Last year I read and wrote a blog reflecting on Carole G. Silver’s fascinating book, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (1999). At that time, I was trying to reconcile her insightful presentation of the cultural perceptions and prejudices surrounding fairies with how I had first learned about the Faeryfolk in the early 1970’s, when I was immersed in a Neo-Pagan spirituality.
Since last Spring, I have been pursuing a deeper understanding of fairies in relationship to 19th century English literature. I had been coming across them for years, most recently in Jane Eyre and in her two later novels, Shirley and Villette. I had earlier found various references to fairies in the novels of Charles Dickens, especially in A Christmas Carol – which is a classic fairy tale in its form and execution – and also in Nicholas Nickleby. This had made me curious about the role of fairy lore in 19th century literature.
Recently I came across this book of Victorian fairy stories by Jack Zipes, which has confirmed something I had read in Silver’s book and written about in my blog, “The Trouble with Fairies” (1 April 2024).
I ended that blog with reflections on Silver’s chapter dealing with how certain mid-to-late 19th century writers used fairy stories as a vehicle for questioning the status quo and furthering social criticism. Zipes’ Introduction in Victorian Fairy Tales (1987) offers an historical overview of how fairy tales had been utilized, progressively but also conservatively, in Victorian society. As I read his Introduction, I began to think that perhaps Carole was primarily focused on the more conservative side of the use of fairy tales? These writers used fairy stories to socialize children into conformity with the world as it was, writing pedantic, didactic, moralistic versions of various tales. Other writers, however, used the fairy tale to present and explore visions of a better world, writing new versions of old fairy tales and creating new ones – all of which strove to envision and portray a different way of living; indirectly criticizing social conventions and mores that were oppressive or repressive—and that they felt needed changed.
Zipes’ Introduction confirms what I’d read at the end of Strange and Secret Peoples (1999) concerning such a progressive use of fairy tales. He gives the reader a succinct history of the suppression and then the reclaiming of fairy tales in England from the mid-17th through the late 19th century. Zipes argues that fairy stories had been repressed in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, first by the Puritans – who found fairy stories to be immoral as well as unreconcilable with their version of Christian doctrine and ethics – and then by advocates of the Enlightenment – who rejected fairy stories on the grounds that they were irrational and therefore not in concert with their epistemology, which put Reason above all other faculties in the quest for truth and wisdom.
It took the Romanticist Movement to begin to restore the fairy tale to English society and make it acceptable. His Introduction mentions a number of the progressive writers and their primary fairy works; those for whom fairy stories were a praxis through which to express the widespread unease with the industrialism, materialism and pragmatism of 19th century Britain, offering readers – through excursions into fairy worlds and fictional experiences involving fairies – various ways to re-imagine the world and work for positive social change.
Beyond the Introduction, Zipes culled together a great selection of fairy stories from 19th century writers, from Catharine Sinclair to Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and George MacDonald, just to name four. It is a book well worth reading if you are interested in some of the most mature examples of fairy story writing in 19th century England, in which you can imagine the influence they may have had in either enforcing social conformity or inspiring positive social change.
- Montague Whitsel
