Christina Rossetti, one of the important minor poets of the Victorian Age, was, like her more-famous brother Dante Gabriel, born in London. She lived there most of her life. She was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement through her brother, though she was not a part of it. At one time she was engaged to the painter James Collinson, a member of the Brotherhood, but broke the engagement when he left Anglicanism and returned to the Roman Catholic Church.
Miss Rossetti was very deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement, and her life was closely bound up with high-church activities. In poor health most of her days, her appearance reproduced in some of Dante’s paintings tended to become the model of the Pre-Raphaelite ascetic type. She showed literary promise early in life, and her first book of poetry was printed by her maternal grandmother when she was seventeen. Then followed several poems printed in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1861. Goblin Market and Other Poems, published in 1862, is her most famous work. In addition to several other volumes of poetry, she produced nursery rhymes, short stories, children’s stories and a number of religious tracts. Many of her poems are truly ‘Victorian’, that is, much concerned with death and a very serious kind of spirituality. But some have a timeless quality and are still familiar, as this last stanza from A Christmas Carol, sometimes known by its first line, ‘In the deep midwinter’:
What can I give him, Poor as I am? If I were a shepherd I would bring a lamb, If I were a Wise Man I would do my part. Yet what I can I give him, Give my heart.