APPENDIX
Notes on authors not represented in the Anthology.
RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM (1788-1845) was a clergyman who adopted the pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby in order to write The Ingoldsby Legends: or, Mirth and Marvels. These began to appear piecemeal in the early issues of Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837, and were eventually collected in three volumes in 1840, 1842 and 1847. The prose tales are in much the same vein as the comic fantasies included in Dickens’, Pickwick Papers; they include “The Spectre of Tappington”, about a trouser-stealing ghost, and “The Leech of Folkestone”’ about a murder unsuccessfully attempted by magical means. The witty verses, rich in overblown wordplay, carry forward a tradition of humorous poetry whose fashionability was renewed by the more light-hearted works of THOMAS HOOD (1799-1845); some of the Ingoldsby legends appeared in the New Monthly Magazine during the period of Hood’s editorship (1841-43).
MARIE CORELLI was the name adopted by Minnie Mackay (1855-1924) for her literary endeavours, which included several best-selling occult novels. A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) describes the revitalization of an effete young woman by a Chaldean magician. Ardath (1889) is a fantasy of reincarnation mostly set in the fabulous prehistoric city of Al-Kyris. The Soul of Lilith (1892) features a girl whose soul is imprisoned in her body after death so that she may be used as an instrument of occult enlightenment. The Sorrows of Satan is a Faustian parable in which Satan, depressed by the ease with which men fall prey to his wiles, finally meets his match in a saintly novelist called Mavis Clare. Marie Corelli was the perfect embodiment of late Victorian values: her unorthodox piety, moralistic fervour and monumental vanity combined to preserve in her the illusion that she was far too good for this world, much more suited to life among the angels.
F. MARION CRAWFORD (1854-1909) produced a rather rough-hewn Arabian Nights fantasy, Khaled (1891), and a number of romances containing occult elements, including a long and somewhat laborious femme fatale story, The Witch of Prague (1891).
JAMES DALTON (dates unknown) is credited by various bibliographers with having produce a number of anonymous works, including an early comic fantasy about an incautious deal with the devil, The Gentleman in Black (1831) and other items with some fantasy content. These other items include one of the very few fantasy novels to be produced in the three-decker format which dominated Victorian publishing - a remarkable moralistic comedy called The Invisible Gentleman (1833). This stands at the head of a rich Victorian tradition of cautionary tales of invisibility, which also includes Charles Wentworth Lisle’s The Ring of Gyges (1886), James Payne’s The Eavesdropper (1888), C. H. Hinton’s Stella (1895) and H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897). The British Museum Catalogue gives separate listings to “James Dalton, novelist” and the Blackwood’s writer James Forbes Dalton, but the latter was active in the same period and his story “The Beauty Draught” (1840) has exactly the same moral as The Invisible Gentleman, so he may well be the same person. The bibliographical confusion is further compounded by the fact that some sources identify the author of The Gentleman in Black etc. simply as “Dalton”, a signature which was also used by Richard Harris Barham’s son Richard Harris Dalton Barham on various pieces published in Bentley’s Miscellany in the late 1830s.
LADY EMILIA FRANCES DILKE (1840-1904) wrote two volumes of allegorical prose poems, The Shrine of Death and Other Stories (1886) and The Shrine of Love and Other Stories (1891). The stylistically ornate and distinctly morbid stories are among the more curious fin de siècle fantasies produced in Britain.
GEORGE DU MAURIER (1834-1896) produced three eccentric sentimental fantasies, of which the best is Peter Ibbetson (1891), whose eponymous hero, condemned to life imprisonment, achieves a kind of escape by sharing his dreams with a girl he knew in childhood. Trilby (1894) is more famous because of the sub-plot involving the heroine’s subjugation by the mesmerist Svengali. The Martian (1897) is a moralistic fantasy of reincarnation.
