Covent Goblin Market

I am feared in field and town: Goblin, lead them up and down.

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream¹

Virgins are like the fair Flower in its Lustre, Which in the Garden enamels the Ground; Near it the Bees in play flutter and cluster, And gaudy Butterflies frolick around; But, when once pluck’d, ’tis no longer alluring, To Covent-Garden ’tis sent (as yet sweet), There fades, and shrinks, and grows past all enduring, Rots, stinks, and dies, and is trod under feet.

— The Beggar’s Opera²

Beautiful is the fruit piled in the centre walk of Covent Garden market; tempting the fairest and the richest daughters of Eve to touch, and then to make it their own.

— Punch (1844)³

When Christina Rossetti made the original title for Goblin Market (1862) “A Peep at the Goblins,” she engaged in guidebook terminology. Nineteenth-century guidebook writers frequently use “peep” in their titles to suggest that the text offers a brief look at a real location or population.⁴ Ann and Jane Taylor’s popular children’s guidebook, City Scenes, Or, A Peep into London, for Good Children (1809), may have been inspired by an “old song,” which recommended, “If ever you go to London town, / Just take a peep at Covent Garden.”⁵ By luring Laura, Jeanie, and her readers into the market to “peep at goblin men” (l. 49), Rossetti implicitly suggests that her poem offers a guide to a real location.⁶ One of the many “must sees” of nineteenth-century guidebooks was the spectacular Covent Garden Market, where “the poet may also ramble,” Thomas Miller writes in 1852, “call[ing] up visions.”⁷ As a practical and fashionable destination for shoppers and a popular subject for writers across several genres, Covent Garden Market’s cornucopia of sights, smells, sounds—and most certainly its prospect of danger—would have been familiar to Rossetti, a life-long Londoner, and may have provided impetus for her poetic guidebook, Goblin Market.

Of the richly diverse critical debates over the poem from its 1862 publication to the present, none have fully considered the real location that may have inspired Rossetti’s titular market. Many have approached the poem metaphorically—thereby the fruit, goblins, and the market in which they reside vanish into allegory, or as Elizabeth K. Helsinger argues, function as a “figurative dress for a narrative of spiritual temptation, fall, and redemption.”⁸ Recently, however, scholars have pointed to the materiality of the poem, putting the “market,” as Herbert Tucker writes, “back in ‘Goblin Market.’”⁹ While the materiality of the goblin fruit and its modes of exchange have been astutely explored, the market’s real geographical counterpart remains unresolved. Mary Wilson Carpenter posits that the poem “suggests its location in the . . . intersection of imperialist culture and consumer capitalism.”¹⁰ There is probably no better example of this “intersection” than Covent Garden Market. I want to suggest that Rossetti transformed London’s busy Covent Garden Market into the sparsely populated, bucolic fairytale land of Goblin Market. In this respect, the poem functions as a guidebook to teach children—and mothers like the grown Lizzie and Laura, “beset with fears” (l. 546)—to be wary of a popular, and necessary, London destination.

In December 1850, William Michael Rossetti moved the family to 45 Upper Albany Street (later 166 Albany Street) where Christina Rossetti completed Goblin Market on April 27, 1859.¹¹ Although Cumberland Market was around the corner from the Rossetti household, it offered only hay and straw relocated from Haymarket in 1830. Just to its south Clarence Gardens opened to sell other wares, but Edward Walford relates in 1892 that the markets were “never . . . very largely attended.”¹² For any significant purchases of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, the Rossettis, like any London family, would have gone to Covent Garden Market. Christina Rossetti visited the Market twice within one week in December 1883 to buy a wreath, a cross, and flowers for the funeral of friend Charles Cayley.¹³ And William Michael Rossetti recalls, “The motto of the ducal family of Bedford, written over Covent Garden Market, ‘Che sarà sar...