Jonty Claypole

Christina Rossetti kept his picture all her life.

So she was sort of clearly very drawn to him and his work.

Her father was also friends, and this will become very important later, with an Irishman called Thomas Keatley, who wrote a book called Fairy Mythology in 1828.

And the Rossetti children...

had this book.

And it's an early expression of the Victorian obsession with fairies.

And it's a sort of almanac or a listing of all the different types of fairies you can get.

So you've got this going on.

And then the family become very involved in the local church, which is a church called Christchurch on Albany Street.

And Christchurch was one of the vanguards of the so-called Oxford movement, which has come up in slob before this.

which is a sort of new evangelical strain of Anglican Christianity that perceives Protestantism or Anglicanism as having gone rather lowbrow and is a sort of return to the ceremonies of Catholicism.

And Christchurch was one of the vanguards of this movement.

And they had one of the very best preachers of the Oxford movement, a man called Reverend William Dodsworth,

And a lot of the family became very converted to this very English religious movement in complete contrast to the Rossetti Catholic background.

And Christina and her sister Maria were the most fervent converts of all.

And so there's this weird paradox in that Christina is actually starting to grow up as a very austere religious English woman, despite coming from this very bohemian household.

Then comes the rock and roll years, because in 1848, when she's 18, her brother Dante has gone to the Royal Academy.

He has great promise as an artist, a painter.

He's also a poet.

And while at the Royal Academy, he teams up with fellow students.