The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy Read online

  THE EDITOR

  Brian Stableford is one of Britain’s leading writers of science fiction and fantasy. He is the editor of The Dedalus Book of Decadence, The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy and Tales of the Wandering Jew. He has translated for Dedalus, under the pseudonym of Francis Amery, Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain and The Angels of Perversity by Remy de Gourmont.

  LIST OF CONTENTS

  Title

  The Editor

  1. Introduction

  2. Nathan Drake

  Henry Fitzowen

  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Kubla Khan

  4. John Keats

  Lamia

  5. Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  The Nymph of Lurleiberg

  6. Benjamin Disraeli

  Ixion in Heaven

  7. Charles Dickens

  The Story of The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton

  8. John Sterling

  A Chronicle of England

  9. Dinah Maria Murdoch (Mrs Craik)

  Erotion

  10. Alfred Tennyson

  Morte d’Arthur

  11. Lewis Carrol

  The Walking Stick of Destiny

  12. William Morris

  A Dream

  13. George MacDonald

  The Woman in the Mirror

  14. Christina Rossetti

  Goblin Market

  15. William Gilbert

  The Sacristan of St. Botolph

  16. Edward Lear

  The Dong With The Luminous Nose

  17. Walter Besant & Walter Herries Pollock

  Sir Jocelyn’s Cap

  18. F. Anstey

  The Siren

  19. Andrew Lang

  In The Wrong Paradise

  20. Oscar Wilde

  The House of Judgement

  21. Vernon Lee

  St Eudaemon and His Orange Tree

  22. Richard Garnett

  Alexander the Ratcatcher

  23. Appendix

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Modern publishers and booksellers recognise three genres of fantastic fiction, and label their produce accordingly as science fiction, horror or fantasy. Although the world’s best-selling contemporary author, Stephen King, is marketed under the second label the genre which has the largest following is fantasy.

  This is slightly surprising, given that fantasy was not demarcated as a publishing category until the late 1960’s, in the wake of the astonishing success of the paperback editions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Before that date, paperback books which would now be labelled fantasy had sometimes been published on the ragged edge of publishers’ science fiction lists, often under the heading “sword and sorcery”, but the sub-genre was not reckoned to have much profit making potential. Fantasy novels were regarded, by readers as well as by publishers, as perfectly appropriate reading for children but not for adults. The elevation to fashionability of Tolkien’s trilogy changed that dramatically, restoring the respectability of the fantasy novel as something that adults might read without being deemed childish. Once granted this licence, millions of readers queued up for more.

  The Lord of the Rings is the parent of the modern publishing category, but Tolkien’s work has a long and complicated ancestry of its own. The wave of fashionability which snatched up The Lord of the Rings was largely an American phenomenon - it began on American campuses during the brief heyday of flower power and the counter culture - and it has been American writers who have supplied the publishing category it inspired with most of its best-sellers: Stephen R. Donaldson, David Eddings, Terry Brooks, Katherine Kurtz, Tad Williams, Melanie Rawn, and many others; but the tradition of fantastic fiction from which The Lord of the Rings descends, and which provided Tolkien with his inspiration, is a distinctly British one.

  Other nations, including America, have their own fantasy traditions, but these tend to be distinct and markedly different. It is inevitable that this should be the case; because they are rooted in particular folkloristic resources the fantasy traditions of different nations lend themselves rather more readily to treatment in isolation than traditions of science fiction and horror, whose inspirational roots are universal. It is true, of course, that fantasy writers frequently borrow from alien folkloristic traditions, and that some folkloristic materials have themselves been transmitted from one oral culture to another in days long gone by, but each nation does tend to have some essential kernel of uniqueness within its popular mythology, embodied not only by a particular fondness for certain tales but also by a more general attitude of mind.

  This book traces the development of the British fantasy tradition through a period of great importance: the nineteenth century. This was a key phase in the evolution of fantasy in all nations. The century began with an upheaval of attitudes associated with a general revival of interest in the imaginary and the supernatural associated with the Romantic Movement. The Romantics renewed the respectability of the fantastic and stimulated a good deal of discussion about the possible artistic uses of fantastic material. In Britain, however, the cultural environment to which that renewed interest had to adapt came to be determined and defined by the unique and specific conditions of Victorian publishing and Victorian moralising.

  British writers of fantasy did not find it comfortable to labour under the stresses and strains of Victorian attitudes. Fantasy is by its nature subversive of “common sense”, and the more rigid the moral attitudes which pass for common sense become, the more anarchic and dangerous fantasy may seem. The new interest in the fantastic inspired by the Romantics faded somewhat as the moral climate shifted and esoteric poetry gradually ceded its cultural centrality to exoteric prose. Fantasy was largely banished to the margins of the literary landscape as the realistic novel moved into the foreground, but it did not disappear and it continues to play an important if subsidiary role.

