Milton and Rossetti:
"Puritanism," Chastity, and Charity in the Victorian Context

The notion that Milton could be a positive influence on Christina Rossetti at first seems unlikely. Although the Victorians for the most part exalted Milton, most Victorian High Church Anglicans, or Anglo-Catholics, did not. A church party devoted to ecclesiastical authority and to Catholic-style worship reforms, Anglo-Catholics were predisposed to despise Milton; and Rossetti was one of the most famous Anglo-Catholics. In his study of Milton in the Victorian period, James G. Nelson says that in the nineteenth century "Milton's art and ideals were . . . of considerable use to those who found them congenial and of great concern to those who found them subversive."4While recent critics have questioned the usefulness or adequacy of the term "puritan" to describe Milton, the Victorians had no such qualms: as Nelson observes, regardless of their individual political and religious views--and the corresponding positive or negative connotations they assigned to the term--most Victorians regarded Milton as the quintessential puritan. While "dissenters, Evangelicals, and Whigs were generally lavish in their praise of [Milton]," not surprisingly, the "High Churchmen, Catholics, and Tories frequently damned him with faint praise or with outright scorn and disapproval" (pp. 11-12). Even among those Victorians with no particular political or religious enmity toward Milton, there existed a common notion that "[Milton's] coldness and austerity and lack of ordinary affections were too extreme to be normal" (p. 91).

In addition to Anglo-Catholics, Nelson mentions at least one other distinct group that was antipathetic to Milton during the Victorian period: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Because she was female, Christina Rossetti never attended the meetings of the "brotherhood," but she considered herself a part of the group; indeed, as a number of critics have observed, the PRB's first substantial literary success came with the publication of Rossetti'sGoblin Market and Other Poemsin 1862. William Morris, who was influenced by the movement in its later years, may have voiced a common Pre-Raphaelite reaction to Milton when he said that "the union in [Milton's] works of cold classicalism with Puritanism (the two things which I hate most in the world) repels me so that Icannotread him" (qtd. in Nelson, p. 89).

But because of her distinctive asceticism as well as her gender, Rossetti was on the margins of the anti-Miltonic Anglo-Catholic and Pre-Raphaelite[End Page 557]circles. Indeed, her brother William Michael Rossetti described her as "'an Anglo-Catholic, and, among Anglo-Catholics, a Puritan.'"5Antony Harrison reminds us that in the mid-nineteenth century "Anglo-Catholicism was perceived ... as a radical movement."6Who better for a radical to look to for inspiration than Milton? And Rossetti's brand of Anglo-Catholicism was more radical than most, because of her contemplative, almost clerical lifestyle and her intense preoccupation with the temptations of the material world, which at once fascinated and terrified her.

Milton's influence on Rossetti most likely originates in her childhood, in a source that has heretofore been unexamined. Rossetti's childhood visits to Holmer Green, the idyllic country home of her maternal grandparents, would have provided her with special exposure to Milton's works. Rossetti's grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, was an Italian emigrant and scholar who loved Milton and who translated Milton's works--includingComus--into his native language.7It was he who noted and encouraged Christina's poetic talent from very early on, and who had her first poems privately printed; as Georgina Battiscombe argues, "From a child's point of view by far the most interesting person at Holmer Green was Grandfather Polidori. ... Christina loved him as she never loved her own father. She was his favourite grandchild" (p. 26). According to Kathleen Jones, Gaetano "was a genuine eccentric ... who could be found translating Milton into Italian before lunch and indulging his passion for carpentry in the afternoon."8Battiscombe describes Holmer Green as an "enchanted garden": for Rossetti, visits there were "the greatest joys life had to offer," and toward the end of her life Rossetti would observe "that they were ... a major influence on her development as a poet" (pp. 24-25).9She lost this childhood Eden at the age of nine, when her grandparents moved to London, but Holmer Green would continue to inspire her imagination; as Jan Marsh observes in her biography of Rossetti, "her first recorded poem was written at the age of eleven," not long "after the loss of Holmer Green."10There Grandfather Polidori often read to his grandchildren, especially Greek myths. But his literary entertainments may very well have includedComus--a text likely to be read to children, especially to a favorite young granddaughter. Also, not far from Holmer Green was Chalfont-St. Giles, where Milton lived in a cottage in 1665.11Rossetti's love for her grandfather--"her most constant friend, tutor, consoler and critic," in Marsh's words (p. 149)--her grandfather's appreciation for Milton, and the poetic inspiration she enjoyed in the orchard and garden of Holmer Green no doubt made Rossetti more open to Milton's influence, at least early in her career, than critics have yet acknowledged. Also, Rossetti's brother William, whom she deeply respected, certainly admired Milton, making liberal use of quotations[End Page 558]fromParadise Lostin his letters and evincing his regard forAreopagiticain a letter to Swinburne.12

