Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness [Hardcover]

Carole G. Silver (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195121996 | ISBN-13: 978-0195121995 | Publication Date: January 14, 1999 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Clap if you believe in fairies! The Victorians did, writes Carole Silver in Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, but she's not exactly talking about Tinkerbell here. Silver prefers the more gruesome and treacherous species of fay: changelings and vampires, brownies and goblins. The Victorians took these creatures very seriously, indeed, and according to Silver, this belief tapped into some of their society's most fundamental anxieties. Fear of physical deformity, of women's sexual power, of racial or class difference: these were the true bogeymen that haunted the Victorian imagination, and they responded with a flood of art, literature, and theater that portrayed these imaginary creatures with equal measures of fascination and horror. Silver even argues that many if not most Victorians believed in the actual physical existence of fairies, citing contemporary news accounts as her evidence. Why fairies? Creatures of the imagination and of the rural past, they offered refuge from an increasingly mechanized and empirical age. More ominously, they also provided expression for some of an imperialist nation's nastier beliefs, embodied in figures from Dr. Jekyll to Snow White's dwarves. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, Strange and Secret Peoples is an original look at the complexities and contradictions of Victorian culture.

From Publishers Weekly

In this engaging and richly illustrated survey, Silver shows how popular superstitions, academic studies of folklore and widespread anxiety over modernization combined to bring magical creatures to life in the minds of Victorian Britons. Silver (The Romance of William Morris) examines representations of fairies and their supernatural kin in literature and painting, and finds that the influence of these so-called elementals extended well beyond the walls of middle-class nurseries. By placing fairy stories alongside both Stanley's sensational reports from the Congo and gross misapplications of Darwinian evolutionary theory, she reveals the stories to be warped historical records of a peculiarly charged moment in modern British culture. Silver demonstrates that fairies, dwarfs, ogres, banshees and other such members of the "elfin tribes" often took on the physical attributes of supposedly "primitive" peoples such as the Pygmies, and she shows how scientific efforts to establish the reality of fairies led, ironically, to the definitive refutation of their existence. While Silver rounds up what have become the usual suspects in academic studies of the supernatural (W.B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, to name a few), she also brings in less celebrated but equally colorful characters: romantic painter Henry Fuseli, "armchair explorer" R.G. Haliburton and kidnapped Pygmy Ota Benga, who in 1904 was displayed as the "missing link" in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo. Learned and engrossing, Silver's exhaustive study synthesizes intellectual history, literary criticism and earthy folk myth.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1st edition (January 14, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195121996
• ISBN-13: 978-0195121995
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,292,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #74 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Victorian

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark Victorian Obessions (And Present-Day Fears), June 3, 2002

By 

J. E. Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Paperback)

Carole G. Silver's Strange & Secret Peoples: Faries & Victorian Consciousness (2000) is the best serious book on the subject of fairies and fairy lore to be published since Patrick Harpur's broader, belief-based study, Daimonic Reality (1994).

Silver believes that the Victorian love of fairy-themed plays, stories, paintings, and operettas actually reflected several dark and ugly obsessions for which the fairies were perfect symbols and potent conduits. These included mistrust of female sexuality and independence, fear of racial contamination, and a horror for birth deformity and child-stealing. For Silver, all Victorian thought and feeling on and for fairies had a decidedly downward pull. The fairies were not only easily and readily dismissible: they were something to actively fear.

Not all of Silver's chapters are equally good, but the author has a keen methodical writing style and a thorough understanding of the abundance of material she has gathered together. Especially satisfying are Silver's citings of fairy-related stories by neglected authors Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Fiona MacLeod and others; Silver briefly summarizes each story and places it within its sociological and historical context.

The major problem with Silver's work is the relentless political correctness, which rears its head whenever the author approaches a 'sensitive' issue; Silver would have been wiser to hold herself to a higher intellectual standard. It is fairly difficult to believe that, thirty-five years ago, she would have so heavily underscored the same objections she does here.

Is it really so difficult to understand how and why African pygmy tribes 'discovered' by Victorians were initially suspected to be less than fully human? Instead of allowing those scientists credit for the groundbreaking work they did, and allowing for--or at least rationally acknowledging--the genuine scientific ignorance of their time, Silver approaches the subject with a highbrow "I shudder to think" attitude which seems like willful historical stupidity itself.

The same applies to her awkward chapter on swan maidens: Silver writes defensively, as if exploring and elaborating upon the misogyny of the Victorian era will be misconstrued as her own misogyny, merely because the author is addressing the subject.

Though it takes itself and its subject too seriously on occasion, this is the best book likely to be published on the subject for some time. Students of folklore and myth will find it interesting and highly readable, if its uniformly dark conclusions not consistently persuasive.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read, December 18, 2000

By 

Kurt A. Johnson (North-Central Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-buy!, May 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Hardcover)

Enchanting, illuminating, and clear-headed, Carole Silver's study of the Victorians and their fairy obsession is a warehouse of treasures for anyone interested in fairy lore and the humans who hoard it. A born storyteller and endlessly smart, Silver brings to life the ideas and images that made up what we know of Victorian culture, showing how their reality and unreality differed from our own.