The Best Victorian Fantasy Novels

First, could you set the scene? What are the broad trends we see in Victorian fantasy?

Fantasy doesn’t have a hard starting date – it’s something that grows. With some of the texts that I’ve chosen, some people would say: ‘is that fantasy, or is that fairytale?’ – and that is part of what fantasy is, that there are no hard boundaries. I mean, who likes a fantasy tale with hard boundaries? The very genre itself defies that! My favourite text on the list, George McDonald’s Phantastes, is subtitled ‘a faerie romance for men and women,’ and it’s often cited as the first English language fantasy novel. And yet, in my list, I’ve got a couple of texts that predate it. These things are fantastical, they’re early fantasy, and they shape­­­­ what we come to know as fantasy today.

It’s interesting that these arose in an era when people were starting to push back more strongly against the Enlightenment, and against the sense that hard science and reason have an answer for everything. It was the height of the Industrial Revolution in the UK; London was the largest city in the world. People were being ripped up from their rural roots, moving into urban areas. It’s not just industrialization, but – how shall I say – factory-isation! So people were being pulled from their stories, were no longer surrounded by their cultural stories. In England, specifically, literacy was rather low – literacy was much higher, interestingly, in Scotland at the time than it was in England. Identity was challenged, and people were also missing the quiet, the rural. So people were, one might think, over-romanticising the rural, the wild, the forested, but the loss of and need for such places was real. In places like Manchester, the average life-span of a working-class male was less than 20 years, because of factory work and pollution – so it’s easy to understand why the rural and the untamed became more appealing. People longed for a simpler, slower, greener past.

In the midst of all this, and in some ways in response to it, the Medieval Revival began. People like A. J. Scott, the first ever full-time English literature professor, started diving back into England’s stories, stories that had been forgotten. Even Shakespeare wasn’t being taught in school. Chaucer had been mostly forgotten, Spenser too – all these classics that we think of as core English literature, and the medieval romances we think of as foundational texts. They were being rediscovered, and people were getting really excited about them – the scholars, but then that starts to make its way out into the popular culture. That was in response to some of this longing for a simpler past, longing for our own identity – not the identity of Greek and Roman myths, not the identity of German fairy tales, or continental romances, but for Britain’s own stories and fables.

Some of those things fed into the important themes that shape the beginning of British fantasy, which we still see in the threads of what we identify as fantasy today. Identity, storied inheritance, the importance of knowing who you are and where you come from – and tied into that, self-knowledge: knowing who you are on the inside, that need for self-reflection and self-awareness, which often feeds into being a better human being. Themes of greed, and how that affects the environment especially. And right from the very beginning, the environment – greenery, forest and field – was really important to the fantasy genre. The earliest fantasists were environmentalists.

Social justice is a key theme in the early threads of fantasy, which I find really interesting. In fact, at least four of the writers on my list – I don’t know as much about Haggard on this front – were passionate about social justice issues, and that’s true of other early fantasy figures like William Morris and Charles Kingsley. That’s all tied in, really interestingly, with the early medievalists, most of whom are also really involved with such issues. They’re not just passionate, they’re active: they actually take on social justice issues, fighting for the poor, fighting for a voice for women, fighting for better housing, fighting for more green space, fighting for education to be available for others. So that’s the roots of what we now consider modern fantasy – and you see that reflected in the texts.

You mentioned A. J. Scott; I know you’ve written about his influence as George MacDonald’s mentor.

Oh, that makes me happy! It’s one of my missions in life, the revival of A. J. Scott.

Well, your first choice is a George MacDonald text – could you introduce us to Phantastes?

Phantastes is often considered the first fantasy novel in English literature. This is the first novel by MacDonald, so he didn’t start his career in a typical genre. As a young man, MacDonald was already very concerned about the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the loss of story. His primary mentor and teacher was A. J. Scott: the big thrust in Scott’s teaching was that we need to find our stories again – and MacDonald took on that mantle. In fact, MacDonald himself became a literature teacher. He was one of the first literature teachers of women in tertiary education, and for forty years he was giving lectures on British literature, because he was trying to help re-story the British populace. And you see that in this text: this is a story about stories.