Another connection between Christina Rossetti and Milton is her friendship with David Masson, one of the most important Victorian Milton scholars. As Nelson observes, it was a commonplace among most Victorian critics that Milton lacked passion and warmth. Even Matthew Arnold, who admired Milton, described him as "unamiable" and argued that his "asperity and acerbity, his want of sweetness of temper, of the Shakespearean largeness and indulgence, are undeniable" (qtd. in Nelson, pp. 90-91). But Masson dissented from this predominantly negative view of Milton's character. He "felt that [Milton's] connection with the Puritans reinforced those qualities one might properly expect to find in a great religious poet and prophet" (Nelson, p. 93). According to Nelson, Masson saw "nothing unfortunate" in Milton's inherent "sternness, austerity and aloofness": these qualities of "seriousness" were necessary to the vocation of a religious poet (p. 93). And Masson saw Milton as one of the greatest religious poets, a figure who "pre-eminently possesses and displays those qualities and characteristics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante in their role ofvates" (qtd. in Nelson, p. 93).

As Rossetti's editor atMacmillan's Magazine, Masson surely recognized in her and her work the vocational intensity and Miltonic "seriousness" of a great religious poet. Rossetti came to know Masson in the early 1850s through his wife-to-be, Rosalind Orme, with whom she studied drawing (Marsh, p. 141). Also, as secretary of the Friends of Italy, where most of London's expatriate Italian community gathered, Masson would have known many of the same people as the Rossettis. His critical essays on Milton were published throughout the 1850s, and his highly influential, multivolumeLife of John Miltonbegan appearing in 1859, the same year as the first issue ofMacmillan's(also the year Rossetti wroteGoblin Market). Although many critics have assumed that Christina's first publication ("Up-hill") inMacmillan'swas the result of her brother Gabriel's efforts, it was in fact her personal appeal to Masson that led to the acceptance of her poems, and later to her first commercially published collection,Goblin Market and Other Poems(1862). Her letter to Masson reflects the cordiality of their relationship: "Bored as you are with contributions, many of them doubtless being poems good or bad by unknown authors, I feel ashamed to add the enclosed to the heap: the more so as personal acquaintanceship might make it more unpleasant for you to decline them" (qtd. in Marsh, pp. 267-268).

The aspect of Milton that Rossetti would have found especially congenial to her is his theory of chastity and charity. Many readers of Milton have misunderstood his concept of chastity, confusing it with virginity and[End Page 559]the harsh denial of all pleasures. For Milton, however, chastity is not necessarily virginity, but rather love for oneself. The relation between chastity and charity is critical to Rossetti, whose distinctive religious sensibilities--what her brother William referred to as her Anglo-Catholic "puritan[ism]"--reflect her own painful personal struggle to reconcile her chastity, which others often perceived as coldness, with her deep commitment to the ideal of charity.  

