[In the essay below, Moss contrasts the versions of fantasy offered by Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald Moss describes MacDonald's fantasy land as one in which the child characters must rely on a divine power for guidance, while Carroll's child characters depend on and mature through their own intelligence.']

Writing classic British children's fantasies in the 1860's and 1870's, George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll essentially established the traditions of modern fantasy. Though they were personal friends and admired one another's work, these two writers held profoundly different views of reality. MacDonald, strongly influenced by Romantic conceptions of childhood and imagination, saw the universe as an orderly and miraculous creation, the work of a loving God whose will would finally prevail. Carroll, despite his conscious expressions of faith, seemed in the Alice fantasies acutely aware of disorder and chaos, of an uncertain and ever-shifting reality. These contrasting visions of reality provide the bases for two distinct traditions of fantasy which have found rich expression in the work of many other nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantasy writers. MacDonald established what has often been called "sacred" fantasy, a term which suggests that the imaginative quests and heroic efforts of human characters are performed in the service of a higher and divine order of reality. Lewis Carroll's fantasies, on the other hand, issue entirely from the imaginative faculties, the emotional fears and wishes of the child character. Carroll's Alice fantasies begin and end in the same place; they refer only to themselves and do not lead the reader into an awareness of divine reality. MacDonald's view of the imagination suggests that it is a mode of receiving divine revelation, while Carroll views it as a vehicle for the child's emotional survival and growth.

In many ways the fantastic works of George MacDonald assimilate ideas and techniques of emerging forms of fairytale and fantasy in nineteenth-century England. In the aftermath of the first expressions of Romanticism early in the century, some of the finest creative and critical minds increasingly turned to the imagination as a source of inspiration and sustenance in an age of anguished religious doubt and shifting values.¹ John Ruskin's literary fairy tale, The King of the Golden River (1851), combined an emphasis upon spiritual purity and social responsibility with a magical sense of nature and an idealized vision of childhood. In his famous fantasy, The Water-Babies (1863), Charles Kingsley attempted to reconcile the miracles of science with religious and social concerns. But George MacDonald explored these issues in the largest and most significant body of fantasy written in nineteenth-century England.

Several factors probably account for MacDonald's achievement. Born in Huntly in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on December 10, 1824, MacDonald experienced in his childhood both the moral rigors of Calvinism and the picturesque landscape and the mysterious stories, legends, and ballads of the Celtic imagination.² A student of Romantic conceptions of nature, the imagination and the child, a Congregationalist minister who had to leave his pastorate for preaching what his congregation believed to be heretical German Romantic theology, an avid reader of German Romantic fairy tales, and an explorer of dreams, the unconscious, and psychic states such as mesmerism, MacDonald was uniquely prepared to weave these varied threads of conventions and ideas into a rich new tapestry. In so doing, he essentially established the conventions of modern British fantasy. In addition to his own Scottish background, MacDonald also had a clear understanding of the intellectual currents of his time. Like Kingsley, MacDonald was compelled in some way to compensate for anxieties resulting from religious doubt.

M. H. Abrams has explained that one of the major characteristics of Romantic writers is their penchant for attempting to make up for the loss of God, for a universe drained of supernatural meaning.

In its central tradition Christian thought had posited three primary elements: God, nature, and the soul; with God, of course, utterly prepotent, as the creator and controller of the two others and as the end, the telos, of all natural process and human endeavor. The tendency in innovative Romantic thought (manifested in proportion as the thinker is or is not a Christian theist) is greatly to diminish, and at the extreme to eliminate the role of God, leaving as the prime agencies man and the world, mind and nature, the ego and the non-ego, the self and the not-self, spirit and the other, subject and object.³

