The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library) (3 page)

Despite his great support of the fairies’ cause, Dickens himself wrote only one children’s story of any consequence, “The Magic Fish-Bone,” from his serial
Holiday Romance
(1868). This mock fairy tale, purportedly the work of “Miss Alice Rainbird, Aged Seven,” retains the naivety of its supposed child author but nevertheless has its clear Victorian lesson. The villain here is poverty. Although the little heroine possesses the magic fish-bone throughout the story, she does not use the one wish it can grant her until after her father has tried every way he can to help his struggling family. “When we have done our very, very best, papa, and that is not enough,” Princess Alicia realizes, “then I think the right time must come for asking help of others.”

While wry, “The Magic Fish-Bone” is not as broadly comic as William Makepeace Thackeray’s fairy tale
The Rose and the Ring
(1855). Then living in Italy, the novelist drew at his daughters’ request a number of Twelfth Night characters to entertain them during the holidays; when recovering from a bout of malaria, he amused himself by inventing an elaborate story based on these pictures. He tested the narrative, chapter by chapter, on the bedridden daughter of his friend William Wetmore Story, the American sculptor. Here were the King, the Queen, the Dame, the Dandy, and all the other stock characters of the pantomime, the traditional British Christmas stage show that combined fairy stories with broad comedy and elaborate spectacle. Under the pen-name “Michael Angelo Titmarsh,” Thackeray wrote and illustrated (in the manner of Cruikshank) his “Fire-Side Pantomime”
about “a little
misfortune
” bestowed by the Fairy Blackstick on innocent Prince Giglio of Paflagonia and Princess Rosalba of Crim Tartary.
The Rose and the Ring
is a delightful Christmas confection by a master humorist, a deft parody not only of British pantomime but also of contemporary melodrama, studded with an abundance of puns and topical jokes as amusing to adults as to children. While mercilessly burlesquing fairy tale conventions,
The Rose and the Ring
is the first masterpiece of prose nonsense in English juvenile literature, anticipating the higher comedy of
Alice in Wonderland
by a number of years.

Dickens’ and Thackeray’s light-hearted works for children confirmed that the fanciful had become fashionable. A wealth of fairy stories appeared in the middle years of Victoria’s reign—some of them, however, of dubious quality. Some Victorian storytellers are too long-winded, others too precious for modern sensibilities. Many, evidently intent on writing nineteenth-century equivalents of
Pilgrim’s Progress
, are preoccupied more with moral and pious discourses than with the marvels of fairyland. Perhaps the trouble with many Victorian stories is that, as Andrew Lang noted in
The Lilac Fairy Book
(1910), “the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome.… These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.”

The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, as “Lewis Carroll,” may have called
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and
Through the Looking-Glass
(1871) “fairy tales,” but their genius is really of an entirely different sort. Tolkien argued that “since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels,’ it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment or an illusion.” The dream narrative is no more a true fairy tale than is the beast fable; there is nothing especially enchanted in the latter, for the talking animals are merely symbols of human frailties. Carroll’s most ambitious, most earnest work for children,
Sylvie and Bruno
(1889, 1893), does concern fairies, but this late Victorian attempt to combine instruction with amusement only proves Lang’s point: it tries to be funny, and fails; it tries to preach, and succeeds.

Still, a good deal of the new literature proved to be more than fairy gold. Charles Kingsley’s
The Water-Babies
(1863), a naturalist’s parable, is admired now less for its overt social message than for its author’s marvelous storytelling and inventive wordplay. Although little read today, Dinah M. Mulock Craik wrote several distinguished fairy books. Her most famous children’s story is
The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling-Cloak
(1875), a fairy novella which, despite its pitiful hero and deathbed scenes, is never too maudlin or sentimental.

