Goblin Market and Other Poems.

ROSSETTI, Christina.

Item Number: 124149

London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865.

Second edition of the book that launched Christina Rosetti’s literary career and is believed to have inspired Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Octavo, original cloth, with two designs by Dante Gabriel Rosetti. In very good condition. Uncommon in the original cloth.

The story of two sisters tempted with fruit by goblin merchants, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has inspired disparate interpretations. Some critics suggest that the fantastical poem is about feminine sexuality and its relation to Victorian social mores, while many others view it as an overt expression of Rossetti's feminist and homosexual politics. Other critics focus not on gender but on the Victorian consciousness of a capitalist critique of the growing Victorian economic market, whether in relation to sisters' Lizzie and Laura's interaction with the market as gendered beings, the agricultural market, or in the rapid increase in advertising the "Market". When Goblin Market was released in April 1859, most Victorians weren't able to purchase fresh fruit, a historical note of importance when reading the poem for Victorian agriculture and tone.