Sucking the Forbidden Fruit: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

Nobody expects the Victorian wombats! Given the title, listeners won’t be hugely surprised to hear there are goblins in today’s episode, but wombats!?!?

Yes, the sleeper hits of this episode are our round, furry friends from Australia. Or, as the poet Christina Rossetti would put it in a poem to her family pet, gli umobatti. “Goblin Market” is already going to 11 on the weirdness scale, and we’ve said nothing of the fairies, goblins, sexual repression, feminine hysteria, class anxiety and evangelism coming your way. If you’re into High Victorian weirdness then, boy, this is the SLoB episode for you.

Christina Rossetti was the daughter of an exiled Italian radical and sister of the famous painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “Goblin Market” is her hit poem from 1862. 1862 was, incidentally, the same year in which, across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson sent her poems to T.W. Higginson (asking if they breathe) and Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, improvised a story about a girl called Alice going underground.

“Goblin Market” is a bizarre, rollicking, long poem about a young woman called Laura who “sucked and sucked and sucked” the “fruit globes” of some goblins - which is just an unnecessary erotic way of saying she ate some fruit - and wasted away, until saved by her sister Lizzie in a truly bizarre ceremony in which she licks sticky juice off her face.

Rossetti was inspired by John Keats and his theory of negative capability, and she was at the heart of London’s bohemian artistic elite, the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. But she was also neurotic, austere and devoutly religious, turning her back on her brother’s louche goings-on in his house in Chelsea, where aesthetes slid naked down the bannisters and cavorted with his collection of exotic pets.

But she did not turn her back on Gabriel Rossetti’s pet wombat, Top, named after his great university friend, the radical designer and writer William Morris. Come for the fruit globes, stay for the wombats in this edge-of-your seat SLOB episode.

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