Genres: Fantasy
But the struggle between instruction and delight was at its fiercest in fantasy. Throughout the nineteenth century, fantasy wavered between the didactic and the subversive – sometimes even in the same text. Sinclair’s “Uncle David’s Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies,” for instance, an interpolated tale in Holiday House, preaches industry and temperance while slyly undercutting its own earnestness. Similarly, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), lampoons didacticism through parody and associates instruction with savagery, yet the novel begins and ends on a sentimental note, drawing the reader’s attention to the sanctity of childhood as a hallowed destination for “pilgrim[s],” as the introductory poem puts it.
As Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn (2016) – among others – observe, fairy tales, which initially addressed a multigenerational audience, were appropriated as children’s literature from the mid eighteenth century forward; The Governess is one of many early texts to incorporate literary fairy tales for didactic purposes. (Fielding instructs readers in reading fantasy not “to let the Notion of Giants or Magic dwell upon your Minds; for by a Giant is meant no more than a Man of great Power; and the magic Fillet round the Head of the Statue was only intended to teach you, that by the Assistance of Patience you may overcome all Difficulties” [2005, p. 86].) Traditional and literary fairy tales were used to teach lessons from teetotalism, as in George Cruikshank’s 1854 Fairy Library, to environmentalism, as in John Ruskin’s 1850 The King of the Golden River, to Christian Darwinism, as in Charles Kingsley’s 1863 The Water-Babies and George MacDonald’s 1883 The Princess and Curdie. Simultaneously, such texts often implicitly critique Victorian society; when at the end of The Princess and Curdie the city of Gwyntystorm falls into the abyss, victim of its citizens’ lust for gold, the warning for readers is clear. Significantly, MacDonald is chastising adults, not the child reader. Such moments make didacticism’s subversive potential apparent in a way that some eighteenth-century children’s writers would certainly have disapproved of.
Spurred by an awareness of the flaws of the adult world, some Golden Age writers were drawn to fantasy as a place where they could not merely commune with children but temporarily become honorary children themselves, a state implicitly deemed superior to adulthood. Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Ruskin, and Kenneth Grahame have all struck biographers as men who found the demands of adult life (particularly adult sexuality) difficult, while Nesbit has been portrayed as a kind of permanent girl, partly because she sometimes makes cameo appearances in this guise in her children’s fiction. Yet Golden Age fantasy is by no means exclusively escapist – or, for that matter, exclusively aimed at children. As with other genres of its moment, its readiness to engage, in ways both humorous and trenchant, with significant questions and social controversies from child labor (The Water-Babies) to woman suffrage (The Marvellous Land of Oz) tells us much about the era’s understanding of children and adults alike.
REFERENCES
1 Alcott, L.M. (2001). Little Women (ed. A.H. Alton). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press (originally published 1868–1869).
2 Avery, G. (1994). Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
3 Chen, S. (2013). Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
4 D’Amico, L. (2017). Finding God’s way: Amelia E. Johnson’s Clarence and Corrine [sic] as a path to religious resistance for African American children. In: Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900 (ed. K. Capshaw and A.M. Duane), 182–200. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5 Darton, F.J.H. (2011). Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (originally published 1932).
6 Decker, M. (2017). From bad boys to good managers: Twain, Aldrich, and the creation of a middle-class ideal. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 42 (3): 267–284.
7 Dixon, D. (1986). From instruction to amusement: Attitudes of authority in children’s periodicals before 1914. Victorian Periodicals Review 19: 63–67.
8 Fielding, S. (2005). The Governess, or, The Little Female Academy (ed. C. Ward). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press (originally published 1749).
9 Flegel, M. (2016). Everything I wanted to know about sex I learned from my cat: Animal stories, working-class “life troubles,” and the child reader in Victorian England. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 41 (2): 121–141.
10 Fleming, P.C. (2016). The Legacy of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature and the English Novel, 1744–1859. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
11 Goody Two-Shoes: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1766 (1881). London: Griffith & Farran.
12 Grenby, M.O. (2007). Chapbooks, children, and children’s literature. The Library 8 (3): 277–303.
13 Gubar, M. (2009). Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
14 Holt, J. (2008). Public School Literature, Civic Education,and the Politics of Male Adolescence. Burlington: Ashgate.
15 Kim, S. and Nelson, C. (2018). Navigating between home and empire: Mobility and male friendship in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Three Midshipmen. Children’s Literature in Education 49 (3): 323–337.
16 Levy, M. and Mendlesohn, F. (2016). Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
17 Olson, M. (2000). Turn-of-the-century grotesque: The Uptons’ Golliwogg and dolls in context. Children’s Literature 28: 73–94.
18 Sanders, J.S. (2011). Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
19 Smith, V.F. (2017). Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
20 Speicher, A. (2017). The school of one scholar: Schoolmistress-schoolboy romance in the nineteenth-century school story. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 42 (1): 3–20.
21 Traill, C.P. (1826). The Young Emigrants, Or, Pictures of Canada, Calculated to Amuse and Instruct the Minds of Youth. London: Harvey and Darton.
22 Welsh, C. (1881). Introduction to Goody Two-Shoes: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1766. London: Griffith & Farran.
23 Wheeler, E.L. (2019). Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road, Or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills. Levelland, TX: Laughing Dogs Press (originally published 1877).
24 Wolff, R.L. (1975). Some erring children in children’s literature: The world of Victorian religious strife in miniature. In: The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (ed. J.H. Buckley), 295–318. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
25 Yonge, C.M. (1896). Countess Kate and The Stokesley Secret. London: A.D. Innes and Co.
FURTHER READING
1 Bratton, J.S. (1981). The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. London: Croom Helm.
2 Drotner, K. (1988). English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–1945.