Victorian
Christina Rossetti
1830 – 1894
English poet (1830–1894)
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- British
- Pre-Raphaelites
- pre-raphaelite-brotherhood
About
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English writer of romantic and devotional poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.
Life on the Timeline
Major Works
No works have been hung in this gallery yet — the acquisitions team is at work.
Exam Dossier
Most-asked topics
- Goblin Market as fantasy/allegory and sisterly love
- Christian devotional and renunciatory themes
- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood connections (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, PRB journal The Germ)
- "Remember" and death/memory poems
- Femininity, self-denial and Victorian gender ideology
- Nonsense and children's verse: Sing-Song
- Sonnet sequence Monna Innominata and the female poetic voice
- "In the Bleak Midwinter" and Rossetti's carols/hymns
Previous-year themes
- Goblin Market: allegory, sexuality, sisterhood and redemption
- Rossetti's place within the Pre-Raphaelite movement
- Devotional/religious poetry and Tractarian influence
- Female desire, renunciation and Victorian gender codes in her verse
- Death, mourning and remembrance as recurring motifs
- Monna Innominata as a response to Petrarchan/Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet tradition
- Rossetti compared with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite poets
Common confusions
- Confusing Christina Rossetti with her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was primarily a painter and poet-founder of the PRB, not the author of Goblin Market.
- Confusing 'Remember' with 'Song (When I am dead, my dearest)' — both deal with death and memory but open and argue differently (Remember asks to be remembered; Song asks to be forgotten without grief).
- Assuming Goblin Market is a children's poem simply because of its fairy-tale surface, overlooking its allegorical/erotic and religious dimensions.
- Mixing up Sing-Song (nursery rhymes, 1872) with Monna Innominata (adult sonnet sequence on love, 1881) as both are shorter verse collections.
- Attributing 'In the Bleak Midwinter' to a male Victorian poet due to its carol/hymn status rather than recognizing Rossetti's authorship.
- Treating Rossetti purely as a devotional/religious poet and overlooking her secular, sensuous, and even subversive early poetry like Goblin Market.
Memory tricks
'Goblin Market, Grapes of temptation' — G for Goblin Market, G for the Garden-of-Eden-like fall through fruit.
'Up-Hill = Up to the end' — the poem's Q&A form mirrors life's uphill journey to death.
'Remember, Remember — the silent land' — links poem title directly to its refrain.
Christina (sister, poet) vs Dante Gabriel (brother, painter-poet) — 'Christina writes, Dante paints (and writes too).'
Sing-Song = Sing for children (nursery rhymes); Monna Innominata = 'unnamed lady' sonnets for adult love.
PRB founded 1848 — 'eighteen-forty-Great' — remember Rossetti family's deep PRB roots via brother DGR.
