Who needs men? Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

Goblin Market was written in 1859, published in 1862, and in manuscript was dedicated to Christina Rossetti’s sister Maria. 1 It has the appearance of a children’s fairy story and was a nursery favourite in the Victorian period. It will still engage a young listener when read aloud. But rather like ‘The Ancient Mariner’ or Alice in Wonderland , it is a text for both adults and children which can be read in a disconcerting number of ways. In recent years it has been read as a Christian allegory; a feminist Christian allegory with a female Christ figure; an allegory of sexual desire; a female rites of passage poem; a lesbian manifesto; a poem about the erotic life of children; a metaphoric statement about patterns of social destructiveness in Victorian England; and in psychoanalytic terms as a power struggle between mothers and children. Only the last of these seems to me self-evidently silly. Its ‘underground reputation as a forgotten feminist classic’ 2 was blown by the appearance of an abbreviated version of the poem with pornographic illustrations in Playboy in 1973, where it was described as ‘the alltime hard-core pornographic classic for tiny tots’. 3 As this should make clear, there has been a marked revival of interest in Goblin Market in the last fifteen years during which time it has perhaps been reread more extensively than any other Victorian poem. 4 And the appearance of the first volume of Crump’s long-needed edition of Rossetti’s poetry has now made it much easier to read Goblin Market in relation to her other poetry of the 1850s and 1860s.