Abstract
As seen in the previous chapter, in the second half of the nineteenth century, fairy tales were increasingly seen as primitive stories of mankind, gnomes, elves and fays resulting from people’s unscientific or uneducated reading of the natural world. The rise of folktale scholarship, moreover, manifest in the multiple attempts at collecting and classifying folk and fairy tales in the nineteenth century, from Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries (1828) to Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology (1891) at the end of the century, more and more constructed the fairy tale as more or less a natural material: once collected and catalogued, the tales could be observed by folklorists and anthropologists, as if with a magnifying glass or a microscope. Such works also underlined how fairy tales reflected primitive people’s beliefs and interpretation of the natural world. Analyses of the fairy tale of this type influenced children’s literature as well. In many mid-century children’s magazines, such as Margaret Gatty’s Aunt Judy’s Magazine or Charlotte Yonge’s The Monthly Packet, the connection between fairy tales and natural phenomena was often stressed, not simply providing children with rational explanations for natural processes that were believed to be supernatural, as seen with the example of Samuel Clark’s Peter Parley’s Wonders of Earth, Sea, and Sky (n.d.), but also explaining to children what led primitive peoples to create such fairy stories, as the following article highlights:
Perhaps all these stories originally sprang from an allegorical way of describing the actions of nature… Of those which are most clearly what are called nature-myths, we may mention Thorn-rose (or, as it is often called in English, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’), which simply arises from an allegory of the Spring kissing the Earth into new life.3
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Notes
Arabella Burton Buckley, Life and Her Children (New York: D. Appleton & Co., (1880) 1881), p. 77.
Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860), p. 225.
[Anon], ‘Fairy Tales’, Monthly Packet 25 (Jan. 1878), pp. 80–94 (93). See also Rev. S. Goldney, ‘Fables and Fairy Tales’, Aunt Judy’s Annual Volume (London: Hatchards, 1885), pp. 20–32.
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. viii.
Secord coined the term ‘commercial science’ to define Victorian popular science as it partook of the commercial culture of exhibition in the early nineteenth century. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Deception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 437, qtd in Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, p. 10.
Alan Rauch, ‘Mentoria: Women, Children, and the Structures of Science’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27.4 (Dec. 2005), pp. 335–51 (335–6).
Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’, Children’s Literature 14 (1986), pp. 31–59 (33).
Bernard Lightman, ‘Depicting Nature, Defining Roles: The Gender Politics of Victorian Illustration’, in Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman (eds), Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2006), pp. 214–39 (219).
Arabella Burton Buckley, The Fairy-Land of Science (Chapel Hill: Yesterday’s Classics, (1879) 2006), pp. 1–5.
Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 33–4.
The colour pictures (printed by means of wood engraving by Edmund Evans) were accompanied by a verse text by William Allingham in In Fairy Land (1870) and later pre-issued with a new story by Andrew Lang under the title ‘The Princess Nobody’.
This was not always the case among children’s writers. A case in point here might be Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841–85), Mrs Gatty’s daughter, both writer and naturalist, whose literary fairy tales drew upon folklore. See, for instance, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, (1882) 1894).
Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 53.
John Tyndall, ‘Scientific Use of the Imagination’, Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1871), pp. 125–67 (129).
[James Hinton], ‘The Fairy Land of Science’, Cornhill Magazine 5 (Jan.-June 1862), pp. 36–42 (37).
Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 100. Bown explains how Hinton’s definition of mid-Victorian science and its power to open up to higher mysteries resonates with Kantian metaphysics, perhaps linked to his reading of Hans Christian Oersted’s The Soul in Nature (translated into English in 1852). Oersted’s The Soul in Nature defined the world as a unity of opposing forces, drawing links between the universe and the human mind.
Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 66.
Arabella Burton Buckley, Winners in Life’s Race or the Great Backboned Family (London: Edward Stanford, (1883) 1892), pp. 351–3.
Arabella Burton Buckley, Moral Teachings of Science (London: Edward Stanford, 1891), p. 46.
This is highlighted in her essay ‘The Soul, and the Theory of Evolution’, which was written while Buckley was writing her Fairy-Land of Science, and in which she looks at different types of spiritualism through the lens of evolutionary theory; Arabella Burton Buckley, ‘The Soul, and the Theory of Evolution’, University Magazine 3 (1879), pp. 1–10.
Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology (London: Walter Scott, 1891), p. 23.
Srdjan Smajic, Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 175.
Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 326, qtd in Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 51.
Gates, Kindred Nature, p. 61. Ecology was, historically, closely related to Darwinism: the word, coined by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (18341919) in his Generelle Morphologie in 1866, aimed to forward the cause of Darwinism. Indeed, Haeckel defined the new science as ‘the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact’, and foregrounded ‘the complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions for the struggle for existence’. Translation by W. C. Allee et al., Principles of Animal Ecology, qtd by Robert C. Stauffer, ‘Haeckel, Darwin, and Ecology’, Quarterly Review of Biology 32 (1957), pp. 138–44 (141). For more on the links between ecology and Darwinian evolutionary theory see Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imaging and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 22.
Edmund Gosse, The Naturalist of the Sea-shore, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (London, (1890) 1896), pp. 264–96, qtd in William H. Brock, Science for All: Studies in the History of Victorian Science and Education (Aldershot: Varorium, 1996), p. 29.
See, for instance, Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Our Field’ (1870), A Great Emergency and Other Tales (London: George Bell & Sons, 1877), pp. 225–43; Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Victorian Children’s Literature and the Natural World: Parables, Fairy Tales and the Construction of “Moral Ecology” ‘, in Jennifer Harding, Elizabeth Thiel and Alison Waller (eds), Deep into Nature: Ecology, Environment and Children’s Literature (Lichfield: Pied Piper Publishing, 2009), pp. 222–47.
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Talairach-Vielmas, L. (2014). ‘How Are You to Enter the Fairy-Land of Science?’: The Wonders of the Natural World in Arabella Buckley’s Popular Science Works for Children. In: Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342409_3
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