by Susan Keeping

Created on: September 17, 2007   Last Updated: September 18, 2007

"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."
Christina Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti was born in London, England in 1830. She was the youngest of four children; two girls and two boys. She came from one of the most interesting families in Victorian England. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a poet who had to flee Italy for political reasons. He fled to London where he eventually became Professor of Italian at Kings College, London University. Her mother was a Polidori, one of her brothers became Lord Byron's physician. Her brother was the poet and artist, Dante Rossetti.

Christina was brought up in the Church of England. Her father had been Catholic but allowed the children to be brought up as Anglicans. She was very devoted to her religion.

In 1843, her father became ill and had to give up his job. It was then up to her mother to support the family. Christina's older sister, Maria, became a governess, and her brother, William became a government clerk. Dante by then was already an artist, Christina also thought she would become a governess but her health would not allow it. Her mother started a day-school where Christina helped when she could.

In 1848, James Collinson, a painter of her brother's group of artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, proposed marriage to Christina. She turned him down because he had recently converted to Catholicism. He reverted to Anglicanism and proposed again, she accepted. Two year later, however, he again became Catholic and she broke off the engagement.

When she was 17, her grandfather Polidori, printed some of Christina's poems on his private printing press. She contributed some poems under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne in a publication called The Germ, a Pre-Raphaelite literary journal, in 1850.

In 1853, Christina's mother gave up the day-school which had never been much of a success and tried to start another school in Somerset; this failed too. In 1854, Christina's brother, William, brought the family back to London to live with him. However, her father Gabriele died soon after. To earn a little extra money, Christina wrote dictionary articles and Italian translations. The most she made was ten pounds a year.

Lizzie Siddall, Christina's sister-in-law, tried to get her to produce a volume of her works. Eventually, in 1861, she began to prepare her poems for publication.

Her first book, The Goblin Market and Other Poems,

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