ABSTRACT
In a verse autobiography published in 1836, Caroline Bowles-Southey, wife of the Poet Laureate, recalled the centrality of Christian texts to her childhood. The Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and sundry books of sermons dominated her early education, entertainment, and imaginative life. The young Elizabeth Barrett carefully recorded in her diary her own daily chapters of Bible reading, which included the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, as well as staggering amounts of theological literature. Christina Rossetti fell in her teens under the spell of the Tractarian preaching of the Reverend William Dodsworth, pored over Keble’s Christian Year, and forced herself to give up playing chess because she cared too much about the very unspiritual ambition of winning. In November 1836, the Christian Lady’s Magazine printed a letter concerning the appropriate writing and reading of poetry by devout women (VI 429-36). A woman should always bear in mind
eternal and unworldly pleasures, states M. A. S., for while sacred poetry “elevate[s] the affections,” “worldly poetry [is] a sand-box of Satan” (432). For these and other nineteenth-century women, Christianity and Christian texts offered a guide for all thoughts and actions, and a central focus for social, artistic, and literary projects.