Often people are quick to say that Phantastes is shaped by German Romanticism, or even Romanticism generally – and it is. But that’s just a tiny bit, one tiny thread. If you pay attention to the text, you’ll see that MacDonald is quoting from Jacobean drama, he’s quoting from Shakespeare, he’s quoting from the classics, he’s quoting from German texts and French texts and American texts… all different genres of literature. That ties back into the one of the important parts of the early shaping of fantasy: fantasy is in its very essence, I think, stories made of stories and stories shaped by stories. And for MacDonald this is really key.

In this particular tale, MacDonald starts the story with a twenty-one year old called Anodos – which means ‘without a way’, or, ‘a way up.’ He’s on the cusp of adulthood, and he’s just about to take on the responsibility of his whole estate – so, responsibility for the land and for his orphaned sisters. He’s just finished university. And from the outset, we discover that he doesn’t know his own family story. He’s chastised for that right at the beginning by a faerie, who is his ancestress. He doesn’t know the facts of his own history, or fairy stories and literature. He’s zoomed through some books, but not paid much attention to them, so that even his little sister knows fairytales better than he does. But he has been caught up in this fervour for medievalism that is happening as MacDonald was writing this story – the idea that every sufficiently privileged young man should be a gentleman, chivalric, a knight. At the time MacDonald was writing, medievalism had become so popular so quickly that people were selling Excalibur stoves and Galahad soap. MacDonald was saying: Don’t cheapen our stories. Get to know them.

Anodos enters fairyland saying, ‘I’m going to be a knight. I’m going to kill a dragon, I’m going to save a maiden. Great. This is my inheritance.’ And he very quickly discovers that actually he needs to be rescued again and again, because he hasn’t paid attention to the stories. Who is he rescued by? He’s rescued by women – old women, young women – and he’s rescued by people who do not have the education or status that he thinks is required to be a gentleman. He quickly learns that actually, being a knight is not about this imperialistic notion of what it means to be English and gentlemanly and chivalric; but rather the true definition, the true Old English word cnight (which has Germanic roots), means ‘one who serves.’ He has to learn to serve others, to learn from others, and that’s how one becomes a true knight.

MacDonald’s really intentional with the title. It’s not just Phantastes – it’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance For Men and Women. So again, this story is not merely an expression of the modern genre of Romanticism, it’s a faerie romance: MacDonald’s pulling us back right from the very beginning: remember the old tales, the medieval tales, the ancient tales that have shaped us. And it’s for ‘men and women’. (MacDonald raised some very feisty daughters, and was a suffragist from the beginning.)

Anodos has to learn to listen to the stories, to know the stories well, to learn from others and to serve others. And this is the ‘first novel’ of modern fantasy.

Fascinating. So for MacDonald the interest in the old stories on the one hand, and social justice on the other, aren’t separate concerns – they’re two sides of the same coin?

Yes! That’s what’s so I find so fascinating with the Medieval Revival. All these medievalists were also out teaching in the working men’s colleges and the women’s colleges; they were working in social housing and labour laws. Those are the same people, which is so interesting!

You’ve worked on a graphic novel of The Golden Key, another George MacDonald text.

I’m very excited and humbled to be a part of this project. I wrote the introduction and the biography at the end. Steven Hesselman, the artist, spent seven years working on the art. What is incredible that Hesselman has used the entire original text, with the exception of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. I’m really excited about the medium of a graphic novel that doesn’t reduce the text, but actually serves the text – and how Hesselman’s choice to do this has made a Victorian fairytale accessible to people of all ages again, in an era where we’re not used to reading that language. I know of seven year olds, nine year olds, twenty year olds, seventy year olds who zoom through this – and some of them have said to me, ‘I think I could now read the real version.’ And I say, ‘You have read the real version! The pictures just helped you hear the text better!’

The Golden Key is a very important tale in itself. Many key people in the history of fantasy – like Tolkien and Lewis and Chesterton – point to it as being a signature tale for them. Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, illustrated The Golden Key (and several other of MacDonald’s works).

