The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (review)

This is a book to be welcomed by scholars of the Victorian press. The central argument of Caroline Sumpter's engaging monograph is that the Victorian periodical press helped to reinvent the fairy tale for nineteenth-century audiences. In doing so it contests the assertion, put forward by Charles Dickens (in "Frauds on the Fairies," 1853) and many others since, that the age of mass media left little room for belief in fairies or an oral folkloric tradition. Instead of perceiving the fairy tale as the "antithesis of the newspaper—as timeless, untouchable, and beyond the reach of politics and commerce" (3), Sumpter shows the Victorian fairy story to be constructed by and responding to the same social and political developments as the newspaper and the periodical.

The first chapter spans the nineteenth century to provide an overview of the fairy tale's modulating relationship with print culture. While the chapbook was seen by many as a more fitting, antiquarian form for the publication of fairy tales, it was the newer media of the press that helped fire enthusiasm for a fairy tale revival. The second and third chapters concentrate on the children's magazines and shilling monthlies of the 1860s. Sumpter suggests that the middle-class Aunt Judy's Magazine, Good Words for the Young, and the Monthly Packet relied on fairy tales and folklore, whereas cheaper children's literature like the Boy's Own Paper went in for sensational adventure fiction. The fairy tale was of particularly vital importance to these socially conservative magazines because it was perceived to be "the record of man's earliest spiritual impulses" (42). As such it played on contemporary links between the child reader and the "childhood" of the race to formulate fantasies of origin. In this vein Max Müller's etymological and linguistic theories are revealed as important intertexts for Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald's fairy tales. Chapter three also builds on work by Geoffrey Cantor, Sally Shuttleworth, Gowan Dawson and others that examine the crossovers between science, pseudo-science and literature in magazine settings. Here Sumpter locates Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies centrally among a matrix of texts in Cornhill and Macmillan's magazines which form an ongoing and multifaceted response to Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species.

The fourth and fifth chapters move into the 1890s to examine the fairy tale in the socialist press and the elite little magazines. As with the earlier chapters, Sumpter focuses in on a decade in which she sees the periodical press undergoing significant developments in response to social change. In chapter four the analysis of Keir Hardie's Labour Leader and John Trevor's Labour Prophet offers interesting comparisons with the better-known and more successful Clarion. The final chapter turns from labour to leisure to show how writers like Laurence Housman and Edward Purcell understood "belief in the fairy tale . . . as a training in the appreciation of beauty" (151). Refreshingly, the well-known Yellow Book is mentioned, but, as with the Clarion, the better-known periodical serves as a context for exploring under-read texts like the Pageant and the Dome. In this final chapter especially, the reproductions of fairy tale illustrations receive the same kind of illuminating interpretations as the literary works.

As well as analysing the uses to which fairy tales are put by magazine writers and editors, the book tackles the thorny issue of periodical readership. While, at points, the ideas about readers' interpretations are necessarily conjectural, real readers' responses to fairy tales are particularly central to the sections on child readers in chapters two and four. For example, through the letters printed in the Labour Leader, Sumpter reveals children willing to understand fairy tales as political allegories but also shows how their specialist demands shaped the magazine (although she exercises healthy scepticism about whether or not children's letters to the editor were genuine).

Previous work on fairy tales by scholars like Jennifer Schacker, U.C. Knoepflmacher, and...