SOURCE: "Fantasy, Early Nineteenth-Century Reviewers, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge," in Victorian Fantasy Literature: Literary Battles with Church and Empire, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990, pp. 1-19.

[In the following excerpt, Michalson illustrates the negative connotations Victorian critics associated with "fantastic" writing.]

What, then, must be the effect of a confederated and indefatigable priesthood, who barely tolerate literature, and actually hate it, upon all those classes over whom literature has any influence!¹

Unhampered by the theories of reading and the philosophical/linguistic investigations into the nature of literary texts that we twentieth-century critics find so indispensable, the majority of readers in early nineteenth-century Britain had no problem defining fantasy.² For the purposes of this study, then, I do not intend to rely on any contemporary theoretically-oriented definition of fantasy but on the nineteenth-century's looser and perhaps intellectually less satisfactory understanding of fantasy literature as the stuff with magic and fairies and impossible occurrences in it. To say that a work or idea was "fantastic" was to dismiss it as unrealistic and therefore as unworthy of the time or consideration of a truly rational, scientific, progressive inheritor of the Enlightenment.³ Fantasy belonged to the Renaissance with its quaint superstitions. Regrettably, it had lingered for the previous century among the less refined classes in chapbooks and imported fairy tales, and was now impertinently making a new appearance in the works of those suspect practitioners of the new school of poetry that took its impetus from (of all places) the Lake District. Most readers of taste didn't read it. Besides, the vast majority of the fairy tales which had been finding their way into nurseries and adult bookshelves over the last century were French, and to those upper class readers who had kept a wary eye on the Reign of Terror and the subsequent rise of Napoleon, anything French was probably bad. It was Madame d'Aulnoy's Contes des fées, translated into English in 1699 as Tales of the Fairys, whose immense popularity gave the fairy tale genre its name. In 1729 the first English translation of Charles Perrault's Contes du temps passé appeared in London as Histories, or Tales of Past Times, By M Perrault. It was Madame Leprince de Beaumont who came to England in 1745 and included French fairy tales in her popular Magasin des enfans, ou dialogues entre une sage Gouvernante et plusieurs de ses Élèves. Beaumont's Magasin was first published in French in London in 1756 and then translated as The Young Misses Magazine in 1761.⁴ As late as the 1860s English critics still routinely associated French literature with both fantasy and their own fears of an English revolution, as is apparent from contemporary reviews of the English sensation novels which enjoyed immense popularity during this decade.⁵

Because the word "fantasy" could be used to suggest backwardness and irrationality as well as to convey a sense of political unpopularity it became a useful pejorative in the hands of critics like Francis Jeffrey, editor of The Edinburgh Review. Early nineteenth century reviewers loved to engage in partisan politics, and their reactions to the literature of the day were often little more than excuses to launch attacks on Whig or Tory ideologies. Nice literary definitions were not their business, and they tended to use literary terms rather casually, relying on their commonly accepted sense. When the liberal Jeffrey wants to attack Wordsworth in 1808, after Wordsworth has become a Tory, he does so by trying to embarrass him in his new conservative stance by applying an eighteenth-century standard of verisimilitude to his work, adherence to this standard being a Tory trademark. Ever since the first edition of Johnson's Dictionary was published in 1755, and various grammars began to make their appearance throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, a sharp political division concerning the uses of literary and spoken language was recognized and adhered to by most conservative educated readers. It was believed by universal grammarians like James Harris and Lord Monboddo that there was a one-to-one relationship between a word and the thing it describes, and that therefore the kind of language a person used directly revealed his mind, character, and morals. Abstract words were better than concrete, material words and particles were considered "the glory of grammatical art." To use abstractions and particles was to demonstrate that one's mind was not polluted with base, material passions but was elevated to the realms of pure reason. Abstractions were considered closer to the eternal truths and "facts" of existence. The baser language of the mercantile people, according to Johnson, was "in a great measure casual and mutable" and "therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation." Most grammarians believed that peasants used too much fancy; they made up words to suit the expediency of the moment, words which varied from region to region. It was abstract references to universal truth and one-to-one correspondence with Reality which was supposed to infuse the language of the upper classes. This belief was still adhered to by early nineteenth-century conservatives, although their Whig counterparts became more willing to use the common, concrete language that Wordsworth's early Romantic poems made fashionable in more liberal circles. Not even the most liberal Whigs, however, went much beyond the language of early Wordsworthian nature Romanticism. The hard core fantasy poems of Shelley and Keats were not acceptable.⁶

