This post is contributed by Dr. Christian Dickinson, Assistant Professor of English at Brewton-Parker College.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the England described by Shakespeare as “This other Eden, demi-paradise”, had been completely transfigured (855). Factories covered the landscape, eradicating the once natural beauty of the English countryside and belching out columns of black smoke into the evermore stifling air. Urban sprawl and over-population in the cities created a veritable generation of slum-dwelling orphans. Infant mortality in the 1870s reached nearly 100,000 per annum (Chappel); in addition, the lack of regulation for child labor, which allowed roughly half of the population of London’s children between the ages of 5 and 15 to be put to work for ten hours a day, seemed to presage the death of innocence itself (Cody). 

Yet, in the midst of these horrors, a very different form of cultural expression began to gain ascendency. Writers such as George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and, of course, Mary Shelley inaugurated a fiction of the imagination, which served as the foundation for the contemporary genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction. What could have led to such an intense disparity in cultural production? How is it possible that the age which saw children working in factories from ten to fourteen hours a day was also the age that produced some of the greatest works of Children’s and Young-Adult imaginative literature?

One of the most common answers to the above question is that given by Terri Windling, the co-editor of a 2013 anthology of “Gaslamp” fantasy. In the Introduction to this volume, Windling provides the following explanation:

Throughout English history, we find that when the untamed side of human nature is at its most repressed in polite society, it tends to erupt and express itself in obsessive and subversive forms … While respectable Victorian society was as straitlaced as it could possibly be, among young artists and other rebels the nineteenth century was the hey-day of British bohemianism … When we look at these twin cultural movements—strict morality and wild bohemianism—it is easier to understand another odd aspect of Victorian life, which was a widespread interest in psychic phenomena and the occult (17).

Three paragraphs later, Windling provides what is perhaps the second-most-common answer to the above question:

The fairy fad among Victorian adults must also be viewed in light of the rapid changes wrought by the industrial revolution, as Britain moved from its rural past to its mechanized future. With factories and suburban blight destroying huge tracts of English countryside, fairy paintings and stories were rich in nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (18).

Both of these explanations have their foundation in the same attribute—that of human psychology. In Windling’s view, the fantastical productions of the era reacted against the intense moral repression of the period. They also embodied a psychological longing for a pre-industrial age, containing unspoiled productions of nature.

I would argue, however, that the true answer to the above question is not psychological but cultural. In brief, the answer can be found in the hybridizing of both “Realist” and “Fantastical” modes in certain novels of the period. Let me clarify my terms: Traditionally, the genre of the novel is described in terms of “Realism.” In other words, the Victorian novel strives to present real people (often the middle or lower classes) doing real things with real results. It is a form that sought to capture and reflect the harsh realities of Victorian social, religious, political, and cultural life in as unfiltered a way as possible. Yet, at the same time, authors of Children’s Literature commonly set their works in alternate worlds with creatures and characters one would never encounter in modern reality.

In nearly all cases, these modes are set as far apart as possible, and there is often a clear demarcation in the stories themselves between the “real” and the “fantastical” world. Works that included such demarcation would come to be known as ‘portal fantasy’, the most popular examples in the modern day being The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series. Hybridization of the kind I am referring to occurs when this barrier of demarcation between modes becomes translucent or disappears altogether. When elements of both realist and fantastical narrative co-exist in a single work in a way that does not feel forced or arbitrary. Perhaps the finest contemporary example of this is Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I would also put C. S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy” (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) in this category.

However, I would argue that this mixing of modes was inaugurated by Charles Dickens himself. There could be many reasons for this, though the most logical explanation would be that as a man without a childhood, Dickens was attempting to capture in his fiction something of the magical or spiritual wonder he may have felt he was deprived of during his time working in Warren’s Blacking Factory, but also due to the periods of poverty he and his family endured. Dickens never wrote Children’s Literature in the technical sense, but much of his work speaks to what is childlike in the world; in one sense, I believe that Dickens is attempting to give to the children of his day (the children of the urban poor) something he knows they desperately lack.

This hybridization can be seen throughout Dickens’s work but is perhaps best explained by an oft-quoted portion from the “autobiographical fragment” provided by Forster in his biography. It details Dickens’s unique experience in a London Coffee-Shop:

We had half an hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used to go to a coffee-shop, and have half a pint of coffee, and a slice of bread-and-butter. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden market, and stared at the pineapples. The coffee-shops to which I most resorted were, one in Maiden Lane; one in a court (non-existent now) close to Hungerford market; and one in St. Martin’s Lane, of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate, with coffee-room painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side moor-eeffoc (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood (Forster 57). 

The shock which Dickens feels when he recalls his childhood reveries comes from one and the same image being both real and fantastic. Unlike the “portal fantasies” so popular in the 19^th century and before, Dickens does not cross over from the real world into another. Rather, he occupies the world of London and Moor Effoc at one and the same time.   

Moments of hybridity appear in each of Dickens’s fifteen major works, each bringing a moment of wonder into scenes and descriptions typically drab or pedestrian. For example, In Sketches by Boz, an enchanted-looking fountain in Vauxhall-Gardens “present[s] very much the appearance of a water pipe that had burst” (156-57). In The Pickwick Papers, a carved stone, believed by Pickwick to be an artifact from ancient antiquity, is revealed to be no more than a quarry stone inscribed by a local provincial. In The Old Curiosity Shop, the black river takes on the character of personified revenge as it “toys and sports” with the body of Quilp. In Barnaby Rudge, a gathering of workmen apprentices is transformed into a clandestine society of vengeful knights-at-arms. In Dombey and Son, Paul Dombey can see his departed mother across the waves which appear to him in a constant vision, and James Carker is pursued, tossed about, and cast aside by a locomotive with fierce, red eyes.

Coming to the later novels, In Hard Times, the lights of the great factories convert them into fairy palaces. In Little Dorrit, Amy interprets her relationship with Arthur Clennam as that of a character in a fairy tale. In A Tale of Two Cities, the wine spilling from a broken barrel becomes blood in the eyes of a deranged Paris slum-dweller. In Great Expectations, when Pip first meets Estella, he describes her “light com[ing] along the dark passage like a star” (59); in addition, he compares the revelation of his true benefactor to the tale of a doomed Sultan in The Arabian Nights. In each of these instances, and many others which appear throughout Dickens’s complete works, the Inimitable encourages his readers to view the dreary, tragic, and even violent world through eyes of child-like wonder.

However, the texts that most perfectly capture this hybridity are the Christmas Books. Even if we leave out the spirits of the Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come, a supernatural presence hovers over nearly every scene of A Christmas Carol and The Chimes. In Fairy Tales of London, author Hadas Elber-Aviram argues that it is the Christmas books that best exemplify the variety of fantasy that distinguishes Dickens from the other genre writers of his day—that is fantasy in a specifically urban setting.

As Elber-Aviram states regarding this variety of fantasy:

By dint of this very dinginess [such as in Scrooge’s door-knocker], A Christmas Carol emerges as a communal, democratic, ready-to-hand fantasy, where enchantment suffuses London’s bric-a-brac, touching all its objects with a ghostly light, but affording the greatest intensity to the drabbest of all. It is a fantasy geared towards inclusiveness, where even someone as surly, miserly, unimaginative and unpleasant as pre-reformed Scrooge might see a ghostly face in his door knocker, not because the door knocker is unique nor because Scrooge is extraordinary, but precisely because they are not. This insistence on the enchantment of the ordinary and the magic of the shabby forms the core of Dickens’s romance of familiar things (37).

Though Dickens never wrote in the fantastical mode, his works have provided the blueprint for nearly all Modern Fantasy. This patterning is encapsulated in the hybridization of the real and fantastic found in all of Dickens’s major works. Such hybridization proved that the demarcation between these separate modes could be removed and that a harmony between the spiritual and real could be created.   

Though most scholars or readers would certainly not classify Dickens as an author of Fantasy, the hybridization of Realist and Fantastical modes – the “Moor Effoc Effect” – that appears in nearly all of Dickens’s work set the stage for the Fantasy which was to come next century. Authors from Rowling to Pullman to Riordan use this hybridization as the basis of their work. But what is the goal? What these authors, along with G. K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Dickens, are trying to help us see in this hybridization is one simple truth: We live in an enchanted world. If we believe that the world around us is primarily one of gloom and despair, perhaps it is not the world but our own vision that needs to change.

Works Cited

Chapple, Phil. “The Victorian Slaughter of the Innocents.” History Review, no. 36., Mar 2000, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/victorian-slaughter-innocents. Accessed 15 July 2023.

Cody, David. “Child Labor.” The Victorian Web, 26 Apr. 2019, https://victorianweb.org/history/hist8.html. Accessed 15 July 2023.

Datlow, Ellen and Terry Windling. Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gasplamp Fantasy. Tom Doherty, 2013.

Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. Penguin, 1995.

–. Great Expectations. Penguin Classics, 1996.

Elber-Aviram, Hadas. Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to Present. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. E-book, Project Gutenberg, 2008.

Shakespeare, William. “Richard II.” The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2^nd ed, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, pp. 842-83.