The Importance of Being Earnest: The Fairy Tale in 19th-century England

Students of the history of children's literature are thoroughly familiar with the dispute surrounding the reputation of the fairy tale in England at the beginning of the 19th Century. On the one hand, moralists and religious leaders found it hard to believe that tales of giant beanstalks, seven-league boots, and men the size of one's thumb could provide ethical guidance for their young pupils. Similarly, educational reformers regarded fairy tales suspiciously because of their failure to teach anything specific. After all, weren't lessons in arithmetic, geography, and religion more valuable than having a good time?

In 1853, of course, Charles Dickens vigorously attacked these narrow and utilitarian views of fairy literature in his article, "Frauds on the Fairies," which asserted that in an age when men were rapidly becoming machines and slaves to reason, fairy tales were to be respected and permitted to do their important job of nurturing men's feelings and imagination. Dickens was also quick to point out, however, that in addition to providing imaginative stimulation to children, fairy tales could also teach:

It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, the love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force—many such good things have been nourished in the child's heart by this powerful aid.¹

While Dickens' essay does much to defend fairy tales in general against the stern pietism of Puritan literature and the bleak didacticism of the Age of Reason, it does not address the unique qualities of the fairy tale in 19th-century England. How, for example, are the fairy tales of two eminent Victorians such as Dickens or John Ruskin different from those of Perrault or Grimm? What makes them distinctly Victorian?

One quality which helps to distinguish the Victorian fairy tale from its European counterparts is its unique quality of earnestness. The one thing that every scholar of 19th-century literature knows is that the Victorians were "earnest," but what is meant by this and why they were is difficult to say. We know that the Victorians regarded earnestness as a positive moral attribute, and that the absence of it—whether in an individual or in a society—was decidedly bad. Among modern critics, Walter Houghton has provided perhaps the most helpful definition of the term in The Victorian Frame of Mind:

The [Victorian] prophets of earnestness were attacking a casual, easy-going, superficial, or frivolous attitude whether in intellectual or in moral life; and demanding that men should think and men should live with a high and serious purpose.²

Such purposefulness and revolt against moral indifference manifest themselves in much of the period's fiction and non-fiction for adults. For Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, earnestness is an assertion of Christian faith and a celebration of the virtues of hard work. For Tennyson in poems like "Ulysses," it is a quest for self-perfection and truth, an effort "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." For novelists such as George Eliot and Dickens, earnestness is a scrupulous attention to matters of conscience and a desire for social responsiblity in the face of an expanding industrialism. Finally, for Matthew Arnold, it is a belief in the transforming and sustaining power of love in a world which "hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."³

But this value system of hard work, moral awareness, consideration for others, and love is present not only in the adult literature of the period, but also in the children's literature, particularly the fairy tale. In the Christmas books of Charles Dickens, published between 1843 and 1888, and in John Ruskin's fairy classic, The King of the Golden River (1857), one can find clear illustrations of the importance of being earnest. In fact, both works serve as paradigms of Victorian earnestness.

As Harry Stone acknowledges in Dickens and the Invisible World...