Christina Rossetti’s former home
July 31st, 2009 by adminChristina who, I hear you ask? Christina Rossetti – the sister of the Pre-Raphaelite rake who’s currently swaggering around like a nineteenth-century member of Duran Duran in the Beeb’s deeply silly series Desperate Romantics.
Auntie would have you believe that Dante Gabriel and his mates were a wildly unconventional crew hell-bent on shaking up the Victorian establishment, but when it came to poetry none of them could hold a candle to the prodigiously talented – and until quite recently, almost completely forgotten – Christina.
Christina lived much of her life in London, but from April 1853 until March 1854 she ran a school down in Frome in Somerset – this house, one of terrace of three that made up the school, is currently on the market for £325,000.
Lovers of Pre-Raphaelite art will be keen to view it, if only for the fact that it contains the remainder of a mural which was painted by Christina’s brother Dante and William Morris when they visited.
As for Christina – she used to be best known for writing the line “in the bleak mid-winter” but is now rightly acclaimed for her extraordinary poem Goblin Market, “a sensuous fairy story, and a heady tale of repressed sexuality and sisterhood,” as the critic Peggy Reynolds puts it.
It’s well worth checking it out – Dante Gabriel did beautiful illustrations for it (below). The two together are a reminder that the Beeb’s rather desperate Carry on Up Yer Pre-Raphaelites is just no substitute for real thing.

