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Mary Arseneau
University of Ottawa

Pews, Periodicals, and Politics: The Rossetti Women as High Church Controversialists

This paper will focus on the religiously-committed Rossetti and Polidori women and their interest in the countercultural politics of Anglo-Catholicism, tracing through epistolary references, unpublished sources, and neglected publications the narrative of their lively shared commitment to Anglo-Catholicism, its politics, and publications. It is in this neglected corner of Rossetti scholarship-in forgotten writings on church politics published in High Church periodicals-that we find some of Christina and Maria Rossetti's most incisive and urgently stated cultural critique.

Christina's description in 'True in the Main' (published the SPCK's illustrated monthly The Dawn of Day) of Maria Rossetti as a 'pew-opener' alerts us to what is perhaps the most fully documented site of the Rossetti women's involvement in High Church politics: the campaign against pew rents. Frances, Maria, and Christina Rossetti supported the 'free and open Church' movement, agitating for the abolition of a pew system that allowed worshippers to pay for appropriated seating-that is, a private pew for the use of the subscriber only, advantageously positioned for viewing and hearing the service, and at a discrete distance from the 'free seats' occupied by working-class members of the congregations. The Rossetti women's commitment to the abolition of pew rents can be documented over a period several decades, and in outlining it we can reconstruct a partial history of the Rossetti women's activism.

Before 1839 Frances Rossetti had disagreed with the rector at Trinity Church, Marylebone Road over pew-rent. Later, Frances' transcription into her unpublished commonplace book of a poem from Hood's Magazine (July 1844) signals her sympathies with the individual unable to pay for appropriated seating and her indignation at the 'scandal / That desecrates our age.' That Christina and Maria were likewise deeply invested in the issue of pew rents becomes apparent in their respective cognate prose pieces on the subject. Christina's 'Some Pros and Cons. About Pews' published first in The Churchman's Shilling Magazine and then in Commonplace, and Other Stories (1870) is familiar to Rossetti scholars, but Maria's 'Pews: A Colloquy. "One with Another,"' mentioned only in one of Christina's letters, has not hitherto been identified. My paper will examine these prose stories, their origins in controversy in the Rossettis' parish, their broad ranging political references, their rejection of 'the system of worldly England,' and the Rossetti women's commitment to the High Church monthlies in which the stories were published. Finally, I would argue that this neglected prose brings into focus a coherent economy that informs all of Christina Rossetti's 'works'-charitable, devotional, and literary.