The Natural History of Make-believe

This history of children's books with supernatural themes, covers the period from Perrault (1697) to Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) mainly from the viewpoint of how one author influences another. The book's theme is the development of what Goldthwaite calls the 'miracle story' in three genres: nursery rhymes, which lead to nonsense; fairy tales, which develop into fantasies; and beast fables, which lead on to animal fantasies. Each genre is treated chronologically. The line from nursery rhymes to Lear and Dr Seuss is uncontroversial. When discussing Perrault, Goldthwaite emphasises the role of the fairy godmother in children's literature. With Rousseau the genre became didactic, and the tutor replaced the godmother. Kingsley was a great innovator in The Water-Babies, combining the miraculous with nonsense passages and Christianity. I have always puzzled over how Kingsley's four fairies who all become one person at the end, fit into Christian theology, and I decided that she was Mother Nature, ruling Planet Earth under God, and named by Kingsley 'the great fairy Science'. Goldthwaite's interpretation is that Kingsley's Fairy, Irene's grandmother in MacDonald's 'Princess' stories and the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, are the same entity independently arrived at, a divine being, one of the Christian Trinity, an aspect of the Holy Spirit. Since the personification of Wisdom is feminine in both Testaments, Goldthwaite argues that She is the Holy Spirit. While not accepting all his thesis one must recognise that Christian theology is an essential element in these fantasies. Goldthwaite proceeds to analyse what the Alice books owe to The Water-Babies: comparisons to a Cheshire Cat and March hare are made by Kingsley and Carroll's Cheshire Cat and March Hare enter the cast of Alice only in the expanded version written straight after The Water-Babies was published. Goldthwaite's analysis of Alice is really done to death over 100 pages before we reach a celebration of Pinocchio, which Goldthwaite considers a masterpiece, regretting the Disney version. More briefly he looks at Peter Pan and the Oz books before reaching, untypically, a negative critique of Tolkien and Lewis. (Lord of the Rings, being written and published for adults, could have been considered off-limits.) Lewis is criticised for disobeying Christ's teaching on pacifism, and yes, the scene where the children punish the bullies at the end of The Silver Chair goes against Christ's teaching about turning the other cheek. However, where war was concerned, Lewis did not believe that Christ counselled pacifism. He took the Old Testament Commandment to be against murder, but not against killing in a just war. Both Tolkien and Lewis believed that World War II was a just war, and this ethos informs the Narnia and Middle-earth fantasies, written during a time when Britons believed that they faced enslavement, massacre and genocide if Hitler won. Secondary-world, mythic fantasy is described as a 'dead end', though Goldthwaite's mid-60s cut-off point could have allowed a demonstration of how Garner began by echoing Tolkien and then reacted against him to revive the genre with Folklore Fantasy: such writers as Susan Cooper, Ursula Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander and Diana Wynne Jones come too late for his thesis, but the genre is certainly not dead. Moreover, within his chosen period, does not The Sword in the Stone (omitted) fulfil his criteria? And he gives E Nesbit very short shrift. The book concludes with less controversial but still original analyses of the Uncle Remus series and what Beatrix Potter owed to them, tracing descent through Grahame, Kipling and Milne to E B White and some American writers I have not come across before. If Goldthwaite had extended his cut-off point to demonstrate a living tradition of fantasy, he would have widened his potential readership; £20 is a lot to pay for yet another discussion of Alice and attacks on Tolkien and Lewis.