The letters of Christina Rossetti: Two new letters
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Antony Harrisons edition of the Letters of Christina Rossetti, now complete in four volumes, provides Rossetti scholars with an invaluable and long anticipated resource. I present two additional letters here, along with a short list of supplementary notes and corrections to Harrisons edition. The new letters, discovered after Harrisons final volume had gone to press, are of interest because they offer new information about the publishing history of two of Rossettis poems: An Alphabet from England and A Christmas Carol. The first letter, from Rossetti to Mary Mapes Dodge, is tipped in to a copy of the American edition of Maude: Prose and Verse (Chicago: H.S. Stone, 1897) held in the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A & M University. The second letter is inserted in an extra-illustrated copy of Representative Poems of Living Poets, American and English (New York: Cassell, 1886) held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In my transcripts of Rossettis two letters, I retain Rossettis punctuation, but I have not maintained the line or page breaks of the manuscripts or the indentations of the headings.