Customer Reviews

Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Silver has done an outstanding job researching and synthesizing this. Highly recommended for anyone interested in fairies, Victorians, or western culture and history.

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