From Alice to Harry Potter: Children's Fantasy in England (review)

Whatever their merits as literature, we must credit the Harry Potter books with invigorating children's fantasy as well as inspiring a spate of scholarly criticism—with an inordinately large number being devoted to the Harry Potter books (see Lana Whited's review in the September 2003 issue of The Lion and the Unicorn). For those seeking criticism on the broader spectrum of English children's fantasy, Colin Manlove's From Alice to Harry Potter: Children's Fantasy in England is a reasonable place to start. No other recent work attempts to cover so much ground or does it so succinctly. The cover of the book touts it as a "companion for children's literature courses, and as a stimulus for the general reader and students at all levels." Manlove is not writing the definitive critical history of English children's fantasy. This is clearly an introductory work. Indeed, its strength is its identification of trends, or, as Manlove puts it, "placing all the texts in a current of development" (8). Manlove is well equipped for the task; he is a specialist in British fantasy and has published widely in the field, one of his chief interests being historical criticism. However, his work has not always been specifically in children's literature, which may account for some of the curious lapses and points of view I will discuss below.

Because so many children's fantasies have great staying power and seem as fresh today as when they first appeared, we sometimes forget that they are, nevertheless, the products of their time. Winnie-the-Pooh and Mary Poppins may seem timeless, but they reflect the social and intellectual milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, and reveal a great deal about the prevailing attitudes of the day. Manlove's emphasis is on the place of English fantasy amid those prevailing attitudes.

Manlove begins his survey in the mid-nineteenth century, when writers began turning to children's fantasy following its neglect of over a century during the so-called Age of Reason, which looked with great suspicion on the unleashed imagination. It was, in fact, the Romantic movement's worship of the imagination and the growing public interest in national folktales sparked by the Grimms, among others, that led to the writing of the first true children's fantasies by such writers as Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald. Manlove explains the popularity of traditional fairy-tale form in Victorian fantasy, with its strictly ordered world, defined rules of magic, and just retribution, as appealing "to that side of all anxious Victorians which welcomed a genre founded not just on imagination but on moral certainties and an ordered and just universe" (18). His discussion of Victorian fantasy introduces us to some long-forgotten writers and works, such as Mary De Morgan (On a Pincushion, 1877, and The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde, 1880), who was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and Lucy Clifford (Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise,1882), in whose work Manlove sees "something of the same psychological penetration and sense of the complexity of experience that we see in James's novels" (32).

The general direction of fantasy following the Victorian era was toward the playful and escapist. The third chapter, entitled "The Long Idyll: 1900-1950," is itself long, comprising some twenty percent of the entire book, and might have been divided into two or more shorter ones to some advantage. (Indeed, given the book's announced application as a course text and the enormous amount of material covered, chapter subdivisions with appropriate headings would have been a useful feature.) During the first half of the century, when so many of the classic and enduring fantasies were written, Manlove points out that, surprisingly, children themselves tend to be marginalized or even completely absent from the stories. Instead, we see stories of...