Jeffrey's use of vague phrases like "real life" and "eternal and universal standard of truth" are clearly intended to stand in for rather complex Enlightenment aesthetic ideas. When he complains at length that Wordsworth's work is too "fantastic," he means, like most of his contemporaries, that it is too "unbelievable."⁷ The word "fantastic" is used pejoratively three times:

We allude now to the Wordsworths, and the Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious fraternity, that, with good intentions, and extraordinary talents, are labouring to bring back our poetry to the fantastical [my emphasis] oddity and puling childishness of Withers, Quarles, or Marvel. . . . Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are, and as they must appear to every one who will take the trouble of examining into their condition. . . . The gentlemen of the new school, on the other hand, scarcely ever condescend to take their subjects from any description of persons at all known to the common inhabitants of the world; but invent for themselves certain whimsical and unheard-of beings, to whom they impute some fantastical [my emphasis] combination of feelings, and then labour to excite our sympathy for them, either by placing them in incredible situations, or by some strained and exaggerated moralisation of a vague and tragical description. Mr. Crabbe, in short, shows us something which we have all seen, or may see, in real life. .. . He delights us by the truth.⁸

Jeffrey takes it for granted that his readers will accept George Crabbe's realism as better than the invention of "whimsical and un-heard of beings"—as better than fantasy. What is truly odd about this review is that Jeffrey then includes a superfluous attack on Wordsworth's "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" as "fantastic." He writes of Wordsworth's poem:

Now we leave it to any reader of common candour and discernment to say, whether these subtle representations of character and sentiment are drawn from that eternal and universal standard of truth and nature . . . or whether they are not formed, as we have ventured to allege, upon certain fantastic [my emphasis] and affected peculiarities in the mind or fancy of the author, into which it is most improbable that many of his readers will enter.⁹

The speaker in "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" is an ordinary rural inhabitant who remembers making evening visits to his lover's cottage, a fairly common occupation in the country, one would think. In fact, he's so ordinary and rational that he's actually troubled by what he calls his "strange [my emphasis] fits of passion," choosing to reveal his experiences "But in the Lover's ear alone." He attempts to distance himself from his superstitious association of the sinking moon with Lucy's death by referring to his evening visits as "sweet dreams" and he half denies that his superstitious fears are even products of his own mind by exclaiming "What fond and wayward thoughts will slide / Into a Lover's head!"¹⁰ The speaker's apparent discomfort with his own thoughts when they tend toward mystical apprehensions makes it much easier to read him as a troubled rationalist than as a "whimsical and un-heard of being." Although Lucy herself is presented in this poem as a potentially mystical being, her status as such is only potential because we never get beyond the speaker's troubled perceptions, and it is precisely the speaker's trouble with his own perceptions which indicates that he privileges rationality. Such a speaker could give a reviewer like Jeffrey an excuse to praise the poem as "something which we have all seen, or may see, in real life" if he were inclined to do so. Yet if his goal is to attack Wordsworth's turncoat conservatism via a review of Crabbe's poems, it is both useful and convenient to dismiss Wordsworth's work as "fantastic" for it suggests all the aesthetic (and political) irrationality that Tories found distasteful. As a liberal, Jeffrey was hoping to call into question the purity of Wordsworth's newfound conservative stance.

Robert Southey's Thalaba, The Destroyer: A Metrical Romance was given similar treatment by the Edinburgh Review in an earlier article dated October 1802. The attack may well have been politically motivated; the reviewer applies a vague Enlightenment standard of "just imitations of nature" and by this time Southey's pantisocracy friends had long ago deplored his elitist tendencies. A few years earlier, Coleridge had been particularly aggrieved to learn that while Southey mouthed platitudes about an ideal, egalitarian society on the banks of the Susquehanna he insisted on wanting to bring servants along.¹¹ Yet unlike "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" Thalaba is indisputably a fantasy, and the reviewer has a field day deploring this fact. After a plot summary which serves as an excuse to mock Southey's use of magicians and magical items in his poem, the reviewer writes:

From this little sketch of the story, our readers will easily perceive, that it consists altogether of the most wild and extravagant fictions, and openly sets nature and probability at defiance. In its action it is not an imitation of any thing; and excludes all rational criticism, as to the choice and succession of its incidents . . . The pleasure afforded by performances of this sort, is very much akin to that which may be derived from the exhibition of a harlequin farce, where, instead of just imitations of nature and human character, we are entertained with the transformation of cauliflowers and beer-barrels, the apparation of ghosts and devils, and all the other magic of the wooden sword. Those who can prefer this eternal sorcery to the just and modest representation of human actions and passions, will probably take more delight in walking among the holly griffins and yew sphinxes of the city gardener, than in ranging among the groves and lawns which have been laid out by a hand that feared to violate nature.¹²