HENRY RIDER HAGGARD (1856-1925) wrote numerous lost race stories set in Africa, many of which have fantasy elements - most conspicuously the best-selling She (1886), whose unlucky heroine loses her immortality but is conveniently reincarnated in Ayesha (1905) and other sequels. Haggard also wrote a mock-Icelandic saga, Eric Brighteyes (1891) and several other romances of reincarnation. In collaboration with Andrew Lang he wrote The World’s Desire, in which Odysseus goes in search of Helen of Troy.
JAMES HOGG (1770-1835) was a prolific contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, and a leading member of its editorial coterie, within which he was affectionately nicknamed “The Ettrick Shepherd”; his aggressiveness and hard drinking were continually caricatured in the magazine’s “Noctes Ambrosianae” section. He is best-remembered today for his phantasmagoric study in paranoia The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), but he also wrote a number of historical novels (which were virtually eclipsed by Scott’s ) and he became one of the leading conservationists of Scottish folklore by means of his various supernatural tales and the anecdotes and legends which he recorded in his regular Blackwood’s column “The Shepherd’s Calendar”.
LAURENCE HOUSMAN (1865-1959) produced several books of sophisticated children’s fantasies in the same quasi-allegorical vein as George MacDonald and Oscar Wilde, including A Farm in Fairyland (1894), The House of Joy, (1895), and The Field of Clover (1898). His early fantasies for adults include the highly unusual Gods and their Makers (1897), whose young protagonist belongs to a tribe where every man must make his own personal deity, and is eventually banished to the realm where those gods come to life following the deaths of their creators. His carefully reverent Christian fantasies, collected in All Fellows: Seven Legends of Lower Redemption (1896) and The Cloak of Friendship (1905) are the best examples of their kind, and though they refuse to flirt deliberately with heresy after the fashion of the anti-clerical fantasies of Vernon Lee and Richard Garnett they are nevertheless drawn by degrees towards a warm Epicurean liberalism. Housman met Oscar Wilde in Paris shortly before Wilde’s death, and his memoir of their conversation, Echo de Paris (1923), includes two brief fantasy parables which Wilde recited to his listeners. His sister CLEMENCE HOUSMAN (1861-1955) wrote the fine erotic fantasy The Were-Wolf (1890) and a more languid femme fatale story The Unknown Sea (1898).
DOUGLAS JERROLD (1803-1857) was a noted humourist who produced for the satirical magazine Punch a bizarre moralistic comedy, A Man Made of Money (1848-9), in which a man with a spendthrift wife wishes he were made of money, and finds himself able to peel banknotes from his heart - but his substance dwindles away as he spends himself. The story was presumably inspired by Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (1831; tr. as The Magic Skin).
CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875) produced one of the classic Victorian children’s fantasies in The Water-Babies (1863), a very peculiar story in which a chimney sweep’s boy succeeds in learning after death the moral lessons which he never had a chance to absorb in life. The book displays the author’s interest in evolutionary theory as well as his evangelistic fervour, and is said by some Freudian critics to feature an extended (but presumably unconscious) extrapolation of Victorian anxieties regarding the perils of masturbation.
RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936) wrote several notable children’s fantasies, including a series of stories featuring the feral child Mowgli, raised by wolves and educated by a panther and a bear, which first appeared in The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895). Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902) boldly carry forward the Victorian tradition of sensible nonsense, offering fanciful fabular explanations of “How the Leopard Got His Spots”, “How the Camel Got His Hump” and so on.
FIONA MACLEOD was the pseudonym used by William Sharp (1855-1905) for most of his tales based in Scottish folklore, some of which are historical fantasies, some occult romances and some metaphysical allegories. They include the novels Pharais (1894), Green Fire (1896) and The Divine Adventure (1900) and the collections The Sin-Eater and Other Tales (1895), The Washer
of the Ford and other Legendary Moralities (1896) and The Dominion of Dreams (1899). Sharp wrote a few fantasies under his own name, including the title story of The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (1895).
