‘Love Came Down at Christmastime’: Pedagogical Purpose and Religious Devotion in Christina Rossetti’s Christmas Carols

This article argues that three of Christina Rossetti’s Christmas-themed poems – ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1876), ‘Christmastide’ (1885), and ‘A Christmas Carol, for my Godchildren’ (1886) – attempted to reclaim a religious-based Christmas poetics that centralised Christian meditations on Christ’s significance to Christmas over growing nonsectarian celebration in the nineteenth century. Further, in the twentieth century, these poems were part of a growing religious based pedagogical repurposing, which thrust Rossetti’s poetry into the debate about the use of outwardly religious material in the classroom.