SOURCE: "Introduction" to Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves, edited by Jack Zipes, Methuen, 1987, pp. xiii-xxix.

[In the following essay, Zipes highlights the changes in social conditions that led to a resurgence of fairy tales during the Victorian era and comments on the themes of change and social injustice that are found in many fairy stories.']

In contrast to France and Germany, England did not experience the flowering of the literary fairy tale for children until the middle of the nineteenth century. This late flowering is somewhat puzzling, for Great Britain had been a fertile ground for folklore in the Middle Ages. Dazzling fairies, mischievous elves, frightening beasts, clumsy giants, daring thieves, clever peasants, cruel witches, stalwart knights, and damsels in distress had been the cultural staple of the peasants who told their tales at the hearth and in the fields throughout the British Isles. Extraordinary characters, miraculous events, superstitions, folk customs, and pagan rituals made their way quickly into the early vernacular English works by renowned authors such as Chaucer, Spenser, Swift, Marlowe, and Shakespeare; works which became part of the classical British literary tradition. However, the literary fairy tale failed to establish itself as an independent genre in the eighteenth century, when one might have expected it to bloom as it did in France. The fairies and elves seemed to have been banned from their homeland, as if a magic spell had been cast over Great Britain.

Yet it was not magic so much as the actual social enforcement of the Puritan cultural code which led to the suppression of the literary fairy tale in England. The domination of Calvinism after the Revolution of 1688 led to a stronger emphasis on preparing children and adults to be more concerned with moral character and conduct in this world rather than to prepare them for a life hereafter. Through virtuous behaviour and industry one would expect to be able to find the appropriate rewards in temporal society. Above all, Christian principles and the clear application of reason were supposed to provide the foundation for success and happiness in the family and at work. Rational judgment and distrust of the imagination were to be the guiding principles of the new enlightened guardians of Puritan culture and utilitarianism for the next two centuries. Despite the fact that the Puritans and later the utilitarians cannot be considered as monolithic entities, and despite the fact that they each often viewed the Enlightenment itself as a kind of Utopian fantasy, they often assumed the same hostile position toward the fairy tale that bordered on the ridiculous. Here a parallel can be drawn to the situation described in E. T. A. Hoffmann's marvelous tale, Little Zaches Named Zinnober, where a fanatical prime minister representing the new laws of the Enlightenment, which are to be introduced into Prince Paphnutius' realm, argues that fairies are dangerous creatures and capable of all sorts of mischief. Consequently, the pompous prime minister declares:

"Yes! I call them enemies of the enlightenment. They took advantage of the goodness of your blessed dead father and are to blame for the darkness that has overcome our dear state. They are conducting a dangerous business with wondrous things, and under the pretext of poetry, they are spreading uncanny poison that makes the people incapable of serving the enlightenment. Their customs offend the police in such a ghastly way that no civilized state should tolerate them in any way."

Obviously, England after 1688 was not entirely a police state, but the laws banning certain types of amusement in the theater, literature, and the arts had a farreaching effect on the populace. In particular,' the oral folk tales were not considered good subject matter for the cultivation of young souls, and thus the "civilized" appropriation of these tales which took place in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, undertaken by eminent writers such as Charles Perrault, Madame D'Aulnoy, Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, and many others, did not occur in England. On the contrary, the stories, poems, and novels written for children were mainly religious and instructional, and if literary fairy tales were written and published, they were transformed into didactic tales preaching hard work and pious behavior. Moreover, most of the fairy tales which circulated in printed form were chapbooks and pennybooks sold by peddlers to the lower classes. It was not considered proper to defend the fairies and elves—neither in literature for adults nor in literature for children.

The denigration of the fairy tale in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in stark contrast to the cultivation of the tale in France and Germany, where it gradually came to express a new middle-class and aristocratic sensibility and flourished as an avant-garde form of art. In Great Britain the literary fairy tale was forced to go underground and was often woven into the plots of novels such as Richardson's Pamela. As an oral folk tale it could still dwell comfortably among the peasants, but the literary institutionalization of the fairy-tale genre had to wait until the Romantic movement asserted the value of the imagination and fantasy at the end of the eighteenth century. Here it should be stressed that the English utilitarians of the late eighteenth century and the Romantics actually shared the same Utopian zeal that emanated from the principles of the Enlightenment. However, they differed greatly as to how to realize those principles in the cultural life of English society. The Romantics sought to broaden the notions of the Enlightenment so that they would not become narrow and instrumentalized to serve vested class interests. In contrast, the utilitarians did indeed view the Romantics as "enemies of the Enlightenment" á la Hoffmann because they questioned the Protestant ethos and the prescriptions of* order conceived by the utilitarians to establish the good society on earth. The questioning spirit of the Romantics enabled them to play a key role in fostering the rise of the literary fairy tale in Great Britain, for the symbolism of the tales gave them great freedom to experiment and express their doubts about the restricted view of the utilitarians and traditional religion. Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Thomas Hood, Samuel Coleridge, and Hartley Coleridge all wrote interesting fairy tales along these lines, while Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Shelley helped to pave the way for the establishment of the genre and created a more receptive atmosphere for all forms of romance. In time, the return of the magic realm of the fairies and elves was viewed by the Romantics and many early Victorians as a necessary move to oppose the growing alienation in the public sphere due to industrialization and regimentation in the private sphere. Indeed, the Victorians became more aware of the subversive potential of the literary fairy tale to question the so-called productive forces of progress and the Enlightenment, for it was exactly at this point that the middle and upper classes consolidated their hold on the public sphere and determined the rules of rational discourse, government, and industry that guaranteed the promotion of their vested interests. Supported by the industrial revolution (1830-90), the rise of the middle classes meant an institutionalization of all forms of life and this in turn has had severe ramifications to the present day.

We tend to think of the industrial revolution mainly in economic and technological terms, but the impact of the industrial revolution was much more pervasive than this. It changed the very fabric of society in Great Britain, which became the world's first urban as well as industrial nation. Whereas the landed gentry and the rising middle classes benefited greatly from the innovations in commodities, techniques, and occupations that provided them with unprecedented comfort and cultural opportunities, such "progress" also brought its penalties with it. As Barry Supple has pointed out in The Victorians:

the impersonalization of factories, the imposition of a compelling and external discipline, the prolonged activity at the behest of machinery, the sheer problem of mass living in cities, the anonymity of the urban community, the obvious overcrowding in the badly built housing devoid of the countryside, the unchecked pollution—all these must have amounted to a marked deterioration in the circumstances, and therefore the standards of life for large numbers of people.

Such negative features of the industrial revolution did not go unnoticed by early Victorian writers and led to what is commonly called the "Condition of England Debate." In actuality, this was not a single debate but a series of controversies about the spiritual and material foundations of English life and it had a great effect on literary developments. For instance, as Catherine Gallagher has shown in her book The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction 1832-1867, disputes about the nature and possibility of human freedom, the sources of social cohesion, and the nature of representation were embraced by the novel and "unsettled fundamental assumptions of the novel form." Just as the novel developed a certain discourse and narrative strategies to respond to the Condition of England Debate, the literary fairy tale conceived its own unique aesthetic modes and themes to relate to this debate. Writers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hood, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Thackeray were among the first to criticize the deleterious effects of the industrial revolution. Interestingly, they all employed the fairy tale at one point to question the injustice and inequalities engendered by the social upheaval in England. What is unique about the initial stage of the literary fairy-tale revival in England is that the form itself was part of the controversial subject matter of the larger Condition of England Debate. The shifting attitudes toward children, whose imaginations were gradually declared more innocent than sinful, allowed for greater use of works of fancy to educate and amuse them. Even so, despite changing attitudes, German, French, and Danish works of fantasy had first to pave the way for the resurgence of the literary fairy tale and the defense of the imagination in cultural products for children.

As we know, close to two centuries of British educators, writers, and publishers debated the merits of fairy tales and they were found—at least by the conservative camp, or what would be called the "moral majority" today—useless and dangerous for the moral education of young and old alike. Writers like Mrs Trimmer and Mrs Mortimer argued at the end of the eighteenth century that fairy tales made children depraved and turned them against the sacred institutions of society. Their arguments continued to be influential at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although in a somewhat modified form. For instance, one of the champions of the anti-fairy-tale school, Mrs Sherwood, wrote the following in her book The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1820):

Instruction when conveyed through the medium of some beautiful story or pleasant tale, more easily insinuates itself into the youthful mind than any thing of a drier nature; yet the greatest care is necessary that the kind of instruction thus conveyed should be perfectly agreeable to the Christian dispensation. Fairy-tales therefore are in general an improper medium of instruction because it would be absurd in such tales to introduce Christian principles as motives of action. . . . On this account such tales should be very sparingly used, it being extremely difficult, if not impossible, from the reason I have specified, to render them really useful.