Milton's Latin theological treatiseDe Doctrina Christianaclarifies and reinforces his position on the virtues of chastity and charity. Suppressed after his death, the manuscript was rediscovered in 1823, translated into English, and published in 1825 (Nelson, p. 176 n. 54). Given the highly charged religious climate of early nineteenth-century Britain, and the undeniable place of Milton in English cultural history, this treatise was an exciting find. The reception of the text was of course a partisan affair, with various groups supporting or condemning Milton's ideas as they accorded or clashed with their own, and Milton's "deviations" from orthodox Christian theology produced general "shock and disappointment." After "causing ... a mild, two-year flutter in certain theological dovecotes,"De Doctrina"retired to the upper shelves, whence from time to time it was to be taken down for dutiful notice and discussion."13But Gaetano Polidori was among those Milton devotees who would most likely have had a copy in his library, where the Rossetti children did a considerable amount of their reading (Jones, p. 12). Christina Rossetti was exceptionally well read in religious and devotional literature, and whether or not she readDe Doctrina, she was familiar with Milton's prose. Indeed, in the very first entry inTime Flies: A Reading Diary(1885), one of her own devotional writings, Rossetti uses Milton to drive home an important point: arguing that Christians "translate God's law into the universal tongue of all mankind," she adds, "Scrupulous Christians need special self-sifting. They too often resemble translations of the letter in defiance of the spirit: their good poem has become unpoetical."14As Kent and Stanwood note, Rossetti here "alludes to Milton's dictum about the true poet himself being a 'true Poem, that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things.'"15Rossetti feels comfortable drawing on Milton's prose to support her own devotional ideas--even, in this case, referring to one of his antiprelatical tracts,An Apology Against a Pamphlet(1642). These two poets may have had different religious and political allegiances and ideals, but Milton's artistic influence on Rossetti exists apart from their ideological differences.

InDe Doctrina Christiana, Milton identifies a sequence of virtues underneath the general virtue of "charity": first comes self-love ("chastity"), and then comes love for others, or "charity" (De Doctrina, p. 717). As in[End Page 560]Milton's other theological prose,De Doctrinaargues explicitly that chastity is a necessary prerequisite for charity.16For the Renaissance and for Milton, chastity is a reflection of personal integrity, the precondition for all other virtues: it is the foundational virtue that enables agency itself.17InThe Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, he identifies charity as the virtue that gives us interpretive skill ("charitie, the interpreter and guide of our faith," 2:236). Because chastity must come before charity, chastity is the real basis not only for our ability to love others, but also for our power to think critically, to be creative and resourceful, and to act. This is the fundamental sequential relationship thatComusritualizes. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, in his masque (and in other works we do not have space to examine here), Milton genders chastity and charity as feminine.

Like Milton, in her poetry Rossetti represents chastity as the basis for agency, interpretive power, and creativity. But from the only scrap of direct evidence we have regarding Rossetti's opinion of Milton--a brief mention that appears in an unpublished letter--we might dismiss Milton as an influence on her altogether. In this reference, Rossetti suggests that Milton's work was generally unpalatable to her: "Milton I cannot warm towards, even let alone all theological questions" (qtd. in Nelson, p. 34). But the echoes ofComusthat appear throughoutGoblin Marketsuggest strongly that this Miltonic text registered sympathetically and powerfully with Rossetti. As David A. Kent has argued, "Any study of influences on Rossetti . . . must . . . acknowledge special difficulties," as Rossetti was notoriously reticent about her poetic influences, "preserv[ing] an aura of secrecy about her work" that extended to her "acknowledgments of debt to other poets."18As Kent points out, Rossetti has most frequently been compared to George Herbert. Yet before Kent's essay, critics generally did not pursue the issue of Herbert's influence on Rossetti, perhaps partly because, as Kent argues, Rossetti herself "rarely mentions other poets" and indeed actively "suppress[ed] references" to her influences (pp. 252, 254). Taken within the context of her sensitivity on the matter of poetic influence, then, Rossetti's objection that she cannot "warm towards" Milton may reflect what Kent refers to as her strategy of "veiling indebtedness" (p. 253); at the least, Rossetti's practices in this regard render any statements that she does make about other poets more layered and complicated. Rossetti's word choice ("Milton I cannot warm towards") is, moreover, rather ironic: if, as one might infer, Milton leaves her cold--an epithet the Victorians often used to describe Milton--it is nevertheless the perceived coldness (or, as the Victorians would deem it, the "puritanism") of Miltonic chastity that appealed most to Rossetti's Anglo-Catholic sensibility. Like Milton, Rossetti was often accused of coldness, aloofness,[End Page 561]austerity, and other traits popularly perceived as puritanical. Both Milton and Rossetti have been described as religious recluses who stifled their natural passions; and as with Milton, a certain frostiness continues to adhere to Rossetti's personal reputation.

