The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library) Read Free Page B

different sort. Tolkien argued that “since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels,’ it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment or an illusion.” The dream narrative is no more a true fairy tale than is the beast fable; there is nothing especially enchanted in the latter, for the talking animals are merely symbols of human frailties. Carroll’s most ambitious, most earnest work for children,
Sylvie and Bruno
(1889, 1893), does concern fairies, but this late Victorian attempt to combine instruction with amusement only proves Lang’s point: it tries to be funny, and fails; it tries to preach, and succeeds.
    Still, a good deal of the new literature proved to be more than fairy gold. Charles Kingsley’s
The Water-Babies
(1863), a naturalist’s parable, is admired now less for its overt social message than for its author’s marvelous storytelling and inventive wordplay. Although little read today, Dinah M. Mulock Craik wrote several distinguished fairy books. Her most famous children’s story is
The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling-Cloak
(1875), a fairy novella which, despite its pitiful hero and deathbed scenes, is never too maudlin or sentimental.
    Arguably, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made the greatest contributionto Victorian fairy literature. This self-consciously archaic group of artists, poets, and critics redefined English literature as profoundly as it did contemporary painting. It swiftly led into the Arts and Crafts Movement, that late-nineteenth-century protest against the vulgarities of high Victorian design and manufacture. Its proponents wished to discard the Industrial Revolution and return to an earlier, simpler state where romance and social justice could flourish, and Man could be in harmony with Nature. It is remarkable how many other lives crossed those of the Pre-Raphaelites. Ruskin championed them, Carroll photographed them, Mrs. Craik’s husband published them. William Allingham secured haunting wood engravings from his friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes for his collection of poetry,
The Music Master
(1855), in which appeared his most celebrated verse, “The Fairies.” Rossetti showed his sister’s poetry to Allingham and Ruskin before getting it published and providing the book’s extraordinary frontispiece and pictorial title page. The lush sensuality of the title selection of Christina Rossetti’s
Goblin Market and Other Poems
(1862) introduced not only the Pre-Raphaelite but also the “Fleshly School” of British verse, best exemplified by her brother Dante’s and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry.
    Mary De Morgan was the spirited, funny, outspoken sister of William De Morgan, the prominent Arts and Crafts designer and novelist. She was also a superb storyteller who entertained the children of her friends Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, as well as the young Rudyard Kipling and his sister, with her own fairy tales. Her first collection,
On a Pincushion
(1877), was graced with her brother’s pictures; another,
The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde
(1880), with elegant wood engravings by Walter Crane; she dedicated her last anthology,
The Windfairies
(1900), to Burne-Jones’ grandchildren. Hers are among the most skillfully told fairy tales of the period, full of the marvels of the French
contes
but with a Victorian moral sensibility.
    The last phase of these Pre-Raphaelite fairy tales is represented by Ford Madox Ford’s
The Brown Owl
(1891). This rambling youthful romance, written to entertain the author’s sister when he was only nineteen years old, so enchanted their grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown, that the old man found a publisher and contributed two illustrations to the book. It was sold outright for ten pounds, of which the author’s mother gave him ten shillings; it sold several thousand copies, more in the author’s lifetime than any other book