Ingelow, Jean
Ingelow, Jean (1820–97),English poet and novelist, and writer of children's stories. The initial inspiration for her one full‐length fairy story, Mopsa the Fairy (1869), which F. J. Harvey Darton in Children's Books in England described as ‘pure artless fantasy’, perhaps came from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , which had appeared four years earlier. A little boy, out for a walk with his nurse, climbs up a hollow tree and finds a nestful of fairies. He pockets them and flies off to Fairyland on the back of an albatross. Then follows a dreamlike maze of events, during which his favourite fairy, Mopsa, grows until she is older than he. After a long journey they reach the castle where she is to be queen, and he sorrowfully realizes that he must leave her and return home. Though some of the dialogue and characters in the early pages are Carrollian and the plot is as...
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