Don't Eat the Fruit at the Goblin Market!
Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862) and the dangers of forbidden fruit.
Lizzie and Laura lie by a stream as the afternoon succumbs to a fairy-twilight. They wait in rapt silence for a siren song of the Otherworld, and soon, the call hovers above the water, above the wind weaving its way through the reeds. “Come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy…”1
Laura warns her sister to ignore the goblin merchants, whose succulent offerings include every fruit one could possibly imagine, all ripe together in summer weather, climate and season be damned. Yet Laura ignores her own advice and hazards a glance at the goblins. They are, in the great tradition of Britain’s “small gods,” entities of ambiguous species, not quite human, not quite divine—some appear cat-like, and others bearing the features of rats or wombats.2
As long-time readers have no doubt discerned, I am a bit obsessed with fairy folklore. (Crossroads patrons can find an entire series on the subject here.) The goblin emerged in folklore of the Middle Ages as a malicious spirit whose cruelties range from playing pranks on humans to outright murder. Those familiar with older tales of the fae, before they received their child-friendly makeover at the turn of the century, won’t be surprised to learn that the goblins encountered by Lizzie and Laura are anything but friendly purveyors of fine fruit.
Laura cannot resist. She approaches the fruit sellers and informs them that she has no money. They are only too eager to offer a solution.
“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answer’d all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow’d that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gather’d up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turn’d home alone.3
When Christina Rossetti published Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, she had already declined opportunities to write for children: “children are not among my suggestive subjects.”4 Publicly, Rossetti said otherwise—perhaps to obscure the scandalous inspiration behind Goblin Market’s titular poem. Rossetti wrote the first draft of the poem in 1859 while working as a volunteer at the Saint Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a suburb of London. The Penitentiary operated as a center for former prostitutes, and its ethos was remarkable for the Victorian period: instead of punishing the women who sought its doors, the Penitentiary worked to rehabilitate these individuals and assist them in getting back on their feet.
Rossetti herself was a devout Christian, and some scholars believe that the themes of redemption and forgiveness present within “Goblin Market” were influenced by the author’s volunteer work.
“Goblin Market” clearly possesses sexual undertones, as evidenced by the ravenous hunger Laura displays in the above passage. The poem also draws on a common motif in fairy folklore: the dangers of consuming fairy food. Eating fairy food could trap an unsuspecting person in Faerie or Fairyland forever—with a potential antidote being the consumption of human food. (In some stories, eating human food would allow a kidnapped person to return within seven years.)5
But when I revisited “Goblin Market,” I noticed another thread running through the eerie narrative:
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Pluck’d from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the noonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low…6
Lizzie offers her sister this warning after Laura consumes the cursed fruit. She reminds Laura of another young woman named Jeanie, who after tasting the goblins’ fruit develops an insatiable desire for more, one that can never be fully satisfied. Jeanie ages quickly and dies before her time. Laura soon finds herself in a similar state of withdrawal. “I ate my fill / Yet my mouth waters still.”
As I read that passage, my mind went somewhere else—to the haze of a Victorian opium den, smoke curling through the air, victims of a fairy enchantment languishing on velvet cushions, withering away.
Addiction was a subject that would have hit close to home for Rossetti. The Gazette’s current patron series is covering the influence of literature on the Pre-Raphaelite movement; two of Rossetti’s brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti, were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Christina Rossetti was heavily involved as a writer and model. She published her poetry in the Brotherhood’s magazine, the Germ, and by 1850 was the most successful poet in the Pre-Raphaelite circle.7
She also had a front-row seat to the health struggles that plagued Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his lover, muse, and later, wife—Elizabeth Siddal. Both were addicts, Rossetti to chloral and Siddal to laudanum, a tincture of opium. Siddal died of an overdose the year that Goblin Market and Other Poems hit shelves.
Laura nearly dies towards the end of the story, and the agonizing depiction of her withdrawal would have struck a nerve in a society plagued by opium abuse. Indeed, it strikes a nerve now, as the opioid and fentanyl crises have ravaged the lives of so many Americans (and those around the world).
But Rossetti does not condemn her protagonist. Lizzie ventures to the market herself, thinking that obtaining another piece of fruit might help Laura. The goblins attack her, attempting to pry open her mouth and forcing her to eat of the forbidden fruit (as seen in Arthur Rackham’s illustration above). Lizzie escapes and flees to their home:
She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”8
Eat me, drink me, love me. Some literary scholars interpret this as Eucharistic imagery, for when Laura eats and drinks, she is suddenly purified, and finds herself repulsed by the taste of the goblin fruit. However, it’s not just the flavor that shakes Laura from her addiction: it’s the sight of Lizzie covered in pulp and dew, and the horror that the goblins may have also ensnared someone she loves. Laura, in this sense, saves herself—a poignant reminder of the power of family ties and community to jolt one into changing course.
The girls are finally free from the goblins’ drug. Years go by, and they eventually marry and have children of their own.
Even still, they never forget their brush with the Otherworld. Lizzie and Laura are careful to warn their children of the haunted glen: for fairy fruit is “like honey to the throat,” but “poison in the blood.”
Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:
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Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” from Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market.
For those interested in the subject, I cannot recommend enough Francis Young’s Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Rossetti, “Goblin Market.”
Christina Rossetti to Unknown Recipient, 7 March 1862 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. by Antony H Harrison, vol. 1 (University Press of Virginia), 159. Sourced from Dina Roe’s “An introduction to ‘Goblin Market,’” https://web.archive.org/web/20170525215234/https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-goblin-market.
Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (Routledge, 1967), 113.
Rossetti, “Goblin Market.”
Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton University Press, 2000), 71-74.
Rossetti, “Goblin Market.”
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