Fairies and Sylphs: Femininity, Technology and Technique

Abstract

In the 1830s and 1840s, the British popular theatre fell in love with fairyland. Fairies in theatre, impersonated by dancers in flesh-coloured tights and tulle dresses and wings, became fixtures of pantomime, burlesque, and extravaganza. They were at the centre of the Romantic ballet, and at the forefront of its aesthetic and technical innovations. In this, the popular stage was following a cross-media trend. Visual representations of theatre fairies were frequent in the popular press, and the creation of ‘Fairyland’ on the stage, and in the home, became a regular feature of family entertainment both public and private. The craze for fairies and fairy stories was a long-running one, starting with late seventeenth-century translations of fée stories by the French writers, Madame d’Aulnay, and Charles Perrault, leading to translations and adaptations from the Brothers Grimm of German Märchen, or short folk tales (first translated as German Popular Stories, by Edgar Taylor in 1823), and late-century British versions by writers such as George MacDonald. In Britain, the study of fairy tales, and fairy lore, was quickly absorbed into pedagogical theory on the one hand, and the emerging discipline of anthropology on the other. This widespread interest in fairies in the nineteenth century is generally held to be a response to the social, economic, and environmental changes of rapid industrialization of the first half of the nineteenth century.