Arguably, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made the greatest contribution
to Victorian fairy literature. This self-consciously archaic group of artists, poets, and critics redefined English literature as profoundly as it did contemporary painting. It swiftly led into the Arts and Crafts Movement, that late-nineteenth-century protest against the vulgarities of high Victorian design and manufacture. Its proponents wished to discard the Industrial Revolution and return to an earlier, simpler state where romance and social justice could flourish, and Man could be in harmony with Nature. It is remarkable how many other lives crossed those of the Pre-Raphaelites. Ruskin championed them, Carroll photographed them, Mrs. Craik’s husband published them. William Allingham secured haunting wood engravings from his friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes for his collection of poetry,
The Music Master
(1855), in which appeared his most celebrated verse, “The Fairies.” Rossetti showed his sister’s poetry to Allingham and Ruskin before getting it published and providing the book’s extraordinary frontispiece and pictorial title page. The lush sensuality of the title selection of Christina Rossetti’s
Goblin Market and Other Poems
(1862) introduced not only the Pre-Raphaelite but also the “Fleshly School” of British verse, best exemplified by her brother Dante’s and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry.

Mary De Morgan was the spirited, funny, outspoken sister of William De Morgan, the prominent Arts and Crafts designer and novelist. She was also a superb storyteller who entertained the children of her friends Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, as well as the young Rudyard Kipling and his sister, with her own fairy tales. Her first collection,
On a Pincushion
(1877), was graced with her brother’s pictures; another,
The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde
(1880), with elegant wood engravings by Walter Crane; she dedicated her last anthology,
The Windfairies
(1900), to Burne-Jones’ grandchildren. Hers are among the most skillfully told fairy tales of the period, full of the marvels of the French
contes
but with a Victorian moral sensibility.

The last phase of these Pre-Raphaelite fairy tales is represented by Ford Madox Ford’s
The Brown Owl
(1891). This rambling youthful romance, written to entertain the author’s sister when he was only nineteen years old, so enchanted their grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown, that the old man found a publisher and contributed two illustrations to the book. It was sold outright for ten pounds, of which the author’s mother gave him ten shillings; it sold several thousand copies, more in the author’s lifetime than any other book Ford ever wrote.

Unquestionably, the master of the Victorian fairy tale was George MacDonald. His stories, like those of the Pre-Raphaelites, were moral yet more symbolic than didactic or allegorical, as were many of his contemporaries’
efforts. His adult fantasies,
Phantastes
(1858) and
Lilith
(1895), marked the beginning and the end of his distinguished literary career. His children’s books include several of the most extraordinary works of the imagination in juvenile literature:
Dealings with the Fairies
(1867),
At the Back of the North Wind
(1871),
The Princess and the Goblin
(1872), and
The Princess and Curdie
(1883), all exquisitely illustrated by Arthur Hughes. “For my part,” MacDonald explained, “I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” His stories contain a mystial resonance rare in books for boys and girls, and he never wrote a more beautiful fairy tale than “The Golden Key,” from
Dealings with the Fairies.

Just as MacDonald reached the pinnacle of the Victorian fairy tale, the form entered its decline. “At the present moment,” Mrs. E. M. Field reported in
The Child and His Book
(1889), “the fairy tale seems to have given way entirely in popularity to the children’s story of real life.” But she immediately had to amend this statement by acknowledging in a footnote the popularity of Andrew Lang’s
The Blue Fairy Book
(1889). So successful did this collection of classic folk and literary fairy tales prove that it became merely the first volume in a successful series of ten big books of the world’s fairy lore. Lang was surprisingly lean on British legends, but another folklorist, Joseph Jacobs, found enough to fill
English Fairy Tales
(1890),
More English Fairy Tales
(1894),
Celtic Fairy Tales
(1892), and
More Celtic Fairy Tales
(1894). Jacobs’ research was supplemented by William Butler Yeats’ fine early collections,
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
(1888),
Irish Fairy Tales
(1892), and
The Celtic Twilight
(1893), as well as his celebrated verses taken from folklore. Probably the most haunting of these is “The Stolen Child,” from
The Wanderings of Oisin
(1889).

