COVE

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite artist, designed "Buy from us with a golden curl" as the frontispiece to his sister Christina Rossetti's first commercially published book of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (Macmillan 1862). The subject he chose for his composition was the scene of temptation in "Goblin Market," the book's title poem. Together with the title-page vignette, “Golden head by golden head,” the frontispiece shaped readers’ interpretations by proleptically anticipating events in the poem they had not yet read. At the same time, the hand-written caption, “Buy from us with a golden curl” (wood-engraved, like the image, by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.), anchors the picture to the poem and directs readers to the precise scene it visualizes. A comparison of the textual scene illuminates some interesting extradiegetic and interpictorial visual commentary by the artist. While the caption specifically references lines 125-128, where the goblins urge Laura to “Buy from us with a golden curl” and she complies, the picture’s details are drawn from the longer narrative sequence described in lines 32-133. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the first artist to interpret Christina Rossetti’s description of “each merchant man,” also called “goblin men,” whom the poet describes in terms of various animals. His interpretation of these hybrid creatures makes them part animal and part human (wearing clothes and with humanoid hands), an interpretation followed by some, but not all, later illustrators. His most significant extradiegetic commentary is to make Lizzie visible in the scene in which Laura cuts her golden curl in exchange for the goblin men’s fruit. This is an interesting pictorial commentary, as the poetic narrative makes it clear that Lizzie runs home before Laura meets with the goblins: “She thrust a dimpled finger /In each ear, shut eyes and ran” (lines 67-68). By adding Lizzie to the scene, and contrasting her actions and attire with Laura’s, the artist draws on a pictorial tradition of representing “Flesh” with a full-bodied, long-haired, sensuous woman (in this case, Laura) and “Spirit” with a more constrained female figure who resists temptation (in this case, Lizzie). Thus, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s frontispiece prepares readers of “Goblin Market” to interpret the poem allegorically within a religious tradition that dictates the Spirit must resist the temptations of the Flesh. The title-page vignette offers a contrasting, and even contradictory, interpretation of the meaning of this story about sisters and goblins, which interested readers can consider in the annotation to “Golden head by golden head” in the COVE Edition of Goblin Market.

Principal Sources: Cove Edition of Goblin Market; and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History, Ohio UP, 2002.