Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137342409
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.

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From the Wonders of Nature to the Wonders of Evolution: Charles Kingsley’s Nursery Fairies

The romance of natural history

The charm lay here, that it was unknown: the imagination can people the unexplored with whatever forms of beauty or interest it pleases … One of the greatest pleasures of the out-of-door naturalist depends upon this principle. There is so great variety in the objects which he pursues, and so much uncertainty in their presence at any given time and place, that hope is ever on the stretch. He makes his excursions not knowing what he may meet with; and, if disappointed of what he had pictured to himself, he is pretty sure to be surprised with something or other of interest that he had not anticipated. And much more does the romance of the unknown prevail to the natural history collector in a new and unexplored country.¹

As Philip Henry Gosse highlights, surprise, wonder and expectation partake of the Victorian naturalist’s work as he discovers terra incognita and unknown species – even in England. The naturalist’s quest, close to that of the knight of romance, seems to inhabit a fantastic world where magical spells may be cast at any time. Gosse’s Romance of Natural History (1860) makes explicit how, as unknown natural specimens were discovered in England, brought back from foreign countries, or even revealed by the microscope, nature constantly flirted with the impossible and the marvellous. His popular science book epitomizes how naturalists and natural history writings emphasized the endless possibilities and bizarre forms of nature, clothing the natural world with wonderful and fanciful garbs paradoxically as naturalists and scientists unveiled its secrets. As this book will underline, the rhetoric and images of Victorian natural history permeated Victorian culture, and Philip Henry Gosse’s Romance of Natural History is a significant case in point to start our survey of the narratives that popularizers of natural history were offering readers at the time. The title of Gosse’s book makes explicit how natural history was seen as fraught with imaginative potential, nature looking like ‘the enchanted imaginings of an author in a medieval romance’, in Lynn Merrill’s terms.² This imaginative way of looking and defining the natural world, I argue, paved the way for powerful connections between natural history and fairy stories which particularly developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, even if they had long been part of discourses on nature and had especially been used by popularizers and children’s educators in the early nineteenth century. In his preface, Gosse contrasts several ways of studying natural history: learning facts, ‘statistics as harsh and dry as the skins and bones in the museum where it is studied’, in Dr. Dryasdust’s way, observing nature, ‘statistics as fresh and bright as the forest or meadow where there are gathered in the dewy morning’, or looking at nature through an aesthetic glass, ‘with the emotions of the human mind, – surprise, wonder, terror, revulsion, admiration, love, desire, and so forth’.³ Choosing the aesthetic lens, Gosse proposes to his readers a journey as romantic as a poem by Wordsworth.⁴ Nature becomes animated, vibrant with a mysterious energy. Gosse’s description of nature teems with personifications: the newts ‘have donned their vernal attire, and appear veritable holiday beaux, arrayed in the pomp of ruffled shirt and scarlet waistcoat’; creatures are ‘willing’, ‘cheerful’,⁵ or ‘lovely’ and have ‘laughing blue eyes’,⁶ like the germander speedwell.

Gosse’s sensational style is a significant instance of the ways in which science popularizers attempted to make the world of nature more appealing. His narrative transforms a natural history lesson into an expedition into unknown lands, following in the footsteps of famous entomologists such as William Kirby (1759–1850), travel writers like Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799–1861), naturalists like Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) and Charles Darwin (1809–82), or explorers, such as David Livingstone (1813–73). Homely England becomes an exotic land hosting natural mysteries and rare species where the amateur naturalist can assert his national pride through capturing, say, a swallow-tail moth:

