce they turn violent they
don't want her money they want her to eat exactly
and they attack her they try to force feed her
the fruit they pull her hair tear her dress they
squeezed out the juice that served all her face
and lodged in every dimple they basically assault
her with this fruit and this scene Reading it,
it's incredibly intense. It feels like a symbolic
sexual assault. It is vividly assaultive. But
Lizzie stands there like a rock, refusing to
open her mouth. Like a lily in a flood, the poem
says. She endures the abuse without partaking.
She just lets them cover her in juice. And then
she runs home. She runs home, covered in this
sticky juice and pulp, and she tells Laura to
kiss it off her face. Her exact words are, hug
me, kiss me, suck my juices, eat me, drink me,
love me. Which is, I mean, that is some astonishingly
charged language. It is, and Laura kisses the
juice off Lizzie's face, and it acts as a painful
antidote. It burns her looks like poison, but
then it breaks the fever. It cures her. She is
saved. Okay, so. What on earth is this poem about?
Because I've seen interpretations that range
from, you know, it's a charming story for children,
all the way to it's about heroin addiction and
it's a coded exploration of lesbian desire. And
the incredible answer is yes. It is all of those
things and more. That's the genius of Rossetti.
The poem acts as a mirror for whatever the critic
wants to find. It supports multiple, even contradictory
interpretations at the same time. Let's break
some of those down. The religious angle seems
like the most obvious starting point since we
know she was so devout. It's a crystal clear
allegory of sin and redemption from an Anglo
-Catholic perspective. Laura is Eve falling into
temptation by eating the forbidden fruit. She
represents fallen humanity. And Lizzie. Lizzie
acts as a Christ figure. She goes into the wilderness,
into the darkness, she willingly suffers violence
and humiliation, and she offers her own body,
eat me, drink me, as a Eucharistic sacrifice
to save her sister. It fits the theology perfectly.
The saving grace is mediated through a pure figure.
That tracks completely. But then you have the
social angle, which is maybe even more radical
for its time. This is where her real world experience
comes in. This isn't just theory for her. Right.
Tell us more about her work at the Highgate Penitentiary,
because this grounds the poem in a very real,
very grim reality. Yes. From 1859 to 1870, so
right when she was writing Goblin Market, Rossetti
volunteered at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary
in Highgate. This was a house of refuge for so
-called fallen women prostitutes, unmarried mothers,
women who had been cast out of polite society.
So she is spending her days listening to the
stories of women who have been ruined by sexual
temptation, ruined by the market. Precisely.
She saw the real world consequences. In Victorian
society, a respectable woman has one primary
commodity. her virtue. Once it's spent or sold,
she's worthless. She's cast out. In Goblin Market,
Rossetti is writing a radically different ending.
How so? Usually in Victorian novels and poems,
the fallen woman dies. That's the only way to
restore social order. Think of Little Emily and
David Copperfield. But in this poem, the fallen
woman, Laura, is saved. And crucially, she's
not saved by a man or a priest or by marriage.
She's saved by another woman, by her sister.
That is a massive subversion of the trope. It's
female solidarity is the... of redemption. And
then... There's the erotic interpretation because
you cannot read those lines without blushing
a little. The language is so physical. You really
can't. The poem is drenched in sensuality, the
sucking of the fruit, the juices, the final scene
between the sisters. It's incredibly oral, incredibly
lush. Many modern critics have argued that the
goblins represent male sexual aggression and
the fruit is forbidden sexual knowledge. The
attack on Lizzie, where they smear their fluids
on her face, is vividly violent and can be read
as a symbolic rape. And the final scene is this
incredibly intimate physical moment between two
women that is both healing and intensely erotic.
It's a work of immense and immensely controlled
desire. It feels like she's channeling all this
repressed energy. We know she lived a very contained,
chaste life, but the poem is an explosion of
sensory detail and barely suppressed passion.
It's like the repression is a powerful fuel.
