THE ROSSETTI CHILDREN

I n the previous issue of the Notiziario, I wrote about the life and work of the Italian patriot and poet, Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854). As noted, Rossetti was condemned to death by the Neapolitan king in 1821, but escaped to London. There he married and had four children, all renowned in the arts in their own right. In fact, many commentators consider the children, particularly two of them, to have eclipsed the accomplishments of the father.

No family of artists is considered more numerous and prolific in England than the Rossettis.

Maria Francesca The oldest child was born on February 17, 1827. Like all of her siblings, she was born in London and baptized in the Anglican Church. Maria Francesca was educated at home and was equally familiar with the languages and literary traditions of both Italy and England. She grew up in a bilingual household headed by her amiable older Italian father who begat her when he was 44 and a younger severe Italo-English mother, Francesca Maria Lavinia Polidori. After her father’s death when she was 27, Maria opened a private day school for small children with her mother and her younger sister.

As the eldest child, she sacrificed her personal happiness for the sake of her mother and her siblings to whom she was very close. After the school failed, Maria supported herself by working as a teacher of history and the Italian language. In 1867 at the age of 40, she published her first two works: Italian Anecdotes and Exercises in Idiomatic Italian. Because of her advantage as a native bilingual speaker, the books were widely accepted in English schools. In 1871 she published A Shadow of Dante which was an essay about the poet, his medieval world, and his long pilgrimage. She followed this success the next year with Letters to My Bible Class which showed her deepening Christian faith With her brother William’s impending marriage and his desire to occupy their shared house with his new wife instead of with her, Maria decided in 1873 to join the Anglican Sisterhood of All Saints. Three years later, she developed cancer and died at age 49 on November 24, 1876.

Gabriele Dante The second Rossetti child was born on May 12, 1828. Torn between opposing views of life represented by his father’s self-indulgence and his mother’s high moral standards, this first son was never able to free himself from their conflict and so expressed himself in poetry and painting. He was educated at the junior school of King’s College, where his father taught Italian, and at Cary’s Art Academy. At the age of 17, he entered the Royal Academy of Art. After two years, he quit to work under the painter, Ford Madox Brown.

A year later he joined William Holman Hunt’s studio. About this time, he re-arranged and altered his name to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1849 Dante co-founded the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was formed to do battle against the frivolous art of that time. Its members advocated a return to a pre-Renaissance purity of style with an emphasis on being true to nature outdoors. Later that year he exhibited an oil painting entitled “Girlhood of Mary the Virgin.” During the next year, he showed “Ecce Ancilla Domine!” also called “The Annunciation”. To prove his versatility, he published that year his first poems “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Portrait” and “My Sister’s Sleep.” Temporarily switching from oils to watercolors, he produced his two greatest masterpieces “Dante’s Dream” in 1856 and “The Wedding of St. George and the Princess Sabra” in 1857

In 1849 Dante and William co-founded the preRaphaelite Brotherhood which was formed to do battle against the frivolous art of that time.

In 1860, he married his 26-year old model, Elizabeth Siddal. Their only child was stillborn the next year. Despondent, his wife committed suicide by taking a drug overdose in 1862. Rossetti buried a manuscript of love poems with her in the Highgate Cemetery and vowed never to write another love poem. After her burial, he painted “Beata Beatrix,” a posthumous portrait of his wife. Rossetti now began to earn a fairly steady income from his paintings. A year later he completed a biography of the English poet and painter, William Blake (1757–1827.) In 1866 he started an affair with a separated but still married woman, Jane Burden Morris, who inspired him to return to write love poetry. Three years later he exhumed his wife and retrieved his manuscript which was published in 1870 with the simple title Poems. The work was much criticized, more for its manner of recovery than for its content.

Depressed by the negative publicity, Rossetti attempted suicide in 1872. Nursed back to health by his mistress, he produced Dante and His Circle in 1874. With the success of this book, he started writing another collection of love poems called Ballads and Sonnets which was published with wide acclaim in 1881. He also resumed oil painting. His best-known works during this period were “Proserpine” shown in 1874 and “La Pia de Tolomei” shown in 1881. However, years of alcohol and drug abuse took their toll on his health and he died a month short of his 54th birthday on April 9, 1882, at Westgate-on-Sea where he had gone to rest and recuperate. At his death, Rossetti had reached a position of artistic prominence and he had a significant influence on the cultural developments of the second half of the 19th century as a leader of the Pre-Raphaelites. Thus, his imaginative genius earned him a place in the top ranks of English visionary artists.

William Michael The third Rossetti child was born on September 25, 1829. As a youngster, he was dubbed by his parents as “a good little boy,” calm, rational and humble, in contrast to his flamboyant older brother. Like his brother, William was educated in the junior school at King’s College. Instead of taking advanced studies, he became a clerk at the age of 16 in the Excise (later Inland Revenue) Office. When his father became blind in 1847 and could no longer teach, William became the steady financial anchor for the entire family at the age of 18. In 1849 he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with his older brother and served part time as the first editor of the group’s journal, The Germ. His talent as a literary editor was immediately recognized and at age 21 he obtained a part time appointment as an art critic for a magazine called The Spectator.

