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2propelled by a rising middle class that had more disposable income to enjoy leisure andrecreational activities. The Great Exhibition of 1851 would come to epitomize this shiftin Victorian culture.4 Rossetti would also witness and contribute to the expansion of printculture, which included a rise in popularity of prose and non-fiction works and also anincrease in the number of periodicals.5 Although mass print culture would be dominatedby male voices, women writers, like Rossetti, found an outlet and an audience for theirown unique Victorian voices.In the years that followed, the Church of England faced its own calls for reform,responding, in part, to challenges to scripture as an authority for scientific thought. Inparticular, scientific texts like Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33), and afew decades later, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent ofMan (1871) called into question the age of the earth and the origins of humankind as toldin Genesis. There were also opposing religious viewpoints within the church itself,including, but not limited to, the Oxford Movement (the High Church), the Evangelicals(the Low Church), and the Broad Church or Latitudinarian Church.6 At the beginning of4The Great Exhibition of 1851 was “the first world’s fair, [and] officially called theGreat Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations but familiarly known then andever since as the Crystal Palace” (Altick 11). The exhibitors were “housed in the firstprefabricated public housing in history, a vast construction of iron and glass set inLondon’s Hyde Park” (11). The exhibition featured displays from Britain and othernations, which “reflected the success of Britain’s new free-trade policy” (11).5Popular periodicals, such as the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Magazine, theQuarterly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, and the Athenaeum brought to the public attention“the day’s key issues, [including] the latest scientific developments to religiouscontroversies, . . . aesthetic developments, [and] social values and mores” (Black et. alLXXVIII).6To clarify, Altick says, “In the Victorian period ‘Latitudinarian’ was usedsynonymously with ‘Broad Church,’ and in most people’s usage the more general word‘liberal,’ in a religious context, meant ‘Broad Church’ also” (207). According to Altick,the Broad Church “constituted a kind of rudimentary ecumenical movement, seeking tobring various Christian denominations together on common grounds of belief” (207).The Evangelicals or Low Church included a number of Protestant denominations,including Methodists, Presbyterians, The Salvation Army, Baptists, and the PlymouthBrethren. In general, the Evangelicals stressed the “importance of an individual’s

3the Victorian period, despite the dissenting voices of the Evangelicals, the establishedAnglican church (mostly Latitudinarians) maintained political control. As Altick notes,the “bishops, nearly all of whom were connected with the aristocracy by blood, marriage,or patronage. . . functioned mainly as a powerful bloc in the House of Lords . . . theysupported Tory polices down the line” (204). Although the established church wouldmaintain “a powerful entity throughout the Victorian era” (Black et al. LVI), “internalcorruption7 and the failure to serve a changing society” (204) would slowly erode theChurch of England’s influence on the general public.8Rossetti’s family was also known for its own complications and contradictoryviewpoints. Christina’s father, Gabriele, was an Italian immigrant who came to Londonin 1824 after fleeing Italy as a “hunted revolutionary” (Weintraub 1). Gabriele was aDante scholar and Italian teacher. He married Christina’s mother, Frances, the daughterof Gaetano Polidori (another Italian teacher) and Frances Pierce (an Anglo-Saxongoverness). The Rossetti children (Maria, Christina, Dante, and William) inherited a richliterary and scholarly education from their father Gabriele and grandfather, GaetanoPolidori. Frances Rossetti provided the religious education for her children and theywere regularly taken to church. Christ Church on Albany Street, a predominant church inrelationship with God, of prudence and temperance, of conversion, of missionary work,and of humanitarian activism” (Black et. al LVI). The High Church or the OxfordMovement, formed, in part, as a “reaction to the Evangelical movement, led by Oxfordtheologians John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey” (Black et. al LVII).Proponents of the Oxford Movement, “celebrated aesthetic elements of worship, [and]advocated an increased emphasis on religious ritual and a strict observance of clericalhierarchy within the Anglican communion” (LVII). Newman would later convert to theCatholic faith in 1845, which “spelled the end of the Oxford Movement [and ushered ] ina significant Catholic revival” (LVII).7As an example of this internal corruption, Altick asserts that the “bishops andarchbishops lived in almost regal splendor, [while the] ordinary clergymen were on theedge of starvation” (206).8Also contributing to the instability in the established church was the “working-classattack” or “anti-clericalism,” which helped fuel the French Revolution (Altick 205).

