Few works in the extensive oeuvre of Christina Rossetti are as defiantly strange as Speaking Likenesses. It received a puzzled reception upon its release, and critical attitudes toward it have hardly shifted. Rossetti, in a letter to her brother Dante Gabriel in May 1874, describes it as “merely a Christmas trifle” that “would be in the Alice style with an eye to the market” (Family Letters 44).
This characteristically self-deprecating note underplays the sheer weirdness of the work. As Rossetti indicates, Speaking Likenesses indeed consciously imitates the style of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which had already achieved classic status since its release in 1864. Speaking Likenesses does not, however, pay homage to Carroll as much as contest and undermine the joyously anarchic ethos of his work. The cultural relevance of Rossetti’s oddity of...
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Citation: Fagan, Joshua. "Speaking Likenesses". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 February 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16039, accessed 13 December 2025.]
