Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (review)

In her persuasive and lively book, Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas argues that Victorian literary fairy tales and constructions of natural history were mutually influential. She clearly positions her project in relation to previous works by Carole Silver and Nicola Bown (which probed Victorians’ cultural preoccupations via fairies and fairy tale narratives) and studies by Gillian Beer and George Levine (which explored how the methods and metaphors of literature and science intermingled in the age of Charles Darwin). The book abundantly demonstrates how fairies “emblematized the transformations of the meanings of nature” in the period and liaised between the visible and the invisible (161).

The three middle chapters—on Mary de Morgan’s “A Toy Princess,” Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s “Cinderella,” and several versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”—tease out how literary fairy tales commented on the Victorian positioning of “woman’s nature” in relation to culture and the natural world. But the most noteworthy chapters are the four focused on Victorian pedagogy. Chapter 1 compares Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies to popular science works. Because theories like Darwin’s were impossible to visualize, they demanded “to be conceived through the use of the imagination” instead of empirical verification (19). Talairach-Vielmas’s argument foregrounds how the sense of open-mindedness and wonder produced by fairy stories also facilitated new scientific discoveries. Hence, Kingsley infused his science writings with appeals to children’s imagination and used fairies and fairy tales to convey science lessons.

Chapter 2 investigates Arabella Buckley’s approach to writing popular science for children. In The Fairy-Land of Science (1879), for instance, “ice is conceived as spellbound water and is compared to Sleeping Beauty” (53). Readers of Victorian Periodicals Review will be interested in the juxtaposition between Buckley’s books and contemporaneous magazines such as Aunt Judy’s Magazine and the Monthly Packet. Talairach-Vielmas observes that such publications used fairy tales for didactic purposes; however, over the course of the century, they also increasingly used these stories to allegorize and condemn the damage being done to nature by industrialization and urbanization.

Chapter 6, the first of two strong final chapters on children’s fiction, presents Maria Molesworth’s Christmas-Tree Land as a fusion of fairy story and animal story which imagines a nearly utopian ecosystem of noncompeting species. Talairach-Vielmas begins the final chapter with a crucial rhetorical question once posed by Edith Nesbit: “Who wants to know about pumpkins until he has heard of Cinderella?” (142). Accordingly, Nesbit habitually courted children’s interest by merging fairies with prehistoric creatures, resulting in a discourse unmistakably evocative of contemporary popular science books.

Throughout, Talairach-Vielmas’s book offers the fruits of thorough research and nuanced interpretation. Arabella Buckley once asked her readers, “How are you to enter the fairy-land of science?” Today a reader would do well to begin with Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture.