English Literature Students’ Art Exploration

Year 13 English Literature students enjoyed a trip to Port Sunlight on the Wirral in order to visit The Lady Lever Art Gallery as context to their understanding of Pre-Raphaelite movement poet Christina Rossetti.
This beautiful building, set within the ‘chocolate-box’ model village built between 1899 and 1914 by philanthropic industrialist William Lever in order to provide good living conditions for his workforce, houses perhaps the greatest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in this country. The focus on religious symbolism and allusions to classical mythology, as well as precise attention to detail resonates across all cultural production of the movement and, having had this wonderful experience, the students are now better equipped to understand the motivations, concerns and stylistic decisions of Rossetti, who is now rightfully perceived to be one of the foremost poets of the Nineteenth Century and, indeed, one of English Literature’s finest female poets.