CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND THE ECONOMICS OF PUBLICATION: MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE, “A BIRTHDAY,” AND BEYOND

Extract

Impelled to seek relief from a “peccant chest” (L233) at the seaside, Christina Rossetti travelled to Hastings in December 1864, taking a carefully wrapped bundle of unfinished manuscript poetry with her. Throughout the winter until the following March, a series of letters to Cheyne Walk kept her brother Dante Gabriel abreast not only of her gradual recovery, but also of her efforts to complete her second book of poetry, two years after she had made a successful debut with Goblin Market. Shortly after her arrival, Rossetti reported that she was struggling to finish “The Prince's Progress,” the long narrative poem that was to lend its title to the new volume:

[M]y Alchemist still shivers in the blank of mere possibility: but I have so far overcome my feelings and disregarded my nerves as to unloose the Prince, so that string wrapping paper may no longer bar his “progress.” Also I have computed pages of the altogether-unexceptionable, and find that they exceed 120: this cheers though not inebriates. Amongst your ousted I recognize sundry of my own favourites, which perhaps I may adroitly re-insert when publishing day comes round. . . . Meanwhile I have sent 3 (I hope) pot-boilers to Mac's Mag. (L233)

In the past few decades, Rossetti's lifelong effort to see what critics have variously called “the divine spiritual essence of material beauty” (Harrison 56), the “moral and spiritual significance in physical signs” (Arseneau 279), and “the spiritual in the sensuous, the numinous in the material” (Kooistra, Illustration 38) has become a mainstay of Rossetti scholarship. This excerpt from her correspondence, in contrast, reveals her equally profound preoccupation with the materiality and economics of writing. Issues of textual ownership, authorial control, and literary marketability confronted Rossetti in the 1860s as her financial situation forced her to balance book publication with regular contributions to the periodical press, notably Macmillan's Magazine, the magazine owned by Rossetti's publisher Macmillan and Co., which carried more of her poetry than any other British periodical in the nineteenth century. These issues extended beyond Rossetti's personal dealings with Macmillan, however, shaping the material and interpretive consumption of her work throughout her career. This arc may be seen in the publication and adaptation history of one of her most popular poems, “A Birthday,” from its first appearance in Macmillan's Magazine in 1861 until her death. Over time, the poem underwent various types of mediation: reprints in gift books and poetry anthologies, musical adaptation, vocal performance, and quotations in fictional works. Finally, her reaction to the three parodies of her poems published in an 1888 comic magazine – particularly to “An Unexpected Pleasure,” the parody of “A Birthday” – demonstrate her perspective on the increased commodity value of the original poem.