^{Note 1 in page 375} References in my text to Goblin Market and other of Christina Rossetti's poems are from The Poetical Works, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1904)—hereafter cited as Works. The parenthetical date “(B. 1882)” means ‘before 1882,‘ William Rossetti's method of dating Christina's poems before her Pageant volume of 1881 was published.

^{Note 2 in page 375} Memories and Impressions (New York, 1911), pp. 69 ff.

^{Note 3 in page 376} Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1898), p. 207.

^{Note 4 in page 376} See Symbols (1849) and An Old World Thicket (B. 1882). To William Sharp Christina admitted that she was “the ill-tempered one in the family” (William Sharp, “Some Reminiscences of Christina Rossetti,” Atlantic Monthly, LXXV [June 1895], 740). And to William Rossetti's wife Lucy she wrote in 1883, “It is such a triumph for ME to attain to philosophic calm, that, even if that subdued temper is applied by me without common sense, ‘color che sanno’ may still congratulate me on some sort of improvement ! Ask William, who knew me in my early story days: he could a tale unfold—” (Family Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. W. M. Rossetti, New York, 1908, p. 138—hereafter cited as Family Letters).

^{Note 5 in page 376} “The Sources of Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market,‘ ” MLR, xxviii, ii (April 1933), 157-158.

^{Note 6 in page 377} Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Family Letters with a Memoir, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London, 1895), i, 87—hereafter cited as DGRFL,

^{Note 7 in page 377} Gosse, Critical Kitkals (New York, 1896), p. 140.

^{Note 8 in page 377} W. M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences (New York, 1906), i, 5; DGRFL, i, 79; Christina Rossetti, Time Flies (London, 1885), pp. 45, 128, 137, et passim. The wombat was a much later addition to the earthly paradise. It was in 1858 that Christina and William discovered this exotic little creature at the Zoological Gardens, and in 1862 that Christina made the pencil drawing of it that William used to illustrate her Family Letters (opposite p. 45). “In or about 1858,” William writes in Some Reminiscences, “we two were in the Zoological Gardens, and our steps led us towards a certain enclosure hitherto unknown to us, and little scrutinized by most visitors. Christina, who had as good an eye for a ‘beast’ as Dante Gabriel, caught sight of ‘phascolomys ursinus’ a second before myself, and exclaimed, ? look at that delightful object!' ” (i, 285-286). Shortly afterwards, Dante Gabriel was shown the delightful object which later occupied a conspicuous position in his celebrated Tudor House menagerie.

^{Note 9 in page 379} Cf. At Home (Works, p. 339). In this lyric Christina similarly used the feast symbolism to express sensuous joy:

Feasting beneath green orange boughs; From hand to hand they pushed the wine, They sucked the pulp of plum and peach …

^{Note 10 in page 379} Cf.:

She listened like a cushat dove That listens to its mate alone: She listened like a cushat dove That loves but only one.

^{Note 11 in page 379} The Romantic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 263. The poem referred to is Twice.

^{Note 12 in page 381} Bell, p. 231. In William's preface to his edition of Gabriel's family letters, he commented upon the fact that he was accused of concealing relevant information about his brother. His answer to this charge is significant in indicating the position he took, not only as Gabriel's but also as Christina's editor and biographer. He said, “… I have told what I choose to tell and left untold what I do not choose to tell: if you want more, be pleased to consult some other informant” (i, xli). In his preface to his own Some Reminiscences, he likewise admitted frankly that “it does not follow that I know nothing beyond which I write. In some cases I do know a good deal more; but to cast a slur here or violate a confidence there would make me contemptible to myself” (i, xi). Janet Troxell in Three Rossettis (Cambridge, Mass., 1937) produced what she considered incontrovertible “evidence that William was suppressing something about Christina” (p. 202).

^{Note 13 in page 381} Marya Zaturenska (Christina Rossetti, New York, 1949, pp. 59-60) and Margaret Sawtell (Christina Rossetti, London, 1955, pp. 54-55) are the writers in question. For a refutation of Violet Hunt's allegation see Helen Rossetti Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1949), pp. 6, n., and 272.

