Abstract
Charles Kingsley’s comparison of nature’s creatures to the glass-and- iron building which hosted the 1851 Great Exhibition in London ironically suggests that the study of natural history was not that far from the Victorian world of engineering and technological advances. The simile, if perhaps surprising, is in fact not coincidental. Indeed, fairies were recurrently used to represent the wonders of the world of industry in the Victorian period, and were even part and parcel of the Crystal Palace experience: when Queen Victoria, who was privately dubbed ‘the Faery’ by her favourite Prime Minister, Disraeli,2 entered the Crystal Palace for the first time in 1851, the place, she claimed, ‘had quite the effect of fairyland’,3 all the more so because a tableau of fairies representing ‘Art, Science, Concord, Progress, Peace, Wealth, Health, Success, Happiness, Industry and Plenty’ appeared at the entrance.4 Likewise, a contemporary description of the Crystal Palace compared the venue to Fairyland:
The magician is right; but as Beauty’s chamber was guarded by griffins, and all enchanted castles are defended by dragons, so is Fairyland guarded by gnomes; blue, and uncompromising. One occupies the little crypt on either side of the door by which visitors are admitted to Fairyland in crystal. To judge from the costumes of these gnomes you would take them to be plain constables of the Metropolitan Police; but, my word for it, they have all the gnomical etceteras beneath their uniform and oilskin. The entrance to Fairyland is not effected by rubbing a lamp, or clapping the hands three times, or by exclaiming ‘Open Sesame’; but, as a concession to the non-magical tendencies of some of the visitors, a commutation is accepted in the shape of five shillings current money of the realm.5
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Notes
Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, the wonders of the shore (London: Macmillan & Co., (1855) 1890), p. 128.
Lionel Lambourne, ‘Fairies and the Stage’, in Jane Martineau (ed.), Victorian Fairy Painting (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1997), pp. 46–53 (53).
[W. H. Wills and George A. Sala], ‘Fairyland in ‘fifty-four’, Household Words 193 (3 Dec. 1853), pp. 313–17 (313).
Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 96.
Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, p. 136. See also David Elliston Allen, ‘Tastes and Crazes’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary (eds), The Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 394–407.
Anne Larsen, ‘Equipment for the Field’, in Jardine, Secord and Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History, pp. 358–77. The connections between glass and the scientific world displaying specimens in glass cases or preserved in glass jars were not strictly limited to natural history. It is noteworthy that the naturalist Eliza Brightwen refers to a fairy tale to depict late Victorian museum experience: ‘[The student of nature] must pass alone, from chamber to chamber, down corridor after corridor, until he discovers that sleeping princess, Knowledge, who is never found until we industriously seek for her. All I can do is point out the difference between languidly strolling with vacant face between the glass walls of our great museums, and passing eagerly with intelligent interest from one cabinet of recognised treasures to another’ (Eliza Brightwen, More About Wild Nature (London: Unwin, 1892), p. 222, qtd in Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘The Museum Affect: Visiting Collections of Anatomy and Natural History’, in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 371–403 (382). The reference to Sleeping Beauty enhances the process of distanciation (of the museum exhibits from the public, just as of the female body crystallized in its glass and solely to be gazed upon and thus objectified) that characterized nineteenth-century museology. We will see further on how Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie undermines this construction through her Cinderella whose bodily desires and inner nature are, on the contrary, reflected by the glass motif.
Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Among the Merrows. A Sketch of a Great Aquarium’, Aunt Judy’s Christmas Volume (London: Bell and Daldy, 1873), pp. 44–57.
Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (New York: A. L. Burt Company, Publishers, (1860) 1902), p. 183. The exclamation is, in fact, that of Robert Schomburgk, discoverer of the giant water lily.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 151.
Margaret Flanders Darby, ‘Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily’, in Michel Conan (ed.), Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550– 1850 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), pp. 255–83 (266).
[Anon.], ‘Good Friday, and a Better Friday’, All the Year Round 13 (13 May 1865), pp. 373–6 (374–5).
The Crystal Palace was often seen as a place teeming with women’s fantasies and unregulated desires; see Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 66–8.
William Makepeace Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 4 vols, ed. Gordon N. Ray (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), iv, p. 161, qtd in Gowan Dawson, ‘The Cornhill Magazine and the Shilling Monthlies in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Geoffrey Canton,
Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 123–50 (124).
The Cinderella revisions Isobel Armstrong examines are: [Anon.], The History of Cinderella and her Glass Slipper (London: Orlando Hodgson, 1830(?)).
[Anon.], The Amusing History of Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper (London, 1850(?)).
George Cruikshank, Cinderella and the Glass Slipper (London: D. Bogue, 1854).
[Anon.], Cinderella and the Glass Slipper (London: J. Bysh, 1861).
[Anon.], Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper (London: Dean & Son, 1870).
[Anon.], Cinderella; or the little glass slipper (London: Dean & Son, 1876).