Thus Wordsworth sought to unify the mind, the imagination, and nature. Poets such as Coleridge and Shelley manifest a marked interest in unconscious states of mind as a means of perception through which a higher reality is apprehended entirely and truly. And John Ruskin sees divine symbols not only in nature, but also in art. Nancy Mann has shown in her excellent dissertation that Victorian fantasy writers were occupied with similar concerns. While some of these writers, such as Lewis Carroll and William Morris were, either consciously or unconsciously, secularizers, Mann maintains that others such as Kingsley and MacDonald attempted to restore the "lost divine third term."⁴ The revolution in ideas created by the Romantic movement, however, made it necessary for both Kingsley and MacDonald to embody the divine in significantly new ways. In The Water-Babies, then, Kingsley places his central character, Tom, in a totally secular and evil world and redeems him in the divine elements of nature. MacDonald's characters also begin their adventures in the context of the ordinary world. But they enter a fantasy world in which they encounter a divinely "other" presence, and then return to the ordinary world, where they may enact visionary truth in a social and ethical context. This characteristic pattern perhaps allows MacDonald to combine his visionary propensities with his Victorian (and Calvinist) need to keep his eye steadily upon duty in the social world.

Robert Lee Wolff, Richard Reis, C.N. Manlove, and Nancy Mann have all commented upon the "ordinariness" of MacDonald's intellect. Indeed he was not an original thinker, and he did not significantly modify ideas which came to him from theological writers of the past or those which came from the great seminal minds of the nineteenth century. For ideas on childhood, MacDonald drew heavily upon Wordsworth; he is indebted to Coleridge for conceptions of the imagination. The transcendentalism of Carlyle permeates MacDonald's works of fantasy, though in MacDonald this quality becomes a radical kind of immanence, rather than transcendence.

In matters of religious doctrine, MacDonald increasingly turned away from Calvinism (especially after the resignation of his only pulpit as a result of controversies over divine love and such questions as the damnation of the heathen and the place of animals in eternity). Having finally joined the Broad wing of the Established Church, MacDonald associated with religious liberals. He was influenced by the religious writers Jacob Boehme and William Law, who emphasized mystical experience, and by those who stressed tolerance and the importance of ethics, such as the Cambridge Platonists and F.D. Maurice.⁵ MacDonald's theological notions began in childhood:

I well remember feeling as a child that I did not care for God to love me if he did not love everybody: the kind of love I needed was the love that all men needed, the love that belonged to their nature as the children of the Father, a love he could not give me except he gave it to all men.⁶

Despite some private struggles with religious doubt resulting from the deaths of four of his eleven children, MacDonald's faith was never really in question. He believed unswervingly in a divine reality in which all dimensions of nature, including man, participate. Ultimately, through his fantasies, essays, and "unspoken sermons," MacDonald constructed a divine order of his own, using ideas from Pietism, Platonism, and Christian Socialism. In many respects the writing of fantasy became a way for MacDonald to embody his most deeply and profoundly felt convictions about the place of the divine spirit in the material world, and the relationship between adult and child, creature and creator, the imagination and spiritual growth. His ideas on the imagination are especially potent and have exerted a significant influence upon subsequent writers of fantasy. The imagination enables man to penetrate the divine essence and the productions of the pure imagination necessarily express the truths of that divine reality.⁷

In discussing the role of the imagination in his essay "The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture," MacDonald explains that the imagination is "that faculty in man which is likest to the prime operation of the power of God."⁸ Yet in MacDonald's view, man's imagination is only capable of revelation, not creation. Thoughts in man, he says, arise unconsciously. If the man is good, his perception of revelation will be the surest way to truth:

We dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very nature of things.⁹

Hence the miner boy, Curdie, and his father, Peter, in The Princess and Curdie (1883) see the Grandmother as a beautiful woman, "the whole creation . . . gathered in one centre of harmony and loveliness in the person of the ancient lady who stood before him in the summer of beauty and strength."¹⁰ But the Mother of Light explains: "For instance, if a thief were to come in here just now, he would think he saw the demon of the mine, all in green flames" (p. 55). Thus the imagination, if the person is not good, can be a dangerous faculty which may lead one away from the truth. MacDonald explains:

The imagination will work, if not for good, then for evil; if not for truth, then for falsehood; if not for life, then for death. The power that might have gone forth in conceiving the noblest forms of action, in realizing the lives of the true-hearted, the self-forgetting, will go forth in building airy castles of vain ambition. Seek not that your sons and daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; but that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams.¹¹

MacDonald demonstrates the dangerous possibilities of an impure imagination in several of his fantasies. Princess Rosamond in The Wise Woman (1875) imagines ravening wolves and other horrors which inhibit her progress and spiritual growth; Mr. Vane in Lilith (1895) imagines creatures of horror as he journeys through fairy land unless he is in the pure light of the moon. Invariably in the fantasies of MacDonald, a narcissistic imagination turned in on the self is at best self-centered and shallow, and at worst, diseased, perverse, and evil, a pattern prominent among Romantic writers. For MacDonald, the true end of the imagination and its activity is not excess but harmony: "A right imagination, being the reflex of the creation, will fall in with the divine order of things."¹²

In his essay "The Fantastic Imagination," originally published as a preface to a volume of his fairy tales, MacDonald reaffirms and amplifies his convictions on the nature of the imagination. A writer of fantasy may "invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms—which is the nearest perhaps he can come to creation."¹³ In creating such an imaginary world, though, the writer of fantasy must create harmonious and consistent laws: "And in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible."¹⁴

The writer has no such freedom to invent in the moral world however: "In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey—and take their laws with him into his invented world."¹⁵ MacDonald also believes that the lessons acquired through imaginary or visionary experience must be enacted or embodied concretely in the ordinary world. This conviction is expressed in many of his fantasies. In Phantastes, Anodos begins his experience in the ordinary world, and comes out renewed and ready to act upon his knowledge in the context of his moral and social life. The same pattern occurs in At the Back of the North Wind and Lilith.

MacDonald's solution to problems of faith is most persuasively expressed in those fantasies in which he can express intimations and suggestions of the divine without having to spell out its meaning. Again in "The Fantastic Imagination," MacDonald explains the symbolic nature of fairytales. He compares them to a sonata because they evoke "a suitable vagueness of emotion: a fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless might seizes you and sweeps you away . . . The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended."¹⁶ The fairytale and fantasy provided forms, then, which enabled MacDonald to recreate manifestations of divine truth. Whatever doubts man may experience, MacDonald insists, the divine reality exists. And we can receive that truth by responding to it imaginatively rather than intellectually.

MacDonald's artistic success is greatest when he follows his own counsel and lets his unconscious imagination work without the interference of his conscious need to make morals explicit. When MacDonald the preacher works too hard and gets in the way of MacDonald the Romantic writer, the resulting fantasies often exhibit divided structures. For instance, the protagonists of At the Back of the North Wind and Lilith bounce back and forth between the ordinary world and the imaginary world. Likewise The Wise Woman (1875) manifests this split structure, a feature which C.N. Manlove has argued results from a divided vision of reality.

MacDonald, however resolutely he turned away from Calvinism, was not always entirely successful in unifying the Romantic and mystic dimensions of his thought with his unmistakably Victorian emphasis upon work, duty, and obedience. In some sermons, for example, MacDonald expresses the Romantic notion that knowledge results from the imaginative identification of subject with object: "To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know the botany of it."¹⁷ And "I trust we shall be able to enter into its [nature's] secrets from within them—by natural contact between our heart and theirs."¹⁸ If doubt interferes with such mystical identification, MacDonald advocates obedience and action: "He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness."¹⁹ MacDonald suggests, then, that in matters of faith, human beings had best suspend their rationalist analytical faculties in favor of the imagination and the spirit. Yet his Calvinist upbringing undoubtedly causes him to insist that faith must also be accompanied by good works in the context of the social and ethical world.

Yet in his best works of fairy tale and fantasy, such works as The Golden Key, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie in which MacDonald allows his own imagination to work freely, he achieves artistic unity through his skillful use of the quest romance form and through consistently used symbols. In these fantasies the child protagonists move through the fantasy world, where they are tested and where they acquire spiritual and moral truths which can then be enacted in the ordinary world.

The Romantic strain of fairy tale and fantasy which had slowly germinated in the early years of the nineteenth century evolved, then, to a rich culmination in the fantasies of George MacDonald. His use of such forms significantly modified images and ideas of childhood and imagination. MacDonald not only wrote fairy tales and fantasies, but actually created fully realized imaginary worlds of his own where characters apprehend divine truth and so attain higher and purer spiritual states of being.

Lewis Carroll also created an imaginary world of his own, controlled by its independent rules, and in doing so, his first two books for children, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), broke free of the didactic tradition in unprecedented ways and changed the subsequent course of children's literature. They were, Harvey Darton has noted, "the spiritual volcano" of children's literature.

The facts about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's (Lewis Carroll's) life are well-known. He enjoyed a relatively happy childhood in the rectory at Daresbury, where, despite the strongly religious atmosphere, he nevertheless learned at an early age to entertain the children with games, puzzles, drawings, puppets, plays, and stories. Later, Dodgson studied at Oxford, completing his Bachelor of Arts in 1855 and his Master of Arts in 1857. Although he took a deacon's orders in the Anglican Church, he spent most of his career in the secular role of lecturer in mathematics and logic at Christ's Church, Oxford. While Dodgson outwardly affirmed an orthodox faith, some writers have interpreted his fantasies as an indication of his deeply ambiguious views towards religious truth. The terrors and the chaos of the Alice fantasies suggest indeed that Lewis Carroll lacked the unswerving convictions in a divine order of reality which are manifested in MacDonald's best fantasy.²⁰ Carroll repeatedly relies on the humanistic and ordering processes of the mind and the imagination to maintain a precarious balance in the face of a terrifying and uncertain reality.

While the significance of Carroll's two Alice fantasies has been analyzed from almost every conceivable perspective, no account of nineteenth-century fantasy could be complete without investigating the role of Carroll's classic works in the evolution of the genre. And in a discussion of the secular and the sacred in children's literature, his work interestingly contrasts with MacDonald's. Intensely aware of the controversy between the didactic forces in children's literature and defenders of fairy tale, Carroll often mocks or parodies moral tales, instructional verse, and school lesson books. He thereby reveals fantasy and the imagination as means through which children may celebrate an unabashed and joyously free anarchy of their own. Unlike MacDonald's heroes and heroines who move through fantastic worlds to acquire moral virtue and spiritual vision, Carroll's character Alice confronts in her fantasy world some of her profoundest wishes and fears, conquers or rejects them, and so grows toward emotional maturity, rather than spiritual wisdom or purity. Carroll thus realizes an entirely new vision of childhood as a time when children use their imaginations and their intelligence, not in the service of redeeming a fallen creation, but as a way of protecting themselves from stifling adult authority and of acquiring more secure identities for themselves in the face of emotional terrors which threaten to annihilate identity and to impede initiative. At the same time that Carroll created his revolutionary "secular" image of childhood and the imagination in the Alice fantasies, he also helped to encourage the conventional and idealized myth of the Victorian child in articles, public addresses, and in his last fantasies Sylvie and Bruno (1890) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1894). Thus, while Carroll consciously idealized a pastoral vision of childhood and its "golden summer afternoon," his Alice fantasies embodied the subterranean forces at work in the child's unconscious and thus revealed the minds and imaginations of children more vividly and complexly than any of his predecessors. He stresses the child's capacity to grow and to rely on his or her own capacities in order to make sense of the world.

Celebrating the uninhibited play of the child's intelligence and imagination, Carroll, unlike earlier writers of fairy tale and fantasy, sustained a commitment to both the pleasures and terrors of fantasy throughout the Alice books. Through parody and burlesque of the didactic tradition and through games, puzzles and language, Carroll deflates the adult world of authority and puts the child in control. He does not, as earlier writers of fantasy had done, whisk children off to fairy land only to place them under the dominion of powerful figures who provide all the answers, solve all the problems, and neutralize the child's spirit, initiative, and curiosity. Rather Carroll creates for them a fantasy world which renders the arbitrary authority and institutions of adults incoherent and ineffectual and which permits Alice to exercise her own judgments and to make her own decisions. Thoroughly familiar with the characteristic features of traditional fairy tales and other kinds of entertaining stories and amusements for children, Carroll mines this rich source in writing his Alice books, modifying such traditions to liberate children from the confining strictures of conventional moral tales, matter-of-fact educations, and arbitrary adult rules. In the two Alice books he does not impose upon his spirited child heroine the necessity to acquire conventional moral lessons and useful information. Rather, he imbues his early fantasies with all the more significance for children. Thus, he allows Alice to confront a threatening and sometimes terrifying psychological reality and dramatizes her aggressive assertion of identity in the face of it.

Alice's Adventure in Wonderland begins as Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole after the elusive White Rabbit. While intentionally pursuing the nervous creature, she clearly does not mean to plunge into a seemingly bottomless black hole. The fantasy begins, then, out of control, with a familiar but terrifying nightmare sensation—endlessly falling into darkness. As she falls, Alice consoles herself with language. She wonders about latitude and longitude, assuring herself that "Dinah'll miss me to-night, I should think."²¹ Carroll thus shows that language, even the language of nonsense (because Alice does not know the meanings of the words that she utters) can help the child to conquer uncontrollable fears. (Indeed Carroll writes in the preface to Sylvie and Bruno that the most effective way to deal with "unholy thoughts" is through useful mental work.)²² In the Alice books such mental work consists of riddles, puzzles, games, and nonsense. Carroll thus creates a new order of fantasy in which the minds and imaginations of children are engaged not only to provide them with amusement, but also with a means of warding off their terrors. This tendency is exemplified aptly in "The Mouse's Tale." The small, helpless creature confronts his fears of violent and arbitrary extinction in the form of a shaped verse with letters growing even smaller and trailing out almost altogether at the end of the "tale." By imposing his own comic shape and order, that of his "tail," upon his worst fears, the Mouse thus faces up to cunning old Fury, embodies him in a ludicrously humorous form, and through a language puzzle, conjures him into nothingness.²³

Carroll's creation of Alice also marks a new and liberated vision of childhood, one which is all the more authentic because it depicts the emotions, hostilities, and necessary pretensions which real children experience in attempting to make sense of the adult world and in trying to accommodate themselves to the baffling demands of that world. The chaotic quality of the garden, for example, is a telling vision of a child's coming to terms with the fallibility of adults. From the perspective of children, adults, though apparently free to do as they please, may seem to inhabit an attractive and carefully controlled world. Once children reach the "garden" of adulthood, however, they find it full of the same chaotic and baffling anxieties, fears, frustrating constrictions and imperfections which trouble childhood. Carroll reverses the usual adult-child roles in his fantasies, but when Alice finds herself joining the adult game, she is just as muddled and confused as everyone else; as the Cheshire Cat observes, "We're all mad here."

In many ways Carroll suggests that we all remain confused children looking for the right rules in an ever-shifting and unmanageable reality. For Carroll, the imagination is "the necessary angel" which enables human beings to impose their own artificial constructs of order and meaning upon a reality which is essentially meaningless and disorderly. Alice thus achieves a kind of mastery in the fantasy world which she cannot achieve in the real world. She can acquire control over her own unwieldy fears and hostilities, shake the Red Queen into a helpless kitten, and thus face with more equanimity and self-assurance the domineering adults who scold her away from the warmth of the fire (a fitting emblem, perhaps, for adult pleasures and privileges). MacDonald takes children into a fantasy world and gives them spiritual nourishment in order that they may enact moral truth in ordinary reality. Carroll takes them into a fantasy world and gives them emotional sustenance and psychological confidence which they will need to survive in the wilderness of adult passions and desires. In the first, MacDonald implies that children must look beyond themselves for their ultimate resources. For Carroll, no omniscience resides in Wonderland for Alice to discover and depend upon. Alice's trust must be in her own human potential.

In MacDonald and Carroll, then, we find two distinctive modes of fantasy, each representing a different view of childhood, the imagination, and reality itself. In MacDonald's fantasies child characters appear as conventional emblems of innocence, like Little Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind, while Carroll explores the psychological and imaginative complexities of his little Alice. MacDonald sees the imagination as a rather passive faculty which enables the child to receive divine revelation, while Carroll's fantasies suggest that the imagination is a much stronger and more active force which works hard on chaotic experience to create what American poet Robert Frost has aptly called "a momentary stay against confusion."

Inevitably, subsequent fantasists have written in the shadow of these two original giants of fantastic invention. Their impact was immediate. One could discuss literally dozens of nineteenth-century fantasy writers who adapted these two traditions of fantasy for their own purposes. In the 1870's, Dinah Maria Mulock's The Little Lame Prince (1874) and Mrs. Molesworth's (Mary Louisa Stewart's) The Tapestry Room (1879) both reveal the influence of MacDonald and Carroll. In its vision of childhood, imagination, and character, The Little Lame Prince exhibits the sacred or visionary mode of fantasy and draws rather specifically upon MacDonald's classic work At the Back of the North Wind (1871), while Mrs. Molesworth's The Tapestry Room presents a humanistic vision of the child's fantastic world. A brief discussion of each of these successors may enrich the distinctions already explored between MacDonald and Carroll.