I think that's exactly it. By locking everything
down in her daily life, she built up this incredible...
pressure that could only be vented into the poetry
if she had lived a loose bohemian life like her
brother she might never have written something
this strange and this intense the constraint
forced the creativity into this bizarre brilliant
unforgettable shape speaking of her locking everything
down we have to talk about her love life or um
Her lack of one. Because looking at the biography,
she had options. This wasn't a case of her sitting
alone because she was unwanted or unlovable.
She was sitting alone because she said no. She
was a master of renunciation. She had three major
suitors that we know of, and she rejected all
of them, each for a very specific principled
reason. Let's run through the roster. Suitor
number one, James Collinson. Collinson was a
painter and one of the seven founding members
of the Pre -Raphaelite Brotherhood. He painted
a very lovely, very sensitive portrait of Christina.
They were engaged in 1848. It was a done deal.
So what happened? Collinson had a crisis of faith.
He was tormented by religious doubt. He'd been
a Roman Catholic, converted to the Church of
England to join the PRB, and then, while engaged
to Christina, he decided he had to revert to
Roman Catholicism. And for Christina, the devout
Anglo -Catholic? That was the deal breaker. A
total deal breaker. The gap between Anglo -Catholicism
and Roman Catholicism might seem small to us
today, but in mid -19th century England, it was
a chasm. The Oxford movement defined itself in
opposition to Rome. For her, it was a matter
of eternal truth. She broke the engagement in
1850. And it devastated her. Absolutely. The
sources say she collapsed in the hallway when
she saw him by chance afterwards. It broke her
heart, but she would not compromise on her theology.
Faith came first. Okay, suitor number two. This
one seems to have been the big love of her life.
Charles Bagot Cayley. The absent -minded scholar.
He was a linguist, a translator of Dante. By
all accounts, they were soulmates. They had a
deep intellectual and emotional bond. Her brother
William wrote that she loved him deeply, more
than anyone else. So what was the problem this
time? He wasn't agnostic, or at least he had
what she considered to be religious scruples.
He just wasn't religious enough. But she loved
him. She connected with him intellectually. but
she wouldn't marry him because he didn't share
her specific faith. She turned him down in 1866.
She remained incredibly close friends with him
until he died. She even acted as the executor
of his will, but she wouldn't marry him. In her
view, marriage was a sacrament, a spiritual union
ordained by God. If they weren't aligned on the
eternal stuff, she couldn't do it. That is a
level of integrity, or you could say stubbornness,
that is hard to wrap your head around today,
to give up what seems to be... true love for
a theological principle. It's the concept of
renunciation made real. She genuinely believed
that by giving up earthly happiness, she was
keeping herself pure for something greater. But
you feel the cost of that choice in her poetry.
There is so much longing, so much grief for what
might have been. It's not the poetry of someone
who doesn't care. It's the poetry of someone
who wants it desperately, but holds herself back.
There's that famous painting by the symbolist
Fernand Knopf, I Lock My Door Upon Myself. Yes,
inspired by a line from her poem, Who Shall Deliver
Me? That line, I lock my door upon myself, is
essentially her motto. She controlled her world
by shutting it out. And there was a third suitor,
wasn't there? John Brett. Yes, another painter.
He was very persistent, but she just shut him
down completely. And her poem, No Thank You,
John, is thought to be about him. It's hilariously,
brutally blunt. I never said I loved you, John.
Why will you tease me day by day? She doesn't
pull any punches. None at all. I have no heart.
Perhaps I have not, but then you're mad to take
offense that I don't give you what I have not
got. It's almost a modern breakup text. She wasn't
afraid to be direct and final. Let's move to
her later years. Because while she's writing
these beautiful, melancholy poems and navigating
these complex emotional decisions, her body is
effectively attacking her. Her health was always
fragile ever since that breakdown at 14. But
in 1872, she was diagnosed with Graves' disease.
