Rossetti's Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye

Abstract

Recent criticism putting the market back in Christina Rossetti's ''Goblin Market'' (1862) makes, and leaves, space for consideration of the poem's relation to marketing-as-advertising. Written to be read by adults in silence as if out loud to children, the poem trades in the mystique of a virtual orality that is structurally analogous to its goblin merchants' mystification, through promotional language, of both the nature of their retail business and the origins of the produce they sell. The virtual-oral mode of the poem creates rich opportunities for local wordplay to highlight that mystification at a juncture in economic history when with new subtlety and aggressiveness a burgeoning advertising business was transforming Victorian consumerism. The miracle of a sister's redemption from goblin taste stakes on Rossetti's Christian belief her congruent faith as a poet: that a modern tongue may be redeemed by art, in spite of art's collusion with the forces by which it must circulate to earn a hearing.