After a series of modest advances in the civil service, he was able to purchase a more comfortable home in London for his parents and sisters in early 1854. His father died there a couple of months later. As an astute and independent-minded critic, he praised the American Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” in 1855 as a work of poetic genius. During subsequent years, he published studies of Dante and other medieval poets, both in Italian and English. In 1874 at the age of 45, he married Emma Lucy Brown, the daughter of the painter, Ford Madox Brown. William and his wife had four children. The oldest daughter, Elena Maria, married an Italian named Angeli and became an essayist in her own right. Also in 1874, Rossetti edited a collection of the poetical work of William Blake.

With his attention turned to English writers, he continued in the same vein by editing compilations of the work of William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and a volume on the lives of famous English poets. In 1894 after 49 years of service, he retired as the Assistant Secretary of the Excise Office. He now turned full time to his work as an editor, concentrating on the papers of his family members and other pre-Raphealites. His last publication was The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti which was printed in 1911. William quietly passed away at his home in London during the 90th year of his life on February 5, 1919, the last and longest living member of the Rossetti family.

Christina Georgina The youngest Rossetti child was born on December 5, 1830. Like her older sister, she was educated entirely at home. Besides Italian and English, she also learned to read Latin, French and German. Before she was 12 years old, she wrote her first poem to her mother. At 17 her first volume of poetry simply entitled Verses was published privately

Christina was praised as England’s greatest living woman poet since Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806- 1861) for her greatest work The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems.

by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori. In 1850 at the age of 20, she had seven poems printed publicly under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne in the pre-Raphaelite magazine edited by her brother William. During that same year, she broke off her engagement to a Pre-Raphaelite painter named James Collinson because he became a Roman Catholic. When her father died in 1854, she started working in the private day school which her older sister had established. Noting a scarcity of good books for youngsters, she started privately writing texts for use in the school. Eight years later at the age of 32, she fell in love with Charles Bagot Cayley but refused to marry him because, although he had no religious faith, he declined to become an Anglican. Melancholic about this lost love, she took up her pen again and wrote Goblin Market and Other Poems which was published under her own name in 1862.

The work was greeted with acclaim by critics. In 1865 she traveled to Italy, visiting her father’s home town of Vasto, for inspiration. Upon her return she wrote Vanna’s Twins, a semi-autobiographical work about an Italian family living in England. During the next year, she wrote and published her greatest work The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. As a result, she was praised as England’s greatest living woman poet since Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861). In 1871, Christina became very ill with a thyroid condition known as Grave’s Disease. Although she recovered after two years, her physical appearance was affected. Disturbed by her close brush with death and motivated by her older sister’s decision to become an Anglican nun, Christina wrote exclusively on religious topics for the next nine years. She fell into a depression after the deaths of her sister in 1876, her brother Dante Gabriel in 1882 and her mother in 1886 and published only sporadically through 1892.

In May 1892, while she was under consideration to succeed Alfred Lord Tennyson as the national poet laureate, she discovered that she had cancer and underwent surgery to have the tumor removed. The operation was not successful, and the malignancy reappeared in a few months. Realizing that the end was near, she struggled to finish Verses which was published in 1893. She then started her last work Maude. However, she died on December 29, 1894, at the age of 64, and Maude was printed posthumously. After her death, New Poems was discovered and published by her brother William in 1896.

Conclusion With the story of the father in the last issue and of his four children in this issue, you have the history of the Rossetti family covering 136 years from the birth of Gabriele Rossetti in Vasto, Abruzzo, Italy, in 1783 to the death of the last child, William, in London in 1919. No family of artists is considered more numerous and prolific in England than the Rossettis.

Bibliography Maria Francesca:

1. Supplement, Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature, Volume II at page 1299 (1891).

2. Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature, Volume II at page 1876 (1902).

3. New Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 10 at page 194 (Micropedia 1998).

Dante Gabriel:

1. Supplement, Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature, Volume II at page 1299 (1891)

. 2. Cassell, Encyclopedia of World Literature at page 1424 (1953).

3. Magill, Critical Survey of Poetry, Volume 6 at pages 2424-2426 (1982).

4. Encyclopedia of World Biography, Volume 13 at pages 308-309 (2nd Ed. 1998).

5. New Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 10 at pages 193-194 (Micropedla 1998).

William Michael:

1. Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature, Volume II at page 1876 (1872).

2. Supplement, Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature, Volume II at page 1299 (1891).

3. New Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 10 at pages 194-195 (Micropedia 1998).

4. Marchesani, “La vita e l’opera di W. M. Rossetti”, Vasto Domani at page 4 (July 1999)

. Christina Georgina:

1. Cassell, Encyclopedia of World Literature at page 1424 (1953).

2. Magill, Critical Survey of Poetry, Volume 6 at pages 2416-2418 (1982).

3. Encyclopedia of World Biography, Volume 13 at page 307 (2nd Ed. 1998).

4. New Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 10 at page 192 (Micropedia 1998).