Abstract
In 1864, The Times suggested that ‘quiet sober people favoured Macmillan, and were a good deal puzzled and a little scandalized when The Water-Babies began to tumble about in it like so many porpoises’.3 The magazine’s publisher, Alexander Macmillan, saw his readers rather differently. Writing to Charles Kingsley in 1862, Macmillan told him that his ‘very quaint and choice piece of grotesquery’ would suit the magazine ‘admirably’, claiming that it would achieve a harmony in Macmillan’s impossible within Good Words.4 In fact, while Macmillan’s Magazine was associated for some with ‘a sort of douce sobriety’, finding The Water-Babies amid articles on science, philosophy and political economy was perhaps not quite the shock for readers that The Times reviewer claimed.5 In its first number, Macmillan’s styled itself as a successor to King Arthur’s Round Table. Like the Cornhill, which followed two months in its wake, it was fascinated with myth and fairy tale. In his first Cornhill ‘Roundabout Paper’, W. M. Thackeray invoked the Arabian Nights in defence of the magazine’s serialised novels.6 Readers of the Cornhill in the 1860s to 1870s, who turned to titles such as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, found curious short stories which questioned the boundaries between fantasy and realism.
There must be fairies, for this is a fairy tale; and how can one have a fairy-tale if there are no fairies?.1
Alas! there are no real fairies in stories such as mine.2
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Notes
Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1864), 2–9 and 207. Müller introduced the 1889 Macmillan edition of this text after Kingsley’s death, but also suggested in the preface that he would ‘gladly have altered or struck out whole lines’ in the ‘ethnological passages’.
On the influence of Darwin on theories of racial extinction, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 188–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
On Tylor’s reference to The Water-Babies in Primitive Culture, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 257; and J. A. V. Chapple, Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986), 140.
See Fraser’s, 78 (Sept. 1868), 353–62. In this later article, Greg discusses the possibility of a republic in which the poor are forbidden to reproduce. On Greg’s relationship to Darwinism, see Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Sussex: Harvester, 1980), 35–36.
See Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. John Burrow (London: Penguin 1985), 179, for the passage to which Howman refers.
For the full list of titles and dates, see George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 45. Rossetti’s wider contributions to Macmillan’s are discussed briefly by Alexis Easley in First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 168–67.
Rossetti’s twentieth-century appropriation in Playboy is discussed by Lorraine Kooistra Janzen in Christina Rossetti and Illustration (Athens: Ohio University Press), 240–47.
CM, 3 (Mar. 1861), 318–31. On Thackeray Ritchie’s later support for women’s suffrage, see Lillian F. Shankrnan, Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, ed. Abigail Burnham Bloom and John Maynard (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 168.
The assumption that Christian socialism was analogous with a call for either state intervention or later forms of socialism is misleading: see K. S. Inglis, The Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 262–71.
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© 2008 Caroline Sumpter
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Sumpter, C. (2008). Science and Superstition, Realism and Romance: Fairy Tale and Fantasy in the Adult Shilling Monthly. In: The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227644_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227644_4
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