Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (review)

Lorraine Janzen Kooistrahas aptly subtitled her book. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History is preeminently a publishing history, charting the production, interpretation, and reception of Rossetti's work for adults and children. She skillfully follows Rossetti's involvement in the Victorian book trade as well as twentieth-century productions, packaging her illustrated poetry as collectibles and even erotica. As Kooistra rightly asserts at the close of the introduction, "This is the history, not of a book, but of many books published under the name 'Christina G. Rossetti'" (17). Accordingly, the two sections of the book, "Victorian Productions" and "Twentieth-Century Reproductions," function well independently of each other; a reader interested in either can easily pick it up and benefit from Kooistra's rich archival research. These two sections—as well as the introduction—can, in fact, seem so autonomous and independent of one another as to put into question the book's cohesion as a unified whole. But if understood as a publishing history, the book's lack of unity seems less problematic.

Those familiar only with Rossetti's poetry, the poem-painting pairs of her more famous brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or even Christina's saintly face (the painter used Christina as a model for The Girlhood of Mary Virgin [1849]) may be surprised to learn of the depth of Rossetti's visual poetics and of her serious commitment to art. In the first chapter of "Victorian Productions," entitled "Christina Rossetti's Visual Imagination," Kooistra richly describes and includes samples of Rossetti's attempts at illustration not only of her own work, such as Goblin Market (1862) and Sing-Song (1872), but of popular religious works, such as John Keble's hymn book, The Christian Year (1827). As a result, Rossetti—a woman characterized as quiet, serious, even saintly; a single woman who experienced unrequited love (her fiancé James Collinson broke their engagement when he rejoined the Catholic Church); and the writer of work rich in technical virtue but overwhelmingly melancholy in content—gains richness and complexity.

Kooistra briefly contrasts Rossetti's private illustration to the public "double works" of William Blake and Christina's favorite illustrator of her own work, brother Dante Gabriel. Kooistra's separation of Rossetti, who had ambitions to be her own illustrator, from the distinguished tradition of Victorian author-illustrators of adult and children's literature—including W. M. Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, and George Du Maurier—is, however, troubling. Kooistra mentions that Rossetti gave her sketches to an outside illustrator (43) and expands this comparison to Carroll in a later chapter on "Books for Children," where she mentions Carroll's self-illustrated Alice's Adventures under Ground (1886) (98); in both cases, she misses a perfect opportunity to connect Rossetti's fascination with the visual, which here appears individualistic or comparative, to a Victorian climate that fostered word and image productions by author-illustrators and between authors and outside artists, as her work publicly appeared. For example, Charles Dickens, who shared Rossetti's commitment to outside illustration to enhance his written work, collaborated with eighteen different illustrators. If Kooistra fails to contextualize Rossetti's contributions more broadly with author-illustrators and like-minded authors like Dickens, she meticulously researches the publishing history of Rossetti in her lifetime and beyond. We learn fascinating details of her lesser-known devotional works, botanical drawings, and extensive knowledge of the Victorian language of flowers. Kooistra provides important details on Rossetti's attitude toward various illustrators (for example, Alice Donlevy, Lisa Wilson, and Pre-Raphaelites like Arthur Hughes and her brother), copyright, and her various British and American publishers.

In the second section, "Twentieth-Century Reproductions," Kooistra illuminates how Rossetti's work became refashioned as notions of childhood and sexuality changed throughout the twentieth century. For example, poems referring to death in Sing-Song, seen asappropriate for children of the Victorian age given the high infant mortality rate, were often excluded from post-World War...