ABSTRACT
In Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Goblin Market’, ghastly fruit vendors advertise their wares with rhymed shouts: ‘Figs to fill your mouth,/Citrons from the South/Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;/Come buy, come buy.’ Such invitations were not peculiar to poetry, or to goblins, in the Victorian period. Costermongers had cried their wares with such enticements since the early sixteenth century, and in the nineteenth century they were selling everything from mackerel, watercress, and hazelnuts, to nutmeg graters, songs, and china ornaments. In a letter to the Musical Times in 1877, several costermonger cries are given their musical due, and transcribed as ‘charming’ songs (Rogers 1887: 369). By 1900, a law was passed forbidding the crying of wares: costermongers still walked the streets and roads vending their wares, but they had to do so silently. But in the Victorian period, their cries were still a part of the national soundscape, pleasing to some, noxious to others, and in Rossetti’s poem, dangerously seductive.