^{Note 14 in page 382} See my unpub. diss. (Univ. of Calif., L. ?., 1957), “Beauty for Ashes: A Biographical Study of Christina Ros-setti's Poetry.” Unless otherwise stated, the following material in my text is derived from this source.

^{Note 15 in page 382} Autobiographical Notes, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols. (London, 1892)—hereafter cited as Notes. My information about Scott is drawn from this work.

^{Note 16 in page 382} In Scott's youth he and Lewes were intimate friends (Notes, I, 129-134).

^{Note 17 in page 382} DGRFL, i, 114-115; Some Remin., I, 131; Holman W. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London, 1905), I, 230; Helen Rossetti Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 151. Ford Madox Brown once remarked that women in general and his own wife in particular were “en

chanted“ by Scott (W. M. Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-raphaelitism, London, 1900, p. 39).

^{Note 18 in page 383} My information about this poem (Works, p. 200) is derived from William's enlightening comment about it in his notes (Works, p. 473, n.).

^{Note 19 in page 383} DGRFL, I, 266; Anna Gilchrist, ed. Herbert H. Gilchrist (London, 1887), p. 161.

^{Note 20 in page 384} In the summers of 1866 and 1869, although Mrs. Scott may not have been present upon the latter occasion (The Rossetti Papers, ed. W. M. Rossetti, New York, 1903, pp. 203, 396; Gilchrist, pp. 160-161, 175; Three Rosseltis, pp. 155–156; DGRFL, n, 201; Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Letters to Miss Alice Boyd, ed. John Purves, Fortnightly Rev., cxxix [May 1928], 583).

^{Note 21 in page 384} We cannot suppose that the actual writing of Goblin Market was a lengthy process, for upon more than one occasion William has assured us that his sister's “habits of composition were eminently of the spontaneous kind,” that she seldom meditated or deliberated before writing a poem, but on the contrary, after “something impelled her feeling or ‘came into her head’, ” she wrote rapidly, easily, and without hesitation, almost as though “her hand obeyed dictation” (Works, pp. lxviii-brix; New Poems, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London, 1896, pp. xii-xiii). And of all her long poems, Goblin Market strikes the reader as the one the most likely to have been produced in the mood of direct inspiration. I take it that she wrote the poem out as a whole first, and later made whatever revisions and alterations she deemed necessary. It would not have been impossible for a poet with her working habits to have turned out the approximately 550 lines within a week or so.

^{Note 22 in page 384} Much has been written about Maria's harmful influence over Christina. Posterity's conception of Maria as a narrow-minded, gloomy fanatic partially originated in Christina's own portrait of her sister in Time Flies. Maria, she wrote, “shrank from entering the Mummy Room at the British Museum under a vivid realisation of how the general resurrection might occur even as one stood among those solemn corpses turned into a sight for sightseers” (p. 128). This vivid portrait was reinforced by Sir Edmund Gosse's view that “the influence of Maria Francesca on her sister seemed to be like that of Newton upon Cowper, a species of police surveillance exercised by a hard, convinced mind over a softer and more fanciful one” (Critical Kitkals, p. 160). R. D. Waller was the first critic to detect and to expose the fallacy of such a conception of Maria. He emphasized the love existing between the two sisters and quoted Gabriel's opinion that Maria was “the healthiest in mind and cheeriest of us all, with William coming next, and Christina and I nowhere” (The Rossetti Family, 1824-54, Univ. Manchester, No. ccxvn, Eng. Ser. No. 21 [Manchester, 1932], pp. 179-180). This observation is borne out by the fact that in the depths of her last fatal illness in 1876 Maria could still write a bright little letter to Christina playfully calling her “the crowned Queen of Dears” (Family Letters, p. 56). On her deathbed Maria unsentimentally scoffed at what she called the “hood and hatband” style of mourning (Time Flies, p. 213). Cheerful and loving though she may have been, Maria, who joined an Anglican sisterhood in 1874, was undoubtedly strait-laced and Puritanical in her attitude toward sex, and would have considered it her unquestioned duty to rescue Christina from an affair with Scott.

^{Note 23 in page 385} The reference is to Christina's Prince's Progress of 1865.