Tory reviewers would occasionally savage pieces they found politically objectionable by referring to them in the language of fantasy. The British Critic ran a series of scathing reviews of Byron's Don Juan from August 1819 to December 1823. The anonymous reviewer of Cantos VI-VIII sums up Byron's literary career by complaining that at one time "the friends of literature and virtue mourned over the occasional perversion of Lord Byron's splendid talents" but now Byron's "spell and mystery" had become "as stale and palpable as most other pieces of solemn charlatanerie." He then sums up Don Juan by saying that Byron had "bestrode the broken knee'd hobby-horse of Radicalism," sinking "from the dignity of Milton's fallen angel, to the vulgar horned and tailed devil of a puppet-show."¹³ Milton, of course, was one of the greatest fantasy writers who ever lived, yet he could get away with writing fantasy in part because he lived before the Age of Enlightenment when people were expected to be rational and in part because his works were heavily Protestant and easily lent themselves to domestication. For every politically threatening romantic who read Milton's Satan as a glorious rebellious anti-hero there were probably a dozen conservative Anglicans who attributed Satan's heroic qualities to his "fallen angel" status. It is therefore not surprising that the Anglican backed British Critic could attack Byron's literary and political radicalism with a demonic metaphor which is contrasted unfavorably to Milton's Satan. What is surprising is that the reviewer also uses a fantasy metaphor when he sarcastically refers to Byron's "spell and mystery," as a description of his literary career. His career is then accorded a special kind of "puppet-show" demonic status which is inferior to that of Milton's glorious creation, which, although unarguably fantastic, had the saving grace of being Christian in outlook. Byron's special status is surprising because one of the British Critic's leading Whig opponents, the Monthly Review, accorded a similar status to Shelley's Prometheus Unbound when its anonymous reviewer felt that the drama had gone beyond the pale of acceptability. The Monthly Review was normally inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to radical poets, but like Byron, Shelley had crossed the line of "occasional perversion" into an aggressively anti-Christian stance that no radical who wished to maintain a toehold on respectability would endorse. His drama was troubling because it went beyond the pseudo-daring domesticated references to classical mythology embraced by fashionable readers by creating its own mythology and its own parallel world. In this sense, Prometheus Unbound was truly a fantasy, but like the improbable but not fantastic Don Juan, it was accorded outsider status. If Byron's sentiments were devilish but unworthy of Milton's Satan, Shelley's were unChristian but unworthy of respectable heathenism:

There is an excess of fancy which rapidly degenerates into nonsense: if the sublime be closely allied to the ridiculous, the fanciful is twin-sister to the foolish; and really Mr. Shelley has worthily maintained the relationship. What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus? Greek plays, Mr. Shelley tells us in his preface, have been his study; and from them he has caught—what?—any thing but the tone and character of his story; which as little exhibits the distinct imaginations of the heathen mythology as it resembles the virtuous realities of the Christian faith. It is only nonsense, pure unmixed nonsense. .. . ¹⁴

Fantasy was suspect in all political quarters, and anything fantastic occupied a status outside of the standard binary oppositions of Reality/Art, God/Devil-Heathen, Tory/Whig. Yet, as I said earlier, most reviewers were more worried about political ideologies than aesthetics, and their anti-fantasy stances were usually never more than casual side notes, convenient ways to prolong an attack against an already objectionable piece. The brunt of the objection to fantasy literature came not from literary reviewers but from adherents to various Christian sects both within and without the Anglican Church. That Prometheus Unbound as a fantasy was considered anti-Christian apart from Shelley's own avowed atheism can be surmised from this later portion of the above review:

Where are the things, then, "not dreamt of in our philosophy?" The Prometheus Unbound' is amply stored with such things. First, there is a wicked supreme deity.—Secondly, there is a Demogorgon, superior, in process of time, to that supreme wickedness. Thirdly, there are nymphs, naids, nereids, spirits of flood and fell, depth and height, the four elements, and fifty-four imaginary places of creation and residence.—Now, to what does all this tend? To nothing, positively to nothing. . . . [Shelley's] Manichean absurdities, his eternally indwelling notion of a good and evil principle fighting like furies on all occasions with their whole posse comitatus together, cross his clearer fancy, and lay the buildings of his better mind in glittering gorgeous ruins. . . . The benevolent opposition of Prometheus to the oppressive and atrocious rule of Jupiter forms the main object, as far as it can be understood, of this generally unintelligible work; though some of it can be understood too plainly; and the passage beginning, 'A woful sight,' at page 49, and ending, 'It hath become a curse,' must be most offensive, as it too evidently seems to have been intended to be, to every sect of Christians.¹⁵

The furious reactions of Christians of all stripes to fantasy literature in particular and novels in general had a profound impact on educational institutions and ultimately on the academic critical treatment of literary genres. . . .