One way to oppose the rigid upholders of the Puritan law and order school was to import fairy tales from France, Germany, and Scandinavia and to translate them as exotic works of art. This mode of counter-attack by the defenders of fairy tales gained momentum at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1804 Benjamin Tabart began to publish a series of popular tales which eventually led to his book Popular Fairy Tales (1818) containing selections from Mother Goose, The Arabian Nights, Robin Hood, and Madame D'Aulnoy's tales. In 1818 Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine was published and gained acceptance because of its obvious Christian message about the pagan water nymph who leads a virtuous life once she gains a human soul. In 1823, John Harris, an enterprising publisher, who had already produced Mother Bunch's Fairy Tales in 1802, edited an important volume entitled The Court of Oberon; or, The Temple of Fairies, which contained tales from Perrault, D'Aulnoy, and The Arabian Nights. Coincidentally, this book appeared in the same year that the most important publication to stimulate an awakened interest in fairy tales for children and adults was issued, namely German Popular Stories, Edgar Taylor's translation of a selection from Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Grimm with illustrations by the gifted artist George Cruikshank. Taylor made an explicit reference to the debate concerning fairy tales in his introduction, in which he aligned himself with the "enemies of the Enlightenment":

The popular tales of England have been too much neglected. They are nearly discarded from the libraries of childhood. Philosophy is made the companion of the nursery: we have lisping chemists and leading-string mathematicians; this is the age of reason, not of imagination; and the loveliest dreams of fairy innocence are considered as vain and frivolous. Much might be urged against this rigid and philosophic (or rather unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise, as our judgement or our memory; and so long as such fictions only are presented to the young mind as do not interfere with the important department of moral education, a beneficial effect must be produced by the pleasurable employment of a faculty in which so much of our happiness in every period of life consists.

The publication of German Popular Stories acted as a challenge to the anti-fairy-tale movement in Britain, and its favorable reception led to a second edition in 1826 and a new wave of translations. For instance, Thomas Carlyle published two volumes entitled German Romances, which included his translations of fairy tales by Musäus, Tieck, Chamisso, and Hoffmann in 1827. Also his unique book Sartor Resartus (1831) was based to a certain extent on Goethe's Das Märchen. Various English periodicals carried the translated tales of Otmar, Chamisso, Hoffmann, Tieck, Novalis, and Hauff in the 1830s, and new translations of the Grimm brothers' tales appeared in 1839, 1846, 1849, and 1855. In addition to the significant impact of the German tales, the arrival in 1846 of Hans Christian Andersen's Wonderful Stories for Children, translated by Mary Howitt, was a momentous occasion. His unusual tales, which combined fantasy with a moral impulse in line with traditional Christian standards, guaranteed the legitimacy of the literary fairy tale for middle-class audiences. From this point on, the fairy tale flowered in many different forms and colors and expanded its social discourse to cover such different topics as proper comportment for children, free will, social exploitation, political justice, and authoritarian government. The 1840s also saw the translation of the Arabian Nights (1840) by Edwin Lane; Felix Summerly's Home Treasury (1841-9), which included such works as Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and Jack and the Beanstalk; Ambrose Merton's The Old Story Books of England (1845); and Anthony Montalba's Fairy Tales of All Nations (1849).

The gradual recognition and acceptance of the fairy tale by the middle classes, which had heretofore condemned the genre as frivolous and pernicious, did not mean that the Puritan outlook of the bourgeoisie had undergone a radical change, however. Indeed, to a certain extent, one can talk about a "cooption" of "the enemies of the Enlightenment." That is, middle-class writers, educators, publishers, and parents began to realize that the rigid, didactic training and literature used to rear their children was dulling their senses and creativity. Both children and adults needed more fanciful works to stimulate their imagination and keep them productive in the social and cultural spheres of British society. Emphasis was now placed on fairytale reading and storytelling as recreation—a period of time and a place in which the young could recuperate from instruction and training and re-create themselves, so to speak, without the social pressure calculated to make every second morally and economically profitable. The stimulation of the imagination became just as important as the cultivation of reason for moral improvement. Although many tedious books of fairy tales with didactic lessons were published, such as Alfred Crowquill's Crowquill's Fairy Book (1840) and Mrs Alfred Gatty's The Fairy Godmothers (1851), various English writers began to explore the potential of the fairy tale as a form of literary communication that might convey both individual and social protest and personal conceptions of alternative, if not Utopian, worlds. To write a fairy tale was considered by many writers a social symbolical act that could have implications for the education of children and the future of society.