  Whatever is deemed unsuitable for discussion in “realistic” fiction tends to become the subject matter of supernatural fiction, albeit in disguised form. The fierce moralists of Victorian Britain were uniquely extravagant in deeming topics unsuitable, and it was inevitable that their repression would call forth some uniquely extravagant, and sometimes rather peculiar, responses. Some of these responses were apologetic; some writers of fantasies took care deferentially to excuse what they were doing and to demonstrate that fantasy could be placed in the service of Victorian morality. Others were, in various ways, subversive: some writers did what they did unrepentantly, cleverly challenging and undermining the moral order of Victorianism. As the end of the century approached, and a second upheaval of values swept away the Victorian verities, the advent of a new liberalism was reflected more clearly in fantasy than in any other kind of writing.

  The philosophic and scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a triumph of wisdom over superstition, and of tolerant scepticism over mean-spirited dogma. It brought about a new confidence in the power of the human mind, and fully deserved to be reckoned an Age of Enlightenment. The new power of the mind was reflected in a far better understanding and control of the environment than men had ever enjoyed before. A new science fed a nascent industrial and technological revolution, and the effects of this intellectual and material progress were nowhere more evident than in Britain. But any increase in power is always accompanied by a certain sense of frustration: progress in one arena always increases awareness of its absence in others.

  The Enlightenment had the effect of lighting a lantern in the twilight; as well as adding to the sum of illumination it also separated out light and darkness, throwing that which was not bright-lit into a deeper and more threaten
ing gloom. It created opposition where before there had been permeation. This is clearly reflected in the literary produce of the aftermath of the Enlightenment, where we find the gradual emergence of a new Realism in dialectical opposition to a new Romanticism. It is evident, too, in the paradoxes of Victorianism, which was the culmination of a peculiar amalgam of moral confidence and moral anxiety.

  The uneasy and fearful aspect of Romanticism was exhibited in the Gothic horror stories which were so popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but horror is not the only expression which anxiety can find and Romanticism also had a celebratory element which took a certain comfort in the failure of Realism to secure its dominion absolutely. It is in fiction much more reminiscent of the modern fantasy genre than the modern horror story that we find this second aspect of Romantic dissent: the comic, the sentimental and the mystical.

  Because these aspects are several, fantasy - considered as a genre - is less easy to define than the other two genres of imaginative fiction. Horror fiction can be characterised by its ambition to frighten and disturb the reader; science fiction by its attempt (or at lease its pretence) to remain within the bounds of hypothetical possibility. Fantasy seems to be more easily characterised, at least in the first instance, by means of a series of negatives: it is that fiction which is not mundane, yet does not belong to either of the other two genres of supramundane fiction.

  It is incorrect, however, simply to consider fantasy as a kind of residual category. Hindsight does allow us to perceive a fantasy genre emerging in the nineteenth century, possessed of some degree of coherency in spite of its hybrid nature. The writers and critics of the day did not think in terms of literary genres - not, at any rate, in terms of the genre categories we recognise today - but that did not prevent writers of fantastic fiction being influenced by one another and recognising a degree of common cause in what they were doing. The later writers included in this anthology would all have been familiar with the work of the earlier ones, and would have recognised some degree of kinship between their own works and those previously issued. Although they did not call themselves “fantasy writers” - and only a handful of them specialised in fantasy - their fantasy works were part of a developing tradition of discourse. What we see when we look back at the fantasies of the period is not an amorphous mass but an assembly of texts grouped around certain key themes, which evolves certain characteristic methods in the course of its progress.

  Most of the stories which are nowadays written for publication under the modern fantasy label belong to a sub-class which J. R. R. Tolkien, in his classic essay “On Fairy-Stories” describes as “Secondary World” fantasies. These are stories set in imaginary worlds whose spatial and temporal connection with the real world are frankly mysterious, but whose nature and contents are intelligibly related to it. Lin Carter, who became the most ardent champion of adult fantasy in the world of American publishing after the success of The Lord of the Rings, argues in his book Imaginary Worlds that Secondary World stories constitute the hard core of the fantasy genre.

  The “purest” fantasy, for both Tolkien and Carter, consists of stories set entirely within a Secondary World. In many stories of a closely related kind, however, the characters must move from our mundane world into the Secondary World, and may move back and forth across the boundary between the two. Any reasonable definition of Fantasy must obviously accommodate these works. A broader definition, though must also take in stories in which a part of the mundane world is briefly infected or transformed by a limited incursion from a Secondary World, even if the Secondary World is not formally allotted a space of its own. Such incursions are frequently likened to (or “explained” as) dreams and hallucinations; many actual examples are concerned with the displacement from a hypothetical Secondary Word of a single magical character or object. Horror stories typically deal with similar disruptions of the normal course of world affairs, but in horror stories the intrusions are necessarily threatening; where the effect of the temporary incursion is at least partly enlivening or life-enhancing then the work is usually better classified as a fantasy.

