Covent Goblin Market

Abstract

I am feared in field and town: Goblin, lead them up and down. --A Midsummer Night's Dream (1) Virgins are like fair Flower in its Lustre, Which in Garden enamels Ground; Near it 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 Opera (2) Beautiful is fruit piled in centre walk of Covent Garden market; tempting fairest and richest daughters of Eve to touch, and then to make it their own. --Punch (1844) (3) When Christina Rossetti made original title for Goblin Market (1862) Peep at Goblins, she engaged in guidebook terminology. Nineteenth-century guidebook writers frequently use in their titles to suggest that 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 at Covent Garden. (5) By luring Laura, Jeanie, and her readers into market to peep at goblin men (l. 49), Rossetti implicitly that her poem offers a guide to a real location. (6) One of many must sees of nineteenth-century guidebooks was 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 richly diverse critical debates over poem from its 1862 publication to present, none have fully considered real location that may have inspired Rossetti's titular market. Many have approached poem metaphorically--thereby fruit, goblins, and 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 materiality of poem, putting market, as Herbert Tucker writes, back in 'Goblin Market.' (9) While materiality of goblin fruit and its modes of exchange have been astutely explored, market's real geographical counterpart remains unresolved. Mary Wilson Carpenter posits that poem suggests its location in ... 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 sparsely populated, bucolic fairytale land of Goblin Market. In this respect, poem functions as a guidebook to teach children-and mothers like grown Lizzie and Laura, beset with fears (1. 546)--to be wary of a popular, and necessary, London destination. In December 1850, William Michael Rossetti moved 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 corner from 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 markets were never ... very largely attended. (12) For any significant purchases of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, Rossettis, like any London family, would have gone to Covent Garden Market. …