Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature

This study of the Victorian fascination with fairies reveals their significance in Victorian art and literature. Nicola Bown explores what the fairy meant to the Victorians, and why they were so captivated by a figure which nowadays seems trivial and childish. She argues that fairies were a fantasy that allowed the Victorians to escape from their worries about science, technology and the effects of progress. The fairyland they dreamed about was a reconfiguration of their own world, and the fairies who inhabited it were like themselves.

Although fairies are now banished to the realm of childhood, these diminutive figures were central to the work of many Victorian painters, novelists, poets and even scientists. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Victorians were obsessed with fairies: yet this obsession has hitherto received little scholarly attention. Nicola Bown reminds us of the importance of fairies in Victorian culture. In the figure of the fairy, the Victorians crystallized contemporary anxieties about the effects of industrialization, the remoteness of the past, the value of culture and the way in which science threatened to undermine religion and spirituality. Above all, the fairy symbolized disenchantment with the irresistible forces of progress and modernity. As these forces stripped the world of its wonder, the Victorians consoled themselves by dreaming of a place and a people suffused with the enchantment that was disappearing from their own lives.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: small enchantments; 1. Fancies of fairies and spirits and nonsense; 2. Queen Mab among the steam engines; 3. A few fragments of fairyology, shewing its connection with natural history; 4. A broken heart and a pocket full of ashes; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Nicola Bown's study reminds us that for the Victorians the fairy symbolized disenchantment with the irresistible forces of progress and modernity. As these forces stripped their world of its wonder, Victorians consoled themselves by dreaming of a place suffused with the enchantment that was disappearing from their own lives.

Nicola Bown is a lecturer in the Department of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published articles in Textual Practice, Women: A Cultural Review, and the Journal of Victorian Culture, and worked for the Royal Academy on their Victorian Fairy Paintings show. This is her first book.