‘What is it?’ ‘It is a lewd goblin’: Taking Critical Cues from Illustrative Adaptations of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market

Abstract

When adapters interpret a work over and over again, they focus on details that can shape the way we think about a text. Focusing on these adaptive details can often lead to seeing gaps in the criticism of a text. Such is the case with Goblin Market, a poem that critics have been noting is ‘ambiguous’ since its first publication in 1862. While most critics understand that this ambiguity centres on the sexual undertones of the poem, the key to understanding this allegory might be discovered by turning to illustrative adaptations. In all illustration, one detail is reproduced consistently: the goblins are visualised as animals. Yet animality is rarely discussed in criticism of the poem, and almost never with any depth. I argue that we can view adaptation as a type of meaning-making that literary and cultural critics might build upon when analysing familiar texts.