This talk and this line of thought comes out of a paper I heard at a conference called
IBI.
And I can never remember what IBI stands for, but it's a conference of children's books
that happens in Roehampton every year.
And a few years ago, this guy whose name I can't remember, I'm embarrassed about that,
but never mind, gave this paper in which he talked about how children's fantasy represented
the distinct growing stages of the child.
And I'm sitting there thinking, that only works for boys.
All his stages involved being put into short trousers, being made to give up your teddy
bears, being made to go to school.
It was a very masculine approach to the child's trajectory.
And that started the line of thought, which then when I started working on the book with
Mike Levy, who used to be president of the IFA, led to me thinking that I noticed that
while male writers of the interwar period, and interwar is 1918 to 1939, so that apparently
is not a phrase meaningful to many Americans, but anyway, seemed to see the outdoors as
a locus for the fantastic.
And with it a sense of release from the confines of the polite world, female writers seemed
to keep their fantasy much closer to home.
And I went into my reading of Victorian fantasy with this idea, which turned out to be mostly
wrong.
I love it when my ideas are wrong.
And for most of the past three months, I've been doing almost nothing except reading Victorian
children's fantasy.
But thinking in these terms of the landscape of the fantastic, I did start to notice a
particular pattern in these early books, which I don't think is true of modern fantasy for
children.
And when I've been thinking about fantasy, I've been thinking very roughly in the three
waves I've written up there.
First wave is roughly the 19th century, second wave 1890 to 1940, third wave 1950 to Harry
Potter.
Don't take them too seriously, they're merely ways for me to organize my reading.
But what that meant is that if I think in those waves, then there's a wave that really
goes right the way through from the 19th century, right up to the lion, the witch and the wardrobe,
in which there is a very distinct containment of the fantastic within the domestic sphere.
And the reason I've offered the lion, the witch and the wardrobe is my concluding example.
And I know I'm coming back to talk about Victorian fantasy is because I know it's provocative.
What could be less containing than the world of Narnia?
They go out into this world, they have these wild adventures, there are animals, there
is this huge landscape that opens up further and further and further.
But Narnia is contained within a wardrobe, an essentially ordinary domestic piece of
furniture.
And in their entire time in Narnia, the children of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe never
leave the house.
On its own, that seems like too big a statement.
But when I fitted it into what I see across the 19th century, it feels more like a cusp
moment, a moment of change that at the same time holds that idea of containment.
Now you can take the notion of containment as either essentially real with a capital
R, literal or metaphorically.
And I'm going to begin with those literal examples I noticed in which the fantastic
is accessed within the house or is, if one thinks about it this way, actually contained
within the house.
Now I should say this work is at pretty early stages, much of it may not even make it into
the book and comments are very welcome.
One of the earliest examples of this containment and one of the most extreme was Mrs. Molesworth's
The Cuckoo Clock.
In this book, Griselda goes to live with two elderly aunts while her family are abroad.
And after a few nights, she discovers the cuckoo in The Cuckoo Clock.
And as we, and by that I mean a modern audience, come to expect, the cuckoo then takes her
on adventures.
But what I started to realize was odd about the adventures, again, is the degree to which
they take place within the house.
The first magical journey is to the Palace of the Nodding Mandarins, which is actually
a China model on the drawing room table.
The second journey is to the Land of the Butterflies, which has every appearance of the lady's
own garden.
And there's a peculiarity there that in reality, in the real world, Griselda does not actually
enter the garden physically until very late in the adventure.
She quite literally doesn't leave the house for the first three weeks, as far as I can
tell.
And there she meets a young boy whose desirability as a playmate rests almost entirely on his
active desire to come into the domestic sphere first of the garden and then of Griselda's
home.
He is desirable because he desires domesticity.
F. Anstey is vice versa, which is a famous novel in which a boy and his father change
places and the boy gets sent to school.
Most of you will have seen remakes of this in various versions.
It might seem an odd thesis because it's set in part in public school, but I read
Storkian Company, which is probably one of the most famous of the boys' schools of the
same period, so boys' school stories, and that's very outward driven.
The boys spend as much time as they can trying to get out.
In vice versa, the boy spends his entire time trying to leave school and get into the home,
and the occupation and domination of the home and the patriarchal sphere is what is at stake.
And the father does his absolute best never to be forced out onto the rugby field once
he's at school.
So again, the home becomes the locus of the fantastic.
I'd say that the issue of territoriality within the domestic sphere is actually central to
this book.
George McDonald's The Princess and Curdie has two aspects to the fantastical.
The invasion of the goblins into the kingdom and the relationship with the grandmother
– Eileen's grandmother.