Yet Rossetti believed profoundly in the need for, and the efficacy of, Christian charity in the postlapsarian world. Indeed, charity is one of the most prevalent themes in her canon. P. G. Stanwood observes that "self-knowledge, charity, avoidance of judgment of others, and energetic and ceaseless instruction characterize Rossetti's devotional prose, and evidently her own personality."19For example, in her devotional workLetter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments(1883), Rossetti says, "The paramount motive for what we do or leave undone--if, that is, we aim at either acting or forbearing worthily--is love: not fear, or self-interest, or even hatred of sin, or sense of duty, but direct filial love to God" (Selected Prose, p. 273). Charity toward fellow human beings was harder for Rossetti to express, however. William Rossetti described his sister's "reserve and distance" as "not remote from hauteur." According to him, when a woman accused Christina of acting purely from motives of "self-respect" rather than from "fellow-feeling with others, or from kindly consideration for them," Rossetti "admit[ted] that it hit a blot in her character. . . . She laid the hint to heart and . . . never forgot it" (qtd. in Marsh, p. 112).

For Rossetti, sisterhood provides a way to explore the responsibilities associated with charity. As Helena Michie observes, the word "sister" has a particular cultural resonance in the nineteenth century, and is "central" to an understanding of "how Victorian culture understood and represented relations between women." Michie argues that for the Victorians, "sexual difference between women is expressed and contained within the capacious trope of sisterhood, which allows for the possibility of sexual fall and for the reinstatement of the fallen woman within the family."23In her study of the rhetoric of fallenness in mid-Victorian culture, Amanda Anderson defines the term "fallen woman" as applying "to a range of feminine identities: prostitutes, unmarried women who engage in sexual relations with men, victims of seduction, adulteresses, as well as variously delinquent lower-class women." Victorian texts commonly depict a fallen woman as being unable to "transcend [her] fallen state" by herself; rather, she must be the recipient of "a divine, uplifting act of grace."24During the nineteenth century, this "uplifting" influence became increasingly the social responsibility of unfallen women, or women whose chastity was intact.

The importance of unfallen women saving fallen women was more than a commonplace for Rossetti. In 1859 she began volunteer work at the St. Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women at Highgate Hill, a refuge for prostitutes and other female outcasts.25Also known as a House of Charity, this penitentiary was run by Anglican nuns along with a staff of volunteer "sisters." "Sister Christina," as she was known at Highgate, began working there regularly a few months before she wroteGoblin Market(Marsh, p. 221). Marsh argues that the volunteer Sisters "were fully conscious of the redemptive Christ-like nature of their task," and that Rossetti's "guiding parable was not the Good Samaritan but the Lost Sheep," for "she regarded all the strays of Highgate as reclaimable lambs" (pp. 226-227). She would have seen each endangered soul, or lost lamb, as vitally important.

As Diane D'Amico observes,
consistently, from Rossetti's fallen woman ballads of the 1850s and 1860s to her later devotional prose and poetry, Rossetti directs the reader's attention away[End Page 563]from seeing the sinner as other, as separate and apart from the rest of the human community. Although her faith certainly led her to see the fallen women of her time as sinners, for Rossetti that was not the end of their story. Not only could each fallen woman become a saint, but each individual should also aspire to be like the penitent and loving Mary Magdalene. (p. 117)

Rossetti devoted her energies to this mission at Highgate until her health forced her to stop. Because of the confidentiality of the work, she recorded very little about her experiences there, but we know that this rehabilitative project would have presented a sustained challenge to her tenacity and resourcefulness, qualities that charity demands. Rossetti's work with fallen women was an act of charity, and like her writing of poetry, she would have seen it as a proper function of feminine creativity.