We see in it some of the same themes that we’ve already talked about as being intrinsic to fantasy – identity and self-knowledge, but especially the inheritance of story. This is a tale of two characters that take the same journey, but are parted during that journey. MacDonald is weaving in influences from all sorts of other stories, perhaps most notably John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress. In A Pilgrim’s Progress, the male has the harder journey and the female has the easier journey; in The Golden Key, MacDonald flips that on its head. Some people say it’s not fair – the female has the harder journey, the boy has it so easy. But the reason that the boy has it so easy is that he has the stories. That is part of what gives him access to the golden key. Tangle, the girl, does not have that advantage; we’re told very clearly that she doesn’t have roots, she’s abandoned. Both of them don’t have present parents, but the boy is fed with stories by his caring aunt, while the girl is left without rooting stories

That shapes their journey. But also they’re met right at the beginning by Mother Nature, essentially: the grandmother with the green hair. We see how nature, the environment, is also part of the journey, and something that they both need to engage with – to be cleansed by, renewed by, and learn wisdom from. Sometimes people don’t pick up on this fact that she is a Mother Nature character, and how important it is that she is the one who guides them on to the other elements that eventually reunite them, so that they can ascend together.

There’s an equally fantastical journey in your next choice… It almost needs no introduction – tell us about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll.

Fascinatingly, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is in part a conversation with Phantastes. Dodgson and MacDonald were very good friends. In fact, it was MacDonald’s children to whom Dodgson read his manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and who said: ‘You have to publish this.’ So there’s a beautiful relationship there. They were two men who loved to talk philosophy, theology, mathematics, and science together, as well as literature, and Dodgson often joined the MacDonald family in the theatre that they would put on.

So, back to the social justice stuff: the MacDonald family would put on theatre and stories not just for their friends, but for widows and orphans in the neighbourhood. Dodgson was quite famously involved in those; he would join them in some of the performances. The Light Princess is one that we know he really enjoyed acting in. So it should come as no surprise that scholars have been able to find some really interesting conversation between the texts of Phantastes and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In structure, the novels are very similar. There are even certain sections, like the conversation with the flowers, where Dodgson is using the exact same words, the exact same names of the exact same plants as MacDonald. So they’re clearly having fun back and forth with each other, playing with the words and the ideas of someone else.

Alice is a tale that is perhaps less obviously shaped by the texts that come before. Dodgson is more idea-focused: he’s playing with ideas from Locke, and from Blake, and with lots of mathematical ideas – he is a mathematician. Dodgson is passionate about the importance of the imagination, and that the imagination is not something that belongs to the uniquely to the arts – science and mathematics also cannot happen without imagination. In both of the Alice books there is this concept of a portal, an entrance into another world, but those two worlds seeping into each other – so no super hard boundaries.

Dodgson is also, interestingly, pushing back against something that MacDonald less obviously pushed back against. One of the other key Victorian fantastical texts is The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. It was hugely popular in its day, but has become decreasingly so, and one reason is that it’s really explicitly didactic and moralistic. Kingsley meant it be fun and clever with obvious wordplay and naming, but Dodgson and MacDonald found that type of writing to be too heavy-handed, and perhaps not as successful as more subtle ways of challenging and changing people. It shapes some of the levity and silliness of Dodgson, this pushback against such heavy-handed morality tales. Kingsley is also part of the social justice movement, and is concerned about child labour laws and environmental degradation –that’s part of his tale as well – but it’s definitely not Charles Dodgson’s way of addressing these issues.

Dodgson pulls in poems and rhymes that are going to be familiar to his readership. Sometimes he makes light fun of them, but he’s not dissing them completely. And you can see even as he’s pushing back against the didacticism in some of those popular Victorian morality poems; he is showing another way to play.

One other resonance Alice has with Phantastes, and other fantastical tales, is the whole identity issue. Alice doesn’t really know who she is when she falls down the hole, and she can’t figure out who she’s going to be – is she going to be big, is she going to be small? And interestingly, that’s compounded by her inability to remember a poem – it’s really stressful for her that she can’t remember a poem, because poetry is part of her identity. All the way up through the fantasy of the Inklings and beyond we can trace the need to remember certain poems or rhymes or stories, and how important that is for the success of a protagonist’s journey, but also as part of their identity.