The Little Lame Prince is the story of Prince Dolor who, upon the occasion of his christening, is dropped by a careless nurse and made lame for life. A white-haired, but beautiful, fairy godmother (reminiscent of MacDonald's goddess-like grandmother figures who appear prominently in The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie) comes to honor the child and to bring the sad news of the queen's death. Thereafter, she is the child's only friend and protector. When Prince Dolor's father, the King, dies of grief for his wife, the child's wicked uncle banishes the little lame prince to a remote tower and proclaims Prince Dolor, rightful king of the kingdom, dead.

Prince Dolor lives a tediously boring and unhappy life in the sealed tower with his ill-tempered nurse until his fairy godmother visits him and presents him with a magic traveling cloak. Thereafter the Little Lame Prince flies about on the cloud, seeing strange, disturbing sights, much as MacDonald's Little Diamond flies about with the North Wind. After viewing a bloody revolution following the death of his uncle, Prince Dolor returns to the tower to find that his nurse has deserted him. Five days later she returns with a legion of Prince Dolor's subjects who take him back to the palace and restore him to his throne. After ruling wisely and justly for many years, Prince Dolor turns his throne over to his nephew, bids his people farewell and departs on his magic traveling cloak, never to be seen again. Presumably he has entered a higher spiritual reality.

In her vision of childhood, Mulock follows MacDonald closely. Like MacDonald's Princess Irene of The Princess and the Goblin and Diamond of At the Back of the North Wind, Prince Dolor is a blessed child who effects a spiritual conversion in the iciest hearts. Prince Dolor is, moreover, an essentially passive and static character. His adventures are initiated for him by his fairy godmother. His imagination does not create; it merely allows him to receive revelation from the fairy godmother who is clearly the representative of a spiritual world of ideal value. She sounds in fact much like MacDonald's "Mother of Light":

.. . the little lame Prince forgot his troubles in looking at her as her figure dilated, her eyes grew lustrous as stars, her very raiment brightened, and the whole room seemed filled with her beautiful and beneficent presence like light.²⁴

Even in his adult years, Prince Dolor remains childlike, refusing to marry because "no wife in the world would have been found so perfect, so lovable, so tender to him in his weakness, as his beautiful old godmother" (p. 110). The prince is, in fact, passive to the point of being regressive, making up his mind to die because the world is so ugly. But the ultimate victory of the prince is assured from the beginning because he is so clearly aligned with both beneficent spiritual powers and the righteous human order.

Although Dinah Mulock's fantasy is derivative of MacDonald's fantasy in most respects, her writing lacks the literary power of MacDonald's best work. Mrs. Molesworth is a more original and more powerful writer than Mulock. Mrs. Molesworth's fantasy, The Tapestry Room (1879), contains features resembling the fantasies of both MacDonald and Carroll. However, like the Alice books, her fantasy reveals the imagination as a human, rather than divine, faculty, which enables children to create visions and to alleviate loneliness and boredom.

The Tapestry Room is set on a large estate in the French countryside where a lonely and bored little girl, Jeanne, plagues her old nurse, Marcelline, constantly for stories. She is much more like a real child than the idealized vision of children in the fantasies of MacDonald and Mulock. (One recalls, too, that Carroll's Alice embarks upon her fantasy to relieve boredom.) Unlike Alice who must venture into the fantastic world alone, Jeanne is accompanied by her cousin Hugh, who comes to live with Jeanne when his parents die. Hugh is given the tapestry room where he is quickly ushered into a strange fantasy land by Dudu the Raven and Houpet the Chicken. He visits the Forest of Rainbows and Frogland with Jeanne, and they experience a transcendent moment of vision. In ordinary reality Jeanne does not seem to remember this fantastic journey and, to the consternation of Hugh, appears to be content with mundane, childhood games, dolls' teaparties, and the like. One day, as the two children play a make-believe fairy game, they re-enter the world of fantasy. They are given luminous wings by Dudu the Raven and they enter a lovely chamber of white cats where a beautiful white lady spins stories for children. At the end of a fairy tale, the children are astonished (but the reader is not) to learn that the lovely white lady has been transformed into their old nurse Marcelline. Finally, in the last segment of The Tapestry Room, Dudu tells the children the adventurous history of their family and then unaccountably disappears.