4the Oxford Movement, was Rossetti’s home church from1843-18769 and from 1876 toher death in 1894, she attended another Christ Church (Woburn Square) near her homeon Torrington Place. Christina and Maria would uphold their mother’s religiousdevotion. Dante and William, more “dutiful than devotional” (Weintraub 5), wouldbecome critical of the church and eventually drift away from regular attendance. Thereligious and social tensions within the Rossetti household and in Victorian society ingeneral, along with the variety of literary, philosophical, and scientific texts thatinfluenced her, provided fertile ground for Rossetti’s writing.10Rossetti’s response to the waves of change in her social and religiousenvironment would be to write poetry and prose that exposed the struggles and thetriumphs of the spiritual journey. Rossetti’s writing is marked with the anxieties, eventhe sufferings, of a Victorian woman in a volatile time. Yet, even when the scripturalfoundation of her church is questioned, Rossetti’s voice of faith remains resolute.Rossetti demonstrated in her own life a devotion to a public and private liturgicalpractice and her habits are echoed in over 50 years of religious writings.11 As my thesis9As Raymond Chapman notes, the Anglo-Catholic teachings of Christ Church onAlbany Street were a natural fit for Rossetti, reflecting her own family’s Anglican andCatholic background. As a “product of a mixed family, more Italian than English,”Chapman says, “[her] maternal grandmother had dealt with religious division by havingher sons brought up as Roman Catholics and her daughters as Anglicans” (170).10Mary Arseneau notes that Christina Rossetti “read in English, Italian, German, andFrench: knew Italian poets better than most scholars studying her poetry today; and readthe important poets, novelists, and critics of her century including Coleridge, Shelley,Keats, Scott, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), BarrettBrowning, Browning, Tennyson, and many more. [She also read] periodicals, includingAthenaeum, Macmillan’s Magazine, the Saturday Review, Blackwood’s, and theEdinburgh Review. As an adult she approached Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenseras a scholar, spending innumerable afternoons at the British Museum. . . [She] publishedmore than two thousand pages in a range of works whose focus was not primarily poeticor creative but rather biographical, critical, devotional, or exegetical” (“Introduction”xv).11One of Rossetti’s earliest recorded poems, a birthday gift for her mother, was writtenwhen she was just eleven (Marsh 33). Rossetti would write and publish up until her deathon December 29, 1894.

5will show, Rossetti will answer Victorian religious doubt and the industrialization ofclock-time with volumes of devotional poetry and prose designed to direct her readersback to the rhythms of divine grace through an emphasis on liturgical rituals and theliturgical calendar.The critical response to Rossetti’s devotional writing since its reception has beenvaried, not surprisingly given the complexity of her family, social, and religious milieu.An 1876 review of Rossetti’s poetry exclaimed: “Miss Rossetti has set up a littledevotional shrine here and there throughout the volume, where we find her on her knees,with a strong faith, a deep sense of spiritual needs . . . As she sinks her poetry rises”(“Christina Rossetti’s Poems” The Catholic World 127). Similarly, in 1904, Ford MadoxHueffer asserted that her poetry is “a prayer, an adoration of the Saviour, a fear of theAlmighty, a craving for pardon and for rest” (397). In a 1931 biography, Eleanor WalterThomas explains that “[Rossetti] accepted the God and the doctrines of Christianity asrevealed in the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and interpreted by the Church ofEngland” (192). With this in mind, Thomas suggests that Rossetti’s devotional poemsand prose works were reflections of Rossetti’s “flight from the finite to the Infinite. . .her quest for God” (190). Others, however, saw Rossetti as a melancholy, repressedwoman and her poetry as an expression of mental illness and suffering. Even her ownbrother William Michael Rossetti prefaced his anthology of her poetry by saying, “Overscrupulosity made Christina Rossetti shut up her mind to almost all things save the Bibleand the admonitions and ministrations of priests . . . Her temperament and character,naturally warm and free, become a fountain sealed” (lxviii).12 Sandra M. Gilbert and12Notably, William Rossetti’s view of Christina’s writing in his “Memoir” is much morenuanced than this simple statement regarding her “over-scrupulous” ways. As much ashe critiqued her religious close-mindedness, he also praised her steadfast faith. And,importantly, William did not think that her religion in any way diminished her poetictalent; for instance, he says, “Impulse and élan were checked, both in act and in writing,

