Notes Introduction 1. See Lyn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820–1870 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1980), pp. 13–14. 2. Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1. 3. Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature,p.2. 4. Andrew Lang, ‘Introduction’, The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), qtd in Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 186. 5. There are three main anthologies of Victorian fairy tales: Jack Zipes (ed.), Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (London: Routledge, 1987); Michael Patrick Hearn (ed.), The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); and Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds), Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 6. Criticisms of industrialism and the mechanical age were often conveyed through the fairy-tale language. Examples might be Thomas Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review 49 (1829), pp. 439–59), Charles Dickens’s articles and novels, as well as essays that were published in Household Words in the 1850s, such as [W. H. Wills and George A. Sala], ‘Fairyland in ’fifty-four’, Household Words 193 (3 Dec. 1853), pp. 313–17. Bown also connects winged fairies with mod- ern inventions, such as the air balloon; Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, p. 48. 7. John V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 11. 8. Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 6. 9. Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 3. 10. Though Victorian fairy painting was not a movement in itself, its golden age was between 1840 and 1870; after 1870, fairies mainly appeared in children’s literature and illustrations, in particular those of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2000), p. 11. 11. Most popular science books were aimed at women and children as I argue in Chapter 1. The issue of readership is more complex for the fairy tales and fantasies I analyse which were published in the Cornhill Magazine and the Strand Magazine. 163 164 Notes, pp. 6–15 12. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-Enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 22; Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1983) 2000); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1988) 1991). 13. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (eds), Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. xix. Although Knoepflmacher and Tennyson argue that the imagination of Victorian artists and men of science never fully coalesced, artists using science yet expressing their ambivalence, particularly regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution, their collection hardly looks at nature seen through the prism of natural history. Knoepflmacher and Tennyson mention Alfred Tennyson (who, in In Memoriam (1850), uses Charles Lyell’s geol- ogy, but expresses doubts in 1868 regarding the implications of the theory of evolution as regards Christianity) and George Eliot’s portrait of Lydgate in Middlemarch (1871–2). 14. Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, p. 135. 15. Merrill, Romance of Victorian Natural History, p. 95. 16. Barber, Heyday of Natural History,p.19. 17. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1976) 1994), p. 65. 18. Bernard Lightman, ‘ “The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian Sci- ence’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 187–211 (198). 19. See, for instance, Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘old-fashioned’ fairy tales, such as ‘The Neck’, ‘Kind William and the Water Sprite’ or ‘The Fiddler and the Fairy Ring’; Juliana Horatia Ewing, Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, (1882) 1894). I will argue later on that Ewing’s fairy tales are closer to folktales, hence their natural setting. 20. See Jack Zipes’s introduction to Victorian Fairy Tales. 21. See Nicola Bown’s analysis of Edward Hopley’s Puck and a Moth (Pre- Raffaelite Version) (1854); Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, pp. 41–3. 22. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23. Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone; or, new walks in an old field (Edinburgh: John Johnston, 1841), pp. 222–3, qtd in Silver, Strange and Secret Peo- ples, p. 34. 24. Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, p. 85. 25. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, p. 209. 1 From the Wonders of Nature to the Wonders of Evolution: Charles Kingsley’s Nursery Fairies 1. Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860), pp. 271–2. Notes, pp. 16–19 165 2. Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 13. Gosse’s book was originally entitled The Poetry of Natural History. 3. Gosse, Romance of Natural History,p.v. 4. Gosse, Romance of Natural History,p.9. 5. Gosse, Romance of Natural History,p.5. 6. Gosse, Romance of Natural History,p.6. 7. Zoologist, p. 3650, qtd in Gosse, Romance of Natural History, pp. 24–5. 8. Zoologist, p. 6621, qtd in Gosse, Romance of Natural History, p. 190. 9. Merrill, Romance of Victorian Natural History, p. 15. 10. Gosse, Romance of Natural History, p. 42. 11. Gosse, Romance of Natural History, p. 187. 12. Fairy painting drew heavily upon Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, two plays which particularly emphasized the way fairies were related to nature and the forces of nature (Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2000), p. 13). In addition to Fuseli and Blake, Carole G. Silver men- tions David Scott’s Puck Fleeing Before the Dawn (1837), Richard Dadd’s Puck, Robert Huskisson’s The Midsummer Night’s Fairies, Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s Oberon Watching a Mermaid (1883), Edwin Landseer’s Titania and Bottom and John Simmons’s oil paintings and watercolours of Titania as major fairy paintings derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.John Stothard, Francis Danby, Henry Thomason or Joseph Severn contributed Shakespearian fairy paintings as well (Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 19–20, 215). Victorian fairy painting changed after 1850, freeing itself from literary influences. 13. Gosse, Romance of Natural History,p.9. 14. Fairies peopled the ‘fairy’ poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley, or darker and more supernatural tales by Sir Walter Scott or James Hogg. Blake even claimed he had witnessed a fairy’s funeral. Far more than proposing an expedition to discover the mysteries of the natural world, however, Blake’s work suggests rather ‘traditional associations of fairies, sexuality, and the fertile earth’ (Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, p. 26). 15. The microscopic quality of Victorian fairy painting is most exemplified by Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke (1855–64). The paint- ing presents an unknown territory, and its variations on the fairies’ size construct the little people as a new species to be catalogued. Moreover, the fairies merge with the natural world, the grass in the foreground giving the viewers the impression that the painter’s brush has provided them access to an invisible universe, as if seen through a microscope: among fairies, elves and gnomes of different sizes, a dragonfly plays the trumpet, a gnat acts as coachman. Aligned with insects, the little people’s diversity is evaluated as if by a naturalist. Though many will argue that Victorian fairy paintings, like Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke and its play with various sizes, entail a dream-like atmosphere, 166 Notes, p. 19 their sometimes disorientating effect is nevertheless in keeping with the politics of observation of the time. As Merrill argues, the use of the microscope in Victorian England was likely to produce ‘a disoriented sense of fragmentation ...a loss of unity ...Too many details signal a fail- ure of meaning, a collapse of unity, the death of hope’ (Merrill, Romance of Victorian Natural History, p. 123). This dark aspect of the Victorians’ obsession with microscopic vision permeates Dadd’s fairy paintings, perhaps to suggest the tensions brought about by scientific develop- ment and its dangers, while simultaneously playing upon the nostalgia for a lost natural world threatened by extinction because of pollution and massive urbanization. Indeed, it is significant to note here that Victorian fairy painting illustrates how Victorian art in general could mediate between scientific and popular culture. Natural history illus- trations in popular science books and paintings uncannily echoed one another, and undoubtedly showed the interchange between science and art throughout the period: the painters linked to fairy painting looked at nature not so much with an artistic eye but with a scientific eye, offer- ing a microscopic realism and scientific accuracy in their depiction of fairy lands. Natural historians’ highly visual prose appealed to Victorian artists eager to experiment with perspective and to take their viewers into invisible realms beyond the reach of human perception.