We come back from scenes so gorgeous, to quiet, homely England. How pleasant to the schoolboy, just infected with the entomological mania, is an evening hour in June devoted to ‘mothing!’ An hour before sunset he had been seen mysteriously to leave him, carrying a cup filled with a mixture of beer and treacle. With this he had bent his steps to the edge of a wood, and with a painter’s brush had bedaubed the trunks of several large trees, much to the bewilderment of the woodman and his dog. Now the sun is going down like a glowing coal behind the hill, and the youthful savant again seeks the scene of his labours, armed with insect-net, pillboxes, and a bull’s-eye lantern. He pauses in the high-hedged lane, for the bats are evidently playing a successful game here, and the tiny gray moths are fluttering in and out of the hedge by scores. Watchfully now he holds the net; there is one whose hue betokens a prize. Dash! – Yes! it is in the muslin bag; and, on holding it up against the western sky, he sees he has got one of the most beautiful small moths – the ‘butterfly emerald’. Yonder is a white form dancing backward and forward with regular oscillation in the space of a yard, close over the herbage. That must be the ‘ghostmoth’, surely! – the very same; and this is secured. Presently there comes rushing down the lane, with headlong speed, one far larger than the common set, and visible from afar by its whiteness. Prepare! Now strike! This prize, too, is won – the ‘swallow-tail moth’, a cream-coloured species, the noblest and most elegant of its tribe Britain can boast.⁷

Suspense, exclamations, imperative forms give pace to the prose, keeping the reader alert – or on the watch. We follow the naturalist through his expedition into the natural world; we vicariously experience his excitement; we discover the creatures as he notices them. The strange-looking insects become exotic specimens which must yield to the Western amateur scientist, as the reader experiences Wallace’s ‘delight’ and the ‘blood rush[ing] to [his] head’,⁸ for instance, when he encounters a grand new Ornithoptera in one of the isles on the eastern part of the Malay Archipelago.

Gosse’s writing, at times violent and gothic, is ‘atmospheric’.⁹ Indeed, the prose becomes even darker when the narrator encounters a hyena, an ‘obscene monster’ whose ‘demon[iac]’ laugh – ‘an unearthly sound’ – rises above ‘the gaunt heaps of stone’. Another soon appears, bearing in its jaws a human skull, and cracking and grinding the bones in its teeth.¹⁰ In contrast, the romantic experience of Mr Thomas, the Bird-keeper at the Surrey Zoological Gardens, looks more like a fairy tale:

By sunset he found himself many miles from London, in a field in which the newmade hay was ready for carrying. No human being was near, and so he threw two of the haycocks into one, at the edge of a wood, and ‘mole-like, burrowed into the middle of the hay’, just leaving his head exposed for a little fresh air, and free for any observations he might make under the light of the unclouded moon. In such a soft, warm, and fragrant bed, sleep soon overcame him, till he awoke with a confused idea of elves, sprites, fairies and pixies, holding their midnight dances around him.

It is the pastoral and romantic vision of nature here that conjures up the little people. Thomas’s observation of the fern-owls, ‘suddenly appear[ing] close to [him], as if by magic, and then shoot[ing] off, like meteors passing through the air’, furthers the parallels with the fairy tale:

The spectral and owl-like appearance, the noiseless wheeling flight of the birds as they darted by, would almost persuade one that he was on enchanted ground. Spell-bound, whilst witnessing the grotesque gambols of this singular bird, there only wanted Puck, with his elfin crew, attendant fairies, &c., in connexion with the aerial flights of the fern-owl, to have made it, as it was to me, a tolerably complete ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, especially as my night-haunted imagination had not yet vanished. As it was, I was delighted with my nocturnal and beautiful scene from nature, and I wished at the time that some of our museum naturalists had been with me, to have shared the pleasure that I felt.¹¹

The naturalist frames the natural world; his ‘scene from nature’ becomes a tableau vivant arousing the man’s senses and turning him into a spectator the better to dramatize the landscape and its inhabitants. The reference to Shakespearian fairies is typically romantic and is strongly reminiscent of fairy painting, from Henry Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom (c.1788–90) and William Blake’s Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c.1786), to Victorian paintings, such as John Anster Fitzgerald’s Titania and Bottom and Daniel Maclise’s Priscilla Horton as Ariel (1838–9).¹² Moreover, Gosse’s attempt at drawing parallels between humans’ feelings and nature, as when sadness is experienced at the sight of autumn, ‘in the decrepitude of age, and … verging towards death’,¹³ or hope in spring, strengthens a romantic construction of the natural world directly inspired by Blake’s, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Queen Mabs and pixies.¹⁴ As shall be seen, however, with the advent of evolutionary theory, such a romantic construction of the natural world was remorphed little by little, popularizers using fairies not just to foregound the wonders of nature but also to tone down tensions and present to their audiences new scientific methods. The microscopic world of fairies that Victorian fairy painters and poets offered their readers,¹⁵ the very same world that Gosse resurrects through his romantic prose, gradually turned into an invisible world that demanded imaginary reconstruction. Although the rhetoric of natural history remained loaded with affect and its language colourful, constantly aestheticizing or even sometimes sensationalizing nature, fairies came to embody polyvalent meanings, as we shall see.