The first of those is precisely about a fantastical challenge to home and half, and is one that
actually crops up a lot in fantasy, where once you start to get cynical, you start to
wonder why don't these people have a right to a home, she says, thinking of ourselves.
And the second is contained and yet not contained in a way we see in other texts, including
I'd say the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, within the household itself.
The grandmother is a goddess figure who is the goddess of the hearth.
She sits in the tower and spins, she's the goddess of the kingdom, she's very domestic.
And she is also essentially a mother, and I realise that she's very much a Marian figure.
She both isolates and emphasises that the true fantastic is found at the heart of the home.
And I think this is one of the reasons it's significant in the sequel, Curdie and Eileen
don't have children.
The collapse of the kingdom is linked to the fact they don't have children.
There is no continuation of half and home.
And that ties in also with a lot of McDonald's ideas about family and his own grief about
losing children.
From Lewis Carroll, there's the obviously contained fantasy of Through the Looking Glass.
Classic commentary on this book emphasises subversive nature of Alice's relationship
with the characters through the glass, and the way in which the book challenges domestic
manners.
But again, what's never mentioned is that Alice never leaves the house in which the
adventure begins.
If the other world is through and inside the glass, then it shares topographical space
with the real world.
That's one of my borderline metaphoric examples.
But I think it's interesting when you place it in this context.
For my last example of literal containment, there's Edith Nesbitt's The Magic City, in
which Philip builds a portal to the fantastic on a table, using primarily domestic objects.
And furthermore, throughout the entire journey he and Lucy make, it is continually said that
he hasn't left the domestic space.
This is the first book to actually make a point of this, and later I'm going to say
why I think that's actually significant.
When he finds himself on an island that no one but he has been able to land on, he's
joined in dreams by his sister Helen, who's not within the fantasy world, because the
island is a counterpart of the island that they built as a game together, and therefore
only those two have access to this pocket universe within a pocket universe.
So there's layers of domestic interiority there.
Now moving on to metaphorical examples, and I've been thinking about this one a lot because
I've just read something about Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, which just tells me how complex
a Texas is.
Because in this book, Tommy is taken out of the external world of the street and the chimney
and the nethers of the house, and then is taken to the river, which could not be even
more external.
But the images of civilization are of houses in the inside of houses, and when I read this
book, the thing that really struck me was that the most fantastical scene to Tom, and
this comes back to last night's talk about what the character rather than what the readers
recognize as fantastical, is not actually the Water Babies, which Tom sort of takes
for granted and goes along with, but the pristine white room into which he falls, which to him
is just almost an impossibility.
It is marvellous, it is fantastical.
And similarly, although Diamond, who is what's called the God Baby of George McDonald's at
the back of the North Wind, totally infuriating little baby who is absolutely pure and wonderful
and doesn't quite lisp, thank God, although he travels abroad, there's a continual emphasis
first on the safety and security of his own home, however poor, and on the construction
of domesticity as a desired outcome of the fantastic.
The resolutions to each of the adventures in this story include the recreation of a domestic
partnership between the daughter of Diamond's father's employer and the reconstruction
of an employment familial relationship, a long, I'd argue, a pre-19th century model
of the assimilated household for Diamond's father and his new employer, who then brings
a family together with the beggar girl and her best friend who are brought from the outside
into the inside to live with them.
And Diamond makes a number of trips outside the home, but they're all problematic.
One sees the wickedness of the world, another sees the desperation in the world, and the
third is a trip to the back of the North Wind, which is very common in all these texts that
describe any kind of fairy land, is often described as a confined garden.
And it's a confinement of the garden that I found interesting.
The other thing I found interesting at the back of the North Wind is a degree to which
his purity and innocence is defined in terms of the degrees to which he acts like a girl.
Why, Diamond child, said his mother at last, you're as good to your mother as if you're
a girl.
Nursing the baby and toasting the bread and sweeping up the hearth, I declare a body
would think you had been among fairies.
Could Diamond have had greater praise or greater pleasure?
You see, when he forgot his self, his mother took care of his self and loved and praised
his self.
I'm not going to carry on with that just because there are too many essays and I can't
put the emphasis is very much on the domesticization of the boy child into feminine habits.
He's at his best when most influenced by the domestic, and his own actions within the book
on other people are to bring them into the domestic, so persuading a man to go home without
drinking to look after his wife.
That interiority keeps coming back.
Could you possibly move your badge, Brian?
The light's bouncing straight.
That perfect ... The light was just pitting my eyes.
Related to this, it advocates the preservation of the infant mind, if necessary, in death.
Thank God this is the only book on my pile to preserve mid-19th century attitudes to
death.