ROBERT MACNISH (1802-1837) was a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, where his contributions were usually attributed to “A Modern Pythagorean”. The pseudonym derives from his first and most significant contribution to the magazine. “A Metempsychosis” (1826), an early identity-exchange story which claims descent from the Pythagorean theory of the transmigration of souls. All MacNish’s work (which was assembled for posthumous publication in volume form in 1838) partakes of an unusually heavy sense of irony and a remarkable flair for grotesquerie, displayed to its best advantage in such hallucinatory stories as “The Man with the Nose”. His penchant for describing altered states of consciousness was presumably connected with the condition which led to his premature death, which he had elected to study scrupulously from within for his doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Anatomy of Drunkenness”.
GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909) wrote one humorous fantasy novel of note at the beginning of his career: the baroque Oriental fantasy The Shaving of Shagpat (1856). The story has allegorical pretensions, but these may be part-bluff. Meredith’s novella Farina (1857) is a historical romance with some fantasy elements.
JOSEPH SHIELD NICHOLSON (1850-1927) wrote three anonymously-published fantasy novels. Thoth (1888) is a curious historical fantasy which features a scientifically-advanced lost race. A Dreamer of Dreams (1889) is a moralistic Faustian fantasy. Toxar (1890) - the best of the three - is an extended conte philosophique cast as a romance of antiquity.
MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT (1828-1897) wrote numerous moralistic ghost stories which stand on the borderline between fantasy and horror, the most interesting being A Beleaguered City (1880), in which the inhabitants of a French town are briefly driven from their abode by the disappointed spirits of their ancestors. She also wrote some of the most famous and most successful consolatory fantasies about the afterlife, following the posthumous exploits of a saintly woman; two such stories are combined in A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1883) and two others are in The Land of Darkness (1888). The title story of this second collection is far less reassuring, offering a tour of the Hell which parallels the little pilgrim’s Heaven, and her later contributions to the sub-genre, “Dies irae;” the story of a Spirit in Prison (1895) and “The Land of Suspense” (1897) offer distinctly uneasy contemplations of Purgatory and Limbo.
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK (1785-1866) made a significant contribution to the development of native British folkloristic materials in his two historical fantasies, Maid Marian (1822) - which popularised the modern version of the story of Robin Hood - and The Misfortune of Elphin (1829), which developed themes from the Mabinogion, including its references to Arthurian legend.
JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900) wrote the most celebrated example of a British kunstmärchen, The King of the Golden River (1851) simply to demonstrate that he could. It follows a classic pattern, allowing the youngest of three brothers to find appropriate supernatural aid in order to repair the damage done to their beautiful valley by his selfish siblings.
BRAM STOKER (1847-1912) went on to write one of the classic Victorian horror stories in Dracula (1897), but his first book was a collection of downbeat allegorical fairy tales, Under the Sunset (1881). Like George MacDonald’s tales they mirror the author’s psychological problems in a rather peculiar fashion.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863) was an early contributor to the sub-genre of Christmas fantasies, under the pseudonym M. A. Titmarsh. The Rose and the Ring (1855), subtitled “a fireside pantomime”, is an uninhibited exercise in parodic slapstick.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866-1946) was the parent and presiding genius of the British tradition of scientific romance, but he also wrote a number of excellent fantasies.
The Wonderful Visit (1895) is a scathing moralistic fantasy in which an angel from the Land of Dreams finds Victorian England an ugly place ruled by sanctimonious hypocrisy and frank injustice. “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” (1898) is a classic cautionary tale which Wells later turned into a notable film script. The Sea Lady (1902) is a calculatedly unconventional femme fatale story which seems in the end to reach a compromise with the sentimentality which it originally set out to undermine. “The Country of the Blind” (1904) and “The Door in the Wall” (1906 ) are classics of allegorical fantasy.
COPYRIGHT
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE
email: [email protected]
www.dedalusbooks.com
ISBN printed book 978 0 946626 78 6
ISBN ebook 978 1 910213 32 2
Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors,
15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248
email: [email protected] www.scbdistributors.com
Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.
58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W 2080
email: [email protected]
First published by Dedalus in 1991
First Dedalus ebook edition in 2015
introduction, notes & compilation copyright © Brian Stableford 1991
The right of Brian Stableford to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed in England by Billings & Sons Ltd
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy Page 42