  Carter alleges in Imaginary Worlds that what differentiates Secondary Worlds from the mundane one can be adequately summed up in a single word: magic. This serves well enough, but there are certain other characteristics worth pointing out. Secondary Worlds usually resemble our own world in very basic ways (atmosphere, gravity etc.) but the details of their geography may be very different. Their flora and fauna are usually augmented by an assortment of creatures borrowed from ancient mythologies. They are usually technologically primitive, and their social organization is likely to be feudal, supported by some notion of the divine right of kings.

  Secondary Worlds of this general kind are essentially composite versions of the world that our remote ancestors once believed in, but which has been displaced by modern knowledge. Other Secondary Worlds whose existence is either featured or implied by fantasy stories tend to be worlds which our ancestors believed to exist in parallel with our own: the Underworld, the land of Faerie, Heaven, the Land of Dreams. Fantasy is deliberately archaic and anachronistic: its central feature is that it deals with that in which we have ceased to believe. For this reason, fantasy often seems nostalgic, and is often redolent with sentimental regret for lost illusions.

  It has always seemed pointless to some critics that anyone should be interested in reading stories about the power of magic in an era when mature and reasonable adults have ceased to believe in its workability. Some nineteenth century educationalists were, in fact, sternly opposed to fairy stories and other tales traditionally told to children on the grounds that such fictions could only mislead and confuse, and would handicap intellectual development. This puzzle sometimes invites a simplistically uncharitable solution; the argument that a taste for fantasy is symptomatic of a failure to cope with the rigours of real life was largely responsible for the pre-1970 notion that fantasy was only fit reading material for children.

  The idea that fantasy is essentially “childish” tacitly assumes that our remote and ignorant ancestors believed in the efficacy of magic because they were simple-minded, and that only people who are similarly simple-minded can take stories about magic seriously. Its adherents reason from this supposition that we may grant a tacit licence to children, permitting them to believe in magic until they are old enough to “know better”, but holds that modern adults ought to have “grown out of” such silly fancies.

  The first tacit assumption on which this line of argument is based is dubious; the second is clearly ridiculous. It is a grotesque misunderstanding to assume that in order to read and enjoy fantastic fiction one must be prepared to believe in the actual workability of magic. Most commentators follow Coleridge in referring to what is actually required as a temporary and limited “willing suspension of disbelief”, but Tolkien goes further than this, characterising the contact between writer and reader in more positive terms, as a demand for a distinct species of “Secondary Beliefs”. Using this observation as a prelude to explanation, Tolkien opens the way to a more sensible discussion of the psychological utility of fantasy.

  Tolkien’s essay refers to three functions of fantasy, which he calls Recovery, Escape and Consolation. It is an essential part of his thesis that fantasy is the natural partner of reason, neither “insulting” nor undermining it, and that our sense of what is necessarily has as its logical counterpart a sense of that which is not. He argues that the ability to take up a fantastic viewpoint for the sake of comparison helps us to put real things in a better perspective; what we “recover” in fantasy is a clearer sight than we normally employ in viewing the world, because it is a less narrow sight - a sight which does not take for granted the limitations of mundanity.

  To argue thus is to assert that we cannot see reality clearly enough if we are trapped within it, and that it is only when we can perform the imaginative trick of moving outside the actual that we can properly appreciate its bounds. This
is the fundamental task of the literature of fantasy, and in the nineteenth century evolution of the genre we can see the principal contributors of the genre developing a series of literary devices adapted to this purpose.

  Seen from this viewpoint, offering fantasies to children is not at all a matter of granting them temporary licence to believe absurdities. It is instead an entirely appropriate means of helping them to arrive at a sensible distinction of the real and the unreal. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the motive forces which we see at work in the evolution of nineteenth century fantasy is a campaign to rehabilitate and revitalise those fictions useful (perhaps even essential) to the education of the developing mind.

  The function of Escape is seen by Tolkien in much the same light as the function of Recovery. He asserts unhesitatingly that the escapism of fantasy is to be evaluated as if it were the escape of a prisoner rather than the desertion of a soldier; it is a liberation, not a moral failure. This statement is not without qualification, however, because Tolkien proposes that if it is to be genuinely rewarding, the escapism of Fantasy cannot be content simply with drawing the reader away from oppression; it must also lead to some kind of goal. This is where the third function of fantasy - that of consolation - emerges.

  Tolkien calls the consolatory goal which he believes a fantasy story should have a “eucatastrophe”. By this he means a climactic affirmation of both joy and right: pleasure alloyed with moral confidence. This does not mean that fantasy cannot or ought not to be tragic, but it does mean that in Tolkien’s view fantasy should not be despairing (as speculative fiction and horror fiction sometimes are); according to this argument, the work of fantasy is essentially committed to the cause of moral rearmament.

  There is nothing surprising in the intimate alliance between fantasy and moral fabulation; such an alliance is already implicit in the idea of magic, whose workability is the central premise of fantasy.