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Speaking Likenesses
With pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes.This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program.
- GenresClassics
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1874
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About the author
Christina Rossetti
346 books567 followersChristina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).
Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.
Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 4, 2025
4.5 ☆
Based on the overall rating here on Goodreads, my 4 star evaluation of Rossetti’s children’s story “Speaking Likenesses” is quite a hot, if not scorching, take…
Sidenote: This is indeed my first work by Rossetti and, no, i have not read the renowned “Goblin market” (yet).
Based on the overall rating here on Goodreads, my 4 star evaluation of Rossetti’s children’s story “Speaking Likenesses” is quite a hot, if not scorching, take…
Sidenote: This is indeed my first work by Rossetti and, no, i have not read the renowned “Goblin market” (yet).
January 21, 2024
Reading through this again while I write my essay on it. The reviews on here are pretty hideous! :(
January 18, 2019
This little-known work from a famous poet deserves a wider readership. It is a series of three fairy tales but they are bound together in one frame narrative, so they are tales within a tale and therefore have no separate titles. The frame narrative foregrounds the historical Mother Goose character of the older female telling fairy tales at home to children - but in this case, these were never folktales told orally. It is merely a narrative device which is an interesting experiment drawn from real circumstances.
The tales themselves are very fun to read but not spectacular feats of writing, especially compared to Christina Rossetti's fantastical poetic masterpiece Goblin Market. Perhaps their biggest problem is that they are too didactic, but they are nevertheless interesting and while their endings are a bit predictable, their middle content is maybe not quite so.
The stories have three female protagonists who - in each case through supernatural elements - are punished for being rude, made to look silly for being arrogant and pretentious, and rewarded for obeying and keeping a promise, respectively. The first and longest tale has several affinities with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a personal friend of Rossetti's, to the extent that one might say Rossetti was trying to take advantage of Alice's commercial success by copying it. The final tale - interestingly and unexpectedly on a personal level - is an original take on the most famous of fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood. It has none of its traditional characters, but there are clear parallels between the characters of the two tales. The plot is similarly about a little girl who carries a basket of good through the woods, where she meets temptations, to a house on the edge of the forest. Rossetti reverses the traditional association of Little Red with disobedience to focus on obedience; the tale, however, is no less didactic than the previous two.
3 stars because it is a good and fun work to read which does not, in my opinion, deserve to be forgotten as much it is, but it is not a spectacular fairy tale collection, nor as good as Carroll's work. It is not as good as Rossetti's poetry, but it is an interesting other side to this wonderful writer which ought to be remembered.
The tales themselves are very fun to read but not spectacular feats of writing, especially compared to Christina Rossetti's fantastical poetic masterpiece Goblin Market. Perhaps their biggest problem is that they are too didactic, but they are nevertheless interesting and while their endings are a bit predictable, their middle content is maybe not quite so.
The stories have three female protagonists who - in each case through supernatural elements - are punished for being rude, made to look silly for being arrogant and pretentious, and rewarded for obeying and keeping a promise, respectively. The first and longest tale has several affinities with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a personal friend of Rossetti's, to the extent that one might say Rossetti was trying to take advantage of Alice's commercial success by copying it. The final tale - interestingly and unexpectedly on a personal level - is an original take on the most famous of fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood. It has none of its traditional characters, but there are clear parallels between the characters of the two tales. The plot is similarly about a little girl who carries a basket of good through the woods, where she meets temptations, to a house on the edge of the forest. Rossetti reverses the traditional association of Little Red with disobedience to focus on obedience; the tale, however, is no less didactic than the previous two.
3 stars because it is a good and fun work to read which does not, in my opinion, deserve to be forgotten as much it is, but it is not a spectacular fairy tale collection, nor as good as Carroll's work. It is not as good as Rossetti's poetry, but it is an interesting other side to this wonderful writer which ought to be remembered.
September 20, 2023
Una decepción este libro. Entiendo que son cuentos infantiles, pero dos de los tres cuentos no tienen ningún propósito, ni siquiera moralizante. Después de haber leído El Mercado de los Duendes de la misma autora, me quedo con un mal sabor de boca, pues en esa obra hace un excelso trabajo poético, es una pena que esto no esté al nivel de su otro trabajo.
December 16, 2021
I suppose it's admirable that Rossetti tried different things during her career.
January 4, 2025
A pesar de ser un libro de cuentos infantiles, me he encontrado entretenida leyéndolos.
Desde luego, el primer cuento es el que más me ha gustado.
Desde luego, el primer cuento es el que más me ha gustado.
January 12, 2025
was alright tbh made me giggle
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November 28, 2025uni read
January 28, 2014
I prefer to believe that Rossetti wrote this to provide inspiration for Arthur Hughes' luscious illustrations rather than as an 'anti-fantasy' or an 'anti-Alice'. Rambling, didactic and altogether a missed opportunity to do something worthwhile with one or two very good ideas.
April 18, 2013
This is a blatant ripoff of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Worse, the author's brother was friends with Lewis Carroll.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews