SOURCE: “Sundering Women from Boys: Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy,” in Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 270-311.

[In the following essay, Knoepflmacher presents an in-depth examination of the ways in which Ingelow, in the short tale “The Life of John Smith” and the fantasy novel Mopsa the Fairy, both acquiesced to and resisted the patriarchal authority advanced by such Victorian counterparts as Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, and George MacDonald.]

Yet—to gaze on her again
(As my tale has taught thee),
Potent Fairy, I am fain,
Therefore have I sought thee—
Through the forest, through the lea,
Through the tangled wildwood,
For I know she dwells with thee,
And her name is—childhood!

—Jean Ingelow, “Mimie's Grass Net,” 1850

It is almost strange in these days to find how quietly a popular writer could live with the world's bustle all around her, almost like one moored among the flowering rushes of a peaceful backwater, while the noisy race went by upon the river. But, indeed, if it had not been so, I think she could not have written at all; unless she had been cherished, shielded, sheltered, as she was, she could hardly have given to us the message entrusted to her in the form that it comes to us.

—Anonymous, Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow, 1901

I

In 1865, in the same year that Lewis Carroll published his first Alice book, Jean Ingelow capitalized on her growing reputation as a poet by expanding an earlier collection of didactic stories in a volume she now retitled Stories Told to a Child. Among the offerings was a fictitious biographical sketch, “The Life of John Smith.” In this deceptively simple narrative, Ingelow uses only six pages to recount the details of the earthly progress of a “great and good man” from his birth “in the parish of Cripplegate Within, at half-past ten on Friday, the 1st of April, 1780,” to his burial at “the age of seventy” in the “cemetery at Kensall Green” (STC [Stories Told to a Child], 185, 190).

Ingelow's narrator seems curiously unselective in giving equal weight to all the details of Mr. Smith's prosaic life. We thus learn that this worthy cut his first tooth at seven months, mastered the whole alphabet “as early as three years old,” and “soon learned to distinguish between tin tacks, ten-pennies, and brass heads” in his father's hardware store, thereby showing capacities for discrimination that almost appear to excel the narrator's own. Mr. Smith's adult life turns out to be just as drab. We are asked to note his “valuable remarks on the lateness of the season in the North,” to which he had traveled after leaving the shop to his eldest son. And, as proof of the retention of “his superior faculties to the last,” we are regaled with Mr. Smith's memorable observation that the Niniveh Marbles in the British Museum “did not answer his expectations: as there was so much marble in the country, and also Derbyshire spar, he wondered that the Government had not new articles manufactured, instead of sending abroad for old things which were cracked already” (STC, 190).

Yet Ingelow's account of a life exemplary for its uneventfulness does not end with the burial of this “universally respected” patriarch. For the narrator who has so complacently reproduced the contours of Mr. Smith's existence now turns on a reader whom she accuses of having yearned for something more stimulating. We are hauled into a dialogue, relentlessly pounded for our presumption in wishing for a narrative spiced by more extraordinary events:

“And is this all?” cries the indignant reader.

All? I am amazed at your asking such a question. I should have thought you had enough of it! Yes, it is all; and to tell you a secret, which, of course, I would not proclaim to the world, I should not be in the least surprised if your biography, up to the present date, is not one better worth writing.

What have you done, I should like to know? and what are you, and what have you been, that is better worth recording than the sayings and doings recorded here? You think yourself superior?

(STC, 190-191)

The “you” harangued in this passage is presumably a child reader who would, by 1865, have had good reasons to suppose that a collection entitled Stories to a Child might contain more fanciful fare. But Ingelow's narrator is clearly extending her attack to all those tempted to indulge grandiose fantasies. Adults, too, it would seem, might benefit from a homely realism that insists on limits.¹ Curiously enough, the moral pushed by John Smith's artless biographer thus resembles the one which closes that most artful of all Victorian narratives, Middlemarch. For the biographer of Dorothea Brooke also relies on a tonal shift when she instructs a “you” to remember that “the growing good of the world” does not necessarily depend on extraordinary deeds. Adopting the familiarity of a kindly aunt addressing a small child, the sophisticated narrator of Middlemarch exhorts us to accept the constraint of ordinariness: “[T]hat things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”²

The narrator of “The Life of John Smith,” however, is confrontational rather than soothing. Whereas George Eliot asks us to recognize the extraordinariness of figures too easily dismissed as inconsequential, Ingelow punctures our very notions of consequence by insisting on her protagonist's inconsequence. Never a character in his own right, Mr. Smith is not nearly as engaging as Sophia and Rosamond, the spry girl-heroines, respectively, of “The Grandmother's Shoe” and “Deborah's Book,” two longer psychological studies also included in Stories Told To a Child. Away from their homes, Sophia and Rosamond travel to locales in which elders curb and channel their precocious imaginings. These austere figures—a Quaker grandmother and a gentleman who restores Rosamond to her hosts—are nonetheless quite tolerant of childish excesses. In “The Life of John Smith,” however, the narrator seems impatient with the expansive cravings of her readers. Whereas Sophia and Rosamond were treated with understanding, here we find ourselves chided for a hunger that Ingelow's antinarrative has deliberately induced.

The unexpectedness of the narrator's harsh assault on a “you” who might reasonably feel superior to poor Mr. Smith causes the reader a much greater discomfort than that experienced by Sophia and Rosamond. Surprised at finding ourselves thrust into the narrative we are reading, we have become more vulnerable than these two transgressive children. Whereas they freely admit their small trespasses, we are harangued for our presumed misreading, embarrassed by a narrator whose cunning turns out to be so superior to Mr. Smith's. We have been tricked, mocked for assuming that the life of a dull boy born on April Fool's Day in 1780 might have yielded something far more exciting. We have underestimated the imagination of an author who has crafted a defiantly anti-imaginative text. Truculent to the very end, Ingelow's narrator prefers to identify herself with the naif who found “cracked” antiques inferior to brand new “articles.” Battered and ejected, we have ourselves been “cracked.” And, to make sure that no residual hunger for the extraordinary lingers in any reader still reluctant to admit having “had enough,” the narrator fires off one parting shot: “I cannot forbear telling you that, whether you are destined to be great or little, the honour of writing your biography is not desired by your obedient servant the biographer of Mr. John Smith” (STC, 191).

I shall return to “The Life of Mr. John Smith” after a slight detour. I have started with it because it raises important questions about the nature of Ingelow's ideology and art, and also because it anticipates a dilemma that Christina Rossetti and Juliana Ewing would face as well in their own fictions for children. Ingelow's parable about ordinariness reveals a deep distrust of a subjectivity that can cause us to magnify our own import as well as to project our desires on admired others. Ingelow extended that distrust to her own career as a writer. Despite her literary prominence and her association with major intellectuals and artists of her time—notably John Ruskin, a steady admirer and frequent caller at her Kensington home³—she chose to lead as unobtrusive a life as possible. In fact, she was so successful in obscuring herself that the surviving details of her private and public life almost seem scantier than those she allowed to the fictional Mr. Smith.

It is hardly accidental, therefore, that we should lack a full-scale biography to match those devoted to Ingelow's male contemporaries or to Christina Rossetti, the writer to whom she was most often compared by her reviewers. Aware “of a new eminent name having arisen among us,” Rossetti herself rather nervously regarded “Jean Ingelow, the wonderful poet” as “a formidable rival to most men, and to any woman.”⁴ Yet, for all her inventive powers, Ingelow retained much of her Calvinist mother's suspicion of art, artists, and artistic rivalry. Rossetti's letters and manuscripts were readily available to late Victorian editor-biographers such as her brother Michael and Mackenzie Bell. Ingelow's scattered correspondence—though probably just as copious—survives primarily through excerpts included in what is bound to remain the most reliable account of her life, the 1901 Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow.⁵

That this modest but insightful study should have been written by a younger friend or relative who concealed her name seems very much in keeping with the tenor of Ingelow's own self-effacing life. Indeed, the anonymous author of Some Recollections astutely characterizes that self-effacement by drawing on a floral metaphor devised by Ingelow's friend, John Ruskin, in his grandiosely entitled Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air Was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew (1879).⁶ Ruskin's moralized anatomy of “all the essential parts of a flower”—its pistil, style, ovary, and stigma—relies on the prime example of the poppy. He has chosen that “impatient and luxury-loving” red flower, he says, because it differs from its more modest peers by boldly displaying its separate parts, having been “at first too severely restrained and then casting all restraint away” (CW [The Complete Works of John Ruskin], 25:260).⁷ To characterize her own subject's temperament, Ingelow's 1901 biographer draws on Ruskin's contrast between the showy young poppy and a more decorous rival: though similarly “confined” in its youth, the primrose never chooses to cast off its early “tutorial leaves” in poppy-like abandon.⁸

The anonymous author of Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow carefully edits Ruskin's floral symbolism in order to create what she regards as an apt emblem for a woman writer who refused to leave the confines of her family, opting to reside first with her parents and then, upon her mother's death in 1878, with younger brothers. The passage Ingelow's biographer enlists for her analogy deserves to be closely examined. In reproducing it, I am also reinstating—in brackets and in italics—some of the infantilizing attributes that Ruskin conferred on his symbolic primrose, attributes that Ingelow's biographer wisely elides:

Ruskin, in his ‘Proserpina,’ gives a faithful delineation of a primrose both in pen and pencil. The words might stand for a description of Jean Ingelow. They occur in what could be used as an allegory for parents, and begin with a picture of a poppy, whose scarlet cup cannot be developed until it has split up and tossed away the cruel cap that has held it in bondage and left its petals marked for ever. ‘Not so flowers of gracious breeding,’ says the sage of his primrose, ‘first confined as strictly as the poppy, with five pinching green leaves, whose points close over it’; [the little thing is content to remain a child and finds its nursery large enough] then ‘the little yellow ones peep out … [like ducklings] they find the light delicious, [and open wide to it]; and grow, and grow, and throw themselves [wider at last] into their perfect rose’ … [But they never leave their old nursery for all that; it and they live on together; and the nursery seems a part of the flower.]⁹

Instead of stressing what might be construed as a regressive attachment to the nursery, as Ruskin had done, Ingelow's biographer prefers to emphasize the primrose's conservative allegiances. She therefore disrupts Ruskin's sequence and concludes the paragraph with a sentence about the calyx (which Ruskin simply calls the “hiding part”; CW, 25:261, Ruskin's italics) that does not occur at this point in Proserpina:

… ‘but the primrose remains always in its calyx, its first home; they are never separated, and the calyx remains part of the flower, which dies in it when its day is over.’

So it was with Jean Ingelow.

Although she gladly hailed every effort made by her friends to enlarge and enrich their lives by any sort of intellectual or philanthropic work, she certainly belonged to the old school of thought so far as regards public life for women, and she experienced a veritable shock each time that anyone she cared for stepped across the old barrier, as she deemed, needlessly; still, she differed in silence; it was far from her to discuss these points, and she sometimes let herself be reminded with a smile that she, in her day, had gone to the verge by publishing her poems. To the generation before her such writing was but the graceful and interesting diversion of a gentlewoman, to be kept for the delectation of her own circle. …¹⁰

Significantly enough, Ingelow's biographer censors Ruskin's characterization of the primrose as a perennially sheltered child who, like Gluck in The King of the Golden River, remains in its original green cradle. To remove the imputation that a mature woman never managed to break free from the nursery, the author of Some Recollections stresses the voluntariness of her subject's confinement. She suggests that Ingelow's decision to stay within the narrow “calyx” of her immediate family stemmed from her cultural affiliation. The writer who belongs to an older “school of thought” still exhibits the Evangelical values of a generation that had placed a premium on female domesticity. Women of letters such as Maria Edgeworth, who worked closely with her father in fashioning her educational texts, or the Taylor sisters Jane and Ann, whose poems for children complemented their own father's more prosaic instructional works, had also discharged a public role while staying firmly implanted within a parental calyx. Jane Taylor died when Jean Ingelow was only four years old; but the friendship between the Taylors and Ingelows gave Jean access to a domestic atmosphere very different from that existing in her own home. Her visits, as a teenager, to the household of Isaac Taylor introduced her to an intellectual atmosphere far more receptive to creativity than that offered by her own parents, the cultivated but repressive Jean Kilgour and the witty but literal-minded William Ingelow.¹¹

Yet if Ingelow was shocked by Victorian women writers who had “stepped across the old barrier” (a possible allusion to George Eliot or even Elizabeth Barrett Browning), her own quietism was hardly without conflict. The author of Some Recollections provides enough information to allow us to construct an “allegory for parents” that strongly suggests that the conformity demanded by Jean and William Ingelow was hard to bear even for one as “docile” as their eldest child. She implies that there was a continued tension between the ideology of self-suppression Ingelow accepted and her dogged need to find a creative outlet for her emotions. The poet had, after all, gone to “the verge” by refusing to remain silent. She was a poppy as well as a primrose.

There are contradictions, then, which do not escape the shrewd author of Some Recollections. Is Ingelow's art conformist or self-expressive? Did a lingering attachment to her “first home” result in writings that merely reasserted “old barriers” at a time of major social and institutional changes? Or did she use her work to break away from the “cruel cap” of an inhibiting nursery? To counter the notion that Ingelow's art was unaffected by the larger life around her, her biographer points to the popularity that her “comforting, consoling, prophetic” verses gained in the United States immediately after the Civil War: “As American homes were just then building up again, families reuniting after the cruel strain and anguish, the heart of the great people was tuned to take part in the melody.”¹²

But even this example may not necessarily rescue Ingelow's work from the charge that it promoted an insulation associated with women and children. Her lyrics might have appealed to adults eager to find an anodyne for the horrors of war. Yet if so, had she not merely found a public forum for private verses that a “gentlewoman” of an earlier generation might have “kept for the delectation of her own circle”? That Ingelow aided a male ideology which valued a segregated female “purity” seems clear from Ruskin's investment in both herself and her writings. He was drawn to her for some of the same reasons that made the little girls at Winnington school so attractive to him. The prepubescent “little birds” Ruskin adored and the spinster whose company he relished struck him as equally virginal, and hence unthreatening. In his Ethics of the Dust (1866), Ruskin assigns Ingelow's verses to one of the little girls whom the Old Lecturer teases: having told the children that because they are small, they “should have very little play, and because I'm big, I should have a great deal,” Ruskin allows himself to be outwitted by one child who recalls verses from “Miss Ingelow”: “The lambs play always—they know no better” (CW, 18:211).

With this background in mind, we can at last return to Ingelow's “The Life of John Smith.” As I noted, the biographer of this fictional patriarch pushes the same restraining ideology with which Ingelow is identified by her own biographer in Some Recollections. Yet, as I also hinted, this identification remains problematic. Despite its final put-down of a childish reader, Ingelow's text involves more than a defense of unimaginativeness. For in exhibiting so fully the dullness of its male subject, the narrative comes close to satirizing the patriarchal ideology it supposedly endorses. The narrator's final act of severance is so intemperate that it calls our attention to the dull temperance of a life in which the domestic and the public never seem to clash: “his father died, leaving him the braziery business, and four thousand pounds in the Funds. Mr. Smith was a kind son. His mother lived with him, and her old age was cheered by the sight of his honors, worth, and talents. About this time he took out a patent for a new kind of poker.” (STC, 188). Is this monotonous conflation of a life's material and emotional aspects really endorsed by the author or is that author slyly detaching herself from her Gulliverian narrator?

Each answer seems as plausible as the other. Acquiescence and resistance are somehow left unresolved. The docility that her biographer attributes to Ingelow, though genuine, is never without a quietly subversive underside. “The Life of John Smith” therefore can be read as a straightforward narrative, as Ruskin seems to have done (although perhaps not without tongue in cheek) when he applauded the “becoming reverence” shown by “Miss Jean Ingelow” toward a “tranquil magnate and potentate, the bulwark of British constitutional principles and initiator of British private enterprise.”¹³ Or it can be read as a satire of those hagiographic accounts of little boys destined for greater things with which the Victorians liked to regale their young. For the story simultaneously endorses and ridicules a mentality that strongly resembles that of William Ingelow, who had little use for art in his world of business. Professing to have no time to pose for the portrait his worshipful daughter had commissioned with her first earnings as a writer, Mr. Ingelow at last relented and “graciously allowed the artist to take him as he sat working before his desk.”¹⁴ Smith's utilitarian perspective on products of art thus may owe much to the “calyx” that restrained Jean Ingelow's early flowering.

How would John Smith or the stolid persona Ingelow adopted to tell that gentleman's life have reacted to Mopsa the Fairy, the fairy-tale novel she published in 1869, only four years after the appearance of Stories Told to a Child? The didacticist who had discouraged all youthful flights of fancy in her collection of tales now produced an extravagant venture into a series of fantasylands in sixteen chapters marked by an unresisting “acceptance of wonders.”¹⁵ Had Ingelow suddenly repudiated her earlier insistence on limits and barriers? Her shift in mode, though acute, does not necessarily betoken a new outlook. Nor is it necessary to attribute that switch in mode, as critics have done, to her desire to capitalize on the recent success of Alice in Wonderland.¹⁶ Instead, if we are willing to allow that “The Life of Mr. John Smith” covertly undermines the constraints it supposedly endorses, we can actually glimpse in that realistic sketch the seeds for Ingelow's fantastic masterpiece for children.

For Mopsa the Fairy only brings to the surface the clash already embedded in the account of a Mr. Smith who, we learn, once was a boy called Jack. A fantasy that features as its protagonist not Mopsa, the fairy-girl who becomes a queen, but rather a good and very dull middle-class boy called Jack, thus offers a dramatic extension of the polarities still half-concealed in “The Life of Mr. John Smith.” The same preference for the ordinary and everyday promoted in Ingelow's didactic tales for children paradoxically finds its way into a text that seems unrestrained in its indulgence of the extraordinary. A narrative that starts out with Jack as its ostensible hero, the patron of the still nameless fairy child he carries in his pocket, ends with her eminence as a grown-up visionary and with his abasement and exile. Yet it is precisely the boy's unimaginativeness, his lack of prevision, that protects him as he penetrates the dangerous magical realms that Ingelow genders as “feminine.” Though welcome as an antidote to Jack's Smith-like stolidity, the superior imagination of Mopsa and her sister-queens is painful, vulnerable, and unstable. The girl who grows beyond Jack in the innermost fairyland into which they have ventured ultimately suffers far more than he. She becomes a wise woman, while he remains a boy. Their union is impossible. An unusual fairy queen must be severed from the ordinary British boy who will soon forget her as well as his imaginative venture. Still, even though she divorces fantasy from realism, Ingelow also tries to reclaim the former mode from boyish worshipers of the “feminine.”

II

The decision to have Mopsa outgrow the boy who had enclosed her in his pocket may well be the most salient of Ingelow's many departures from Alice in Wonderland and At the Back of the North Wind, the two male fantasies Mopsa the Fairy so subtly revises. Midway in the novel, Jack is unsettled to discover, as he measures Mopsa's height, that the girl who had barely reached his knee only “the day before” now comes “as high as the second button of his waistcoat.” Vaguely anticipating the separation that awaits him, Jack tells Mopsa “I hope you will not go on growing so fast as this,” and then wistfully adds, “or you will be as tall as my mamma is in a week or two—much too big for me to play with” (MF [Mopsa the Fairy], chap. 9, 269).

In distancing herself from the precedents of Carroll and MacDonald, Ingelow is seldom as overt or as pugnacious as Christina Rossetti. Ingelow carefully avoided polemics whenever called upon to pronounce “upon the authors of her own time”; nonetheless, as her 1901 biographer points out, although she was “very reticent in speaking either of current literature or of people, she had her strong partialities as regarded both.” The writer whom this biographer calls a “lover of peace” thus engages Carroll in ways that are often so oblique that they can easily be missed.¹⁷ Still, Jack's complaint about the rapidity of “his” little Mopsa's growth seems a fairly direct rebuttal of the fantasy devised by a man who did his imaginative best to retard the maturation of little Alice.

After reaching the innermost regions of fairyland, Mopsa develops at a much faster pace than Jack. Yet her growth is steady and deliberate. The compressions and elongations imposed on Alice in Wonderland—or the abrupt changes in size that North Wind repeatedly undergoes in her various encounters with Diamond—are pointedly avoided in the fantastic lands that Jack visits. The boy falsely assumes that Mopsa will not grow beyond the other fairies he has hauled back from England. Once Jovinian and Roxaletta, Mopsa's brother and sister, have attained their full size of one foot and one inch, they can join the tiny inhabitants of the country that turns out to be their—but not Mopsa's—final destination. Unlike Mopsa, who lingers on Jack's knee, her siblings are ready to fly away. Their mobility, however, is hardly a mark of maturation. For these miniscule adults resemble drones and worker bees subordinated to the larger queen grounded in her hive. Important only as foils to Mopsa, they can be dismissed from the story. The lavish adult attire each wears before flitting away only makes these droll miniatures seem all the more parodic of full-grown men and women. Mopsa, however, still dressed in a “white frock” that shows off her “soft, fat arms, and a face just like that of a sweet child” (MF, chap. 7, 258), has the human capacity for a higher development.

Yet Mopsa not only outgrows Roxaletta and Jovinian, but also proves to be superior to her older sister, the taller, human-sized fairy queen whom Jack saves from slavery and restores to her subjects. Ingelow offers two contrary explanations for Mopsa's elevation. She hints, on the one hand, that Jack's own decided preference for this “little dear” over the other survivors (a fourth fairy child has been lost through his carelessness) resulted in a kiss that had effects as beneficial as the princely kisses bestowed in “Sleeping Beauty” or in MacDonald's / Mr. Raymond's story of Little Daylight. Nonetheless, Ingelow also claims that Mopsa's election as queen of a fairy race she will redeem and rule was predestined by a higher female authority, the mysterious figure referred to—in the book's later chapters—as “Mother Fate.” The two explanations are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Indeed, Jack's selection of a child who might otherwise have remained as ordinary as Roxaletta and Jovinian could, after all, itself have been mandated by “Mother Fate.”

But it seems futile to look for any such reconciliation in a text that thwarts Jack's own desire to obtain an “explanation” or “reason” for every strange event that befalls him (MF, chap. 8, 264; chap. 15, 299). The reader accustomed to realistic narratives will share Jack's frustration in his repeated encounters with creatures uninterested in cause and effect. Enigma and unreason are readily accepted in the fantasylands he visits. Indeed, Mopsa's ready acquiescence to an inexplicable “Mother Fate” gradually alienates her from the human boy who keeps asking “why” to the very end of his adventures:

“But why?” asked Jack.

Mopsa, however, was like other fairies in this respect—that she knew all about Old Mother Fate, but not about causes and reasons. She believed, as we do in this world, that

                                                                                                    That that is, is,

but the fairies go further than this; they say:

That that is, is; and when it is, that is the reason that it is.

This sounds like nonsense to us, but it is all right to them.

So Mopsa [thought] she had explained everything …

(MF, chap. 15, 299-300)

Ostensibly, Ingelow here co-opts the “nonsense” that both Carroll and MacDonald had promulgated in their own forays into fantasy. Yet she appropriates that nonsense for distinct purposes of her own. By having Jack venture into fairylands ruled by a female logic he cannot decode, Ingelow questions the uses to which fantasy had been put in both Alice in Wonderland and At the Back of the North Wind. The two explanations she offers for Mopsa's exaltation—her selection by Jack and her selection by Mother Fate—thus help to illuminate Ingelow's divergence from these male fantasists and to suggest that, like Rossetti and Ewing after her, she felt challenged by the subjectivity of each man's appropriation of female energies.

Although Ingelow does not question the sincerity of Jack's attachment to his little Mopsa, she does suggest that there is something quite arbitrary and proprietary about his preference. The smitten Lewis Carroll chose “Secunda” over a “Prima” who was too old and a “Tertia” who was too young to act as his ideal playmate. Since, originally, Mopsa was of the same age and appearance as the siblings who were hatched in the same nest, Jack's choice seems even more capricious. Inspected by the fairy queen who will add Roxaletta and Jovinian to her subjects, Mopsa seems to have been retarded in her development. Whereas her siblings greet their future sovereign with the politesse of seasoned courtiers, Mopsa coyly hides her face and blushes “with pretty shyness.” The fairy queen whom Jack has rescued from slavery is puzzled by this remarkable difference:

“These are fairies,” said Jack's slave; “but what are you?”

“Jack kissed me,” said the little thing; “and I want to sit on his knee.”

“Yes,” said Jack, “I took them out, and laid them in a row to see if they were safe, and this one I kissed, because she looked such a little dear.”

“Was she not like the others, then?” asked the slave.

“Yes,” said Jack; “but I liked her the best; she was my favourite.”

(MF, chap. 7, 254)

Jack's favoritism, Ingelow seems to suggest here, has somehow slowed down Mopsa's development. Imprinted by a human, the child who was once “like the others” has become far more dependent on him than the two siblings who have reached their maturity as fairies. Like the self-restricted Jean Ingelow, who felt herself bound by her strong allegiances to a parental “calyx,” Mopsa finds Jack's possessive love to be inhibiting rather than liberating. When the slave-turned-queen continues to interrogate her, she falls back on the same refrain. To the question, “How comes it that you are not like your companions?,” she can only repeat, “in a pretty lisping voice: ‘It's because Jack kissed me.’” The queen, who later startles her visitors by informing them that Mopsa is her younger sister and hence a potential rival as ruler of her fairy hive, now soberly acknowledges that “the love of a mortal works changes indeed” (MF, chap. 7, 256).

But what kind of “love” did Jack exhibit when he bestowed an impulsive kiss on the fairy child that struck him as “such a little dear”? It seems rather poignant that, immediately after this exchange has taken place, Ingelow should turn away from Jack's relation to the girl Mopsa in order to reinspect his relation to a more mature female figure, the “lovely slave” who has yet to reveal her identity as fairy queen. There is a marked difference between the two relationships. Whereas Jack can continue to patronize the little girl he regards as his possession, he wants to end the ties that bind him to the wrinkled fairy woman who has changed—as unexpectedly as George MacDonald's Little Daylight—into a radiant young beauty. Even before her transformation, Jack was troubled by the master-slave relationship that linked him to this elderly female. Finding that she had spent his money on purchases he considered to be frivolous, Jack adopted a severe parental tone in making his reproof. At the same time, however, he admits the insecurity of his assumed position of authority: “What do you mean by being so silly? I can't scold you properly, because I don't know what name to call you by, and I don't like to say ‘Slave,’ because that sounds so rude” (MF, chap. 7, 253). But after discovering that the slave-woman wisely used her purchases to bring about her magical transformation, Jack feels even less secure. He is no longer in command of the boat that carries his group to the fairyland interiors they are approaching. Eventually, in the innermost of these realms, where the mandates of Mother Fate become most fully manifest, poor Jack will shed the last remnants of his male authority and boyish self-esteem.

“Captain Jack” senses the waning of his former mastery. He is disturbed by the subservience Roxaletta and Jovinian show to someone who still addresses him as her “master” and tells himself that he is “tired of admiring” the slave-woman's beauty. When he also finds himself “wondering at the respect” shown to her by the assiduous little courtiers who adorn her with flowers and fan her with feathers, his jealousy becomes overt. Jack's dominance, always unquestioned in the borderlands and outer fairylands he has so far traversed, has been eroded. The slave-woman seems an intruder in the boat he shared with creatures smaller than himself as happily as Carroll with his own “merry crew” in the prefatory poem to Alice in Wonderland. Jack therefore prefers to indulge in some regressive play with the one crew member whom he can still dominate: “he curled himself up in the bottom of the boat with his own little favourite, and taught her how to play at cat's cradle” (MF, chap. 7, 256).

As a quick learner and willing playmate, Mopsa only intensifies Jack's desire to single her out. He has no interest in the puppet-like Roxaletta and Jovinian. For her part, Mopsa's older sister displays new powers he finds threatening. Lewis Carroll seized on Secunda as a median neither as childish nor as sexually developed as her younger and older sisters; likewise Jack, having already broken away from his baby sister and from her nurse before embarking on his adventures, dismisses Mopsa's tiny siblings and tries to dissociate himself from the regal lady whose emerging authority and higher status he now finds so troubling.

Jack therefore gladly rids himself of his former slave. Yet his discomforts are hardly over. For Jack will become even more entangled with the magical powers he finds so inexplicable. These powers, which are at their strongest in the matriarchal heartlands he is about to penetrate, will further reduce his significance, sap his self-confidence, and, eventually, demand his banishment from Mopsa's domain:

When they had been playing some time, and Mopsa was getting quite clever at the game, the lovely slave said: “Master, it is a long time since you spoke to me.”

“And yet,” said Jack, “there is something I particularly want to ask you about.”

“Ask it, then,” she replied.

“I don't like to have a slave,” answered Jack; “and as you are so clever, don't you think you can find out how to be free again?”

(MF, chap. 7, 256)

A reversal of roles is set in motion. By asking one he respects for being “so clever” to bring about her own freedom, Jack tacitly admits that he is no longer her master nor even master over his own actions. He seeks his own release from the slave who has become his superior. But the freedom Jack expects cannot be attained through such a separation. The former queen, we later discover, became enslaved only after she fled from the responsibilities that bound her to her subjects. What is more, the severance that Jack now regards as liberating ironically anticipates his strenuously resisted parting from Mopsa. Jack cannot foresee that the little pupil who has become “quite clever” at the game he has taught her will soon surpass him as well as the “clever” sister whose help he solicits.

Despite her greater cleverness, however, the slave-woman is dependent on the unimaginative little boy who is her master. Their interdependence, stressed in the ensuing exchange, suggests Ingelow's own predicament as a writer in a field that had been co-opted by male “masters” of a regressive art:

“I am very glad you asked me about that,” said the fairy woman. “Yes, master, I wish very much to be free; and as you were so kind as to give the most valuable piece of money you possessed in order to buy me, I can be free if you can think of anything you really like better than that half-crown, and if I can give it to you.”

“Oh, there are many things,” said Jack. “I like going up this river to Fairyland much better.”

“But you are going there, master,” said the fairy woman; “you were on the way before I met with you.”

“I like this little child better,” said Jack. “I love this little Mopsa. I should like her to belong to me.”

“She is yours,” answered the fairy woman; “she belongs to you already. Think of something else.”

Jack thought again, and was so long about it that at last the beautiful slave said to him: “Master, do you see those purple mountains?”

Jack turned around in the boat and saw a splendid range of purple mountains. They were very great and steep, each had a crown of snow, and the sky was very red behind them, for the sun was going down.

“At the other side of those mountains is Fairyland,” said the slave; “but if you cannot think of something that you should like better to have than your half-crown I can never enter in.”

(MF, chap. 7, 25-7)

The fairy woman insists on the urgency of her predicament. Thousands of “small people” are waiting to tow their queen through a narrow passage into a mountain enclave that closely resembles Ruskin's Treasure Valley. But they are impotent, as dependent as she is on the little boy's effort to find something more precious than his half-crown. Unless she ceases to be Jack's nominal subordinate, the “strength and skill” of her subjects are of no avail and she will be forced to remain at the margins of her domain, unable to resume her rule.

The fairy woman's dilemma, and Jack's attempt to resolve it, allow Ingelow to allegorize the paradox that confronted Victorian women writers who found themselves simultaneously stimulated and repelled by the “femininities” featured in the fantasies of their male contemporaries. Ingelow, Rossetti, and Ewing are not sure whether they can—or want to—reenter a realm of pure fantasy. The Treasure Valleys, Wonderlands, and regions at the back of North Wind are female domains and hence rightfully theirs. Yet a reclamation of these lands remains problematic. The repossession of such female fairylands required a preliminary cleansing. Any woman writer eager to exercise her own powers of fantasy needed to dissociate herself from men who tenaciously clung to their boyish equation of childhood with femininity. That equation could be crippling. The queen of fairies—whose identity Jack has yet to penetrate—is his dependent as much as his superior. She can shed her enslaved condition only by making the boy acknowledge that he covets something that antecedes his regressive desire to sail “up this river to Fairyland” with the little mate he loves and wants at all cost to retain. That something is, as Ingelow shrewdly knew, a boy's lingering attachment to his first parent, the mother he may continue to invest with magical powers even after he has attained manhood. Whether emulating or repudiating a father's engagement with, and presumed authority over, the material world, Victorian boys, as this older sister well understood, were bound by their unusually strong ties to the mother.

Although Jack will return to his father's garden and bask in the seeming might of that paterfamilias, the boy exhibits few patriarchal traits during the early stages of his fantastic journeys. He is uninterested in material possessions. In order to purchase the slave-woman, still wrinkled and feeble, from her abusive master, Jack was more than willing to part with “the half-crown that his grandmamma had given him on his birthday” (MF, chap. 6, 250). From the very start of his story, Jack has been affiliated with females. Though breaking away from the triangle in which he was flanked by the nurse and his baby sister, he soon became a nurturer himself. For Jack emulates the nurse by promptly feeding the fairy babies nestled in the hollow trunk of the “old thorn tree” with a piece of the plum cake she gave him for his own consumption (MF, chap. 1, 215). He is eager to help deliver the nestlings seemingly deserted by their “old mother.” He not only assists in their passage out of the womb-like structure but also uses his waistcoat pocket as an incubator.

Like Diamond, that other boy-nurturer of babies, Jack seems to relish his adoption of maternal surrogacy. And, just as Diamond adopted Nanny as a sister, so does Jack's immediate identification with Mopsa, while still in the tree-hollow, also place him in something like that androgynous relation of brother-sister complements so dear to the imagination of Victorian women writers such as Emily Brontë and George Eliot.¹⁸ The adventurous “Captain Jack” is certainly far less of an androgyne than Gluck or even Diamond. Still, despite his masculine strutting (he offers to fight the slave-woman's master in order to win her release), he is most at ease when playing with the chubby little girl he wants to own forever. It is, in fact, his Carrollian identification with this female dream-child that licenses his forays into the symbolic dreamscapes offered by female fantasylands.

Nonetheless, the manifestations of the female imagination that Jack encounters in these fantasylands also involve power struggles that go beyond the empty threats of Carroll's Queen of Hearts. Not only the fairy queen cruelly enslaved by a rival race of fairies, but also many inhabitants of the other borderlands and fairylands Jack visits are engaged in sustained tribal wars. Jack's humanity and, above all, his male identity make him immune to the abuses of enchantment better understood by those involved in cycles of submission and domination. His naiveté and the palpable possessions found in the trouser pockets of any middle-class Victorian boy—a dog whistle (MF, chap. 4, 235), a handkerchief, a pocketknife, as well as coins of various denominations—turn out to be prime assets in his dealings with fairy people.

Jack's desire to free a grown-up slave befits a good British boy brought up on the abolitionist principles of Ingelow's own Evangelical religion. He is sincere in wanting to avoid relations that demand the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. But the boy who hopes to avoid a power conflict with the woman he suspects to be more than a slave has no compunction in trying to maintain his supremacy over little Mopsa. He sees no contradiction in wanting her to “belong” to him. Like Lewis Carroll, he cannot admit that a loving playfulness may be inseparable from a desire to dominate. When Jack expresses his hope that Mopsa will not become “too big for me to play with,” he implies that he wants to control her development. But neither she nor he can stay arrested in wonderlands of the imagination. His hope of perpetual play is not only undermined by the reality of growth, but also compromised by his own desire for power.

When Jack at long last comes up with the wish he has found so difficult to formulate, he demands, significantly enough, a share of the power shown by the fairy woman who is no longer a powerless slave. He asks her for a piece of the silk ribbon that she had magically stretched, first into a child-sized handkerchief, then into a domestic apron, and finally into a “most beautiful robe of purple silk” suited to the resumption of her royal duties. Such stretching powers clearly appeal to Jack as much as to Lewis Carroll or George MacDonald, fellow appropriators of that “esemplastic” imagination that Wordsworth and Coleridge had gendered as feminine yet also equated with male desire:

“All these sailors to tow my slave!” said Jack. “I wonder, I do wonder, what you are?” But the fairy woman only smiled, and Jack went on: “I have thought of something that I should like much better than my half-crown. I should like to have a little tiny bit of that purple gown of yours with the gold border.”

Then the fairy woman said: “I thank you, master. Now I can be free.” So she told Jack to lend her his knife, and with it she cut off a very small piece of the skirt of her robe, and gave it to him. “Now mind,” she said; “I advise you never to stretch this unless you want to make some particular thing of it, for then it will only stretch to the right size; but if you merely begin to pull it for your own amusement, it will go on stretching and stretching, and I don't know where it will stop.”

(MF, chap. 7, 257)

The fairy woman's warning is meant to instruct Jack about the proper uses of a fantastic imagination. Its stretching powers ought not be wantonly deployed to indulge irrational or subjective wishes that can border on the masturbatory. Such unrestraint, as the former slave knows from her own bitter experience, can be dangerous. The queen's insistence on limits reveals Ingelow's distrust of the stretchings to which Carroll had subjected his Alice and which MacDonald had dramatized through his expanding goddess, North Wind. But Ingelow's distrust is also directed at her personal venture into fantasy. As Alice reached a height of nine feet, she felt that her own feet, which remained on the ground, were so removed from her torso that they seemed to have been amputated. In Mopsa the Fairy, the slave-woman has also experienced mutilation. Severed from her subjects because she had become “discontented with my own happy country” (MF, chap. 8, 259), she was accidentally captured by wooden-legged townspeople whose original limbs were just as accidentally cut off by fairy rivals after they had tried to make “themselves invisible” (MF, chap. 6, 250).

Jack's wish for magical power is hardly inordinate, since he modestly asks for a “tiny bit” of the royal gown. But he misuses the sliver from the robe by creating a protective envelope, a hymen-like “canopy” or “awning,” for the boat in which he and Mopsa will try to float away. Worried about enclosures that might “melt away,” he wants this shelter to screen and ward off all unsettling changes (MF, chap. 9, 265). But the possession of this piece of matriarchal cloth does not allow Jack to stretch out his childish sense of omnipotence; he cannot arrest Mopsa's development nor fend off change. The permanent childhood abode he seeks for himself and Mopsa is as fragile as those harboring youthful shelter-seekers in Victorian novels such as Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield.¹⁹

Neither Jack nor Mopsa nor even Mopsa's magical older sister can ever be truly “free” in realms ruled by a female imagination. For they must defer to the inscrutable dictates of Mother Fate. When Mopsa deplores that she is “so big now” and wishes to burrow back into “Jack's waistcoat pocket again,” her sister reminds her that their growth as coequal queens was mandated by the “old mother” herself: “She is much more powerful than we are” (MF, chap. 11, 278). And that maternal power, for Ingelow, inevitably produces a pain that women are bound to remember but boys are allowed to repress.

III

When Mopsa surpasses Jack in height, she does not just become as “tall as [his] mamma” but also assumes the maternal functions of a queen who is the antitype of Lewis Carroll's irresponsible Queen of Hearts. As I have been implying, Jack's relation to Mopsa permits Ingelow to review Carroll's strenuous resistance to female growth. In dramatizing the boy's grief over his enforced separation from the playmate who has become a queen, Ingelow taps Carroll's pained response to his own loss. Her genuine sympathy with Jack suggests her capacity for appreciating the intensity of that pain. Nonetheless, aware of the transformation of Carroll's nostalgia into anger, she counters her precursor in two distinct ways. She questions his possessive attempts to dominate a girl he resents for growing up and, even more important, she challenges his undisguised hostility towards adult women. It is hardly coincidental that Jack's weeping farewell from Mopsa should come during sunset at “the edge of the reed-bed” that borders the river on which the two had traveled in their little boat, still undivided by sex and age (MF, chap. 16, 313). For the landscape which Ingelow treats with a mixture of lyricism and irony pointedly recalls the one traversed by another well-remembered boat. The discordance between the tearful Mr. Dodgson's prefatory poem and Carroll's final loosening of the denizens of a mad underground was not wasted on his shrewd revisionist.

Ingelow's last chapter revises the closure of Carroll's text. Attacked by the encircling cards, Alice aborted her increasingly unpleasant dream. On awaking, she discovered that the aggressive cards merely were fluttering “dead” leaves, emblems of her own march towards maturity and death. Jack, however, cannot bear leaving the wonderland that now has Mopsa at its center. Attacked by the reeds that are “growing up” all around him with their “long spear-like leaves,” he nonetheless strains to get a glimpse of her vanishing castle, vainly hoping to penetrate the thicket and find a path that might lead him back to the maiden chamber of an ever-young Sleeping Beauty. But the growing reeds are relentless: “it was of no use, they sprang up and grew yet more tall” (MF, chap. 16, 311). And the setting sun which gilds the “rosy sky” until the gold begins “to burn itself away” only acts, as in Carroll's sad recollection of a golden gleam, as a further reminder of the relentlessness of temporal change. Defeated, the boy throws himself on the ground, “burst into tears again, and decided to go home” (MF, chap. 16, 313).

Ingelow also scrutinizes Carroll's wishful attempt, in the last paragraph of Wonderland, to find compensation in the possibility that Alice may remember—and then transmit to others—the blissful summer days of a briefly shared “child-life.” Alice's sister acts as Carroll's agent in her concluding reverie. Through a surrogate who is no longer a child but not yet a grown-up, he can indulge his wish that a grown Alice might remain his double, a child-lover who will disseminate the story he created for her. By gathering “other little children” around her after attaining “riper years,” she can perpetuate his Alice-centered narrative and hence reassert their former oneness (AW [Alice in Wonderland], 99). Ingelow undercuts this fantasy of cooperation through an unsentimental handling of the relation between Mopsa and her older sister, the slave-woman turned queen of fairies. Unlike Alice's older sister, who can half believe herself in Wonderland, Mopsa's sister insists, with a cruel realism grounded in natural science, that their joint maturation has made them rivals: “There cannot be two Queens in one hive” (MF, chap. 11, 279). If Carroll tried to find some form of fusion to compensate him for the pains of separation, Ingelow prefers to insist on the irrevocability of loss and change.

Mopsa must be driven out of her sister's domain in order to find a hive of her own; once there, the newly crowned queen cannot afford to be ruled by nostalgia. She must view Jack from a new perspective and admit that this immature human is unfit to be a fairy queen's mate. Her only concession is to imprint Jack's features on the fairy prince she is destined to marry. By keeping Jack's clone at her side, Mopsa can always remember the boy who had imprinted her with his kiss. Jack, however, must forget her if he is to become a grown-up man. They belong to separate worlds.

Ingelow's calculated subversion of Alice in Wonderland has been misread, as I have mentioned, as a slavish dependence on Carroll's text. This misreading, so similar to that which has impeded a fuller understanding of Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses as a response to Through the Looking-Glass, is deplorable yet understandable. For Ingelow's dilemma, as she herself seems to hint, resembles that of the slave-woman: despite a wisdom born from her much wider experience, Mopsa's sister cannot by herself re-enter the fantasy world in which she once ruled supreme. Mopsa's dependence on Jack is even stronger; yet, much like the fairy-mother who left her brood in an English thorn-tree, she eventually needs to push the boy away. Ingelow must likewise acknowledge her ties to the male child-lovers she warily follows. Yet just as Mopsa sadly rejects Jack's incongruous desire to be an adult woman's boy-mate, so does Ingelow gently repudiate Carroll's, MacDonald's, and Ruskin's investment in an arrested childhood.

Ingelow's allusions to Carroll therefore involve more than an attempt to capitalize on the children's book that had become a best-seller in the four years that preceded her own book's publication. The links that Roger Lancelyn Green and others have interpreted as signs of Ingelow's attempt to repeat Carroll's “success” always signal subtle dissociations.²⁰ Some of these connections are, to be sure, rather strained: the immobile flamingo soldiers who guard the shores of the river traversed by Jack's boat, for instance, simply seem to have been introduced as sturdier versions of the slippery flamingoes whom Alice used as croquet mallets. Most other links, however, suggest the sophistication of Carroll's sly revisionist.

Green was right in observing that Ingelow's textual allusions to Wonderland are most noticeable in the opening chapter of Mopsa. It is there, of course, as well as in her narrative's climax, that she renegotiates the traffic between fantasy and the everyday that framed Alice's adventures and then were featured in Diamond's night-excursions with North Wind. Ingelow's initial allusions to Carroll's text operate as playful inversions. In each opening, a curious child who breaks away from an older female who is reading a book and squeezes through a hole in order to venture into a space that lacks the behavioral and linguistic signposts of Victorian civilization. Still, whereas Alice's descent into the “antipathies” proves so disorienting that she soon questions her identity, Ingelow's Jack, always secure in his identity as a self-possessed little Victorian male, remains unfazed. Whereas Alice's transgressive sip from a bottle not marked “poison” produces the first of her many bodily discomforts, Jack's matter-of-factness is evident when he calmly notes that the hole he had entered “must have closed up all on a sudden.” Unlike the ravenous Alice who eventually aborts her hunger-dream, this stolid young explorer contentedly settles down to munch the provisions he has brought along: “‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I may have to stay inside here for a long time, and I have nothing to eat but this cake’” (MF, chap. 1, 216).

Ingelow's inversion of gender-stereotypes, however, goes well beyond her decision to replace the little girl who soon bursts into tears with a stoic little boy who will cry only upon his banishment from Mopsa's castle. Lured by a rabbit dressed in male attire, Alice falls down, down, down the hole which that Carrollian surrogate has dug; immured in the hollow tree that also holds the fairy nestlings, Jack is shot, up, up, up, by a female albatross who materializes out of nowhere in order to propel him “through the hole” at the top (MF, chap. 1, 218). The difference is palpable. The White Rabbit finds the girl who towers over him as intimidating as the “savage” Duchess and the angry Queen of Hearts. The huge bird who acts as midwife in delivering a small boy and the fairies in his pocket solicitously hovers above Jack during his entire adventure and promptly descends, on his call, to take him back to his father's garden. The rabbit known only by his pallor remains marooned in Wonderland, clothed in the livery of hearts that symbolize both love and hatred. But the albatross so reassuringly called Jenny acts as a ferrier between the everyday world and a world of fantasy. She is even more supportive as guide and guardian than the hovering Cheshire Cat whom Alice regarded as her sole Wonderland friend.

Although Jenny merely appears at the outset and close of Jack's quest, Ingelow implants other female caretakers in almost all the borderlands and fairylands the boy visits. One of the most sympathetic of these, the apple-woman, is, like Jenny, a mediator between human beings and fairies. Herself an ordinary mortal who has resettled in the country ruled by Jack's former “slave,” the apple-woman relishes her position of privilege among the tiny fairies, who revere her almost as much as their tall sovereign. Separated from grown-up sons she has left behind in Victorian England, she welcomes Jack and Mopsa and treats them as children of her own. Although she cannot accompany them on their last outing and makes erroneous predictions, this nurturant woman acts as a foil, through her warmth and good humor, to fairies who find it difficult to cry.

The insertion of an actual human in a story that, unlike the narrative of Alice's adventures, never purports to be a dream, serves Ingelow's apparent intention to create a much wider spectrum of female figures than those Alice encountered. Unlike the two Wonderland matriarchs, equally flat, violent, and grotesque, the soft-hearted apple-woman and the unsentimental fairy queen who is Mopsa's older sister are pointedly contrasted, though equally compelling. And even a highly unsavory female character, the “powerful” gypsy woman who turns out to be a “very malicious” enchantress in chapter 5 of Mopsa is given a role that becomes more complicated than that played by her counterpart, the hideous Duchess whom Carroll added to his original Underground text.

Indeed, the complexity of this deceptive gypsy woman, a character who poses as a mother, stems, to a large extent, from Ingelow's attempt to evoke Carroll's Duchess. Jack's near-seduction by this pseudo-matriarch provides a commentary on the Wonderland text that seems subtler than the links I have so far examined. Alice disliked the Duchess's “tone,” even before that matriarch sang to her howling baby; Jack, on the other hand, though warned by a caged parrot about the gypsy's cunning, is mesmerized as soon as she approaches him with a baby in her arms and signs a seductive song:

He felt as if there were some cobwebs before his face, and he put up his hand as if to clear them away. There were no real cobwebs, of course; and yet he again felt as if they floated from the gipsy-woman to him, like gossamer threads, and attracted him towards her. So he gazed at her, and she at him, till Jack began to forget how the parrot had warned him.

(MF, chap. 5, 238-39)

Jack's hoodwinking by the gypsy singer allows Ingelow to react to Carroll's hostile caricature of the Duchess. But more than his misogyny, the assignation of a brutal “lullaby” to the Duchess probably caught her attention. As a poet who wrote within the domestic tradition of predecessors such as Jane Taylor (whose Rhymes for the Nursery Carroll's Mad Hatter so memorably parodies), Ingelow may have felt reasonably offended by the deformations of a kind of poetry that Victorian culture had labeled as “feminine.” Yet “Speak Gently,” the anonymous 1848 verse upon which Carroll's parodic “Speak Roughly” was based, would have been just as offensive to Ingelow. Though it pretends to adopt the saccharine point of view of a female speaker, the original nine-stanza effusion was actually written by a man, most likely David Bates.²¹ The song that Ingelow assigns to the gypsy-woman thus seems as much directed at Bates's “Speak Gently” as at Carroll's parody. For the gypsy-woman who holds “a baby on her arm” while singing to Jack is neither the deficient mother whom Carroll ridicules nor the soothing nurturer who advises others to address fragile children in “accents soft and mild” in Bates's 1848 version. Seduced by the gypsy's own “accents” and caught in the paralyzing cobwebs of a pseudomaternal imagination, Jack soon discovers that this impostor is, in fact, no mother at all.

Pitying the screaming baby whom the Duchess so “violently” tosses to the beats of her sadistic lullaby, Alice welcomed the opportunity to assume the role of nurturer offered by the derelict mother who prefers to “get ready to play croquet with the Queen” (AW, 49). Jack, the nurturer of fairy babies, also finds himself drawn to the infant, “wrapped in a shawl” and with a “handkerchief over its face,” whom the gypsy woman seems to treat so gently. He wonders, solicitously, whether this child of indeterminate sex might be too “heavy for her to carry and wished he could help her.” Noticing that the woman “seemed very fond of it,” the respectful boy “softly” approaches this tender domestic tableau, “till the gypsy-woman smiled, and suddenly began to sing” (MF, chap. 5, 239).

Although the gypsy's song is called a “selling song” by the narrator, Jack, charmed by the melodic voice, pays no attention to the words or intentions of the two verses he hears as a lullaby (MF, chap. 5, 238). Alice, too, “could hardly hear the words” of the Duchess's two-stanza lullaby amidst the din of the baby's howling (AW, 49). But whereas Alice remained conscious of the squalling child, Jack forgets the quiet little bundle the gypsy woman pretends to be “hushing.” Like Diamond's submission to the “baby” rhythms of nonsense verses his mother could not decipher, Jack's obliviousness to sense stems from the primal, hypnotic spell of sound. The chanted two stanzas are rhythmically so seductive that the boy stops paying attention to their possible meaning. His sudden lack of interest in the singer's infant thus is a mark of his own regression. For he has dropped his quasi-maternal investment in small creatures as a result of his own relapse into babyhood. As immobile as the wrapped-up form cradled in the gypsy-woman's arms, Jack has allowed himself to become infantilized by succumbing to a preverbal symbiosis:

When the gipsy had finished her song Jack felt as if he was covered all over with cobwebs; but he could not move away, and he did not mind them now. All his wish was to please her, and get close to her; so when she said, in a soft wheedling voice: “What will you please to buy my pretty gentleman?” he was just going to answer that he would buy anything she recommended, when, to his astonishment and displeasure, for he thought it very rude, the parrot suddenly burst into a violent fit of coughing, which made all the customers stare.

(MF, chap. 5, 239)

To Jack's great surprise, the old parrot's “very rude” behavior worsens when that disrespectful bird chooses to turn into a full-fledged parodist: “he began to beat time with his foot, and sing, or rather scream out, an extremely saucy imitation of the gypsy's song, and all his parrot friends in the other cages joined in the chorus” (MF, chap. 5, 239). The screeching cacophony of this parrotic chorus seems far more grating than the roughness of the chorus of “Wow! wow! wow!”—“(in which the cook and baby joined)”—chanted in the Duchess's kitchen (AW, 48). Enraged at finding her prisoner “thus daring to imitate her,” the gypsy turns on the offender. But Jack, too, is outraged at the shattering of his regressive absorption in a maternal lullaby. Aware of his effect, the parrot offers another stanza in which he mimics the gypsy's versification but not her intended meaning: “[H]e began to sing another verse in the most impudent tone possible, and with a voice that seemed to ring through Jack's head, and almost pierce it” (MF, chap. 5, 240).

As Jack bursts into laughter, the spell is broken. Vainly hurling ever-larger objects at the parrot cage, the furious gypsy woman now openly follows a precedent set by Carroll's Duchess, who, after dodging all the saucepans, plates, and dishes thrown at her and at her baby, had so blithely tossed her precious infant at the surprised Alice:

But nothing did the parrot any harm; the more violently his cage swung the louder he sang, till at last the wicked gipsy seized her poor little young baby, who was lying in her arms, rushed frantically at the cage as it flew swiftly through the air towards her and struck at it with the little creature's head. “Oh, you cruel, cruel woman!” cried Jack, and all the small mothers who were standing near with their skinny children on their shoulders screamed out with terror and indignation; but only for one instant, for the handkerchief flew off that had covered its face, and was caught in the wires of the cage, and all the people saw that it was not a real baby at all, but a bundle of clothes, and its head was a turnip.

Yes, a turnip! You could see that as plainly as possible, for though the green leaves had been cut off, their stalks were visible through the lace cap that had been tied on it.

Upon this all the crowd pressed closer, throwing her baskets, and brushes, and laces, and beads at the gipsy, and calling out: “We will have none of your goods, you false woman! Give us back our money, or we will drive you out of the fair. You've stuck a stick into a turnip, and dressed it up in baby clothes. You're a cheat! a cheat!”

(MF, chap. 5, 240-41)

Ingelow here offers her own version of the surprised reaction that we share with Alice as she discovers that the baby she tried to protect has abruptly turned into a grunting pig. Carroll's narrative claims that Alice is “quite relieved” by this unexpected change. Indeed, the girl who wonders what to do with the “creature” she has inherited, seems far less interested in being a little mother than Jack, Diamond, or, for that matter, the Looking-Glass caretaker of Dinah's kittens. Unlike Fern in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, who feeds Wilbur with a baby bottle and wheels the piglet in her doll's carriage, Alice has no great maternal investment in the chubby porker she allows to scurry away: “‘If it had grown up,’ she said to herself, ‘it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think’” (AW, 50).

Ingelow turns a Wonderland deformation into a case of fraud. The bawling baby held by the hideous Duchess in Tenniel's illustration for “Pig and Pepper” was human before its porcine incarnation. But the “poor little young baby” a fictitious mother hurls at her imitator's cage never was anything but a turnip stuck on a stick. By cleverly exposing the gypsy woman's trick, the satirical parrot has freed Jack from those smothering cob-webs. Just as Carroll transforms a stanza taken from “Speak Gently” into the two verses of “Speak Roughly,” so do the two verses so crudely sung by the parrot undo the effect of the two verses sung by the “false woman” who falsified motherhood.

Like Carroll, Ingelow punctures the mindlessness of Victorian baby-worship. But she goes beyond the comic inversions of the man who greatly worried that boys born to unfeminine women might grow into hoggish beasts. If she, too, indicts the falsified sentimentality of highly popular poems such as “Speak Gently,” she does so because such products perpetuate the falsification of male authors who adopt a purported female point of view they find culturally marketable. By adopting the pious female voice of “Speak Gently,” David Bates does a disservice to genuine women poets. This man (who can rightly be accused of being a “false woman”) offers, as the gypsy does, tainted “goods.” And, what is more, he also offers an all-too-easy target for parodists who feel licensed to caricature mindless women as hideous singers and impotent queens. The originator of a bad poem that exploits his culture's sentimental view of the mother-child relation and the clever parodist who exposes that outlook in order to vent his own anger at Victorian matrons are thus equally culpable. And, ironically enough, each can find a wider audience for their products than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's talented trio of poetic successors—Dora Greenwell, Christina Rossetti, and Jean Ingelow.

In authoring both the gypsy woman's song and the old male parrot's “saucy imitation,” Ingelow wants to reclaim the female authority subverted by both Bates and Carroll. And, whereas Carroll inverted Bates's ideological emphasis by simply altering the wording of the lines he parodied, Ingelow creates elliptical texts to support her belief that tonal skills are more important than the phrasing of versified thoughts. Although the poetic pendants she offers through the gypsy woman and the parrot are snippets taken from ballads and hence hardly resemble the antinarrative verses that MacDonald has Diamond recite to his baby sister, they, too, primarily organize an emotional “space,” as Kristeva puts it in her description of genotexts.²² Lulled by the variations of the call to “buy,” Jack may be deaf to the import of the actual words used in the gypsy woman's “selling song.”²³ But the reader becomes aware of certain complications: the voice that Jack hears is thrice removed—the gypsy woman reproduces the speech of a “young, young wife” who, in turn, reproduces the call of the gypsies (MF, chap. 5, 239). The regressive effect that the song has on Jack thus may have something to do with a transmission that spirals back into layers of the past. Later in the narrative, Mopsa will have to wake the dreaming Jack, once more in danger of becoming entangled as he moves through the diminishing spiral coils of a many-ringed Craken, the primal creature that Tennyson had depicted as an unconscious underwater foetus.

Whereas the two stanzas of the gypsy's song flow into each other, the parrot craftily defers reciting his second verse until he has had a chance to observe the effect of the first. Appropriately, his own song stresses the abruptness of change. In the first half of his ballad-fragment, a male speaker who tries to woo a “dear lady”—who may well be the young wife in the gypsy's song—finds himself repudiated. Yet, in the second verse, set after “another day” has passed, the lady urges the man she has jilted to renew his suit. He fails to do so, however, apparently content with a purely mental possession of the inaccessible woman he now calls “my own, own lady.”

The hints of erotic tension and displacements of the gypsy's poem (in which vendors urged young wives to “Buy, buy laces, / Veils to screen your faces”) are now more openly confronted. The lady who rejected her lover has become a lonely Madeline or sequestered Mariana as she acknowledges the intensity of her desire through a Keatsian/Tennysonian “moan.” This unconsummated affair is as potentially pathetic as Dodgson's love for Alice Liddell or Ruskin's love for “Rosie” La Touche. But the parrot's raucous rendition and the comic chorus provided by the parrot's wife cause Jack to burst out in laughter. Still, seduced into mistaking a “selling song” for a lullaby, the boy cannot grasp the veiled import of a romance he only hears as a burlesque. The plight of male and female selves who cannot reciprocate each other's love because of poor timing anticipates, of course, the final division between Jack and his “own, own” Mopsa. But if the parrot's song seems to predict Jack's separation, it also bears on the wooing of dream-children who can only be wedded in a lonely imagination.

How consciously ironic is Ingelow in her handling of the Carrollian precedents she seems to have implanted in this episode? If, as I have tried to argue, she intends to rehabilitate the female voice comically ventriloquized by Carroll through the medium of the Duchess, why is her own female singer exposed as a “cheat” and the male parrot hailed as a brave liberator from imprisoning female fancies? However impertinent or crude, the parrot not only is ingenious enough to break the spell that had subjected his people to female domination but also frees Jack from submitting to the woman who had masked herself as a mother. Since the clever parrot thus resembles the clever parodist who tried to puncture the matriarchal rule of both the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts, can Ingelow really be said to dissociate herself from her predecessor?

Unlike Christina Rossetti who chose to tap Carroll's own anger in Speaking Likenesses, Ingelow does not have to hurl missiles back at the “saucy” creator of the Duchess and Queen of Hearts. Her critique of Carroll, if it can be called that, is based, I think, on her intuitive understanding of the psychic agony that caused his split between adult and child, male and female, satirical and sentimental selves. She understood such conflicts because they stemmed from conditions quite similar to her own. Living the unobtrusive life of a Victorian gentlewoman, a primrose bound by her enduring ties to the nursery, she was, as I have suggested, resentful of the cultural restraints she nonetheless accepted and helped to propagate. What Ingelow opposes to Carroll's oscillations between nostalgia and anger, then, is a fatalism rooted in her sense of the perpetuity of such strife. Whereas Carroll insists on resolving “antipathies” only to oscillate between emotional extremes, Ingelow finds comfort in the enigmatic fairy dictum that she has Mopsa enunciate for Jack's benefit: “That that is, is; and when it is, that is the reason that it is.”

Ingelow's ultimate disagreement with Carroll is artistic, however, and has more to do with his chosen mode of presentation than with the content of Alice in Wonderland. His aggressive comedy deflects from his obsession with loss. By having the parrot sing a song about male and female divided selves, Ingelow seems to suggest that Carroll's comic deformations—his use of parody, satire, and burlesque—may only veil his affinities with poets of loss such as Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson. To a lyricist and latter-day Romantic like herself, his romanticism is therefore enveloped in constructs that are too cerebral. To invert the work of a poetaster such as David Bates is to misuse creative energies capable of much subtler forms of romantic irony. The pleasures of Wonderland are intellectual. Yet beneath this condensed, consummately crafted text lies the unconsummated desire for Alice that Ingelow chooses to handle so differently in her diffuse and episodic drama of divided selves she casts as woman and boy. If Lewis Carroll cannot bring himself to part from the girlish self he wants to retain as an adult, Jean Ingelow must—as Mopsa does—bid farewell to the boyish self who remains imprinted in her female imagination. She relies on her own art of indirection, diffusion, and transposition to intermix the contrary emotional states so central to her and Carroll's creativity. It is not necessary for the gypsy woman to be deformed as a caricature if her song of experience can cause an innocent boy to indulge his yearning for fusion; nor is it necessary to sever parody from nostalgia if a satirical parrot can recite a burlesque that preserves the pathos of its sub-text. Ingelow thus prefers to recombine opposites. In something not unlike a Keatsian “negative capability,” she can simultaneously identify herself with both fantasy and anti-fantasy, with the powers of illusion unleashed by the mesmeric gypsy woman and the powers of disenchantment wielded by the clever parrot.

Ingelow's interest in the conflicts of gender and generation certainly is as pronounced as that of any of the male fantasists before her. But, as her opposition of the two singers in chapter 5 shows, she resists their desire to resolve these conflicts. She neither tries to restore an androgynous oneness through fantasies of regression or early death, as Ruskin and MacDonald had done in The King of the Golden River and At the Back of the North Wind, nor tries to dramatize the sexual consummation of chastened women and men forced to abandon childhood illusion, as Thackeray had done in The Rose and the Ring and MacDonald in “The Light Princess.” Instead, she simply prefers to transpose the gender stereotypes accepted by her culture. Just as Jack is a boy who has feminine traits despite his pronounced masculinity, so is there something decidedly masculine about the aggressive gypsy who makes a mockery of motherhood, and something maternal about the old parrot who worries about Jack's welfare as much as about the fate of his own kin. The strange chapter ends in a final reversal: the gypsy woman, exposed at last as a power-hungry fairy, now becomes transformed into a bird, “an ugly great condor,” while the parrot-people, who belonged to a rival race of fairies, are allowed to resume their former shapes as miniature human beings. There has been no resolution, however, for both tribes continue their never-ending strife. As they knock “each other about,” these antagonists become ultimately indistinguishable to Jack; “tired of the noise and confusion,” the boy takes refuge in the magical boat that proceeds to move “down the wonderful river” (MF, chap, 5, 244-45).

IV

Jack's flight on the giant bird of the imagination who takes him in and out of a fantasyland not only marks a revision of Alice's Wonderland entry and exit but also allows Ingelow to signify her distance from the second major children's book she wants to evoke, At the Back of the North Wind. Indeed, her dissociation from MacDonald's fantasy seems more serious and sustained than her rather playful revisions of Alice in Wonderland.²⁴ For Ingelow challenges the text on ideological grounds rooted in her own Evangelical theology. A fable that privileges a boy's dreamy enchantment with North Wind and rejects his mother's mundane reality is contrary to her emphasis on this-worldly ties and her belief in an allegiance to the familiar calyx of our “first home.” The escapism that leads MacDonald's narrator to endorse Diamond's night-flights and to encourage his final death wish thus is repeatedly challenged throughout Mopsa.

Ingelow's ruddy-cheeked Captain Jack is cast, as I have intimated, as the exact anti-type of that pale and haunted “god's baby,” the tubercular Diamond. Both of these naifs are given the role assigned to the “Dummling” figure whose kindness is rewarded with a treasure or a princess in more traditional fairy tales. Viewed superficially, then, both are feminized caretakers, like Ruskin's Gluck. If Diamond ministers to family, neighbors, and strangers enslaved by poverty and despair, Jack looks after Mopsa and her siblings, the little fairies he transports to safety as well as the slave-woman he frees. Yet the missionary activities each boy discharges only underscore the acute differences between them. Having repaired the lives of those who depended on him for their well-being, Diamond is free to leave the world of parents and friends; having become increasingly dependent on the powers of those he initially patronized, Jack resumes a subordinate position in his parental home.

Whereas MacDonald's narrator treats Diamond as a fellow mystic, “as much interested in metaphysics” (BNW [At the Back of the North Wind], chap. 38, 306) as himself, Ingelow asks her readers to regard Jack's ordinariness as an asset. Able to “look through the look of things” (BNW, chap. 25, 188), Diamond preferred the company of angel boys to that of unimaginative children such as Nanny and Lame Jim. Jack, however, welcomes the return to normalcy Jenny brings about at the end of his adventures. His strong ties to the everyday world, always manifest throughout his travels, shielded him from the blandishments of the fantastic. Ultimately, not even a fully empowered Mopsa can—or wants to—detain the boy infatuated with her incarnation as a wise and sexually matured woman. She thus helps to redirect Jack's quasi-maternal love for a chubby toddler to its primary object, his own mother. Not surprisingly, his last words in the narrative will be “Mamma!” (MF, chap. 16, 316).

Freed of all family ties, “little Diamond” finally gave in to his desire for fusion with the numinous figure who haunted his waking life. Yet Jack is rather easily nudged back into a social order in which he never had been anything other than a coddled little middle-class boy. It is a safer, because more tangible and familiar, order of reality. And it is also the source of all those material talismans Jack so generously shared with the denizens of Fairyland—the plum-cake, his dog whistle, his handkerchief, the half-crown that redeems the slave-woman, and the “silver fourpence” that Mopsa molds into a magical wand to redeem male fairies entombed in a Carrollian underground. These fragments of a solid actuality define Jack's identity. They become staples in a form of traffic or exchange that always confirms his superior status as a human among fairies and endows him with a certain inviolability. As reminders of the greater stability of Jack's world, of a solid actuality to which he clings so much more persistently than Diamond, these objects leave no doubt about Ingelow's own priorities.

These priorities are also underscored by the mighty albatross who takes Jack from one world to another. Soaring above the clouds, Jenny offers Jack her downy back much in the way that North Wind allowed Diamond to huddle in the “woven nest” of her streaming hair. But Jack regards his guide to new marvels with none of Diamond's terrified awe of the intruder who asked him to tear off the protective plaster his mother had pasted over the hole above his bed. Diamond's morbid infatuation with North Wind led to his reckless disregard of his mother's claim on his life. The cautious Jack, however, is reluctant to follow Jenny through the hole that acts as a passageway into the unknown. He wants to be reassured that she will restore him to his family:

“I should be more comfortable,” replied Jack, “if I knew how I could get home again. I don't wish to go home just yet, for I want to see where we are flying to, but papa and mamma will be frightened if I never do.”

“Oh no,” replied the albatross (for she was an albatross), “you need not be at all afraid about that. When boys go to Fairyland, their parents never are uneasy about them.”

“Really?” exclaimed Jack.

“Quite true,” replied the albatross.

(MF, chap. 1, 218)

Jenny's prediction turns out to be correct. After the bird brings him back, Jack finds that—although it is evening now—neither his father nor mother are at all surprised to see him. Diamond's first trip to the realm at North Wind's back was regarded with great anxiety by his weeping mother; his second departure was mourned by Mrs. Raymond and the narrator. But Jack's absence has gone unnoticed. There has been no disruption of everyday routines.

When Diamond hesitated to follow North Wind, she overcame his resistance by identifying herself with his mother. Yet, as noted in the previous chapter, these two female figures became rivals. Jenny, however, essentially remains a parental surrogate. She almost resembles a diligent Victorian governess, carefully repeating the instructions she wants Jack to follow. And when the boy meekly asks her to take him home, she is aware of his bruised self-esteem. Diamond's longing to “be nearer” to North Wind could only be sated through his death (BNW, chap. 36, 289). Jack's thwarted desire to remain at Mopsa's side, however, is delicately handled by Jenny. Aware that she cannot replace the love-object he has lost, she acts as a mediatrix between Mopsa and Jack's mother. She strongly endorses his wish to go back. And by lulling him to sleep with her rhythmic wing-beats, she starts the boy on a process of forgetting that proves more therapeutic than his many memory lapses among the fairies:

As Jack's feet were lifted up from Fairyland he felt a little consoled. He began to have a curious feeling, as if all this had happened a good while ago, and then half the sorrow he had felt faded into wonder, and the feeling still grew upon him that these things had passed some great while since, so that he repeated to himself: “It was a long time ago.”

Then he fell asleep, and did not dream at all, nor know anything more till the bird woke him.

“Wake up now, Jack,” she said; “we are at home.”

“So soon!” said Jack, rubbing his eyes.

(MF, chap. 16, 313)

The repression of painful memories is completed upon Jack's return to the domestic landmarks of his former life. Upon crossing the threshhold of his home, he hears his mother's voice. She is a reader, a disseminator of texts, just like the nurse he left behind in the book's opening.

He drew a little nearer. His mother sat with her back to the open window, but a candle was burning, and she was reading aloud. Jack listened as she read, and knew that this was not in the least like anything he had seen in Fairyland, nor the reading like anything that he had heard, and he began to forget the boy-king, and the apple-woman, and even his little Mopsa, more and more.

(MF, chap. 16, 314)

Ingelow devotes her novel's last pages to the sense of well-being Jack experiences as he readjusts himself to familiar coordinates. The Wonderland Alice shared her adventures with the older sister who then discharged the task of adjusting a surreal dream to “dull reality.” But Jack is delighted to find his parents asking “no questions” about his venture into a realm that Ingelow never treated as a dream-world. The boy basks in a sense of uninterrupted oneness. When he lays his head on his father's waistcoat, he fitfully recalls having carried Mopsa and her siblings in his own waistcoat pocket. But he is more than willing to relinquish his desire to rule as a paternal fairy-king. Looking up admiringly at the father who insists that it is time for this little “man of ours” to go to bed, Jack thinks “what a great thing a man was; he had never seen anything so large in Fairyland, nor so important; so, on the whole, he was glad he had come back, and felt very comfortable” (MF, chap. 16, 316, 314). Unlike a Diamond who never reaches manhood or a Carroll who wishes to be Alice's permanent playmate, Jack welcomes the adult male identity that lies ahead.

The patriarchal coordinates Jack gladly embraces also may appeal to child readers comforted by familiar landmarks and resumed routines. But Ingelow does not allow older readers to forget the wonders of the matriarchal fairylands that had tantalized Jack. She keeps our memories of Mopsa and Mother Fate alive by shifting from Jack's placid position on “his father's knee” to the authority of the mother she has cast as a reader of unnamed texts. This figure's adult voice subtly undermines Jack's and the narrator's complacency. The paragraph that began, “At last his father noticed him,” thus ends with the acknowledgment of Jack's mother: “Then his mother, turning over the leaf, lifted up her eyes and looked at Jack, but not as if she was in the least surprised, or more glad to see him than usual; but she smoothed the leaf with her hand, and began again to read, and this time it was about the Shepherd Lady” (MF, chap. 16, 314).

By allowing her to come last and by assigning her the longest of the many cryptic verses interpolated throughout the narrative, Ingelow makes Jack's mother the most important of all the female singers in Mopsa the Fairy. Earlier lyrics—the lullabies sung by the gypsy woman in chapter 5 or by the stone-woman in chapter 13, the hymn welcoming Mopsa's sister in chapter 8, the Mopsa-led ditty in chapter 15—always pointed to ironies and meanings embedded in the prose narrative. Nor were these songs limited to fairyland natives. The old apple-woman, who taught the fairies the words of the welcoming hymn, is given four songs in chapters 9, 10, and 11. Her lyrics often act as counterweights or antidotes to fairy songs, much as the parrot's song had offset the gypsy's pseudo-lullaby.

Like the solid objects in Jack's pockets or like his own effort to come up with a song “that he had often heard his nurse sing in the nursery at home” (MF, chap. 16, 309), the apple-woman's verses are imports from an actual world. Through them, this immigrant challenges the ascendancy of the fantastic. The human figures that Diamond saw in his first visit to the limbo at the back of North Wind swayed to the “tunes” sung by the magical river running through that strange country. Mute, unnamed, indistinguishable from each other, these settlers were not eager to return to their world of origin. The apple-woman, too, cannot bring herself to return to the pain and hardship bequeathed to humanity by the apple-eaters of Eden. Yet she remains unseduced by the fairies who cosset and flatter her; she maintains her individuality by wearing her former attire and by clinging to many a “stupid old song” she has committed to memory (MF, chap. 11, 280).

Although Jack's mother does not reside in Fairyland, she is as much a mediator as the apple-woman and Jenny. For, like them and like Mopsa, the fairy child altered by human love, she seems keenly aware of the links between competing realities. Indeed, her song about the Shepherd Lady calls attention to the contact between two antithetical orders. The tripartite, nine-stanza poem about the lady entrusted with the flock of a mysterious “piper” is open to conflicting interpretations. If read as a romantic allegory in the mode of Keats's “Eve of St. Agnes” or Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott,” the lady may stand for an aroused poetic imagination. If read as a religious allegory, however, the “shepherd lord” who disappears after leaving his “crook” to his beloved is no demon lover but a rather Divine Bridegroom.²⁵ In either case, however, the mother's song about the Shepherd Lady calls attention to the burden borne by imaginative women who see and understand more than those entrusted to their care. Such women may be fairy queens compelled to raise their subjects to a higher level, mothers charged with the socialization of their children, or unmarried writers who, like Ingelow or Rossetti, deploy their gifts as poets and storytellers to help young readers ill-served by the subjective constructions of male fantasists. Mother Fate has assigned a similar role to all these caretakers.

Jack, however, fails to see that his mother's song preserves, however subliminally, his fading memories of Mopsa. The mother who kisses him upon finishing the long poem steers the boy to “some strawberries on the sideboard in the dining-room” (MF, chap. 16, 316). Denied access to her awareness of anything other than his desire for an evening snack, we are once more tied to Jack's own limited perceptions:

So he ran out into the hall, and was delighted to find all the house just as usual, and after he had looked about him he went to his own room, and said his prayers. Then he got into his little white bed, and comfortably fell asleep.

That's all.

(MF, chap. 16, 316)

The narrator's uninflected tone helps to make this quietistic ending seem anticlimactic. The final matter-of-factness is in marked contrast to the sharper tonal shift at the close of “The Life of Mr John Smith,” that much simpler celebration of uneventfulness. There, a hortatory narrator had suddenly materialized to reprove all readers who dared ask whether they had indeed been told “all.” Here, however, by insisting on our acceptance of the commonplace, the narrator tacitly asks wary older readers to readopt the repressive faculties of a small child. The demand is hard, and even contradictory, for it invites us to erase all memories of the extraordinary and mysterious otherness that Ingelow has kept alive through the indirection of the final song. The narrator's “That's all” thus must be simultaneously accepted and rejected.

V

The many editions Mopsa the Fairy has undergone suggest a continued appeal to different generations of readers. But Ingelow's anti-fantastical fantasy is not without its detractors. Readers drawn to the ironic control exerted by Thackeray's or Carroll's narrators want a stronger authorial presence than that of a self-effacing narrator skilled in the art of under-statement. And readers interested in pinpointing an author's “meaning” are disturbed by Ingelow's fragmentation of her story into a succession of discrete episodes more memorable for their dream-like vividness than for advancing a plot or sustaining a symbolic cohesion. Even the interpolation of poetry into prose has contributed to an impression of arbitrariness and lack of design.²⁶

Ironically enough, the presumed disjointedness of Ingelow's narrative and the seeming incoherence of individual episodes may have much to do with Ingelow's ties to the antecedents she tries to revise. Despite its powerful originality, her narrative is essentially reactive. Not only Carroll and MacDonald are repeatedly targeted, as I have tried to show, but even the work of Ingelow's friend John Ruskin comes under occasional scrutiny. The account of the stone people whom Jack and Mopsa encounter in chapters 12 and 13 softens the punishment meted out to the Black Brothers, similarly petrified in The King of the Golden River. By dwelling on the story of people who were “powerful once” but must now expiate past cruelties, Ingelow anticipates the similar fall of the nation whom Mopsa redeems (MF, chap. 13, 289). But the interlude breaks the narrative flow. Imagistically compelling, it nonetheless seems an unnecessary elaboration of Ingelow's insistence on the agency of a Mother Fate who, though just as punitive as Ruskin's little men, is also far less vindictive.

Yet the text most responsible for the seeming diffuseness of Mopsa undoubtedly is the serially published At the Back of the North Wind. Episodes not wholly woven into Ingelow's narrative often become more understandable when related to MacDonald's sprawling and episodic text. Thus, for instance, Jack's encounter with “the old white horse” Boney and with the “beautiful brown mare” Lady Betty in a border country in which “things are set right again that people have caused to go wrong” (MF, chap. 3, 225, 228, 229) gains poignancy if one remembers the major roles MacDonald had assigned to “old Diamond,” the horse with the “white lozenge on his forehead” after whom his hero was named, and the “red chestnut” Ruby, who turns out to be an angel-horse (BNW, chap. 29, 232).

Able to understand animal language, Diamond was allowed to overhear a conversation between old Diamond, so badly overworked that he has become as “thin as a clothes-horse,” and the “plump and sleek” Ruby (BNW, chap. 31, 251). The abuse of the bony carriage horse turns out to have been “necessary”: both he and Diamond's father were simply ordained to “grow lean” (BNW, ch. 32, 259). Ingelow rebels at a mysticism that can condone such suffering. Unlike Diamond, Jack is surprised to find talking horses and even more surprised that both Bony and Lady Betty have died because of human maltreatment. When he finds out that Boney, like the horse Diamond, “used to live in London,” he feels personally implicated (MF, chap. 3, 226). The horse's caretaker only sharpens Jack's guilt: “I wonder what will be done to all your people for driving, and working, and beating so many beautiful creatures to death every year that comes.” The “alarmed” boy lamely defends himself by contending that “he had never been himself unkind to horses, and was glad that Boney bore no malice” (MF, chap. 3 227).

Ingelow's consistency is evident in the thoughtful and deliberate responses to male constructions that I have been tracing. Nonetheless, by reclaiming fantasy only to subvert it in the name of the “real,” her revisionist art takes risks that can become liabilities. Her rejectionism frequently leads her into exaggerating the very features she wants to redress. Like Rossetti after her, she therefore often magnifies, and hence aggravates, the fantastical elements she wants to subdue. Attracted by fairylands that welcome human visitors such as Jack and the apple-woman, a small child may well prefer Ingelow's tiny fairies to the inhospitable residents of Wonderland. Still, Jack's adventures can be more terrifying than Alice's. The book's many striking instances of violence and pain seem more intense than the discomforts of a dream-child precisely because they do not occur in a dream that can be safely aborted.

Similarly, the inscrutability of Mother Fate's dictates only helps to obfuscate even further the paradoxes through which MacDonald's awesome North Wind tried to justify her own actions. Feared by the fairies, who are “always crying out for an alphabet without the fatal F” (MF, chap. 9, 268), this invisible power seems more of an abstraction than North Wind, even though she stands for a deified motherhood as much as the titaness who claimed to serve the providential design of the Christ-child. Ingelow's apparent wish to counter male paternalism through a female mythology remains guarded and sketchy, perhaps deliberately so, given the potential conflict between her patriarchal Christianity and a matriarchal paganism. Are the black, white, and brown fairies who test Mopsa's future subjects the equivalent of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the spinners who control the threads of all life? If so, is Mother Fate to be identified with Nyx or Night, the parent of the parcae? Just as it is difficult to distinguish among the book's myriad fairy races, so is it impossible to grasp the hierarchical arrangement or chain of command that governs a matriarchal fantasyland ruled by the fatal F.

Is Mopsa to be read as a proto-feminist text? Although Ingelow names her novel after the child who becomes a queen, she maintains the outer lineaments of a boy's adventure story. There is as much of Jean Ingelow in Jack as in Mopsa. Her empathetic understanding of boys and men was noted by Ruskin in a 1867 letter he wrote to acknowledge her latest volume of poems. As much addressing himself as Ingelow, Ruskin mused: “I never cease wondering—with a wonder that has always been with me—how women know the way men love. We don't know your way of loving—it is a mystery to us, which we accept but cannot imagine. But you can imagine ours. How is this?” (CW, 36:530).²⁷ The answer to this rhetorical question is contained in Mopsa, which had not yet appeared at the time. Ingelow's novel suggests that the polarization between male and female selves that Ruskin bemoans is not innate. Women know how men love because they can remember what boys try to forget.

Ideally, Jack and Mopsa ought to fuse. But, like Orpheus and Eurydice in the fine sonnet Ingelow uses as an epigraph for her last chapter or like the lovers in her popular poem “Divided,” they cannot blend. Mopsa is either smaller than Jack or he is smaller than she; there is only one brief moment in which these divided selves are balanced and coequal. As a child, Ingelow identified herself with brothers and male cousins who moved freely without the curbs imposed on a future Victorian lady. Like Mopsa, boxed up in her castle, Ingelow accepted the restraints placed on her powerful imagination. Yet the world of male action retained its earlier appeal.

Like the children's books of Ruskin, Thackeray, and Carroll, Mopsa the Fairy is dedicated to a girl, “my dear little cousin, Janet Holloway.” She was the daughter of a favorite cousin, George Holloway, from whom Jean Ingelow became separated when she was thirteen. Ingelow reappropriated and redirected the constructions of “femininity” undertaken by her male predecessors. But, like Mopsa, she treasures Jack. She does not censure the boy whose return to the father's law allows him to forget Mopsa. Her own nostalgia and her accommodation of the patriarchy thus separate Ingelow from Christina Rossetti, in whose “Goblin Market” there were no human men and whose Speaking Likenesses would not feature boy heroes such as Gluck, Diamond, or Jack. Rossetti's texts are more uncompromising than Ingelow's. Her repudiation of Carroll necessarily involved a rejection of the gentler sister-poet who could empathize with a child-lover's nostalgia. Female rivalry, featured in many of Rossetti's poems, thus also makes its way into her relentless deconstructions of the Alice books. As both Ingelow and Rossetti knew, there really could not be two Queens in a single hive.

Notes

1. The anonymous author of Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, & Co., 1901) alludes to one such reader in the “following anecdote” about an “aged lady,” who was “slowly dying, in a house filled with every luxury”: “At a time of great suffering she wanted something very difficult for her perplexed nurses to get, namely, a book which would not be incongruous in her circumstances, and yet would charm away her pain. In the end they procured for her Stories told to a Child, which pleased her so much that she never would let it go out of her sight again while life lasted” (131-32).

2. George Eliot, “Finale,” in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 613.

3. Ingelow was a year younger than Ruskin, and died three years before he did. The two writers first became acquainted in 1867-68, when he was forty-eight and she was forty-seven; Ruskin begins to cite lines from her poems soon thereafter in his writings, and, by 1877, he lists her name among those of his eleven “best friends” (CW, 36:lxxxvii). The “private house at Kensington” where Ruskin gave an illustrated lecture, in June of 1883, on the art of Kate Greenaway and Francesca Alexander to a group that included Matthew Arnold, James Russell Lowell, Frederick Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, and Ingelow, may well have been her own (CW, 32:535). Although she ceased to write after the death of her favorite brother in 1886 and Ruskin's productivity was affected by bouts of mental illness, they continued to correspond. Her comments on the first chapters of Praeterita are as supportive as they are astute (CW, 35:lvi). For a fuller discussion of their relationship see my “Male Patronage and Female Authorship: the Case of John Ruskin and Jean Ingelow,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 57 (Autumn 1995): 13-46.

4. Rossetti to Dora Greenwell, 31 December 1863, and to Alexander Macmillan, 1 December 1863, in The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, ed. Lona Mosk Packer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 22n, 21.

5. Although Maureen Peters was able to draw on some unpublished family papers for her Jean Ingelow: Victorian Poetess (Ipswich, England: Boydell Press, 1972), her well-intentioned biography is riddled by factual and typographical errors and marred by an insufficient command of the Victorian literary world in which Ingelow moved. Her single-minded thesis could hardly be pushed by someone better acquainted with the nineteenth-century poetics of loss: thus, a young Ingelow's parting from some “faceless and nameless” lover whom Peters finds most “pleasant to think of” as being both “handsome and young” is regarded as the key to her “entire” literary output (29).

6. For the best discussion of this curious book, see Frederick Kirchhoff, “A Science Against Sciences: Ruskin's Floral Mythology,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 246-58.

7. Ruskin's fascination with the sexuality of the poppy he avoids calling a “she” is obvious. He breaks open a virginal “poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its side,” yet notes that the ripe flower “remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days.” In a remark that has a retrospective bearing on the open cleft in Gluck's Treasure Valley, Ruskin downplays the resemblance between human and floral parts: “Instead of ‘ovary,’ I shall say ‘Treasury’ (for a seed isn't an egg, but it is a treasure)” (CW, 25:260, 259).

8. Ibid., 260.

9. Some Recollections, 128-29; the interspliced passages from Ruskin occur in CW, 25:260-61.

10. Some Recollections, 129.

11. The story of the prohibitions placed on Jean's “poetic leaning” has been often told: only after her mother found verses scribbled all over the white shutters of the girl's bedroom was paper finally doled out to the fourteen-year-old. The author of Some Recollections passes no judgment on these and other instances of parental insensitivity; yet she wonders about the origins of a talent strong enough to flourish under such utterly inhospitable circumstances: “Where Jean got her poetic temperament it would be hard to say. Not from her witty, business-like father, and certainly not from her mother, who, though truly delighted to wake up one day to find her eldest child famous, had no really poetic tendencies herself” (15, 13).

12. Ibid., 130.

13. Lecture 5, “The Fireside: John Leech and John Tenniel,” in The Art of England (CW, 33:365).

14. Some Recollections, 128.

15. Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: Children's Books and their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (London: Edmund Ward, 1965), 70.

16. “Undoubtedly the inspiration for Mopsa the Fairy was the amazing success of Alice in Wonderland” (ibid., 69). Green's remark is repeated by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Pritchard in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 357: “It is one of the more successful children's books written under the influence of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.” It is reiterated once more in Carpenter's Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children's Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 57: “[C]loser in spirit to Alice is one of the first imitations to appear, Mopsa the Fairy.”

17. Some Recollections, 165. Ironically enough, Ingelow uses a Carrollian pun on the word “peace” to undermine Jack's lyric peace offering before his ejection from Mopsa's world: the maternal “dame” presiding at the banquet for the new Queen refuses to accept Jack's refrain, “give us peace.” Insisting that he has made a “mistake,” she contends that the dove about whom he sang must have said “Give us peas,” since doves and pigeons are notoriously fond of peas. Asserting her own authority over his text, she overrules Jack's protest and orders the court historian to write “it down as the dame said it ought to be” (MF, chap. 16, 309-10). The dame's intransigence seems designed to match that of the King whose “angry” puns and destruction of verses at the trial so infuriated Alice that she willed her exit from Wonderland. By placing this comic interlude just before Jack's pathetic separation from Mopsa, Ingelow may signal her distrust of the emotional sincerity of Carroll's love-gift to the child from whom he must part. There is little “peace” (or appeasement) in a text that challenges both Carroll and MacDonald.

18. Ingelow's own adult novel, Off the Skelligs (1872), narrated by a sister with “a brother two years older than myself,” bears interesting resemblances to The Mill on the Floss, as well as to Mopsa the Fairy.

19. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, “snug” in the “closet” of the oak-case they use as a bed, are surprised by the servant Joseph who tears down the “pinafores” that act as a “curtain” for their oneness (Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1963], chap. 3, 27). Born with an attached placenta, David Copperfield discovers that he cannot transfer his adoration of his mother to the “most beautiful little girl” he first meets at Mr. Peggotty's womb-like boat house: “little Em'ly and I made a cloak of an old wrapper, and sat under it for the rest of the journey. Ah, how I loved her! What happiness (I thought) if we were married, and were going away anywhere to live among the trees and in the fields, never growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand in hand” (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield [New York: Bantam, 1981], chap. 3, 29; chap. 10, 136).

20. See note 16, above; unlike later critics, however, Green allows that Mopsa “is not in any sense an imitation, though the first pages suggest that it is going to be” (Tellers of Tales, 69).

21. Roger Lancelyn Green, in his “Appendix: ‘Jabberwocky’ and Other Parodies,” prefers Bates to G. W. Langford (The Lewis Carroll Handbook, revised by Denis Crutch [Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1979], 310).

22. See p. 252n, above.

23. The variation in the final line, “Buy, maids, buy,” seems a rather deliberate bow to the hypnotic effect of “Come buy, come buy,” the seductive sales pitch of the eerie vendors who lure “maids” in the opening lines of Rossetti's “Goblin Market.”

24. Still, MacDonald's own textual twitting of his friend's introductory Alice poem in chapter 5 of North Wind may have provided her with a model for her own playful handling of Carroll: by making Jack's self-propelling boat easier on the boy than the craft that had placed demands on a “weak” oarsman, Ingelow extended MacDonald's little joke (see note 3 in the previous chapter) [of Ventures into Childhood].

25. In reviewing Forbidden Journeys, Gwyneth Jones cogently notes that most Victorian nurseries would have “probably contained a print of the ‘Good Shepherd’”: “That it should be the lady, rather than St. Peter or a male cleric, who receives and undertakes the pastoral charge of the flock of human souls is a decidedly interesting innovation on the part of Ingelow” (Victorian Review 19 [1993]: 66).

26. I am relying here on the responses of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as of colleagues in my National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars for college teachers.

27. For a fuller discussion of Ruskin's letters to Ingelow, see the 1995 article cited in note 3, above.

Abbreviations

AW: Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland. In Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts. Edited by Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton and Company, 1992.

BNW: George MacDonald. At the Back of the North Wind. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

CW: The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903–12.

MF: Jean Ingelow. Mopsa the Fairy. In Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. Edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

STC: Jean Ingelow. Stories Told to a Child. London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1896.