In The Tapestry Room, the fantasy world is essentially the creation of the inventive imaginations of the children themselves. Magic and fantasy issue from an interweaving of ordinary reality and imaginative revery. Jeanne and Hugh endow the raven, the chicken, the guinea-pig, and the tortoise with magical power. The fantastic adventures of the two children are initiated, not by an external supernatural agent, but by Hugh's imaginative engagement with the mysterious tapestry, the portal into the fantastic world. The pictures on the tapestry in the moonlight lead the children to imagine both unspeakable terrors and visions of unutterable beauty. In the very center of the fantasy, at the height of their fantastic adventures in Frogland, Hugh and Jeanne listen to song of a dying swan and experience a transcendental, Wordsworthian "spot of time":

The children listened breathlessly and in perfect silence at the wonderful notes which fell on their ears—notes which no words of mine could describe, for in themselves they were words, telling of suffering and sorrow, of beautiful things and sad things, of strange fantastic dreams, of sunshine and flowers and days of dreariness and solitude. Each and all came in their turn; but, at the last, all melted, all grew into one magnificent song of bliss and triumph .. . too pure and perfect to be imagined but in a dream. And as the last clear mellow notes fell on the children's ears, a sound of wings seemed to come with them, and gazing ever more intently towards the island, they saw rising upwards the pure white snow-like bird—upwards ever higher, till at last, with the sound of its own joyous song, it faded and melted into the opal radiance of the calm sky above.²⁵

This central passage seems to hold the key to the essential meaning of The Tapestry Room. Beauty, spirit, enchanted vistas of heavenly firmament come from "the joyous song" of the swan, a traditional emblem of poetic creation and the workings of the imagination. When the song fades, so the enchantment fades. Transcendence comes through the child's imagination, permitting an "incredible glimpse," to borrow Eleanor Cameron's term, but only for a fleeting moment. Though the children try hard to sustain their vision, there was at last "no longer a trace of the swan's radiant flight . . . the children withdrew their eyes from the sky and looked at each other" (p. 98). Like Shelley's fading coal, the children's imaginative visions disappear and leave them with a sense of loss because the dream cannot be sustained. This pattern reminds us of the ending of Through the Looking Glass when Alice questions her own visions and asks, "Whose dream was it, kitty?" In the end, the children have moved away from their own visions, away from fairy tales into the harsh social, political histories of their families, and old Dudu the Raven, the emblem of the children's creative imaginations, has disappeared. The children sadly acknowledge, "I fear he will not come back . . . We shall have no more stories nor fairy adventures." The disappearance of Dudu suggests that the world of childhood imagination inevitably yields to the business of growing up.

In The Tapestry Room, then, Molesworth suggests that the world of fantasy exists only in the imaginations of children; Hugh, Jeanne, and Alice find themselves standing squarely in the gray pavement of ordinary reality, wondering whose dream it was. MacDonald and Mulock, in contrast, take their characters into a divine reality which is itself palpable and real. MacDonald's vision of this reality appears as an eternal possibility for the pure and the childlike. Hence in The Golden Key the most ancient and the wisest spiritual being is the Old Man of Fire, who appears as a tiny child, and Tangle and Mossy enter the column of rainbows, the bright vision which had initiated their quest. Little Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind is taken up into the wondrous country at the back of the north wind, while Mulock's Prince Dolor departs for the spiritual realm on his traveling cloak. In the fantasies of Carroll and Mrs. Molesworth, however, growth is towards emotional maturity, not towards spiritual purity. The characters and the reader are left wondering with the poet Keats, "Whither has fled the vision? Do I sleep or wake?"

¹ See C.N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, Nancy Mann, "George MacDonald and the Tradition of Victorian Fantasy". Diss. Stanford University, 1973, and Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979 for comprehensive discussions of the relationships between shifting religious views and the emergence of fantasy in nineteenth-century Britain.

