Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems

Reading time

about 3.5 h

Length

45,687 words · 348 pages

Structure

146 chapters · 1 front-matter section

Language

English

Era

Victorian

Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, live alone within earshot of goblin merchants who cry their strange fruit at morning and evening — "Come buy, come buy" — and Laura, who tastes it, wastes away for want of more, until Lizzie risks everything to buy her sister's cure from the same goblins who nearly destroyed her. "Goblin Market" (1862) is the poem that made Rossetti's name, a fable as unsettling as it is musical, and it opens a collection that ranges from "The Prince's Progress," a fairy-tale bridegroom who dawdles his way toward a bride who dies waiting for him, to devotional lyrics, ballads, sonnets, and the wrenching short songs — "Song," "Remember," "Up-Hill," "When I am dead, my dearest" — that made her one of the most widely read poets of her century.

Christina Rossetti published Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 and The Prince's Progress and Other Poems in 1866; this collected edition, first issued in the Oxford World's Classics series, gathers both books together with a substantial body of further poems, devotional and secular, published across her career.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of both original collections and the miscellaneous poems that follow them, together with the book's own dedication to Rossetti's mother.

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Subjects

English poetry

About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was born in London to the Italian political exile and Dante scholar Gabriele Rossetti and Frances Polidori, and grew up in a household steeped in art and literature alongside her brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, and William Michael Rossetti, critic and editor; she herself modeled for several early Pre-Raphaelite paintings and contributed poems to the Brotherhood's short-lived magazine The Germ under a pseudonym. A devout Anglo-Catholic, she twice broke off engagements over religious differences with her suitors and never married, and for a decade volunteered at a refuge for former prostitutes in Highgate. Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) established her reputation, its title poem's vivid, ambiguous fable of two sisters and forbidden fruit becoming one of the most widely anthologised poems of the Victorian era; The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866) followed, along with devotional verse, children's poems, and short stories. Her carol "In the Bleak Midwinter," written as a poem in the 1870s, was set to music after her death and remains a Christmas standard. Chronically ill for much of her adult life — first with a condition resembling angina, later with Graves' disease — she died in London of breast cancer at sixty-three.