Iona Opie and Peter Opie, Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 121;qtd in Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 205. Valerie Paradiz argues that the motif of the glass slipper dates further back and already appears in Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1637) (Valerie Paradiz, Clever Maids: The Secret History ofthe Grimm Fairy Tales (New York: Perseus Books, (2004) 2005), p. 154.
Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 30.
Charles Dickens, ‘Fraud on the Fairies’, Household Words 184 (1 Oct. 1853), p. 99.
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, ‘Cinderella’ (1868), reprinted in Jack Zipes, Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 101–26 (111). Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
Caroline Sumpter, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 81. Sumpter also examines Ritchie’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’: ‘we have but to ring an invisible bell (which is even less trouble), and a smiling genius in a white cap and apron brings in anything we happen to fancy’ (Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1867), in Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds), Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 35–74 (36). Likewise, in ‘Maids-of-All-Work and Blue Books’, Ritchie compares the exploited maid-of-all-work to the ‘benevolent race of little pixies who live underground in subterranean passages and galleries’ (Anne Isabella Thackeray
Ritchie, ‘Maids-of-All-Work and Blue Books’, Cornhill Magazine 30 (1874), pp. 281–96.
Rebecca Stott, Theatres of Glass: The Woman who Brought the Sea to the City (London: Short Books, 2003), p. 25. As Rebecca Stott has shown, women were also involved with glass culture from a more scientific perspective: the marine aquarium, for instance, was invented by Anna Thynne in 1849 (Theatres of Glass, p. 126). As mentioned in Chapter 1, the chemist Robert Warington was the first to enunciate the aquarium principles in a paper delivered to the Chemical Society in 1850 by adding plants to the water to give off enough oxygen to support animal life, but Anna Thynne managed to aerate her tank by having the water poured backward and forward. Warington’s invention owned his aquaria the name of the ‘Warington Case’, advertised as an ‘Aquatic Plant Case or Parlour Aquarium’ (Lyn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820–1870 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1980), pp. 115–16.
In ‘A Vision of Animal Existences’ the depiction of a lady holding a copy of John Murray’s first edition of The Origin of Species and allegorizing natural selection sets a parallel between the lady’s appearance and Buffon’s and Cuvier’s classifications of the natural world;[E. S. Dixon], ‘A Vision of Animal Existences’, Cornhill Magazine 5 (March 1862), pp. 311–18.
Susan David Bernstein, ‘Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender’, in Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (eds), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 66–79 (66).
Isobel Armstrong mentions an article published in the Illustrated London News of 5 July 1851, ‘A Lady’s Glance at the Great Exhibition’, in which the reviewer notes the profusion of items designed to adorn the female form and hinting at miscegenated metamorphosis, such as artificial flowers made from the tusks of elephants (Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 217). In an article published in All The Year Round, this association between make-up and waste is brought to light in order to deter women from using make-up: it denounces blush, made with alloxan, a chemical substance derived from the fœtal membranes of animals, together with other examples of recycled refuse that fashionable women use; [Anon.], ‘Paint, and No Paint’, All the Year Round 7 (9 August 1862), p. 521.
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 18.
Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Dryad’, trans. A. M. Plesner and Augusta Plesner, Aunt Judy’s Magazine 6.34 (1 February 1869) and 6.35 (1 March 1869), reprinted in Aunt Judy’s May-Day Volume for Young People (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), pp. 237–47 and 286–96 (296). All further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
[Anon.], ‘Wonders of the Sea’, All The Year Round 4 (5 January 1861), pp. 294–9 (298).
The Rev. J. G. Wood notes the end of the craze for aquaria in such terms: ‘Some years ago, a complete aquarium mania ran through the country. Every one must needs have an aquarium, either of sea or fresh water, the former being preferred… The fashionable lady had magnificent plate- glass aquaria in her drawing-room, and the schoolboy managed to keep an aquarium of lesser pretensions in his study. The odd corners of newspapers were filled with notes on aquaria, and a multitude of shops were opened for the simple purpose of supplying aquaria and their contents. The feeling, however, was like a hothouse plant, very luxuriant under artificial conditions, but failing when deprived of external assistance… So, in due course of time, nine out of every ten aquaria were abandoned; many of the shops were given up, because there was no longer any custom; and to all appearance the aquarium fever had run its course, never again to appear, like hundreds of similar epidemics’ (Rev. J. G. Wood, The Fresh and Salt-Water Aquarium (London, 1868), pp. 3–6, qtd in Barber, Heyday of Natural History, pp. 121–2).
In the Victorian period, the habits of aquarium animals were often read in moral terms as human moral standards tended to be projected upon aquarium creatures. See Christopher Hamlin, ‘Robert Warington and the Moral Economy of the Aquarium’, Journal of the History of Biology 19 (1986), pp. 131–53.
Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (London: Penguin, (1863) 1995), p. 75.
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© 2014 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
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Talairach-Vielmas, L. (2014). Nature under Glass: Victorian Cinderellas, Magic and Metamorphosis. In: Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342409_5
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