Now, a book I find particularly interesting and which is a much, much better book than
the title indicates, and I do think the title's help this book fall into obscurity, is Jean
Inglow's Mops of the Fairy, which is ... It was 1869, and it's a dreadful title, isn't
it?
It's remarkably like The Wizard of Oz.
There are some very strong similarities up to it, including something that looks a lot
like the TikTok Man, which, of course, is a later Oz book.
Now, this is one of the few early fantasies which allows the protagonist out.
Jack gets trapped in a tree in the garden where he meets fairies, and the fairies in
here taken to fairyland by an albatross.
Go figure.
But Jack's liberation comes crashing to a halt because one of the fairies, the one
he kissed, turns into a baby girl, and Jack finds himself a surrogate parent.
For much of the rest of the adventure, Jack is looking after Mops until he is liberated
by her adulthood.
Fairyland is a nursery, and the only adult character is an apple seller, who, having
found her way into fairyland, is occupied as a nursemaid to the fairies, which she prefers
to the destitution she experiences in the real world, like Diamond's father, like the
nurse in Nesbitt's The Magic City, where entering the household of another reinforces the message
of domesticity.
Nesbitt allows her nurse to be resentful.
Everybody else couches this with gratitude, although I do want to emphasize that in historical
terms, finding a job with a roof over your head was definitely the way to go.
This was a good outcome.
So I found that interesting because the way it coded domesticity in terms of the actual
adventure, Jack gets to go home when Mops is grown up, and Mops becomes a queen and the
liberated independent woman.
We don't see Jack become an adult man.
Now C.S.
Lewis as Sylvie and Bruno fascinated me for a number of reasons, not least.
Sorry.
I've said C.S.
Lewis, haven't I?
I've actually written that.
It's Lewis Carroll.
Thank you, darling.
I think that's why I keep him.
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno fascinated me for a number of reasons, not least the
sudden realization that an awful lot of critics have commented on it haven't read the book.
Watch out for that.
And they're not the only ones.
I'd include me in that.
This was my first time.
It's fascinating structurally.
If I'd read this before I wrote Rhetoric Metrics of Fantasy, it would have been my taproot text
for liminal fantasy.
The narrator dreams, fantasizes, enters the fantastic, and does so almost always from
a room, even if it's a room and a train carriage.
The fantastic is contained in itself first within a palace and then within a garden.
The narrator drifts through into these places that are fantastical places.
There's never a clear portal, and there's never a clear sense of which way the fantastic
is going.
Is the garden coming to us, or are we going to the garden?
And when Sylvie and Bruno do find that they're the children, do come into the real world,
gets into the other side of the novel, which is this really irritating domestic intrigue
in which the narrator has acquired this proprietorial interest.
He wants to make sure these two characters end up getting married.
Now, Sylvie and Bruno are supposed to be at the center of a political intrigue in which
their royal rights have been usurped, but Carol loses sight of this.
He has very little interest in it, as far as I can tell.
That domestic narrative and the role of children in a domestic space takes over the book.
The garden or wilderness that Sylvie and Bruno are supposed to be in gets reconfigured as
the back garden of the house in which the narrator is staying.
But I need to emphasize here, it's not that explicit.
There's just this constant unsteadiness of where you are.
But I think it's no surprise that the liminal figure in this text, whose nonsense poems
are often function as the portals into and out of fantasy, is the gardener.
And that's a figure that I think crops up in a number of places.
Because for most of these writers, gardens, and specifically walled gardens, are places
of safety.
And to go back to the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or not so much that, but to
the magician's nephew, Eden is in a walled garden.
A text that's occasionally cited by people who are interested in fantasy, partially because
of its pagan mythic qualities, is Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.
And here I think the domesticization of fantasy is actually key to the story.
Because while Dickon, who's a symbol of what we might call high wild magic, and I can't
remember his term used, I think it might be, is allowed to roam the moors, his role is
not to take Colin and Mary into that fantastical space, but to bring the fantastical space
into the hidden garden.
And even Kenneth Graham's The Wind and the Willows, which is one of the books that Humphrey
Carpenter talks about in terms of most breaking with this interiority, actually the most wondrous
scenes are always in some ways domesticized.
The residence is of rat, mole, and badger.
The scene in Piper at the Gates of Dawn, where I think it's a baby otter, is found at the
feet of Pan.
There is a cozy comfortableness there.
And whilst I found the wild wood itself was described in mundane terms, the farm to the
domesticated landscape is the fantasticated landscape.
And I'll read this just because I thought it was so beautiful.
To all appearance, the summer's pump was still at fullest height.
