Who is the Alchemist in Christina Rossetti's 'The Prince's Progress'?

Abstract

Recent criticism of Christina Rossetti's major fairy-tale narrative poems ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Prince's Progress’ has demonstrated the importance of understanding their religious symbolism. In this light, ‘The Prince's Progress’ has been read not only as an ironic tale of an individual pilgrim's progress, but also as structured upon a scheme of historical progress—from the transgression in paradise of Genesis through to the renewal of Revelation. Yet it has proved difficult to incorporate the poem's most extended episode, that of the alchemist, into this historical scheme. This article, by tracing the biblical and literary sources of this figure, argues that the alchemist is an embodiment of the old dispensation of ‘the Jews’, or of ‘the law’, in the historical scheme of Christian supersessionist theology. This provides strong support for that critical tradition in which the poem is to be understood ultimately in religious terms. But this article also argues that the supposition that the characters within the narratives of ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Prince's Progress’ are themselves capable of the symbolic interpretation of events—a supposition that is becoming critical orthodoxy—rests on an understanding of Rossetti's symbolic method in these poems which is wholly mistaken.