IT’s years since I published my biography of Christina Rossetti in which I speculated that her teenage ‘breakdown’ may have been linked to sexual trauma or abuse, and I have not kept up to date with much Rossetti scholarship, while nonetheless applauding the ongoing critical attention her verse now receives. But I ought to have been aware of the article by Simon Humphries in Notes & Queries, March 2017, where a summary account of Rossetti’s mental state by the physician who attended her in 1845 extends biographical understanding of these mid-teen years
Mackenzie Bell, Rossetti’s first
biographer, consulted Dr Charles Hare around 1895-6. After some delay, Hare, whom obits described
as a meticulous correspondent, explained he had sifted through over 8000
case notes to locate Rossetti’s, replying on 2 November 1896, when he was aged
78 (he died just two years later). As Humphries
shows, meticulously, the diagnosis of a nervous breakdown caused by ‘religious mania’
was not made by Hare but by other commentators. But Hare did describe Rossetti
when he was first consulted in November 1845 as ‘then 15’ (she was four or six weeks short of this birthday
) ‘and of a highly neurotic disposition and character.’ He was
the fourth medic to be called, which must reflect the family’s acute anxiety.
Although then denying that he
was disclosing the ‘medical memoranda’ or patient records which would ‘under no
circumstances whatever’ be made public, Hare continued to quote his case notes
as ‘matters of observation open to anyone at the time or mentioned in ordinary
conversation’. They actually read like a
record of what his patient told him.
‘Has been out of health for several months & a
marked change has taken place in her manner & in her way of speaking. When walking
out would suddenly leave her mother & turn back home, or run forward
without any cause & when asked why, said she did not know. Has said very
odd things—has also spoken of suicide; her spirits have been low & she does
no drawing or work of any kind.
‘She tells me that she
feels low & heavy & has a pain & heat almost constantly over a
small spot at the top (vertex) of the head;
this part is hot to the hand applied.—Is aware that she does not always express
herself correctly but she cannot help it; she does it from impulse.
‘She is usually very unwilling
to go out for a walk—feels too listless to do so: she does not like the effort
necessary to prepare for a walk though when out she does not object to the
walking. She tells me that she has a very strong impulse to burn her fingers as
by putting them on the hot bars of the fireplace: she knows that she will have
pain to suffer in consequence and she ‘does not like that better than anyone
else’; but yet she cannot help burning her fingers; she has done so 3 or 4
times the same morning.’
This reads as a vivid
description of behaviour in extreme psychic distress.
Hare continued to attend
Rossetti on a regular basis for the next five years (he recorded over 100
notes) and observe some improvement in her condition. However, in 1849 he was
again summoned, when she was ‘very weak’ and ‘confined to the sofa’, with pains
and ‘confusion in the head’.
‘I found that the headache had become more frontal:
her dreams were usually ‘frightful’ ones, & she had besides, ‘frequently
the sensation of vertigo or rather the sensation of things around
her—furniture, the walls, the floor—moving; the walls appear to be falling
gradually forward & the floor to have an undulating motion, & she sees
creeping things on the floor around her: mind sometimes wanders, she says very
odd things & is rather contrariant’ [sic]’
These alarming symptoms diminished ‘in a couple of
months’, although the pain in her head persisted. On 9 June she composed the poem, ‘Looking Forward’, writing out a copy for Hare
‘in her own neat handwriting’, whose title one could interpret as evidence that
she had resumed writing – although the content remained suicidal:
Sleep, let me sleep, for I am sick of care;
Sleep, let me sleep, for my pain wearies me…
Sweet thought that I may yet live and grow green,
That leaves may yet spring from the withered root,
And buds and flowers and berries half unseen;
Then if you haply muse
upon the past,
Say this: Poor child, she
hath her wish at last;
Barren through life, but in death bearing fruit.
All these symptoms,
but most especially the impulse to touch fire-hot bars, which allies with the ‘cutting’
incident recalled by her brother when she scored her arm with sharp scissors, surely
record the kind of self-harm often associated with severe teenage anguish - now
termed an ‘acute mental health crisis’ rather than a nervous breakdown. The migraine-like headaches, nightmares and hallucinations suggest a post-traumatic recurrence four years after the original
attack.
Of course I don’t
know what caused or precipitated Rossetti’s crisis in 1845 or its return in
1849. Those with professional knowledge of
teenage mental health whom I consulted in my turn spoke of self-harm,
dissociation and suicidal impulses being recognised traumatic symptoms of sexual abuse,
which in the context of Rossetti’s otherwise warmly affectionate family life seemed
a plausible suggestion. And I wish I
had known of Hare’s notes when I was researching
her life.
