COVE

This image is specifically chosen for the image gallery because it is illustrated by Laurence Housman, but as we know, Christina Georgina Rossetti actually deliberately asked Laurence Housman to use pen and ink to keep the goblins looking as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her brother, had illustrated them originally.  So, with that being said, Laurence Housman dedicated a lot of time to perfecting the exact copies of the Goblins in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti had created. We are looking at Laurence Housman’s image here, but if you visit Lorraine Janzen's curation of Dante Rossetti's Goblin Market Illustration,you can see how identical the goblins look between the two pieces of work. This is extremely noteworthy because the act of actively coping another artists work is so uncommon, and frankly, unheard of. In regard to editions of any piece of work, the individual(s) who is making the new edition of whatever work is to be remade, there is always an individual spin on the works itself. In this case, it was the request of the author of the poem, Christina Georgina Rossetti, to keep the goblins in the illustrations identical to those of her brothers. As the author, it is safe to assume that she did that because she strongly resonated with the style that Dante executed in his goblins and directly linked it to the poem she had written. It was a perfect fit. Laurence Housman respected that and brought a whole new light to the two full page illustrations that Dante Rossetti had created. Houseman created twelve full page illustrations and several in-text illustrations that were placed to decorate the poem. Laurence Housman was extremely successful in his 1893 edition of Goblin Market.

Source: Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “Laurence Housman (1865-1959),” Y90s Biographies, edited by Dennis Denisoff, 2010. Yellow Nineties 2.0, General Editor Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019, https://1890s.ca/housman_bio/