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 scientificallyadvanced 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 kunstmarchen, 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.
* Poor Figgins always called M. Baudelaire "the Master."
The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: 19th Century (European Literary Fantasy Anthologies) Page 37