6Susan Gubar,13 examples of the psycho-social feminist school of thought that stillinfluences Rossetti criticism today, proclaim that Rossetti’s “female poet-speaker[s]must discover . . . that for the woman poet only renunciation, even anguish, can be asuitable source of song” (572). They ably highlight a particular tone and voice revealedin some of Rossetti’s poetry; nonetheless, their vision is narrow as it is based only on afew poems in Rossetti’s first volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).Yet, despite the myopic nature of their analysis, feminist critics, like Gilbert and Gubar,were the first to reintroduce Victorian women writers, like Rossetti, to the scholarlyconversation and offer different ways to look at their writing.The conversation that began with the early feminist critics is important becausetheir perspective allows for a more nuanced view of how Rossetti’s religious practicesimpacted her writing. One particular book, Lynda Palazzo’s Christina Rossetti’sFeminist Theology (2002), advocates for Rossetti’s “feminist theology” that attempts tonavigate the “fundamentally male religion” (2). Palazzo’s analysis of Rossetti’s narrativepoem “Goblin Market” as an example of “positive female spirituality” (7) has beeninstrumental in my own analysis of Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Importantly, Palazzo,like the feminist critics before her, argues that Rossetti’s writing (in particular her earlypoems) clearly demonstrates her struggle with Tractarian thought on female sexualityand the female body (8).14 My inquiry into Rossetti’s devotional writing arises out ofPalazzo’s observation of the female body’s struggle through male-dominated religiousdoctrine that oppressed the female body. However, my analysis will look at sexuality andbut the most extreme spontaneity in poetic performance always remained” (The PoeticalWorks of Christina Georgina Rossetti: with Memoir and Notes lxviii).13Gilbert and Gubar wrote the influential book The Madwoman in the Attic: The WomanWriter and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1979).14One of the issues that Palazzo takes up in her analysis of Rossetti’s early poems is theTractarian Edward Pusey’s teachings of renunciation. Palazzo argues that some ofRossetti’s poems demonstrate her own struggle against “adolescent girl’s longings, halfsexual, half-spiritual” (6) and how she directs these desires “towards martyrdom” (6).

7other bodily experiences in Rossetti’s writing as not in conflict with her religiouspractice, but essential to the way Rossetti experienced her religion.15Many critics have focused on Rossetti’s religious devotion. Notably, AnthonyHarrison, in his 1988 book, Christina Rossetti in Context, is harsh with her previouscritics and states that “Rossetti has suffered severely from the critical approaches ofbiographical scholars who have frequently read her verse to lay bare the nature of herunfulfilled passions or to discover the identity of her innominate lover” (2).16 Harrisontargets specific feminist scholarship, successors to Gilbert and Gubar, that saw Rossettieither as a victim of patriarchal oppression or as a subversive woman writer, promotingfeminist ideals. Diane D’Amico in Faith, Gender, and Time (1999) observes Rossetti’simage has changed over the last century from “[a woman] reflecting the values of aVictorian woman of faith. . . [to,] most recently, . . . a highly intelligent woman in apatriarchal society whose poetry reveals both victimization and subversive feminism”(1). D’Amico’s observation may have been true in 1999, but it appears that Rossetticriticism is coming full circle in recognizing that her work reflects the values of anineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic faith. For instance, Dinah Roe’s 2006 book ChristinaRossetti’s Faithful Imagination is careful in acknowledging feminist criticism for15Frederick S. Roden postulates a similar pattern in Rossetti’s writing in his essay “Kissof the Soul.” He argues that given the “revival of interest in incarnational theology [andthat] through the Oxford Movement in the early nineteenth century, the relationshipbetween religion and sexuality, spirituality and gender, began to be re-examined. Inglorifying the beautiful body of Christ in the Real Presence, religious discourse took on amore body-centered voice” (38). Notably, Roden asserts this body-centered religiousdiscourse is not new at all, but echoes the “mystical heritage” (38) of the Anglicanchurch. He notes, as one example, that in the 1840s, Showings of Love by Julian ofNorwich, a fourteenth-century mystic, resurfaced to influence writers like Rossetti (38).16Harrison goes on to suggest that “readings of Christina Rossetti’s works by such criticshave depended on the fallacious assumption that her poetry is written for the most part ina confessional poetic mode. . . [instead, he suggests,] her poems are exploratory,presenting notably different views—from poem to poem and even from one version of apoem to another. . . her aesthetic values often derive from extremely diverse andsometimes ostensibly incompatible literary sources” (2).