Let’s talk about your next choice. Could you introduce John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River?

King of the Golden River predates Phantastes. It’s a shorter book – you could argue it’s a novella – but it was a breakthrough for modern fantasy. This was the only piece of pure fiction Ruskin wrote. He tells many tales within his other writing, but he was challenged by a young girl to write this.

It’s the traditional fairytale setup of two evil brothers and a young, good brother. They live in a very fertile valley, and the two older brothers insult a traveller who turns out to be one of the four winds. Dire consequences ensue, and there is environmental degradation as a result. The long and the short of it is, without giving too much away, the two older brothers go off to try to solve the problem, and both end up failing; and the younger brother succeeds – but how and why he succeeds is the crux of the story.

Here are a lot of the typical fairytale tropes: the evil brothers, the good brother, and the fact that greed and a lack of care for others results in dire straits. It is the younger brother, the put-upon brother who is not self-centred and ego driven and greedy, who succeeds. But what’s really important, and makes King of the Golden River part of the history of fantasy, is that this is a written tale, not a collected tale. This was an era of collecting fables and fantasies – the Grimm brothers, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang – people are collecting tales again, but that this is a written tale moves it into fantasy. It’s interesting today to see people like Naomi Novik or Shannon Hale who are pulling back in that intentional engagement with what we would think of as fairy tales.

“John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River was a breakthrough for modern fantasy”

We again see in this story some of the themes that we’ve talked about: the concern about modernisation and the loss of knowing who you are… but Ruskin is a writer who actually shapes all of our other writers; what he’s doing and what he’s writing shapes each of them. Ruskin is a passionate scientist and a passionate environmentalist, and passionate about art; he’s very involved in Medieval Revivalism; he was a very close friend of MacDonald’s. He’s friends with most of the others as well.

For Ruskin as an early environmentalist, the natural environment is more valuable than gold in this story. At the beginning, the character doesn’t have the wisdom to see how important nature is – he wants gold rather than a healthy landscape – and the journey is a discovery that actually the most valuable thing is a beautiful, green, healthy, fertile land that we can engage with – both through healthy farming as well as leaving some land natural. And for the man who wrote ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,’ this is really key. Winds and water are so important to the story, and Ruskin is very concerned about how even the winds are being impacted by the industrial pollution.

Your next choice made me smile, because of course it is a fantasy novel, but I had never looked at it that way: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Yes, it was delightful for me when the penny dropped. I realised, wow, this is a fantasy story! I hadn’t realised that before. The subtitle describes it as, “[b]eing a ghost story of Christmas.” We have that ‘ghost story’ concept prominent in our heads when we think of A Christmas Carol, which is interesting, because there’s actually only one ghost who has a part. There are the unnamed ghosts in the background, but really, Marley is the singular ghost, right? The other visitors in the tale are spirits, not ghosts. And there’s time travel in the story, and space travel…

When I started to think of it in the context of it being a fantasy tale, that changed how I viewed the story – a story that my family reads every Christmas. I realised that this is actually an early tale of fantasy. It’s got a lot of the same important themes. There’s the theme of transformation obviously, that’s key to the text: that transformation is possible. And one of the things I find really interesting with A Christmas Carol is that the monster that has the protagonist in its grip is the protagonist’s own ego, his own greed. Augustine defines evil as being curved in on oneself – and that’s Ebenezer, right?

Ebenezer Scrooge. We tend to just call him Scrooge. We forget that his first name is Ebenezer. Another one of our key fantasy themes is knowing your stories: the word Ebenezer actually comes from the Old Testament, it’s a Jewish word, and refers to a story in which the people were supposed to build a monument of stones to help them remember what God had done for them in the past. So as they move into the future, if there are times when they lose their way, when they get distraught, they are to remember the Ebenezer. And that’s what the word came to mean: this recollection of the stories in the past that remind us that ‘God has brought us this far.’ So, Ebenezer’s name is really intentional, because that is this story!