In the period between 1840 and 1880 the general trend among the more prominent fairy-tale writers was to use the fairy-tale form in innovative ways to raise social consciousness about the disparities among the different social classes and the problems faced by the oppressed due to the industrial revolution. Numerous writers took a philanthropic view of the poor and underprivileged and sought to voice a concern about the cruel exploitation and deprivation of the young. It was almost as though the fairy tales were to instill a spirit of moral protest in the readers—and, as I mentioned, the Victorian writers always had two implied ideal readers in mind: the middle-class parent and child—so that they would take a noble and ethical stand against forces of intolerance and authoritarianism. For instance, John Ruskin's King of the Golden River (1841) . . . depicted two cruel brothers who almost destroy their younger brother Gluck because of their greed and dictatorial ways. Moreover, they threaten the laws of nature, reminding one of the cruel materialism of the industrial revolution. However, due to Gluck's innocence and compassion, he does not succumb to the brutality of his brothers and is eventually helped by the King of the Golden River to re-create an idyllic realm. Similarly, Francis Edward Paget wrote The Hope of the Katzekopfs in 1844 to decry the selfishness of a spoiled prince and convey a sense of self-discipline through the lessons taught by a fairy, an imp, and the old man Discipline. William Makepeace Thackeray composed The Rose and the Ring (1855), a delightful discourse on rightful and moral rule in which the humble Prince Giglio and Princess Rosalba regain their kingdoms from power-hungry and materialistic usurpers. Frances Browne also made a significant contribution to the fairy-tale genre with the publication of Granny's Wonderful Chair in 1856. Here the wonderful chair provides the framework for a group of connected tales told to the young girl Snowflower, whose virtuous and modest behavior parallels the conduct of the protagonists in the tales. Though poor and orphaned at the beginning of the book, Snowflower's diligence is rewarded at the end. The progression in Granny 's Wonderful Chair enables the reader to watch Snowflower learn and grow to be the "ideal" Victorian girl. Such is also the case in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), except that here the model is a boy. To be exact it is Tom, a chimney sweep, who leaves his body behind him to become a water baby in the sea. There he (with others as well) undergoes various adventures and learns all about rewards and punishments for his behavior, especially from Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. In the end he realizes that he must take the initiative in being good, for people always tend to reciprocate in kind.

Almost all the fairy tales of the 1840s and 1850s use allegorical forms to make a statement about Christian goodness in contrast to the greed and materialism that are apparently the most dangerous vices in English society. The moralistic tendency is most apparent in such works as Catherine Sinclair's "Uncle David's Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies" in Holiday House (1839), Clara de Chatelain's The Silver Swan (1847), Mark Lemon's The Enchanted Doll (1849) Alfred Crowquill's The Giant Hands (1856), and Mary and Elizabeth Kirby's The Talking Bird (1856). In each case the use of the fairy-tale form as a fanciful mode to delight readers is justified because of the seriousness of the subject matter. Consequently, the fairy tale at mid-century was a manifesto for itself and a social manifesto at the same time. The compulsion felt by writers to rationalize their preference for using the fairy tale to express their opinions about religion, education, and progress often undercut their aesthetic experiments. Nevertheless, even the boring allegorical fairy tales were an improvement on the stern, didactic tales of realism which English children had been obliged to read during the first part of the nineteenth century.

Underlying the efforts of the Victorian fairy-tale writers was also a psychological urge to recapture and retain childhood as a paradisiacal realm of innocence. This psychological drive was often mixed with a Utopian belief that a more just society could be established on earth. U. C. Knoepflmacher makes the point in his essay "The Balancing of Child and Adult" (1983) that the Victorian writers' "regressive capacity can never bring about a total annihilation of the adult's self-awareness":

Torn between the opposing demands of innocence and experience, the author who resorts to the wishful, magical thinking of the child nonetheless feels compelled, in varying degrees, to hold on to the grown-up's circumscribed notions about reality. In the better works of fantasy of the period, this dramatic tension between the adult and childhood selves becomes rich and elastic: conflict and harmony, friction and reconciliation, realism and wonder, are allowed to interpenetrate and coexist.

Knoepflmacher asserts that the regressive tendency balanced by self-awareness was a major feature of most Victorian fantasies. And, certainly, if we consider the three most important writers and defenders of fairy tales from 1840 to 1880, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald, it is apparent that their quest for a new fairy-tale form stemmed from a psychological rejection and rebellion against the "norms" of English society. If the industrial revolution had turned England upside down on the path toward progress, then these writers believed that English society had to be revolutionized once more to regain a sense of free play and human compassion. The remarkable achievement of Dickens, Carroll, and MacDonald lies in their artistic capacity to blend their regressive urges with progressive social concerns, without succumbing to overt didacticism.

In his essay "Frauds on Fairies" (1853) published in Household Words, Dickens took issue with George Cruikshank and any other writers who might seek to abuse the fairy tale by attaching explicit moral or ethical messages to it. Dickens argued:

in an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected. Our English red tape is too magnificently red even to be employed in the tying up of such trifles, but everyone who has considered the subject knows full well that a nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun.

Dickens himself tended to incorporate fairy-tale motifs and plots primarily in his novels and particularly in his Christmas Books (1843—5). It is almost as though he did not want to tarnish the childlike innocence of the tales that he read as a young boy—tales which incidentally filled him with hope during his difficult childhood—by replacing them with new ones. But Dickens did use the fairy tale to make political and social statements, as in Prince Bull (1855) and The Thousand and One Humbugs (1855), and his regressive longings for the innocent bliss of fairyland are made most evident in his essay A Christmas Tree (1850):

Good for Christmas time is the ruddy color of the cloak, in which—the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket—Little Red Riding Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve, to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be.

