In 1847 Rossetti’s grandfather Gaetano Polidori printed her first volume Verses on his private press. She began more formal publication of her work by submitting poems to the pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ. During her lifetime, she achieved her greatest acclaim with her 1881 volume A Pageant and Other Poems, a work that would elevate Rossetti’s name into the circle of the most wellknown female poets. Her best-known work is “The Goblin Market,” which treats the most provocative of adult issues—race, class, sex, drugs, disease, infertility, spirituality, and commercialism— in the singsong tones of a children’s poem.
Evolution, race, and empire. Published just three years after Charles Darwin’s landmark essay On the Origin of Species (also in Literature and Its Times), “The Goblin Market” resonates with concerns raised by evolutionary theory. Though the Origin of Species does not directly address the evolution of humans from animals (Darwin would not address this directly until his 1871 The Descent of Man), the essay fostered a widespread anxiety regarding the nearness of humans to other species. Positing a mechanism called “Natural Selection,” whereby new species could evolve from old, the Origin implied that the apparently stable (some even said, a divinely ordained) natural order, which set humanity clearly apart from and above other species, was neither so stable nor so clear-cut.
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