For more than a hundred years Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has fascinated teachers and critics while enchanting readers of all ages. In remarkably simple, yet richly textured language, Rossetti creates a strange and haunting world inhabited by horrid goblin creatures who tempt the unwary to buy their magical fruit. The poem's human protagonists, two adolescent sisters, thoroughly engage the reader through their joys, suffering, and love for one another.

But Goblin Market is more than just an enjoyable, readable story. It offers intriguing insights into important human concerns. Rossetti illustrates through the goblin men and their magically appealing fruit the seductive nature of evil.

Through the effects of the fruit on Laura, Rossetti shows that evil, like drugs and other apparently pleasurable things, cannot long satisfy. She conveys the idea that those who embrace evil or selfish pleasure will suffer—and so will those who love them. On a deeper level, Rossetti's 567-line poem provides significant insights into the relationships between men and women and into the often-divided human personality. Perhaps more important, the poem develops the idea that a suffering individual enslaved by habits or evil can be rescued through the redeeming love and sacrifices of another.