The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (review)

Caroline Sumpter's The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale is a new addition to the rapidly growing Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Sumpter sets out to negate the myth that the popular press destroyed the fairy tale, suggesting instead that, by bringing the tale into the present, the press helped reinvent it, utilizing it as a vehicle for discussing such issues as industrialism, evolution, nationalism, feminism, and socialism. Combining media and fairy tale history, Sumpter recontextualizes the tales, describing their functions in an era of mass readership as well as providing insights into works ranging from children's stories to the weird, homoerotic fantasies of Laurence Housman.

Beginning with an "alternative history of the fairy tale" (11), the book concentrates on a series of case studies. One is on the use of tales in children's magazines, primarily Aunt Judy's Magazine—created and shaped by Margaret Gatty and her daughter, J. H. Ewing—and Good Words for the Young, edited by George MacDonald, who published many famous children's works, including the "Curdie" books, in its pages. Focusing more on the periodicals than on the tales they contained, Sumpter connects the magazines' fictional and factual contents to the Victorian fascination with origins, specifically to the "celestial mythology" of Max Müller and the "savage" anthropology of E. B. Tylor, popularized by Andrew Lang (himself famous for his rainbow fairy tale collections).

A second case study explores the literary tale and fantasy in two adult monthlies designed for the intellectual middle classes, Cornhill and Macmillan's magazines. Sumpter highlights the journals' attempts to connect science (especially Darwinian evolution) and fantasy. At its center is an examination of Charles Kingsley's racism and classism in Water Babies (published in Macmillan's in 1862–63) and a valuable analysis of the differences between the serialized and later book versions.

The most innovative chapter of the volume describes the politicization of the fairy tale in the labor press of the 1890s. Using as its epigraph the phrase from Keir Hardie's Labour Leader, "I wonder were the fairies Socialists?" (88), this section explores both how Hardie recreated fairy tales to assist in the making of child socialists, and his audience's reaction. Sumpter also examines how Robert Blatchford's Clarion and John Trevor's Labour Prophet involved working-class children (and young adults) in the "religion of socialism" through the use of such vehicles as "The Cinderella Supplement" and Cinderella Clubs. As in the earlier chapter on children's magazines, Sumpter includes the valuable responses of readers to the stories, thus illuminating how and by whom such materials were read.

A final chapter (followed by a brief coda) studies the use of fairy tales in fin-de-siècle "little magazines" including the Dome, the Pageant, the Butterfly, and Venture. Here, the emphasis is on coterie writers and artists, and a discussion of the importance of illustration enriches the text. Sumpter suggests that the fairy tale was used for everything from promoting folk culture to asserting aesthetic doctrines, commenting on decadence and supporting anti-decadence, endorsing national identity and glorifying "innocence," as well as for pornographic and homoerotic purposes. Housman's strange tales are described, but the lack of insightful analysis weakens the impact of Sumpter's argument.

In all, the book reaffirms the importance of the Victorian periodical press to the survival and reinterpretation of the fairy tale. While it pinpoints the 1860s and 1890s as important eras in press and in fairy tale history, the reader is left wondering about the life of the tale in the years between. What of the impact of the important Spiritualist and Theosophical journals of the 1880s? Light (1881), the magazine of the London Spiritualist Alliance, and The Two Worlds (1888), that of the Society for Psychical Research, were certainly concerned with fairies, tales, and lore. Lucifer (1887–97), later The Theosophical Review, included numerous accounts of meetings with the elfin...