Article Analysis
The cries of the goblin merchants give the story its haunting quality.
Lizzie is more sensible than Laura, so she is more protective when it comes to heeding the cries, and she ends up protecting Laura.
Repeating Lizzie’s warnings over and over again provides an “aural lesson” for the reader, as well as for Laura.
There is some disagreement as to whether the nature of the cries is local in context or provides a larger comment about the class war.
Rossetti’s poem is somewhere between the sounds of the streets around her and the literary evocations of that city that transform sounds into words.
London had a reputation for being filled with a huge array of noises from dawn to dark, and that voice appeared in children’s stories and guidebooks.
Critics describe the Victorian age as a time that was filled with the sounds of growing industry and the increasing density of the streets of London.
These sounds in London were the hallmark of Rossetti’s childhood.
The streets of London were often represented as part of an agrarian establishment, but the cries in the street were a sign of a growing urban concentration in London.
The cries of the goblins, ironically, tended to promote things that were new and fresh life, such as ripe fruits, using their sensual benefits.
There was a huge bias against gluttony at that time, perhaps because of the lack of material wealth, so the cries of the goblins both acknowledged the temptation at hand and also tried to exploit it.
The combination of crying, purchasing and eating gave the two sisters the chance to regulate their moral lives by allowing them to choose the vendor whom they trusted the most. There was also an element of class conflict in this situation because of the accents of many of the vendors.
These goblins were the opposite of class warfare, though, as they were composites of many different animals in their genetic parentage.
Laura is willing to bargain with the goblins; Lizzie wants her own terms.
Not all street criers were just selling fruit, of course. A lot of the cries were selling sexual services, even during the repressed Victorian era.
The dustman stood as an antonym for the proper English gentleman.
People in all social classes in London enjoyed reading about the criers, whether it was in children’s literature or tales for grown-ups.
There are two ways that the sisters engage the goblin criers: Laura hurries to negotiate, while Lizzie is more willing to delay the finalization of the deal in order to get what she wants out of the situation.
The city population of London had lost connection with its agricultural roots, so they were often at the mercy of the prices set by the criers, much like Laura and Lizzie are in this situation.
Many children’s writers (including Rossetti) used the metaphor of buying and selling to express the different emotional and moral choices out there.
Buying and selling is a frequent motif in nursery rhymes.
Because even then food manufacturers could alter the makeup to make things cheaper on their own end, Victorian customers had to be careful about the groceries they bought from the criers.
Alphabet books, surprisingly, show researchers a lot about their culture.
The image and language in alphabet books show and enter the reality of the city in which they are made.
Alphabet books had multiple levels of interpretation, from the child actually learning his letters to the older person seeing them.
The words associated with the various letters in the alphabet books taught young readers a variety of lessons, putting important names and terms into the consciousness of the young ones.
Something that one can take away from this article is the fact that propaganda is not new, and may not ever have been new. When we read something like George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and look to the future as a time when indoctrination is not only a real possibility but is almost a certainty given the technology that we already have in place, we fall into error, as Norcia’s article indicates. Instead, this indoctrination has been happening almost as long as there have been stories in the first place.
One of the oldest works of literature is the Old Testament, and one of the oldest stories in that collection is the tale of the serpent entering the Garden of Eden. It is perhaps best to read the story the way that a child reads it, rather than to try to understand why an all-powerful God would put the seeds of disaster in the very garden that he had asked Adam to tend. The serpent came to Eve and tempted her with fruit from a tree that would open her eyes so that she would know good and evil and (more importantly, one guesses) be like God. It doesn’t take long before Eve has tried some and then given some to Adam, and then there’s a mad rush to find leaves to cover up the nudity that the two of them both discovered. Before long, God has returned and cast them out of the garden, sending them forth into the world with a hazy understanding that childbirth (which Eve has not yet experienced) will be painful, and that she will always have a special enmity with the serpent (who seemed fairly reasonable just an hour or so before, if not outright kind). The purpose of the story is to teach obedience to God and to place humanity in a sinful context, so that there is leverage for religious leaders to use to bring their subjects to heel in later centuries. Also (since there are some snakes who are poisonous), a concomitant effect of this story is to create a fear and loathing of snakes. Even now, snakes make many of us uneasy, even when we have been assured by a handler that the one that we have been asked to pick up is not poisonous in the least. That is, at least in part, a result of the conditioning that comes from this most ancient of stories.
And so when we consider Rossetti’s tales of the goblin crier, we should not be surprised to find that the goblins are not only a little frightening but also carry lessons on multiple levels about society. It is fair to say that the agenda at work in Rossetti’s tale is a little more complex than the caution against transgression and scaly reptiles in the Old Testament, and it is a trend that continues today. Consider the popular children’s cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants. The characters involve a greedy owner of a fast food restaurant (Mr. Crabs), a cynical and tired cashier (Squidward) and an idealistic, naïve fry cook (SpongeBob himself). Throughout episode after episode, the greed of Capital appears in Mr. Crabs’ constant machinations designed to bring himself more money; the fact that SpongeBob only makes a hazy wage comes up on a number of occasions. However, SpongeBob keeps reporting to work, taking pride in the Crabby Patties (the hamburgers, if you will) that he makes and keeping “love” as one of the central ingredients. The message from this story is that while Capital will always be greedy, hard work will always be its own reward for those who are willing to find motivation in external sources rather than just the bottom line.
Modern cartoons are not the only source of indoctrination, either. Many of the Bugs Bunny cartoons that came out during World War II no longer appear on television and are hard to find in video archives. This is not because the art that went into their composition is inferior in some way. Rather, it is because the content might well be offensive to modern viewers in more than a few ways. During World War II, the United States had Germany and Japan as their principal enemies, and the ways in which more than a few of the episodes during that time period were written showed caricatures of what “Japs” and “Krauts” looked like, and the episodes even used this terminology, as the burgeoning cartoon industry was trying its best to help the American government win the mind of the child (and, perhaps by extension, the adult – note that cartoons did not appear on television in those days exclusively; they also appeared as part of the entertainment on the screen at the movie theater before the feature presentation).
So if we are asked to believe that Rossetti’s goblin criers are transmitters of an ideological message, we would not find that difficult to believe. One of the tasks that parents face in all cultures is to find ways to motivate their children and guide them into productive adulthood. If part of that process involves convincing children to follow a particular ideology, is that not all the better? So the tales that children are told, and the books that children are given to read, often contain a set of ideas that are designed to help them fit within the social structure in which they were born. This perhaps is one reason why the nature of the Lego set has shifted so radically between 1975 and today. Back then, Legos came in giant boxes and contained unmarked pieces in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors, and the child was to take those blocks and assemble them however he (or she) saw fit. Fast forward four decades, and you find that kits with tons of unlabeled Legos are almost impossible to find. Instead, when you buy Legos, you see kits that come with pictures and instruction kits, designed to push the creator toward one outcome, whether it is the Millennium Falcon, Barbie’s house or some other loaded product. Decorated to appeal to specific genders, these play sets are much more focused than their predecessors, as the corporate interests have no doubt found that consumers make calmer and more materialistic adults than creators do.