Notes

1. For more on the loss of Eden and the sorrow of Eve as recurrent subjects in Rossetti's work, see Diane D'Amico, "Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene: Christina Rossetti's Feminine Triptych," inThe Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David Kent (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 175-191. See also the chapter "The Fallen Woman Poems" in Diane D'Amico,Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 94-117.
2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(1979; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), p. 188.
3. The threatening forces in all of these texts have traditionally been identified as masculine. This is certainly the case with the undeniably male goblins inGoblin Market. But the gender of the assaulting power inComusis more complicated: Comus' band consists of both sexes, and although Comus himself typically is assumed to be male, John Rumrich argues that "the sexual overtones of [Comus'] enchantment are in fact both masculine and feminine," and that Comus himself is a "hermaphroditic serpent." See Rumrich, "'Comus': a fit of the mother," inMilton Unbound(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 88.
4. James G. Nelson,The Sublime Puritan: Milton and the Victorians (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. 12.
5. Quoted in Georgina Battiscombe,Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life(London: Constable, 1981), p. 32.
6. Antony H. Harrison, "Christina Rossetti and the Sage Discourse of Feminist High Anglicanism," inVictorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs E. Morgan (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), p. 96.
7. D. L. MacDonald,Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author ofThe Vampyre (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 169. John William Polidori, Lord Byron's physician and author ofThe Vampyre, was Gaetano Polidori's son and Christina Rossetti's uncle.
8. Kathleen Jones,Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti(Adlestrop, England: Windrush Press, 1991), p. 7.
9. "If one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry it was perhaps the delightful liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather's cottage grounds some thirty miles from London" (Christina Rossetti in a letter to Edmund Gosse, qtd. in Battiscombe, p. 24).
10. Jan Marsh,Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography(1994; New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 527.
11. Milton's cottage in Chalfont-St. Giles was still standing in the years when young Christina Rossetti was visiting nearby Holmer Green. See David Masson,Life of John Milton, 6 vols. (1859-1880; Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1965), 6:491-494.
12. "I did read Milton'sAreopagiticayears ago, and admired it: this must, I fear, be the only one of his prose writings that I have acquainted myself with" (William Michael Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne, January 5, 1875; inSelected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1990], p. 321).
13. Maurice Kelley, Introduction to John Milton'sDe Doctrina Christiana, trans. John Carey, inThe Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-82), 6:10. All references to Milton's prose are from the Yale edition; subsequent citations appear in the text and refer to volume and page numbers.
14.Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), p. 297. Hereafter cited asSelected Prose.
15.Selected Prose, p. 392 n. 176. The Milton reference is fromAn Apology Against a Pamphlet(Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 1:890).
16. For more on Milton's concept of chastity and charity, see Rumrich, p. 73.
17. In Sonnet Nine ("Lady That in the Prime"), Milton praises a young woman for her chastity, which gives her power and agency. Chastity helps her to stand firm against worldly pressures and saves her soul. In this poem he also associates chastity with femininity ("The better part withMaryand withRuth/ Chosen thou hast" [ll. 5-6]. All citations from Milton's poetry are fromJohn Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957).
18. See David A. Kent, "'By thought, word, and deed': George Herbert and Christina Rossetti," inThe Achievement of Christina Rossetti, pp. 250-273; 251, 252-253.
19. P. G. Stanwood, "Christina Rossetti's Devotional Prose,"The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, p. 246.
20. For example,Goblin Market and Other Poemsalso contains "Noble Sisters," a tale of sisters divided by the efforts of one to drive away the other's lover, and "Cousin Kate," in which an unmarried mother competes with her unfaithful lover's new bride, who happens to be her cousin.
21. "Charity," ll. 9-12. All citations from Christina Rossetti's poems are fromThe Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. R.W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979-1995). Subsequent citations refer to line numbers and appear within the text.
22. Rossetti dedicatedGoblin Marketto her older sister Maria, whom she greatly admired, and who became an Anglican nun. The notebook manuscript of "Charity" is in the handwriting of Maria, whose short note appears below it: "The foregoing verses are imitated from that beautiful little poem 'Virtue,' by George Herbert" (Complete Poems,3:399). Like Milton, Rossetti often figures endangered women as flowers; see Milton's "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" and "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester."
23. Helena Michie, "'There is No Friend Like a Sister': Sisterhood as Sexual Difference,"ELH56 (Summer 1989): 403.
24. Amanda Anderson,Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 2-3.
25. For more on the climate of social reform and Rossetti's involvement with Anglican sisterhoods, see Michie, pp. 401-421; Janet Galligani Casey, "The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti'sGoblin Market,"VP29 (1991): 63-78; and Mary Wilson Carpenter, "'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti'sGoblin Market,"VP29 (1991): 415-434.