And although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though the rowans were
reddening and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and
warmth and color were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions
of the passing year.
So it's the tilled acres, clean of the premonitions of what is actually nature, the passing year.
There's a domesticization going on there that I find interesting.
J.M.
Barry, in a sense, his Peter Pan is the text I didn't know what to do with.
One of the big issues, of course, is whether Neverland is real or not, or whether it's
a dream or whether it's a game.
The way there is a constant tension in there between the domesticity of Wendy and the wildness
of Peter.
And I'm still not quite sure to do with this.
I mean, it's a very controversial text in so many ways.
But the one thing that does strike me is that Wendy wins.
Wendy gets the domesticity she wants, whereas I can't imagine in even a slightly much later
text, domesticity being the desired narrative outcome.
Now, a lot of that, of course, is about Barry's own very complex biography in which he is
constantly remaking a home for himself.
He's constructing kinship and constructing family.
But I find it fascinating that that tension is so much more marked than it is in those
earlier texts when domesticity is very much taken for granted.
Another text which interested me, but which doesn't really fit in the normal sense, was
Kipling's Puck of Pook Hill, which is a fascinating novel of time travel and historical
fantasy in which two children gain access to the past through a puck, one of the last
of the fairy.
And the story itself can be understood as one of the domesticization of the English
and of England.
It's very much about the taming of England, except that the past travels to them.
The two children sit there while people from the past come and tell them their stories.
And again, this is something I didn't know what to think about until I happened to have
a conversation with a colleague who was working on relationships with India in the late 19th
and early 20th century.
And what she pointed out is that in this period, an English person was much more likely to
meet, say, an Indian when the Indian traveled to England than the other way round.
And of course, it's actually still the case.
And it's an aspect of empire we often forget.
A lot of studies of colonialism and post-colonialism very much emphasize white people going out
there.
But for most white people, that is not the experience.
The experience is people giving talks about their travels of its Indian students as a
mosque.
And is it Woking?
That's been there since the very end of the 19th century.
It's Vera Swami's restaurant in London, which has been there since the 18th century.
It's that awful elephant umbrella sand somebody brought home.
So the experience of the past and of the foreign is being brought to us.
I have actually made a note here.
The spread of rice pudding is an interesting marker for the dissemination of Indian influence.
And you can see it spreading through the cookbooks as it becomes absorbed and assimilated.
So the past is not a place you went.
It was a place that came to you and changed your world in this structure.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that it's Kipling who writes that structure.
OK, I have three conclusions, except they're not really.
One conclusion I've come to is Edith Nesbitt's The Five Children and It, which was published
in 1902, may actually be a more significant text than we realize.
And that's even taking into account how important it's usually regarded.
Because it's one of the earliest texts I can think of, and do feel free to contradict me,
in which children very decisively experience the fantastic in the great outdoors with the
outdoors being depicted as a safe space in which to explore the fantastic.
There's realist novels, of which the most obvious is Richard Jefferies Bevis.
But the fantastic space up until now has been interior.
And in fact, with the phoenix and the carpet, she returns to the interiority, not to come
back out of it again until the story of the amulet.
And my second related conclusion is that we really need to take a look to the lives of
middle class children between 1850 and 1920 to really understand what's going on here.
Because too often we lose track of the fact that a lot of writers of so-called realist
fiction are actually writing forms of fantasy.
If we look, say, at the books by Ransom, Arthur Ransom's book Swallows and Amazons is not
a realistic book.
It's a fantasy of what childhood could be like.
I started reading before Dangerous Book for Boys came out.
I came across some fact similes of the Handy Book for Boys and the Handy Book for Girls.
And it is very noticeable, the degree to which the Book for Boys is all about you, your dog,
getting out there, finding, catching animals, skinning them, and stuffing them.
There's a whole chapter on taxidermy.
The girls' book, frankly, if you did everything in the girls' book, you wouldn't be able to
move for household embroidery.
What can you do indoors?
What can you decorate?
What can you say?
There's a very clear difference.
But I'm not convinced that these are real.
I'm seriously wondering to what degree they are in themselves fantasies.
By training a historian, and the material I know from social workers from the 1920s,
constantly complains that middle-class children don't get out of the house because they aren't
allowed because their parents think the roads are too dangerous.
Sound familiar?
So I think we need to be actually much more questioning some of our thoughts about what
the norms are in that period.
And my final word is just an observation.
In the real world of the Magic City by Nesbitt, the only time we see Philip or Lucy beyond
the bounds of the domestic space is when they're physically accompanied to different houses,
from one interiority to the other.
Mary and Colin, in the secret garden, never leave mistlethwaite manor.
Thank you.