The Decadents entered the fairy sphere as quickly as they did the rest of British life and art, with the publication of Oscar Wilde’s
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
(1888) and
The House of Pomegranates
(1891). The design of these sumptuous volumes, the first embellished by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood, the second by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, beautifully reflects the artificiality of their texts. What Wilde admired in ancient art, “the Greeks’ joy in the visible aspect of things, all the Greeks’ sense of delicate and delightful detail, all the Greeks’ pleasure in beautiful textures, and exquisite materials, and imaginative designs,” is everywhere evident in these elegant stories. Wilde may have taken his theme of Christian self-sacrifice from Andersen, but these tales are really all about marvelous surfaces. They express a world-weariness tinged with misogyny and homoeroticism not common to earlier English fairy literature. They are more introspective, less concerned with society than with the individual. Wilde’s violences,
whether physical or psychological, are generally self-inflicted: his monsters turn upon themselves rather than upon others. (He was horrified when Yeats told an old tale about blood-thirsty giants that brought Wilde’s son Cyril to tears.) The simplest and clearest of Wilde’s fairy tales, the one most free of the excesses of his aestheticism, is “The Selfish Giant,” from
The Happy Prince.
It is, as Walter Pater assured its author, “perfect in its kind.”

An aestheticism much like Wilde’s permeates Laurence Housman’s exquisite stories. Their verbal filigree is as ornate as the fine line drawings he provided for his collections,
A Farm in Fairyland
(1894),
The House of Joy
(1895),
The Field of Clover
(1898), and
The Blue Moon
(1904). Delight was his chief concern in composing them. “The true end and object of a fairytale is the expression of the joy of living,” Housman explained. “There begins and ends the morality of the fairy-tale: its value consists in its optimism. So for the true and unpolluted air of fairyland we have to go back to the old and artless tales of a day purer and simpler than our own.” “Rocking-Horse Land,” the first tale in his first collection,
A Farm in Fairyland
, beautifully embodies this ideal of fairy literature.

Wilde, Housman, or any other Decadent could have posed for the monster in Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon,” from
Dream Days
(1898). Grahame’s aesthetic creature is no more than a “happy Bohemian,” more concerned with poetry than pillaging. He does not want to hurt anyone. But all true red-blooded Englishmen are, Grahame explains, “the most awful beggars for getting up fights.… Dogs, bulls, dragons—anything so long as it’s a fight.” Grahame, just like his civilized dragon, had no use for this muscular Christianity, and he implies here that he had none for the aims of the British Empire as well.

The most robust of these
fin-de-siècle
fairy tale authors was a woman, Edith Nesbit Bland, who signed her work simply “E. Nesbit.” Her attitude towards fairyland was refreshingly matter-of-fact. Perhaps her greatest gift as a fantasist, as is evident in the Five Children trilogy (
The Five Children and It
, 1902;
The Phoenix and the Carpet
, 1904; and
The Story of the Amulet
, 1905) as well as her other modern fairy tales, was her ability to effortlessly transfer her young characters from contemporary London to lands of enchantment. The earliest example of this power lies in “The Deliverers of Their Country,” first serialized in the
Strand Magazine
(May 1899) and republished in her collection
The Book of Dragons
(1901). This short story possesses all the verve, wit, and self-assured inventiveness one finds in Nesbit’s more celebrated books.

If, by this time the Empire was truly fading, so too were its traditions. The glories of the Victorian fairy tale would pass with the creation of Peter
Pan. He made his first appearance in several chapters of James M. Barrie’s novel
The Little White Bird
(1902), which were later printed separately as
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
(1906), opulently illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The more famous play
Peter Pan
did not open until 1904, to be followed by the novel
Peter and Wendy
in 1911. Perhaps no other character in modern juvenile literature is more misunderstood than poor Peter Pan; even in his first manifestation, in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
, the boy who couldn’t grow up is a tragic figure. Beneath the story’s gossamer charm lies a tale of abandonment, loss, and death, written by a sad little man so distressed with the present that he longed to go back to his past.