8contributing to the promotion of Rossetti’s work and continued reception; however,Roe’s focus is Rossetti’s religious devotion: how her religious practices informed herwriting and the role her writing played in her spirituality.17My analysis of Rossetti’s writing reflects recent scholarship that has called for a“turn to religion” in literary criticism (LaPorte 277), following Ken Jackson and ArthurF. Marotti’s 2004 influential essay “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern EnglishStudies.” Jackson and Marotti assert that a writer’s religion is “certainly a deeppsychological and emotional experience, a core moral commitment, a personally andsocially crucial way of transvaluing human experience and desire, a reality both withinand beyond the phenomenal world” (169). Jackson and Marotti’s focus on Early Modernliterary studies, but the same idea is essential to Victorian literary studies. Religion, tomost Victorians, was formative of the way they thought about and experienced theirsocial environment, as Altick notes in Victorian People and Ideas:The ordinary Victorian had been reared in a culture circumscribed byChristian teaching. In addition to a common literary and argumentativevocabulary, the Bible provided the accepted cosmogony, a considerable partof ancient history, as it was then known and above all the foundations of hismorality. Religion had determined his whole outlook upon life. (203)Altick’s observation of the influence of religion on the ordinary Victorian citizencertainly advocates for a closer look at the role religion plays in a nineteenth-centurywriter’s work, like that of Rossetti. Karen Dieleman’s 2012 book Religious Imaginaries,17For instance, Roe credits Diane D’Amico, Lynda Palazzo and Mary Arseneau for theirwork “in the rediscovery and rehabilitation of Rossetti’s devotional work” (2). She alsocalls for more work to be done to uncover the “role of her religious faith. . . specificallyRossetti’s reading of the Bible” (2). Roe speculates that the “criticism of Rossetti’ssubstantial body of devotional work has historically been hampered by a discomfortabout treating religious writings, particularly by a middle-class, nineteenth-century,single woman, as works of literature” (3).

9which focuses on the writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, andAdelaide Procter, agrees with Jackson and Marotti and Altick and adds that differencesin religious practices influence how religious writing “takes particular shape and voicebecause it emerges from Christian religious imaginaries formed—deliberately but also indeeper, unconscious ways—by continual engagement in particular worship andenvironments” (17). In essence, these critics have all recognized that religious practicesare foundational to the way a writer’s imagination is formed. Rossetti, from cradle tograve, through the decades of religious doubt and increasing secularism in VictorianEngland, remained a willing and faithful participant in the Anglo-Catholic faith. Herreligious devotion and also the specifics of her religious practices cannot be ignored orover-simplified when analyzing her writing.Certainly, Rossetti scholarship has begun to recognize the influence of herreligious practices and other religious writers on Rossetti’s writing. For instance, manyRossetti scholars have recognized the influence of her male Oxford Movementcontemporaries.18 Among these theologians, John Keble, who wrote the influential bookThe Christian Year, and John Neale, who reintroduced the patristic teachings in his bookMedieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching, are said by Ludlow to have influencedRossetti’s content and also the form of her devotional writings (Ludlow 30). Althoughthe work of these critics has been a valuable contribution to Rossetti scholarship, fewcritics have yet conducted an in-depth analysis of the relationship of her devotionalwriting to other Christian writings. Among these few, Roe acknowledges the Pre-18For example, Diane D’Amico, David A. Kent and P.G. Stanwood, Frederick S. Roden,Emma Mason, Esther Hu, Krista Lysack, Raymond

UNIVERSITY OF REGINA . FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE Lara Dawn Stoudt, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in English, has presented a thesis titled, 'From House to Home': The Structure of a Soul Journey in Christina Rossetti's Devotional Writing, in an oral examination held on November 30, 2016. The