Fingers to the fire: Christina Rossetti’s mental health crisis

 

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.