Victorian Fairy Tales ed. by Michael Newton (review)

Michael Newton has produced an elegant and versatile volume in Victorian Fairy Tales, one that promises to appeal to a general audience but also to be useful for readers in fairy-tale and Victorian studies. As a scholar and teacher in both disciplines, I am pleased to recommend this resource. Though Newton himself is not a fairy-tale scholar, it is nevertheless clear that he has immersed himself in this rich, emerging field. Where some anthologies are skimpy in their introductions, explanatory notes, and other auxiliary materials, Newton offers a nicely layered and admirably organized paratext to the fairy tales he has selected.

The book begins with a brief but thorough introduction that encapsulates much of the last decade of fairy-tale scholarship. Newton defines the Victorian literary tale, placing it in an historical context of oral folklore transmission and of older literary tale traditions. He details sources and origins of the fairy tale. He differentiates between stories of fairies and fairy tales, but acknowledges the correspondence between these two forms. Most importantly for the fairy-tale scholar, he demonstrates the ways in which the Victorian fairy tale spoke to contemporary social concerns. Newton touches on the rise of science, Britain’s empire, and shifting gender and sexual identities as subjects manifested by the fairy tale.

Newton proceeds to a “Note on the Texts,” where he discusses the volume’s structure and his rationale for various inclusions and exclusions. This section is helpful for scholars new to the field of fairy-tale studies, as well as for faculty deciding whether to adopt the volume as a course textbook. What’s important to know here is that Newton chose to navigate between tales “already familiar to those engaged with the genre,” such as those by Southey or Mulock Craik, and those “not much, if ever, anthologized,” such as those by De Morgan or Housman (xx). His rationale is convincing, though there are a few tales I would have liked to see in this anthology.

Next, his impressive “Selected Bibliography” is usefully divided into sections: anthologies of Victorian fairy tales, reference books; books on fairies (the legendary creature, as distinguished from fairy tales); critical histories of fairy tales; biographical works of the literary artists included in the anthology; background works on children’s literature; critical works on the fairy tale; and critical works on the individual authors appearing in the volume. This section should be welcome to undergraduate and graduate students embarking on fairy-tale study; however, Jennifer Schacker’s book National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (2003) is absent from the critical monographs section and is a must for those working in the field. The background works on children’s literature section might benefit from the addition of Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella’s Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction (2013), Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009), and Troy Boone’s Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (2005).

Newton also provides a chronology of the English literary fairy tale. The concept here is excellent: to incorporate the fairy tale into a general literary and cultural timeline of England, thus emphasizing the fairy tale as an integrated part of the Victorian mediascape. The timeline serves as a nice signal boost for those fairy-tale texts not included in the anthology. Newton notes works that, although they are not specifically fairy tales, nevertheless contribute to the overall Victorian fairy-tale culture (like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, 1862). As with the bibliography, there are a few gaps here and there. It would have made sense to note the founding of both of Dickens’s magazines, Household Words (1850) and All the Year Round (1859), which sometimes featured articles about fairy tales and fairy-tale pantomimes. Although Newton includes some important fairy painters (like Henry Fusili and Joseph Noel Paton), he leaves out...