Cart

Your cart is empty
The Unbegun — Christina Rossetti — literary quote tee — dark romanticism — black — front — Quoteiac
The Unbegun — Christina Rossetti — literary quote tee — dark romanticism — black — back — Quoteiac
Quoteiac

The Unbegun — Rossetti Quote T-Shirt

Sale price$32.00
Size:
Size Guide — Standard 1

Standard 1 — 4.2 oz/yd² Unisex Tee

Retail fit, true to size. Measurements are of the garment laid flat. Lay a shirt you already like flat and measure across the chest, seam to seam. Match that number to the Chest column.

Size Chest Width (laid flat) (in) Length (in)
XS 16.5 27.0
S 18.0 28.0
M 20.0 29.0
L 22.0 30.0
XL 24.0 31.0
2XL 26.0 32.0

Rossetti asked whether anything's sadder than unfinished work, then answered herself: "work never begun." By 1885 she'd been writing for two decades and knew the cost.

Christina Rossetti, Time Flies (1885)

"Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes: work never begun."

Context

The logic is the whole point: unfinished work at least proves you started, so the deeper loss is the work that never got its chance. Rossetti isn't mourning failure — she's drawing a line between two kinds of it. Verified to the 1885 first edition.

Who It's For

  • The maker who keeps revising the plan instead of starting it
  • The writer with seventeen first chapters
  • Anyone who has been meaning to begin

Begin.

The Design

A front-print tee. Two lines across the chest — the question up top, the verdict below. The period does the work: no qualifier, just the conclusion, worn.

Also on the Unbegun Mug and Unbegun Journal.

About This Tee

  • 100% combed and ring-spun cotton
  • Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²)
  • Retail fit, true to size
  • Side-seamed construction
  • Machine washable, cold water
  • Quoteiac logo on the left sleeve

Christina Rossetti, in Plain English

  • Lived 1830–1894, London
  • Published Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, at 31 — still her best-known work
  • Time Flies (1885), where this line appears, was a devotional written in prose, not verse — a daily diary kept in her mid-fifties
  • Wrote through chronic illness — Graves' disease in the 1870s, and the cancer that ended her life in 1894
  • Declined marriage more than once on religious grounds; one of the most widely read women poets in English
The Unbegun — Christina Rossetti — literary quote tee — dark romanticism — black — front — Quoteiac
The Unbegun — Rossetti Quote T-Shirt Sale price$32.00