Scrooge is constantly, throughout the tale, being reminded of his ebenezers – the stories that have shaped him, the good stories of his past, and the stories that will reshape him, and do reshape him as he recollects them. When the story begins he has forgotten his stories, he’s lost his roots, and yet in rediscovering them and hearing them again, he finds his identity again and fights off the monster. And, of course, Dickens is also pushing back against the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

Yes, all the same themes again! Really interesting. Your last choice is quite different to the rest: let’s talk about She by H. Rider Haggard.

I had read King Solomon’s Mines when I was probably too young to read it. I think plenty of movies have been made of that; it’s Haggard’s most famous book today. I came across She because it was in a book of essays by C. S. Lewis; he has a whole essay called ‘The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard.’

The concept of mythopoeia is one that intrigues me greatly – that’s why I did my doctoral dissertation on the mythopoesis of George McDonald, because Lewis and others call him the greatest mythopoeic writer. There’s a great sentence that Lewis has at the conclusion of his essay. He points out the deep defects in the book, and I would agree with him, there are defects, not least in some of Haggard’s racism. (He has characters of different races with positive traits, but he does fall into some stereotypical racism as well; I think I want to allow that he’s not as bad as many in his time – it doesn’t justify it, but it’s important to recognise that he was ahead of some others.)

Lewis says that what keeps us reading in spite of all the defects is the story itself, the myth; he says Haggard is the textbook case of the mythopoetic gift, pure and simple. He’s talking specifically about the novel She – so when I read that, I knew I had to go read this book.

It’s a quick read. It’s an adventure romp. She: A History of Adventure is its title, and it’s a first person narrative that follows the journey of an academic and his ward, who isn’t quite as intelligent as he is – he’s good looking, but not smart. They journey to a lost kingdom in interior Africa that they accidentally discover, and there they encounter an unknown people who have a mysterious white queen named Ayesha. Ayesha is known to her people as She, which is short for ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed.’

She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed will be a very familiar phrase to any Brit. The phrase is less familiar in North America, but in the UK I’ve heard people use that title grumblingly for their wives or their mothers – and Rumpole in John Mortimer’s classic radio drama Rumpole of the Bailey always calls his wife that. She is the story is from which that is sourced!

So, the two gentlemen set off on the journey when a mysterious shard is discovered, one which indicates that the young, handsome, not-so-intelligent Leo is descended from a mythical people – and, we discover, potentially from Isis. So it’s a story of forgotten inheritance once more.

Knowing that C. S. Lewis loved the story, I was intrigued to try to figure out why. I later discovered that Tolkien really loved this story too, and it’s one of the few more modern texts that Tolkien actually names as an influence. There’s an interesting link with Lewis… She Who Must Be Obeyed, this white queen, is an immortal being that comes from an earlier time, another world, who has power to kill people and to charm people. When men are not in front of her, they know she’s evil, and they know they need to get rid of her. When they’re in front of her, they lose all ability to withstand her beauty and her charm, they’re just mesmerised. However, if women are in front of her, they continue to see her as evil. As soon as I read that, I thought: that’s Diggory and Polly from The Magician’s Nephew; that’s Jadis, the White Queen, from Narnia! And we have that direct Lewis quote saying that this is a great mythopoeic tale… For me, that was exciting, to see story shaping story! She engages with ancient Egyptian myths, ancient African myths, and story-less contemporary Imperial England coming together with that, thus creating a new story and a new myth with mythic power.

There’s another section where Ayesha is Jadis from Narnia… She meets these two characters from England, and immediately thinks, “Oh, a new territory I can conquer.” The text says: ‘She had evidently made up her mind to go to England. And it made me absolutely shudder to think of what would be the result of her arrival there… In the end, she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world had ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life’ – and we, the reader, know it would be evil. And that’s exactly what Jadis wants to do when she arrives in England in The Magician’s Nephew!

So one of the really important legacies of She is how it has shaped the next generation of fantasy writers. I think it’s worth reading if you’re interested in the history of fantasy, worth visiting – it’s a quick read – for that element alone. And for how Haggard brings together myths of the past to shape a new myth, that we now know did go on and successfully shape yet other literary myths, new fantasy that was to come after him.