What was to be was Dickens' adult quest for fairy bliss in his novels, and it is not by chance that one of the last works he wrote toward the end of his life was "The Magic Fishbone" . . . , part of a collection of humorous stories for children entitled Holiday Romance (1868). Here Dickens parodied a helpless king as a salaried worker, who is accustomed to understanding everything with his reason. He becomes totally confused by the actions of his daughter Alicia, who receives a magic fishbone from a strange and brazen fairy named Grandmarina. Alicia does not use the fishbone when one would expect her to. Only when the king reveals to her that he can no longer provide for the family does Alicia make use of the magic fishbone. Suddenly Grandmarina arrives to bring about a comical ending in which the most preposterous changes occur. Nothing can be grasped through logic, and this is exactly Dickens' point: his droll tale—narrated from the viewpoint of a child—depends on the unusual deployment of fairy-tale motifs to question the conventional standards of society and to demonstrate that there is strength and soundness in the creativity of the young. The patriarchal figure of authority is at a loss to rule and provide, and the reversal of circumstances points to a need for change in social relations. The realm of genuine happiness that is glimpsed at the end of Dickens' fairy tale is a wish-fulfillment that he himself shared with many Victorians who were dissatisfied with social conditions in English society.

Like Dickens, Carroll fought tenaciously to keep the child alive in himself and in his fiction as a critic of the absurd rules and regulations of the adult Victorian world. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) Carroll made one of the most radical statements on behalf of the fairy tale and the child's perspective by conceiving a fantastic plot without an ostensible moral purpose. The questioning spirit of the child is celebrated in the Alice books, and Carroll continually returned to the realm of fantasy in his remarkable fairy tale "Bruno's Revenge" (1867) . . . , which eventually served as the basis for his Sylvie and Bruno books (1889, 1893). The endeavor to reconcile the fairy world with the world of reality never meant compromising the imagination for Carroll. If anything, reason was to serve the imagination, to allow vital dreams of pleasure to take shape in a world that was threatening to turn those dreams into mere advertisements for better homes and better living, according to the plans of British industrial and urban leaders.

Carroll's deep-seated belief in the necessity of keeping alive the power of the imagination in children was shared by George MacDonald. In fact, after he had completed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland he sent the manuscript to the MacDonald family, who warmly encouraged him to have his fantastic narrative published. Though MacDonald himself was not as "radical" as Carroll in his own fairy tales, he was nonetheless just as pioneering in his endeavors to lend new shape and substance to the fairy-tale genre. In 1867 he published Dealings with the Fairies, which contained "The Light Princess," "The Giant's Heart," "The Shadows," "Cross Purposes," and "The Golden Key." Thereafter he continued to write fairy tales for children's magazines and included some in his novels. In fact, he wrote two compelling fairy-tale novels, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883), which became classics in his own day. MacDonald stressed the aesthetic reversal of traditional fairy-tale schemes and motifs and social transformation in all his fairy tales. For instance, his most popular work, "The Light Princess," is a witty parody of Sleeping Beauty which stimulates serious reflection about social behavior and power through comical and unexpected changes in the traditional fairy-tale form and content. Here, a bumbling king and queen give birth to a daughter after many years of sterility, and because they insult one of the fairy godmothers their daughter is cursed with a lack of gravity. Thus, she can only fly around the court, and her hilarious behavior upsets the absurd conventions of the kingdom. But she is also potentially destructive, because she has no sense of balance and tends to seek to gratify her whims with little concern for other people. Only when she sees a humble prince about to die for her own pleasure does she develop human compassion and gain the gravity necessary for mature social interaction. MacDonald often turned the world upside-down and inside-out in his fairy tales, to demonstrate that society as it existed was based on false and artificial values. He purposely portrayed characters on quests to discover a divine spark within themselves, and self-discovery was always linked to a greater appreciation of other human beings and nature, as in the case of "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" (1882). . . . Domination is opposed by compassion. Magic is power used to attain self-awareness and sensitivity toward others. Fairy-tale writing itself becomes a means by which one can find the golden key for establishing harmony with the world—a Utopian world, to be sure, that opens our eyes to the ossification of a society blind to its own faults and injustices.