It's a serious autoimmune disorder affecting
the thyroid. And in the 19th century, the treatment
for that was? Basically nothing effective. It
was a terrible ordeal. It caused her eyes to
protrude, it darkened her skin, it made her hair
fall out, and it caused heart palpitations and
extreme fatigue. It was disfiguring and exhausting,
and she had a near -fatal crisis with it that
left her an invalid for years. And that wasn't
the end of it. No. Later, in 1893, she developed
breast cancer. She really went through the wringer
physically. She underwent a mastectomy, which
was a brutal, agonizing surgery in 1893 without
modern anesthetic or aftercare. The cancer returned,
and she eventually died in December 1894. But
before she died, she wrote quite a bit about
death. And her attitude wasn't one of fear. It
was almost a kind of coolness. Indifference is
a good word for it. Look at her most famous poem
on the subject, Song. It starts, When I am dead,
my dearest, sing no sad songs for me. Plant thou
no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree.
She tells her lover not to mourn. She says, Just
let me be. And if thou wilt, remember, and if
thou wilt, forget. It's so strikingly modern.
She's rejecting the entire Victorian obsession
with elaborate mourning rituals, the black crepe,
the weeping, the monumental funerals. What do
you think she's saying there? She's saying, I'll
be in the twilight. I'll be dreaming. I won't
know if you're crying or not. Your grief is for
you, not for me. It doesn't matter. It's a very
stoic, almost comforting view of the afterlife
as a place of quiet rest, not fire and brimstone
judgment. Speaking of funerals and graves, we
cannot end this deep dive without talking about
the Highgate Cemetery incident. Because this
story is. It's like something Edgar Allan Poe
would have written, but it actually happened
to her family. It is the ultimate gothic horror
story of the London literary scene. So Christina
is buried in the Rossetti family grave in Highgate
Cemetery, but that grave was already infamous
long before she was laid to rest there. Because
of Elizabeth Siddle, Dante Gabriel's wife? Exactly.
When Elizabeth died of a laudanum overdose in
1862, the same year Goblin Market was published,
Dante was overcome with grief and guilt. He felt
he had neglected her for his art and his other
affairs. So he makes this grand dramatic gesture.
The grandest. At the funeral, just before the
coffin was sealed, he took the only manuscript
of his unpublished poems, his life's work up
to that point, and he slid the book into her
coffin, tucking it into her famous red hair.
He buried his art with his muse. I have given
everything to the grave. It's very dramatic.
Very. It was the ultimate romantic gesture. But
fast forward seven years to 1869. Dante is now
more famous, but his eyesight is failing. He
can't paint as much. And his friends are urging
him to publish a new book of poetry. And he realizes
the only copies of his best early poems are decomposing
six feet under in Highgate Cemetery. Oh, no.
I know what's coming. I still hate it every time
I hear it. He authorizes the exhumation. He gets
permission from the. home secretary. In the dead
of night, with a fire lit beside the grave to
ward off noxious fumes, a group of men dig up
his wife to retrieve a book of poems. That is
just monstrous. It is profoundly macabre. Dante
couldn't bring himself to go. He sat in a friend's
house waiting. But the manuscript was retrieved.
According to eyewitnesses, Seidel's body was
remarkably preserved and her red hair had continued
to grow, filling the coffin. The book was taken
out. disinfected and published and christina
knew about this the whole family knew the whole
family knew it was a dark cloud over them christina
with her profound sense of the sacred and the
profane must have been horrified she knew her
brother had desecrated his wife's grave for the
sake of his career and then she had to be buried
in that same plot eventually yes it really highlights
the fundamental difference between them dante
sacrificed other people even the dead for his
art christina sacrificed herself her for her
faith. She is buried in that same grave, but
her legacy is completely untainted by that kind
of monstrous selfishness. They had a very powerful
distinction to make. But despite all this darkness,
the exhumation, the illness, the constant renunciation,
her public legacy is surprisingly bright. I mean
that literally. We're talking about Christmas.
