Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (review)

Early in George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), the narrator remarks that "intercourse with fairies" is a worthwhile educational activity (London: Smith, Elder 26). MacDonald's narrator speaks of moral education, but his assurance that the fairies have something to teach us prepares us to find social, historical, and even scientific knowledge in a contemplation of fairies. Fairies are us, we might say. Or if the fairies are not we exactly, then they are other people who differ from us in size and even goodness. At least this is the way people in the nineteenth century thought about fairies. The little people at the bottom of the garden are remnants of original peoples, variously ancient Druids or early invaders of the British Isles. Or perhaps they are remnants of ancient myth. Or perhaps they are simply the "other," people racially different from ourselves and probably less developed socially than we think we are. After Darwin, the fairies entered the evolutionary view of human development. Mostly, fairies are beautiful and remind us of such qualities related to beauty as childhood, nature, frivolity, and freedom from constraint. For the Victorians, the fairies served many purposes; they saw fairies everywhere—even in smoke-spewing factories that, in Charles Dickens's imagination, could serve as fairy palaces. What amounts to a near obsession with fairies in the Victorian period derives from a fear of loss and dislocation, a fear that human life has lost its connectedness to anything other than the molecules and chemicals that constitute matter.

Several recent books chronicle the Victorians' interest in fairies: The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper (1990), Victorian Fairy Painting, edited by Jane Martineau (1997), and Strange and Secret Peoples by Carole Silver (1999), for example. Jack Zipes and U. C. Knoepflmacher have discussed the fairy tale in connection with children's literature, and somewhat earlier Maureen Duffy exhaustively argued for the connection between fairies and the Victorian erotic sensibility in The Erotic Worldof Faerie (1972). I mention Duffy because her work does not find a place in the more recent studies of fairies in Victorian culture. Its absence is also noteworthy in Nicola Bown's Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature. Bown takes for her focus a dual Victorian obsession: science and belief. How can belief continue when the microscope and other scientific modes of perception keep explaining the world as ordered mechanically or at least confounding traditional notions of a divine hand shaping creation and human development? What Bown shows is the increasing impossibility of maintaining traditional belief; her final chapter takes up the departure of the fairies, a recurring Edwardian refrain.

Between the late eighteenth century's revival of interest in fairies to their disappearance in the early twentieth century, they provided much interest for artists, writers, and even scientists, as Bown impressively shows. She begins with the late eighteenth century and artists such as Henry Fuseli and William Blake. As she notes, men more than women took an interest in fairies. The survey of the nineteenth century that follows bears this out partly because men did take a strong interest in fairies, and partly because Bown avoids any sustained consideration of writers and artists for children. Absent in her survey are artists such as Kate Greenaway and Eleanor Vere Boyle, or writers, such as Mary DeMorgan or Jean Ingelow, whose work draws on contemporary interest in fairies. If we think of writers for the young, the number of women who wrote about fairies is large indeed. But the male artists and writers for the young who choose fairy subjects are also missing in Bown's book: for example, George Cruikshank, Richard Doyle, Laurence Houseman, Arthur Hughes, Charles Kingsley, Andrew Lang, and MacDonald. Men's interest in fairies nicely connects with Bown's useful discussion of nostalgia. The longing for a return to the homely virtues is a longing...