Product Description

Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era. Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237700 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Carole G. Silver is a Professor of English and holds the Humanities Chair at Yeshiva University (Stern College). She is also Adjunct Professor of English at New York University. Among her publications are The Romance of William Morris and The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris.

Customer Reviews

Not all it could be, but an interesting work
This is an interesting study of a subject which has perhaps less attention than it deserves. In spite of the exceedingly ill-mannered review in the New York Times, the contention that at least some people in Victorian times believed in fairies is a perfectly valid one; after all, people today, many of them quite intelligent and well educated, hold similar beliefs. The author is to be commended for largely refraining from the cynicism about other peoples' experiences which mars too much academic work in fairylore and related fields. That said, it isn't quite all it could be. References to Antonio Gramsci's writings were not properly cited, making it difficult to track down the specific translation and edition used. Most importantly, the author failed to make her work fully accessible to those of us who work in related fields; particularly irritating was her use (outside period quotations) of mutilated anglicisations of words from the various Celtic languages. While these barbarous concoctions may have been in common use in Victorian literature, they obscure the connection of this literature to the folkloric source material. Embedded in modern prose, they are not only ugly and confusing, but border on the the offensive. Modern scholars of Victorian ethnography generally use accepted present day romanisations in their own writing, retaining the crude phonetic attempts of the nineteenth century only in quotes. Surely the Irish, Scots, and Welsh nations deserve the same basic courtesy as the Arab, Chinese, and Bantu peoples.

Enchanting and trustworthy account of British fairy lore.
An enchanting book with a great deal of curious and interesting information. It's written with enough clarity and charm to appeal to nonspecialists, though it is also an authoritative and trustworthy resource for scholars. Investigating everything from the survival of ancient beliefs (especially in the Celtic fringes of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland) through the work of anthropologists and folklorists to the cute designs for nursery wallpaper, Carole Silver demonstrates the ways in which the widespread nineteenth-century interest in fairy lore exposes fears and fantasies close to the Victorian unconscious. The author draws on an extraordinary range of sources: newspaper accounts, legal cases, theology, linguistics, the new social sciences of anthropology, ethnology and psychology, and texts ranging from the essays of Thomas Carlyle to the literary fairy tales we still read to our children. She explores in depth the belief in changeling children, the rendering of goblins and other dark primitive creatures, and the gender and power relations revealed in stories of fairy brides. This is real scholarship to illuminate the current and continuing popularity of fairies and their stories. -- Sally Mitchell, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Temple University

A fascinating read
In this strangely different work, Professor Silver examines the British fascination with Faeries and other imaginary creatures from 1798 to 1923. She examines such sources as literature, fairy tale collections, anthropologists, newspapers, ballet, and a host of others. The book is encyclopedic in its reach, covering dwarves, mermaids, fairies and more. The author traces the evolution of fairy lore, and how its changes reflect changes in Victorian attitudes. She shows how fairy concepts reflected Victorian views on women, race, childhood, industrialism, and more.

This book is a fascinating read. In particular, the fairy brides/gender and goblins/race chapters were absolutely fascinating, and impossible to put down. My one complaint is that the hardbound book was printed in a very small font, which made for some irritating reading sessions. That said, though, this is a very good book.