We are. If you go to a church service or even
just a shopping mall in December, you will hear
Christina Rossetti. She wrote the poem In the
Bleak Midwinter. I had no idea that was her.
I've seen that every year. It was published posthumously.
The composer Gustav Holst set it to music in
1906. And later, another composer, Harold Dark,
did a version. It's consistently voted the best
Christmas carol of all time by choir masters
and experts. And there's another one too, right?
Love came down at Christmas. Another staple.
So the woman who wrote about goblin fruit and
spiritual self -flagellation also scripted the
coziest, most beloved moments of the holiday
season. Contradictions just keep piling up. It
shows her incredible range. She could do this.
Simple, pure, perfect, devotional lyric just
as well as the complex, knotted psychological
drama. And In the Bleak Midwinter is actually
a profound piece of theology. It contrasts the
majesty of God with the humble, freezing reality
of the stable. Earth stood hard as iron, water
like a stone. It's beautiful and real. And her
influence didn't stop in the church. The modernists
who came after, they respected her. They did,
which is rare. Usually the modernist people like
T .S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf despised the Victorians.
They thought they were stuffy and sentimental.
But Virginia Woolf wrote about Rossetti with
real respect. She saw that Rossetti wasn't just
spilling her emotions on the page. She was a
master craftsman. She cut away everything unnecessary,
creating these hard gem -like poems. The poet
Philip Larkin was a huge admirer, too. And we
found some bizarrely contentious... Temporary
pop culture connections when we were researching
this. Very weird ones. J .K. Rowling. The title
of her first crime novel, The Cuckoo's Calling,
is a direct quote from Rossetti's poem, A Dirge.
And the Beatles? Is there a Beatles connection?
Indirectly via Yoko Ono, her song Who Has Seen
the Wind from her 1970 album Plastic Ono Band.
The lyrics are almost verbatim from Rossetti's
children's poem of the same name. That's amazing.
And Bear McCreary, the composer who does the
music for huge shows like The Walking Dead and
video games like God of War. He composed a beautiful
choral piece based on her poem song When I Am
Dead, My Dearest. Her work is just, it's everywhere.
It's in the hymnals. It's in the universities.
It's in the pop charts. It's in detective novels.
One last fun fact to humanize her completely.
We think of her as this ethereal spirit, this
saintly, otherworldly figure. But she was also,
well, a nerd. She was a stamp collector. Get
out. Seriously. A serious philatelist. She started
collecting stamps in 1847. The first adhesive
postage stamp, the Penny Black, was only issued
in 1840. So she was a very early adopter of this
new hobby. That is fantastic. I love that detail.
It's such a mundane, earthly, orderly hobby for
someone with such a tumultuous inner world. The
sources say she wrote letters to her brothers,
asking them to save stamps for her from their
travels. It makes her so real. It reminds you
she was a person sitting in a room, maybe a little
bored, carefully sticking stamps in a book while
also thinking about the vastness of eternity.
It grounds her. So if we have to summarize the
Rossetti paradox, what is it? She's a contradiction
in every possible way. She is. She's the model
who critiqued the artist's gaze. The passionate
romantic who rejected marriage for religion.
The quiet recluse who engaged directly with the
grimmest social problems of her city. It feels
like her power, her entire creative engine, came
from that one word we used earlier, refusal.
I think so. In a world that was shouting, her
brother, the critics, the industrial revolution,
she found her power in silence, in saying no.
She built a fortress around her soul. And by
locking the door upon herself, she actually preserved
her genius. She didn't burn out in a blaze of
glory like her brother. She burned inward, like
a star collapsing into itself. And the result
of that collapse, the light it gives off, is
Goblin Market. The result is Goblin Market. So
that is our challenge to you, the listener. Go
read it, but don't read it as a sweet nursery
rhyme. Read it as the controlled explosion of
a repressed genius who saw everything and said
almost nothing. Until she picked up her pen.
It's a wild, unforgettable ride. Thanks for diving
deep with us. We'll see you on the next one.
Goodbye everyone.