The creation of fairy-tale worlds by British writers moved in two basic directions from 1860 until the turn of the century: conventionalism and utopianism. The majority of writers such as Dinah Mulock Craik (The Fairy Book, 1863), Annie Keary (Little Wanderlin, 1865), Tom Hood, (Fairy Realm, 1865, verse renditions of Perrault's prose tales), Harriet Parr (Holme Lee's Fairy Tales, 1868), Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen (Moonshine, 1871 and Friends and Foes from Fairy Land, 1886), Jean Ingelow (The Little Wonder-Horn, 1872), Mrs Molesworth (The Tapestry Room, 1879 and Christmas-Tree Land, 1884), Anne Isabella Ritchie (Five Old Friends and a Young Prince, 1868 and Bluebeard's Keys, 1874), Christina Rossetti (Speaking Likenesses, 1874), Lucy Lane Clifford (Anyhow Stories, 1882), Harriet Childe Pemberton (Fairy Tales for Every Day, 1882), Andrew Lang (The Princess Nobody, 1884 and The Gold of Fairnilee, 1888), Herbert Inman (The One-Eyed Griffin and Other Fairy Tales, 1897), and Edith Nesbit (The Book of Dragons, 1900) conceived plots conventionally to reconcile themselves and their readers to the status quo of Victorian society. Their imaginative worlds could be called exercises in complicity with the traditional opponents of fairy tales, for there is rarely a hint of social criticism and subversion in their works. It is almost as if the wings of the fairies had been clipped, for the "little people" do not represent a real threat to the established Victorian norms. Magic and nonsense are not liberating forces. After a brief period of disturbance, the fairies, brownies, elves, or other extraordinary creatures generally enable the protagonists to integrate themselves into a prescribed social order. If the fairies create mischief that makes the protagonists and readers think critically about their situation, they ultimately do this in the name of sobriety. Perseverance, good sense, and diligence are championed as virtues that must be acquired through trials in magical realms to prove they will become mature "solid citizens."

Yet, even in the works of the conventional writers, there seems to be a longing to maintain a connection to the fairy realm. Some of them, like Ingelow, Molesworth, and Nesbit, even broke with convention at times. Respect was paid to those spirits of the imagination, the fairies, who reinvigorated British cultural life in the nineteenth century after years of banishment. Indeed, the return of the fairies became a permanent one, for writers of all kinds of persuasions discovered that they could be used to maintain a discourse about subjects germane to their heart. Unfortunately, by the end of the century such publishers as Raphael Tuck and Routledge could make standard commodities out of the fairy tales—mainly the classical European tales—and published thousands of toy books and picture books to earn grand profits from what used to be considered pernicious items for sons and daughters of the middle classes.

Fairy tales for profit and fairy tales of conventionality were disregarded by English writers of the Utopian direction. Their tales reveal a profound belief in the power of the imagination as a potent force that can be used to question the value of existing social relations. There is also a moral impulse in this second direction. However, it does not lead to reconciliation with the status quo—rather, rebellion against convention and conformity. Fairy-tale protagonists are sent on quests which change them as the world around them also changes. The fairies and other magical creatures inspire and compel the protagonists to alter their lives and pursue Utopian dreams. In the works of MacDonald, Carroll, Mary De Morgan, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Evelyn Sharp, and Laurence Housman the creation of fairytale worlds allows the writers to deal symbolically with social taboos and to suggest alternatives to common English practice, particularly in the spheres of child rearing and role-playing. In many instances the alternatives do not lead to a "happy end," or, if happiness is achieved, it is in stark contrast to the "happy" way of life in late Victorian and Edwardian England. In Humphrey Carpenter's critical study of the golden age of children's literature, Secret Gardens (1985), he makes the point that fantasy literature and fairy tales of the late nineteenth century stem from a deep dissatisfaction with the socio-political realities of England.

While it was not overtly "realistic" and purported to have nothing to say about the "real" world, in this fantastic strain of writing may be found some profound observations about human character and contemporary society, and (strikingly often) about religion. It dealt largely with utopias, and posited the existence of Arcadian societies remote from the nature and concerns of the everyday world; yet in doing this it was commentary, often satirically and critically, on real life.

Clearly there are signs in the works of Carroll, MacDonald, Wilde, Ewing, De Morgan, Grahame, Sharp, Housman, Nesbit, and even Molesworth that they identified with the "enemies of the Enlightenment." In a period when first Christian socialism and later the Fabian movement had a widespread effect, these writers instilled a Utopian spirit into the fairy-tale discourse that endowed the genre with a vigorous and unique quality of social criticism which was to be developed even further by later writers of faerie works such as A. A. Milne, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and T. H. White. This endowment in itself was the major accomplishment of the Utopian fairy-tale writers. But there were other qualities and features that they contributed to the development of the literary fairy tale as genre which deserve our attention.

To begin with, there is a strong feminine, if not feminist, influence in the writing of both male and female writers. In contrast to the Kunstmärchen tradition in Germany and folklore in general, which were stamped by patriarchal concerns, British writers created strong women characters and placed great emphasis on the fusion of female and male qualities and equality between men and women. For instance, in most of MacDonald's tales, particularly "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" . . . , "Cross Purposes," and "Little Daylight," the male and female protagonists come to realize their mutual dependency. Their so-called masculine and feminine qualities are not genetically determined but are relative and assume their own particular value in given circumstances. What is often understood as masculine is feminine in MacDonald's tales. Gender has no specificity—rather, both male and female can develop courage, honesty, intelligence, compassion, etc. The most important goal in MacDonald's fairy tales lies beyond the limits set by society. The worth of an individual is indicated by his or her willingness to explore nature and to change according to the divine insights they gain. Magic is nothing else but the realization of the divine creative powers one possesses within oneself. Here MacDonald differed from many of the traditional Victorian writers by insisting on self-determination for women.

MacDonald was not alone in this conviction. Mary De Morgan, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Evelyn Sharp, and Edith Nesbit all depicted female protagonists coming into their own and playing unusually strong roles in determining their own destinies. Princess Ursula's refusal to conform to the wishes of her ministers in De Morgan's "A Toy Princess" (1877) . . . celebrates the indomitable will of a young woman who is determined to run her life according to her needs rather than serve the royal court like a puppet. In Ewing's "The Ogre Courting" (1871) . . . Managing Molly, a clever peasant's daughter, maintains her independence while making a fool out of a brutal male oppressor. Mrs Molesworth's Princess Auréole in "Story of a King's Daughter" (1884) . . . uses another technique to tame the brute in man: she sets an example of compassion which eventually induces Prince Halbert to learn to feel for the sufferings of his fellow creatures. Princess Auréole uses her courage and imagination to get her way and her man in the end, just as Firefly in Sharp's "The Spell of the Magician's Daughter" (1902) . . . shows remarkable fortitude and creativity in disenchanting a country and captivating a young prince. Similarly the Princess in Nesbit's "The Last of the Dragons" (c. 1900) . . . acts in a very "unladylike" way by taking the initiative and defeating the last of the dragons with love.

In all of these tales—as well as in other works, such as Christina Rossetti's fascinating poem The Goblin Market—there is an intense quest for the female self. In contrast to such fairy tales as "Cinderella" (1868) by Anne Isabella Ritchie and "All my Doing" (1882) by Harriet Childe-Pemberton . . . ,are fascinating examples of female self-deprecation, the narratives by De Morgan, Ewing, Molesworth, Sharp, and Nesbit allow for women's voices and needs to be heard. The narrative strategies of these tales strongly suggest that utopia will not be just another men's world. What is significant about the "feminist" Utopian tales is not so much the strength shown by the female protagonists, but the manner in which they expose oppression and hypocrisy. Here, the social critique is both implicit and explicit as it pertains to Victorian society. The new "feminine quality" in these tales is part of the general re-utilization of the traditional fairytale motifs and topoi by Utopian writers to express the need for a new type of government and society. All the formal aesthetic changes made in the tales are connected to an insistence that the substance of life be transformed, otherwise there will be alienation, petrification, and death. This is certainly the danger in De Morgan's "Toy Princess," and it is the reason why she also questioned and rejected arbitrary authority in such other tales as "The Necklace of Princess Fiormonde," "The Heart of Princess Joan," and "Three Clever Kings."

Male writers expressed their Utopian inclinations in fairy tales by depicting English society as one which stifled and confined the creative energies of compassionate young protagonists. Both in his tales and his illustrations Laurence Housman portrayed Victorian society symbolically, as a rigid enclosure. In such tales as "The Rooted Lover" . . . , "The Bound Princess," "The White Doe," and "A Chinese Fairy-Tale," Housman's protagonists reject material gains to pursue love and beauty. The aesthetic composition of the fairy tale and the noble actions of his characters are contrasted to the vulgar materialism of late Victorian society. Such a view of British society was shared by Oscar Wilde, who developed his critique of greed and hypocrisy in his two collections of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and The House of Pomegranates (1891). In particular, "The Happy Prince" .. . is a sad commentary on how isolated the ruling class had become from the majority of English people by the end of the century. Like many Utopian writers of this period, Wilde felt that social relations had become reified, and he disparaged the philanthropic movement of the upper classes as mere ornamental patchwork. If British society was to reform itself substantially, then not only had it to undergo a spiritual reformation, but class domination and the destructive effects of industrialization had also to be brought to an end.

To oppose class domination and the crass exploitation of the "little people" became the underlying bond of many Utopian fairy-tale writers toward the end of the nineteenth century. The unique quality of the individual tales often depended on the non-conformist message and the "non-sensical" play with words, plots, and motifs. These made sense once the reader realized that the writers were endeavoring to subvert those so-called sensible standards which appeared to fulfill the needs of the people but actually deceived them. For example, a fairy tale such as Kenneth Grahame's "The Reluctant Dragon" (1898) . . . plays with the expectations of the readers and refuses to meet them because Grahame was more interested in fostering human compassion than in human deception. His tale reveals how the aggressive instincts of people can be manipulated and can lead to a false sense of chauvinism because of stereotyping—in this case, of knights and dragons. Kipling, too, in "The Potted Princess" (1893) . . . composed an interesting tale that experimented with audience expectations and deception. In the process it allows for the rise of a lowly prince and the transformation of a young boy into a tale teller. The theme of coming into one's own is closely tied to the rejection of the materialistic and artificial standards set by society.

