A Brief History of Fairies in Victorian Popular Culture

by Jackie Valadez

While various conceptions of fairies and realms beyond our own lie within many cultures across time, contemporary society’s views on fairies and folklore stems mainly from a sweeping craze during the Victorian era. From about 1840-1910 anything and everything fairy was readily produced and the general public was eager to take in media depicting magical places far beyond their immediate realities. Popular arts of the time such as painting and ballet took inspiration from literature around fairies, especially Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Blake, a leading figure of the Romantic movement, and a student of the occult tradition, had a distinct fascination with fairies.¹ He, along with Henry Fuseli would have a lasting influence on Victorian painters by tapping into the other side of fairy tradition. In Strange and Secret People’s, Carole Silver attributes this influence to Blake and Fuseli acknowledging a darker side of the fairy mythos: “Blake, like Fuseli, recognizes that the sports of the fairies are usually cruel; the sinister nature of some of the images suggests Blake’s recognition of the dark side of the fairy tradition.”² At the same time, the social sciences were rapidly growing fields, with the new disciplines of archaeology and anthropology being used to connect fairy mythology to the larger history of human evolution. This emphasis on fairies in popular culture, and within rigorous academic fields created a wealth of information on the fae and other preternatural beings that has had a longstanding influence. Today when we think of fairies, what immediately comes to mind are ideas of soft benevolent angelic beings that are intimately braided to nature in ways that suggest a type of utopia; a heaven of beauty and peace. But the other side of fairy history speaks to the psychology within repressed societies, connections to hell and death, and the dismissal of ancient matriarchal ways of life.

The fairy frenzy of the Victorian period pulled imagery and ideas from folktales, local legends and rural memorates. One of the themes seen throughout various cultures in Europe was the idea of Fairyland as a type of afterlife. Fairies were closely connected to specters, and the Spiritualists continued that line of thought. A preoccupation with death marked the movement and Spiritualists believed that life did not stop after death, it just continued on into new spheres of existence. Fairyland was theorized by some Spiritualists as the next step for the human soul. Folklorists looking into Celtic and Norse mythology collected stories of fairyland as a sort of purgatory. “The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor”, a story from Cornwall, tells the story of Mr. Noy who, while lost in a swampy forest, finds that his long dead lover is actually alive but trapped in fairyland under the spell of pixies who keep her prisoner. “Oh, beware! Embrace me not, nor touch flower nor fruit; for eating a tempting plum in this enchanted orchard was my undoing.”³ Her captors were those that had “lived as mortals,-may be thousands of years ago.” Mr. Noy’s lover stops him from eating or drinking anything in fairyland and thus prevents him from meeting the same fate. This theme of entrapment is common in much of fairy mythology, and serves as a warning against coming into contact with the fae.

Another popular theme within fairy lore was the fairy queen, and some social anthropologists of the time interpreted these ideas as, “relics or folk memories of a prehistoric period of matriarchy or of matrilineality; the relatively high position of women within them was a sign of how ancient such tales were. Most ancient of all—preserved and transmitted mainly through Irish materials—were the tales of truly independent powerful fairy queens who simply seduced, consorted with, and abandoned mortal heroes at will.”⁴ Though for the most part, many of the leading anthropologists deemed the idea of matriarchal societies barbaric, and used it to further ideas of patriarchal rule. It’s no wonder that in an era marked by its extreme repression and anxieties about the role of women in society, many would use fairy mythology to explore ideas of individual freedom.

At the end of the Victorian era fairies had begun to be flattened into societal ideals of the time, with artists such as Cicely Mary Barker popularizing the image of fairies connected to flowers, child-like and seemingly unable to cause any real harm.⁵ The dark mythology and exploration of prior beliefs were turned away in favor of images that depicted fairies as examples of Christian ideals. The fervor, serious inquiry, and exercise in imagination seems to have stopped after the Victorians. It speaks to an assumption that we know all there is to know about existence, the hand of materialism gripping the contemporary psyche so hard there seems to be a war on imagination. Still, there is a yearning to understand possibilities outside our present realities, and an examination of fairies and other ideas in forgotten mythologies is a powerful vehicle for examining ourselves to reach realities beyond our own.

1 Laura Miller, “The Occult Tradition, Blake, & the Kabbalah: A Preliminary Study,” (Bowling Green, Kentucky: Western Kentucky University, 1977), https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2632/.