Rector’s Reflections
Wednesday 11th December 2024
In the Bleak Midwinter: A Victorian View of Christmas
Today, I’m starting a new series of reflection, on a Christmas theme. I’m going to be looking at the background to the popular Christmas carol, In the Bleak Midwinter. The words of this carol were written by an eminent Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti, and we will be reflecting on what this carol might have to say to us today when we think about the meaning of Christmas in our own time and culture. Part of this will involve a brief exploration of Christian belief and practice in Victorian England. I think it is very easy to caricature “Victorian Christianity” and dismiss it for what we perceive to be a naïve sentimentality. But there is much more to “Victorian Christianity” than we might think, and I think it has much to say to us in our own day. By using the phrase “Victorian Christianity”, I am using a shorthand to describe the sort of religious belief and practice which was typical of the Church of England during most of the reign of Queen Victoria( 1837-1901). There were many other types of Christianity around in the British Isles at this time, but I am limiting myself to what was typical of the Church of England.
How shall I start? Well, a good beginning might be to outline the life of the author of this carol. Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830. She had two famous brothers, Dante and Willaim, who were slightly older than her: Dante was born in 1828 and William in 1829. Dante was a poet, painter and translator, and Willaim was a Man of Letters (although William also had a day job, working for the Government, which helped to pay the bills). Both Dante and Willaim were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In case you are curious about the surname, the father of this remarkably talented family was an Italian who came from Naples: one Gabriele Rossetti. Gabrielle was a political exile, and was professor of Italian at King’s College London. Their mother, Frances, was the sister of Byron’s physician.
Christina was educated at home by her mother. This might surprise us today, when home-schooling is very much the exception. However, it was not uncommon among middle class families in Victorian England, especially for young women. And I think no one could suggest that there was anything lacking in Christina’s education. She was a highly educated woman. Her family would have expected nothing less.
Christina started to write poetry at an early age, and her first collection was printed in the early 1840s, when she aged only12. However, her first major collection of poetry was not published until some twenty years later, when Christina was in her early 30s: the collection was entitled Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Christina continued to publish until a couple of years before her death, despite increasing ill-health. Her last work was a commentary on the final book of the Bible: The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Book of the Apocalypse (1892). Following her death, her brother Michael edited an edition of her complete works.
As well as being a poet, Christina was a committed Christian, identifying with the High Church tradition within the Church of England. Christina’s faith was anything but simplistic. She was a reflective human being, open to recognising the presence of ambiguity in our lives. At times, she writes with frankness; at other times, her tone is full of delicacy. She must have been an absolutely fascinating woman to have as a friend.
Christina never married. A collection of her poetry published in 1881 includes a sonnet sequence setting out a tension between divine love and human passion, and one reading of these poems would be to suggest that Christina is saying that divine love is superior to human passion. But I’m not sure that Christina was ever entirely convinced about this. Earlier in her life, she had been engaged to a painter, one James Collinson, for many years. It seems that religion may indeed have been a factor in the ending of this relationship, but relationships are complex, and there may have been many other reasons to end the engagement.
So there, in brief, is an outline of the life of Christina Rossetti, one of the great poets of Victorian England. And what of her poem, In the Bleak Midwinter? We shall turn to this in more detail in tomorrow’s reflections.