The Work
Goblin Market was first published in Rossetti's debut collection Goblin Market and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1862). The collection, with illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, established Christina Rossetti as one of the major poets of her generation. The poem is approximately 567 lines of loosely rhyming verse with a distinctive irregular meter - varying line lengths, insistent repetition, incantatory rhythms - that has been widely recognized as one of the most formally original poems in Victorian English.
The poem has generated an extraordinary volume of critical commentary, making it one of the most discussed poems of the Victorian era. Initial readers recognized both its formal brilliance and its disturbing content; subsequent generations have read it through lenses ranging from feminist criticism to queer theory to Christian typology to psychoanalytic interpretation. The theological reading - which Rossetti herself authorized by providing a Sunday school lesson on the poem - treats it as a redemption allegory rooted in the Eden narrative and the typology of Christ's sacrifice.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 3:6 - 'And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat' - is the narrative source for the poem's temptation. Laura's decision to eat the goblin fruit parallels Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit: in both cases, the action involves a forbidden kind of seeing (pleasant to the eyes), a desire for a transgressive knowledge, and a surrender to a persuasion that is not simply rational but sensory and emotional.
The goblin merchants' wares - 'Figs to fill your mouth, / Citrons from the south, / Sweet to tongue and sound to eye' - are a direct echo of the Eden fruit narrative, and their insistent crying of 'Come buy, come buy' is the equivalent of the serpent's invitation. Laura's transaction (she pays with a lock of her hair and a tear - her self, in miniature) parallels the Fall's transaction: the giving of the self for a forbidden knowledge that ultimately diminishes rather than enhances.
Song of Songs 2:3 - 'As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste' - is the poem's positive counter-text. The legitimate fruit of the Bridegroom - the love of Christ, mediated through the Song's erotic imagery - is athe alternative to the goblins' illicit fruit. Rossetti uses this contrast throughout her devotional poetry, and it is particularly operative here.
John 15:13 - 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends' - is enacted in Lizzie's self-offering. When Laura is dying of her addiction to the goblin fruit, Lizzie goes to the goblins and offers herself to be smeared with their juice without eating it - enduring their assault so that she can bring the fruit's antidote back to her sister. The redemptive act is clearly modeled on Christ's sacrifice: Lizzie absorbs violence meant for another, returning transformed and offering herself as the medicine of salvation. Her cry - 'Eat me, drink me, love me' - deliberately echoes the Eucharistic words of institution (Matthew 26:26-28: 'Take, eat; this is my body... Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood').
The Eucharistic resonance is not incidental: Rossetti was a devout Anglo-Catholic for whom the Eucharist was the central act of Christian worship and the primary vehicle of Christ's self-giving. The poem dramatizes a Eucharistic substitution: Lizzie offers her body - covered in the goblin juice she has not consumed - as the medicine that heals her fallen sister. This is typological theology: the figure of the sacrificial victim who takes on another's corruption and transforms it.
Author and Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, a Dante scholar, and Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti, an Anglo-Italian woman of deep Anglican piety. The family's Italian and English roots, combined with the religious intensity of the Oxford Movement which deeply influenced her mother, shaped Rossetti's distinctive combination of sensory vividness and theological seriousness.
The immediate context of Goblin Market includes Rossetti's voluntary work with the St. Mary Magdalene home for 'fallen women' - prostitutes and women in sexual difficulty - which she undertook for several years in the 1850s and 1860s. Some scholars have argued that the poem is partly an exploration of the experiences of the women she met there: the seductive appeal of what destroys, the aftermath of that destruction, and the possibility of redemption through another's sacrificial love.
Rossetti provided the poem's authorized interpretation in a Sunday school lesson she gave, in which she explained that the goblins represented temptation and that Lizzie's self-offering represented Christ's sacrifice. This authorial interpretation does not exhaust the poem's meaning but confirms that the theological reading is not imposed from outside.
Literary Analysis
The poem's formal achievement is inseparable from its theological content. The goblin merchants' verses - 'Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry: / Come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy' - are hypnotic, their insistence mimicking the quality of temptation itself: repetitive, sensory, rhythmically compelling. The poem's irregular meter and rhyme scheme mirror the goblins' disorder against which Lizzie's steadiness is set.
Laura's addiction - after eating the goblin fruit, she can no longer hear the goblins but longs perpetually for the taste she cannot recapture - is a remarkably precise psychological description of addictive craving, and this has given the poem contemporary resonance in discussions of addiction, desire, and the body.
Critical Reception
Initial reception focused on the poem's obvious beauty and disturbing content - what exactly are the goblins selling? what is the nature of Lizzie's ordeal? Victorian reviewers skirted these questions. Twentieth-century feminist critics read the poem as a critique of female sexual vulnerability in a predatory male market economy; queer theorists read Lizzie's physical contact with Laura as a lesbian rescue narrative. The Christian theological reading - while authorized by Rossetti herself - was largely neglected in academic criticism until the late twentieth century.
The most balanced critical readings acknowledge that the poem sustains multiple interpretations simultaneously: the feminist, the queer, and the theological are not mutually exclusive but mutually illuminating. Rossetti lived in a culture where female sexuality was both policed and commodified, and her theological resources gave her a way to address the situation of women exploited by that culture through a typology of sacrifice and redemption.
Theological Significance
The poem is the most significant Victorian literary treatment of substitutionary atonement applied to female experience. Rossetti's Lizzie enacts what the penal substitutionary tradition describes: the innocent person absorbs the violence directed at the guilty, returning transformed and offering the healing that results. But Rossetti's version is importantly different from the forensic account of atonement: it is relational and embodied rather than legal and transactional. Lizzie's healing of Laura is not a payment of a debt but a physical act of love - a bearing of one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2) that restores the fallen sister.
Legacy
The poem has been continuously in print since 1862. It has influenced poets including Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who illustrated it), Gerard Manley Hopkins, and later poets including Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. Its influence on children's fantasy literature - the allure of forbidden fruit, the sibling rescue - can be traced in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), where Edmund's Turkish Delight repeats the same pattern of addictive forbidden sweetness.
In contemporary culture, the poem has been widely adapted - in graphic novels, musical settings, films, and feminist retellings - indicating both its formal richness and the persistence of its central concerns.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Genesis 3 (the Fall narrative), Song of Songs 2-3 (the longing for the beloved), John 15:13 (laying down one's life for friends), Matthew 26:26-29 (the Last Supper and Eucharistic words), Galatians 6:1-5 (bearing one another's burdens), and Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant who bears others' griefs).
Further Reading
- Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (2002) - essential for understanding the poem's visual reception and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's illustrations. - Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (2004) - the best theological study of the poem. - The Rossetti Archive (online) - provides comprehensive access to manuscript, publication, and critical history.