² Greville MacDonald. George MacDonald and His Wife. 1924; rpt. New York: Johnson, 1971, p. 20. The biographical facts concerning Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's life, his famous pseudonym "Lewis Carroll," his famous picnic with Alice Liddell and her sisters and the subsequent publication of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are so well known and have been so often recounted that I have not mentioned them in this text. However, the best biography on Lewis Carroll is still Derek Hudson. Lewis Carroll. London: Constable, 1954.

³ M. H. Abrams. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolt in Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971, p. 91.

⁴ Mann, p. 26.

⁵ Mann, p. 56.

⁶ George MacDonald. Weighed and Wanting. 1882, as quoted in Greville MacDonald, p. 85.

⁷ In his chapter on MacDonald in Modern Fantasy, C.N. Manlove explores in some detail what he conceives to be a rather pervasive division in MacDonald's thought and literary art. According to Manlove, MacDonald avoided intellectual controversy because he was not skilled enough to handle debate. Behind MacDonald's affirmations Manlove sees fears and doubt: "MacDonald's personal involvement [in Victorian religious doubt] is given away not the least by his obsession with these themes in his writing—there are few of his sermons where they do not appear in some form, especially the word Obedience,' to which he is almost pathologically addicted: he is in part attacking the impertinence of his own intellect. Obedience now becomes not only a means of his unconscious self-surrender, but of conscious suppression of self (p. 63). Manlove documents rather carefully his argument that MacDonald experienced a conflict between his conscious role of zealous preacher and his identification with Christian Romanticism and mysticism. While there is some justice in Manlove's discussion, he seems to me somewhat unfair to MacDonald in failing to note that MacDonald's Romanticism can accommodate vagueness and even what seem to be contradictions and inconsistencies. His reluctance to enter into open debate surely is a manifestation also of his deep Romantic conviction that infinite truth cannot be pinned down concretely, rather than an issue of his limited intellectual capacities, as Manlove suggests. MacDonald's best fantasies embody spiritual truth which MacDonald believes cannot be apprehended by the intellect. Each fantasy is, in at least one sense, an apologetic for faith which MacDonald did see as threatened. He is least successful when he tries to make these lessons explicit. See Manlove, p. 55 ff.

⁸ George MacDonald, "The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture," A Dish of Orts. London: Edwin Dalton, 1908, p. 2.

⁹ MacDonald, "The Imagination," p. 13.

¹⁰ George MacDonald. The Princess and Curdie. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966, p. 49. Subsequent quotations from this text will be taken from this edition and page numbers indicated in the body of the text.

¹¹ "The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture," p. 29.

¹² "The Imagination," p. 35.

¹³ "The Fantastic Imagination," A Dish of Orts, p. 314.

¹⁴ "The Fantastic Imagination," p. 314.

¹⁵ "The Fantastic Imagination," p. 316.

¹⁶ "The Fantastic Imagination," p. 319.

¹⁷ George MacDonald. Unspoken Sermons. London: Longmans, Green, 1885, II, 236.

¹⁸Unspoken Sermons, II, 237.

¹⁹Unspoken Sermons, II, 119.

²⁰ For complete details concerning Lewis Carroll's life, his famous friendships with children, etc., see Derek Hudson. Lewis Carroll. London: Constable, 1954. All biographical information on Carroll in this article is taken from this source.

²¹ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Alexander Woollcott. London: Nonesuch Press, n.d., p. 20. Subsequent quotations will be taken from this edition; page numbers will be indicated in parentheses immediately following quoted passage.

²² Lewis Carroll. Sylvie and Bruno. London: MacMillan, 1890, p. xv.

²³ For a detailed analysis of Carroll's use of nonsense language, see Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952.

²⁴ Dinah Mulock. The Little Lame Prince. 1874; rpt. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956, p. 36. Subsequent quotations will be taken from this edition; page numbers will be indicated in parentheses immediately following quoted passage.

²⁵ Mary Louisa Molesworth. The Tapestry Room. London: MacMillan and Company, 1879, pp. 97-98. Subsequent quotations will be taken from this edition; page numbers will be indicated in parentheses immediately following quoted passage.