Indeed, if fairies and fairy tales were frequently used throughout the Victorian period to focus on the wonders of nature or of science, they also aimed to express doubt and anxieties related to the implications of scientific knowledge. Before the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the issue of extinction sometimes informed popular science books, a practice that often pointed to the popularizers’ difficulties in explaining natural history without undermining revealed religion. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the idea that the theory of evolution was something impossible to see, demanding therefore to be conceived through the use of the imagination and certainly not empirically verifiable, made the task of popularizers even more difficult. In the second half of the nineteenth century, fairies, connoting both ‘the marvels and difficulties of science’,¹⁶ in Nicola Bown’s terms, were often to be found whenever popularizers aimed to introduce their readers to the latest scientific developments and conceptions of the natural world. Because the latest scientific discoveries – and especially, of course, evolutionary theory – touched on the foundations of religious belief, their implications were to permeate Victorian culture, and were refracted in such popular science works. If science appeared to disenchant the world, scientists increasingly explaining away the mysteries of natural phenomena,¹⁷ Victorian popularizers played a key part in presenting the natural world as enchanting and entrancing: although the wonders of science could account for the mysteries of nature, nature nonetheless remained a fairyland, and the explanatory power of (evolutionary) science, suggesting, for instance, that transformations of all kinds were always possible, could appear magical. Thus, beneath this contradictory construction of fairies and Fairyland one may discern not just the Victorians’ ambivalence towards science but also the way science seemed to desecrate the world, robbing religion of its aura – or, worse, undermining religious faith itself.

As this chapter and the following underline, fairies entered popular science works, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century,¹⁸ as a substitute for God, recalling that, although scientists may attempt to explain nature away, nature retained some of its mysteries. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century fairies typically inhabited science books for women and children (both groups being audiences for which elementary science books were destined). In most of these books the magic and wonders of Fairyland rewrote the wonders of creation. Early science books for children had already called attention to the wonders of the natural world and highlighted its magical dimensions. Samuel Clark’s Peter Parley’s Wonders of Earth, Sea, and Sky (1837) or A. L. O. E.’s [C. M. Tucker’s] Fairy Know-A-Bit, or a Nutshell of Knowledge (1866)) are significant examples. Peter Parley’s Wonders of Earth, Sea, and Sky is punctuated with natural wonders or wonderful natural mechanisms and uses fairies and the marvellous in order to give a divine dimension to natural creations. The world of fancy is repressed through the presence of rational explanations for mysterious processes or appearances, however, as in the explanation of Aurora borealis, Ignes Fatui (Will-o’-the-Wisps), the ‘spectre of the Brocken’ and Fata Morgana (or Fairy Illusion).¹⁹ In the last case, only, does the narrator equate the natural phenomenon with a fairy tale: ‘The scene must look as wonderful as any thing you have read about in a fairy tale.’²⁰ Peter Parley merely deals with facts, making explicit that science is poles apart from the supernatural, the marvellous or the world of fancy, as when he describes Mary Anning’s recent palæontological discoveries and advises his readers to visit the British Museum to see such specimens:

I will show you a picture of what creatures were once living where the town of Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, now stands, and tell you something about their structure and their habits. You may perhaps be ready to think that a great deal of what we profess to know concerning them, is the work of fancy, but I can assure you that it is not, and by and by I will endeavour to convince you that there is reason enough for you to believe what I tell you.²¹

In fact, as we will see throughout this book, the meaning of fairies and Fairyland changed as anthropology started to examine folklore through an evolutionary lens: fairies increasingly fuelled scientific discourse as vehicles of a much more ambivalent discourse.²² Books such as Rev. J. G. Wood’s Common Objects of the Country (1858), the Kirby Sisters’ works or Annie Carey’s The Wonders of Common Things (1880) all draw parallels between the natural wor...