The German Romantic writer Novalis, who had a great influence on MacDonald, once remarked, "Mensch werden ist eine Kunst"—to become a human being is an art. This remark could have been Kipling's motto for his tale, and it certainly could have been the unwritten slogan of the Utopian fairy-tale writers by the end of the nineteenth century. The fairy tale itself exhibited possibilities for the young to transform themselves and society into those Arcadian dreams conceived in childhood that the writers did not want to leave behind them. The artwork of the fairy tale assumed a religious quality in its apparent denial of the material world.

It is not by chance that many of the late Victorian fairy-tale writers took a resolute stand against materialism. The industrial revolution had transformed an agrarian population into an urban one. Compelled to work and live according to a profit motive and competitive market conditions, people became accustomed to think instrumentally about gain and exploitation. Both in the middle and lower classes it became necessary to compete with and exploit others to achieve success and a modicum of comfort. Here, the Christian Church relied on philanthropy as a means to rationalize the material values of a society that had abandoned the essence of Christian humanism. This is why the Christian minister George MacDonald—and the same might be said of Lewis Carroll—distanced himself from the practices of the Anglican and Congregational Churches. Most of his works, particularly his two fairy-tale novels The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, decry the lust for money in all social classes and the abandonment of Christian values based on human compassion.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a growing tendency among writers to support the ideas of Christian and Fabian socialism. This tendency also marked the rise of Utopian literature which was connected to the fairy tale and indicated the writers' deep dissatisfaction with the way Great Britian had been drastically changed by the industrial revolution. William Morris' News from Nowhere (1891) and H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) illustrate the criticism of those Victorian writers who feared that the machine age would destroy human creativity and integrity. Though Great Britain was at its height as Empire, there was also a strong sentiment among Utopian writers that the Empire had sold its soul to attain power and was using its power to maintain a system of domination and exploitation.

It is interesting to note that many of the late Victorian fairy-tale writers held similar political views and worked in the same milieux in an effort to create a different English society. As is well known, MacDonald was a good friend of Ruskin and Carroll and shared many of the social convictions of Dickens and Morris, whom he also knew. Morris was very much influenced by Ruskin, and in turn his ideas attracted Mary De Morgan, Laurence Housman, and Walter Crane, who illustrated numerous fairy books. Kipling heard the tales of De Morgan as a child and was a great admirer of Juliana Horatia Ewing. Wilde studied with both Ruskin and Walter Pater and developed his own anarchical brand of socialism which he expressed in his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1889), written at the same time as his fairy tales. Crane illustrated The Happy Prince and Other Tales as well as Christmas-Tree Land by Mary Louisa Molesworth. Evelyn Sharp, Laurence Housman, and Kenneth Grahame belonged to the coterie of writers around The Yellow Book founded by John Lane, who wanted to establish a new aesthetics while at the same time retaining respect for traditional craftsmanship. Grahame was greatly influenced by Frederick James Furnivall, an active member of the Christian Socialist movement, who introduced him to the works of Ruskin and Morris. Sharp went on to become one of the leading members of the women's suffragette movement and a socialist. At times she had contact with Laurence Housman, who also declared himself a socialist pacifist and became active in the political and cultural struggles of the early twentieth century. Nesbit was one of the founders of the Fabian Society with her husband Hubert Bland, and she became close to George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and numerous other members of the Fabian movement.

The social and political views of the fairy-tale writers and the cultural climate of late Victorian society make it evident that they felt the future of Britain and the young was at stake in their literary production. Such investment in their work enables us to understand why the literary fairy tale finally became a viable genre in Britain. The revolt of the fairies in the early part of the nineteenth century and their reintegration into English literature occurred at a time when British society was undergoing momentous social and political changes. The Puritan ban on fairy-tale literature that had existed since the late seventeenth century was gradually lifted because the rational discourse of the Enlightenment did not allow sufficient means to voice doubts and protest about conditions in England during the industrial revolution. Though many of the new fairy tales were contradictory, they opened up possibilities for children and adults to formulate innovative views about socialization, religious training, authority, sex roles, and art. For many late Victorian authors, the writing of a fairy tale meant a process of creating an other world, from which vantage point they could survey conditions in the real world and compare them to their ideal projections. The personal impetus for writing fairy tales was simultaneously a social one for the Victorians. This social impetus has kept their tales alive and stimulating for us today, for the aesthetics of these fairy tales stems from an experimental spirit and social conscience that raises questions which twentieth-century reality has yet to answer. The "enemies of the Enlightenment" are still very much with us, and though they are often packaged as commodities and made to appear harmless, they will continue to touch a Utopian chord in every reader who remains open to their call for change.