Christina Rossetti

Macmillan's great poetic gamble

Christina Rossetti, drawn by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti

In January 1861, David Masson, the editor of the recently launched Macmillan’s Magazine, received an unsolicited letter from a young lady he had recently met at a family gathering. Christina Rossetti lived quietly and in straitened circumstances with her widowed mother, her sister Maria and her two brothers Dante Gabriel (occasionally!) and William in Upper Albany Street, London. She had just turned thirty, but had been writing stories and poems since she was a little girl. The Athenaeum had published a few of her poems in 1848 but they had sunk without trace. Now, extremely tentatively, she tried again. She wrote modestly to Masson: ‘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.’

Letter from Christina Rossetti to David Masson, editor of Macmillan’s Magazine (British Library)

Masson showed the poems to his proprietor, Alexander Macmillan who was delighted with them, and the first, ‘Up-Hill’, was included in the February issue of the Magazine, with two more to follow in April and August. Thus began the greatest and most successful poetic gamble of Alexander Macmillan’s career.

Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

   Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

   From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

   A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

   You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

   Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

   They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

   Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

   Yea, beds for all who come.

Alexander was already well-acquainted with Christina’s brothers William and Dante Gabriel, having being introduced to William in Cambridge in the 1850s. The two men were regular guests at his Thursday evening ‘Tobacco Parliaments’, informal gatherings above his shop in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, where Macmillan hosted aspiring authors and artists for tea, beer, whisky, smokes and literary talk. By 1861, William who worked as a civil servant, was becoming known as a critic and art reviewer; Gabriel, a founder member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was even better known as a painter. But there was very little money to go round the family.

At the next Tobacco Parliament, Alexander approached Christina’s brother Gabriel, asking whether his sister had anything else he could look at. By this time she had amassed several notebooks full of poems including a longer work, Goblin Market. Gabriel had recently shared this latter piece with his patron John Ruskin, who disappointingly advised that he thought it unpublishable because of its ‘quaintness and other offences’. Now he wrote to his sister: ‘I saw Macmillan last night who has been congratulated by some of his contributors on having got a poet at last in your person, and read aloud your lively little Song of the Tomb [Up-hill] with great satisfaction. He is anxious to see something else of yours and is a man able to judge for himself; so I think you might probably do at least as well with him as with Masson.’

Christina agreed to show her notebooks, after some revisions, directly to Macmillan. In late October 1861 Alexander approached Dante Gabriel again. The publisher was a great believer in reading out loud to gauge effect; he regularly tried poetry out on his wife and sister-in-law, Caroline and Fanny. Back in October 1855 Macmillan had advertised a public reading of Tennyson’s Maud to be held at the Alderman’s Parlour in Cambridge, concerned that the newest work by his favourite poet had been badly received by the press. One audience member wrote: ‘All who were present did not fail to appreciate the grand aim of the poem, and as a work of art worthy of much earnest study. We trust Mr Macmillan will be induced to give another public reading, when we can promise our readers an evening of rich and choice instruction.’ Now, although he had a preference for straightforward rhyme and rhythm, he had taken the brave step of reading Goblin Market aloud at one of the evening sessions of the Cambridge Working Men’s College:

They seemed at first to wonder whether I was making fun of them; by degrees they got as still as death, and when I finished there was a tremendous burst of applause. I wish Miss Rossetti could have heard it.

Macmillan explained his publishing plan to Gabriel:

My idea is to make an exceedingly pretty little volume, and to bring it out as a small Christmas book. This would give it every chance of coming right to the public. If the public prove a wise and discerning public and take a great fancy to it, we could soon give them an adequate supply. The attraction of the volume would be Goblin Market, and this I think should furnish any designs. But we must of course leave that to you…A quaint wood-cut initial - not elaborate and not sprawling down the page, but with a queer goblin, say, grinning at a sweet patient woman face - or something else of that kind would make a nice addition.

I am greatly amused by the speed with which Macmillan believed he could turn this book around, including illustrations not yet commissioned, in time for Christmas - he was writing this letter at the end of October! In fact the book was delayed by the time it took to turn Gabriel’s two detailed drawings into woodcuts, and eventually came out in March 1862. The sales were not large immediately: 1,750 copies in the first three years, but the work was well-reviewed and the little volume continued to sell steadily throughout the century. Thereafter, with further encouragement and flattery from Macmillan, Christina Rossetti regularly supplied poems to the Magazine, more than twenty in all over the same number of years. Goblin Market is still much studied and admired today, as is Rossetti’s other poetry, including famous verses such as In the Bleak Midwinter.

The language of Goblin Market is full of luscious fruit and dangerous, tempting beauty:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

The story is a magical fantasy of seduction and salvation, with tempted golden-haired Laura being rescued from disaster by her sensible and brave sister Lizzie:

For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.

It is hardly surprising that the initial reaction at the Cambridge Working Men’s College was surprise, and one has to wonder what Macmillan himself made of this extraordinary poem with its vivid imagery and erotic undertones. At its simplest interpretation, Goblin Market is a poem of temptation, resistance and redemption, presented as a fairy tale. When she wrote it, Christina was working at a refuge for fallen women in Highgate. The conclusion to be drawn from her parable seems obvious to us today, but may not have been either to Alexander, or even to Christina. However, the language must surely have raised a smirk among the working men of Cambridge:

She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She suck’d until her lips were sore.

Macmillan was regularly sent submissions by would-be poets: he joked in a letter to Caroline Norton that there were ‘some 20,000 of her Majesty’s subjects in these islands who write verse more or less respectably’. He very rarely published these, however, and before 1862 he said of the two books he had published:

…neither had succeeded commercially, though the merit really appeared to me very high in both cases…I have frequently sent back what I felt to be beautiful and touching verse, simply because I knew it would not sell. That is my business, to calculate what will commercially pay. Unless it will there is no reason why it should be printed.

So what made him take a chance on Goblin Market? The risk that Alexander took in publishing the work was of course mitigated by the commercial attractions of Dante Gabriel’s illustrations, and by the growing renown of the family name. But as his biographer Charles Morgan says, Alexander had ‘the boldness and imagination to take risks.’ And the critical eye of a publisher who would succeed where many others failed.

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For more about Christina Rossetti, I recommend Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994