¹ Robert Southey, Quarterly Review, 4 (1810): 506-507.

² On the other hand, in the past fifteen years there has not only been an upsurge of popular interest in fantasy literature, but a burgeoning of scholarly attempts at defining it. The most notable attempts at definition are Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973); Colin Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (New York: Cambridge University, 1975); W.R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1976); Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University, 1976); Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (New York: Cambridge University, 1981); Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984); and Lance Olsen, Ellipses of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 26 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1987).

³ Thomas Hobbes had called imagination "decaying sense." Samuel Johnson defined the verb "to fancy" as "to believe without being able to prove" and the word "fantastick" as "irrational." See Dr. Johnson's Critical Vocabulary: A Selection From His Dictionary, ed. Richard L. Harp (New York: University Press of America, 1986) 83 and 84. The OED defines "fancy" as "an illusion of the senses, delusive imagination, hallucination" and "fantasy" as "the fact or habit of deluding onself by imaginary perceptions or reminiscences." See the compact edition, 1: 959 and 961. As one critic has recently written, there is a long tradition of fancy being defined as "an inferior version of experience that is at least once removed from reality." See Robert DeMaria, Jr., Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina, 1986) 101.

⁴ Many scholars have recounted the literary history of fairy tales in Great Britain. I have relied on Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) 17-31. Their account is handy, clear, and above all, concise.

⁵ Most reviewers objected to the subject matter of sensation novels, which were full of bigamy, murder, incest, and adultery, and blamed the French for providing literary models for such plots. For many reviewers, the worst artistic crime of the French models was their tendency to falsify life and deviate from the standards of realism by showing vice triumphant. Mrs. Oliphant made it clear that a good part of her objection to such novels stemmed from what she perceived as an unrealistic portrayal of British middle class life. She objected to sensation novels in which an "intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them . . . as the portrait of their own state of mind." She then praises Anthony Trollope's characters because "They live like the most of us. . . . They are like the honest English girls we know; and we cannot be sufficiently grateful to him for freeing us, so long as we are under his guidance, from that disgusting witch with her red or amber hair." See Mrs. Oliphant, "Novels," Blackwoods Magazine 102 (Sept. 1867): 265-80. Not only did sensation novels border on the edges of fantasy by stretching the conventions of realism, presenting "disgusting witches" who committed adultery instead of "honest English girls" who presumably didn't, to many reviewers these novels suggested populist movements in their insistence on breaking down class barriers. In many sensation novels servants achieve high social status and masters lose their station. Worse than fictional class mingling was the reality that people from all walks of life were reading them. "Unhappily, the sensational novel is that one touch of anything but nature that makes the kitchen and the drawing-room kin." See "Our Novels. The Sensational School," Temple Bar, 29 (July 1870): 424. For a discussion of the sensation novel's threat to social distinctions see Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University, 1980) 42-46 and for a discussion of contemporary objections to these novels as French and unrealistic see R. C. Terry, Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860-80 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1983) 58-63.

⁶ Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 1-34.I am indebted to Smith for the Johnson quotation as well.

⁷OED, Compact Edition, I, 961.

⁸ Francis Jeffrey, rev. of Crabbe's Poems, Edinburgh Review 12 (April 1808): 133.

⁹ Jeffrey 136.

¹⁰ William Wordsworth, "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. De Selincourt, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944) 2: 29.

¹¹ Hunter Davies, William Wordsworth: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1980) 82.

¹² Rev. of Thalaba, The Destroyer: A Metrical Romance, Edinburgh Review 1 (Oct 1802): 75-76.

¹³ From a review of Don Juan VI-VIII in The British Critic 20 (n.s.), (Aug 1823), qtd. in Theodore Redpath, ed., The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807-1824: Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats as Seen By Their Contemporary Critics (London: Harrap, 1973) 66-67.

¹⁴ Review of Prometheus Unbound, with other Poems, Monthly Review 94 (Feb 1821), Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 357.

¹⁵ Review of Prometheus Unbound, Monthly Review, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 358.