Christina Rossetti

This wood engraving print was created from an illustration Dante Gabriel Rossetti drew to accompany Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market, for the second edition of her collected works Goblin Market and Other Poems. The piece depicts the moment Rossetti’s protagonist Laura succumbs to temptation and buys fruit from the goblin men ‘with a golden curl’. It shows Laura cutting the curl, whilst her sister Lizzie flees. In accordance with Christina Rossetti’s lines, her brother draws the goblins as anthropomorphic animals, with ‘One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry’ taking the lock of hair.

• Artist Christina Rossetti
• Artwork Goblin Market (Laura with goblin men)
• Material FSC Certified paper and wood
• Date of work 1865
• Credit Original: Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market 1865 ‘After Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ Wood engravings Tate. Library & Archive (London, UK)_x000D_

Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894) was an English poet. Educated at home by her mother, Rossetti was a prolific writer, and had her poems published at the age of 18. Her first commercially printed book of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862, was very favourably received by critics and contemporaries, who declared her the successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She sat for her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti for several of his paintings, notably The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848–9 and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation), 1849–50, both part of Tate’s collection. Her poetry is enduringly popular, and has influenced other writers and poets including Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin. Her verses have also been adapted by composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Gustav Holst.