This essay originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009).
Fairy subject pictures, often based on Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream and The tempest, were popular in late nineteenth-century England, and catered to the Victorians’ fascination with the ‘spirit world’. Frank
Craig’s painting Goblin market, originally exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1911, is a late example of the genre, although fairies, goblins, pixies and elves continued to be the staple of children’s book illustration.
Craig was renowned as a magazine illustrator in black and white, but his material was mainly drawn from historical and social narratives. The works he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1895 to 1915 were also mostly
genre paintings, portraits, and medieval and modern historical subjects in the manner of his mentor at the Royal Academy Schools, Edwin Austin Abbey. Goblin market would appear to be unique in Craig’s output and is
the most impressive example of a fairy painting since Richard Dadd’s The fairy feller’s master stroke, 1855–64 (Tate Collection, London) and Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle’s fairy illustrations half a century earlier.
The painting illustrates a passage from Christina Rossetti’s enduring narrative poem ‘Goblin market’, an allegory of sexual ripeness and illicit pleasure, first published in 1862 with illustrations by Christina’s brother,
the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Illustrators of later editions include Laurence Housman, 1893, and Arthur Rackham, 1933. Craig’s painting depicts the moment when the bewitched maiden, having failed
to heed the warnings of her sister, yields to temptation and gorges on the succulent array of summer fruits proffered by the goblins. The artist, who may have represented himself as a middle-aged voyeur dressed in early
seventeenth century period costume loitering in the background, faithfully adheres to the poem and crowds the scene with the leering dwarfish creatures described by Rossetti. The maiden, by contrast, is a Pre-Raphaelite
beauty whose long tresses, virginal white dress and self-absorption cast her in the mould of John William Waterhouse’s haunting The Lady of Shalott, 1888 (Tate Collection, London). The sharply focused ‘truth to nature’
realism, together with the natural symbolism of the birch forest with a dead sapling in the centre foreground and noxious weeds such as deadly nightshade, nettles and brambles, recalls early Pre-Raphaelite work of around
1850.
Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
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Goblin Market tells the adventures of two close sisters, Laura and Lizzie, with the river goblins.
Although the sisters seem to be quite young, they live by themselves in a house, and draw water every evening from a stream. As the poem begins, the sisters hear the calls of the goblin merchants selling their fantastic
fruits in the twilight. On this evening, Laura, intrigued by their strangeness, lingers at the stream after her sister goes home. (Rossetti hints that the "goblin men" resemble animals with faces like wombats
or cats, and with tails.) Longing for the goblin fruits but having no money, the impulsive Laura offers to pay a lock of her hair and "a tear more rare than pearl."
Laura gorges on the delicious fruit in a sort of bacchic frenzy. Once finished, she returns home in an ecstatic trance, carrying one of the seeds. At home, Lizzie is "full of wise upbraidings," reminding Laura
of Jeanie, another girl who partook of the goblin fruits, and then died at the beginning of winter after a long and pathetic decline. Strangely, no grass grows over Jeanie's grave. Laura dismisses her sister's worries,
and plans to return the next night to get more fruits for herself and Lizzie. The sisters go to sleep in their shared bed.
The next day, as Laura and Lizzie go about their housework, Laura dreamily longs for the coming meeting with the goblins. That evening, however, as she listens at the stream, Laura discovers to her horror that, although
her sister still hears the goblins' chants and cries, she cannot.
Unable to buy more of the forbidden fruit, Laura sickens and pines for it. As winter approaches, she withers and ages unnaturally, too weak to do her chores. One day she remembers the saved seed and plants it, but nothing
grows.
Months pass, and Lizzie realizes that Laura is wasting to death. Lizzie resolves to buy some of the goblin fruit for Laura. Carrying a silver penny, Lizzie goes down to the brook and is greeted warmly by the goblins, who
invite her dine. But when they realize that she means to pay with mere silver, and to give the fruits to her sister, they turn upon the girl and beat her, trying to feed her their fruits by force. Lizzie is drenched
with the juice and pulp, but consumes none of it.
Lizzie escapes and runs home, but when the dying Laura eats the pulp and juice from her body, the taste repulses rather than satisfies her, and she undergoes a terrifying paroxysm.
By morning, however, Laura is fully restored to health. The last stanza attests that both Laura and Lizzie live to tell their children of the evils of the goblins' fruits, and of the power of sisterly love.
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