Victorian Fantasy Fiction Is No Longer Just for the Childlike

The fantasy fiction of Victorian authors has yet to receive the critical attention that it deserves. Even though it continues to be popular with the general reader, it is either neglected by critics or relegated to the Tolkienian nursery. Both Karen Michalson's historical study Victorian Fantasy Literature and Roderick McGillis's collection of essays For the Childlike: George MacDonald's Fantasies for Children are attempts to rectify this situation.

Michalson's study is in some ways informative and offers a perceptive treatment of the literary rejection of nineteenth-century fantasy fiction, but the book is tedious to read because of its thesis-like style and weak organization. It is an odd mixture of historical literary criticism, fictionalized biographical sketches, which are sometimes irritating, and scattered comments on individual authors and their works. The book consists of nine chapters. Three (not grouped together) trace the reasons for the historical rejection of fantasy fiction, and five treat representative authors and works: John Ruskin and The King of the Golden River; George MacDonald and Phantasies; Charles Kingsley and The Water Babies; Henry Rider Haggard and She; and Kipling and The Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill.

As Michalson points out, why "fantasy fiction" has received less critical acceptance than the "realistic novel" is an interesting question: "The bias in favor of realism in the formation of the traditional canon of nineteenth-century British fiction" can be traced to "nonliterary and non-aesthetic reasons" (i). Apparently, "both Church and Empire needed a canon of realism to promote their own brand of conservative ideology" (ii). Educational institutions and reviewers of the period (including Samuel Taylor Coleridge) helped in the literary battles against the acceptance of fantasy fiction, which Church and Empire considered a threat to the status quo. Fantasy was equated with irrationality and opposition to dogma. "To say that a work or idea was 'fantastic' was to dismiss it as unrealistic and therefore as unworthy of the time or consideration of a truly rational, scientific, progressive inheritor of the Enlightenment" (2). The subjects of fantasy fiction—fairies, magical beings, and occurrences of the impossible—further argued against its acceptance and made such works an easy target for ridicule. Michalson suggests that Coleridge's theoretical separation of Imagination and Fancy, making Fancy a secondary faculty, contributed to the destruction of fantasy as an art form. According to Owen Barfield, however, the author of What Coleridge Thought, Coleridge did not consider Fancy to be intellectually inferior and gave it "an honorable status, in 'the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations'" (Barfield 85). In his own works Coleridge elevated the fantastic and the supernatural, but other reviewers of the period, like "the hanging judge," Lord Jeffrey, disapproved strongly of the irrational or "the fantastic" and condemned Wordsworth's poetry. As Michalson notes of Wordsworth's poem "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," the speaker is quite ordinary and the situation representational of real life (5).

The historical rejection of fantasy is linked by Michalson to "the realism bias of evangelicism" and "was picked up and sustained by educational institutions in the later part of the century" (36). I cannot help but wonder how much influence Evangelical Christianity had in shaping public opinion and the canon. Possibly the audience—such works of fantasy were ostensibly meant to be read by women and children—had as much, if not more, to do with the rejection of fantasy as an art form.¹

Certainly the classic triad of Victorian fantasy fiction—John Ruskin, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley—shared a common interest, as Michalson notes, not only in creating new myths or subverting established ones but in offering in their fiction an imaginative alternative to Evangelical Christian dogmas. Ruskin's King of...