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As argued in the Introduction, as early as in ancient times the term ‘nature’ was polyvalent, indifferently used to define the natural world and human nature alike. In the nineteenth century, the ‘natural historical way of knowing’, to draw upon John Pickstone’s phrase again, implied the breaking down into pieces of natural specimens and humans alike, as naturalists, scientists or medical professionals looked for ‘regularities’,3 recurrently comparing humans to machines to understand function. Moreover, because of the old and enduring association of women and nature, with the onset of the Scientific Revolution the mechanization of the world-view and the attendant increase in mechanistic models aimed at explaining nature saw women as disorderly beings that needed to be controlled, restructuring them in a way as machines. The reordering of the world through the machine metaphor – as an image of the power of humans and technology to control nature and human life – redefined reality. As Carolyn Merchant argues, ‘[r]ational control over nature, society, and the self was achieved by redefining reality itself through the new machine metaphor’.4 Since bodies were seen as marvellous machines made up of different pieces, the Scientific Revolution saw the making and popularization of automata, contraptions often defined as wonderful, all the more so because many of them came from the East.5

Robins were one of the themes chosen by the fairy painter John Anster Christian Fizgerald (1819?–1906) for a series of works on Cock Robin, including The Captive Robin (c.1864), Who Killed Cock Robin?, Cock Robin Defending his Nest and Fairies Sleeping in a Bird’s Nest. In Who Killed Cock Robin?, the death of the robin illustrates how Fitzgerald’s paintings, often dark and permeated by a dream-like or nightmarish atmosphere suggestive of his familiarity with drugs, connect the world of fairies not only with the natural world but also with that of spirits and ghosts. Of course, the series reproduces natural ecosystems and the deaths of animals depict the struggle for life in the natural world. As Nicola Bown suggests, Fitzgerald’s Who Killed Cock Robin? may have been influenced by Victorian taxidermic displays, in particular Walter Potter’s The Death of Cock Robin (1861) which was widely advertised.1 As both decorative art and scientific arrangement, aimed at helping naturalists or amateurs wishing to learn about natural history, taxidermic displays represented ecosystems safely encased in glass. But the fad for anthropomorphic taxidermy also drew attention to the links between humans and animals and anxieties related to humans’ place in the natural world.

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

As seen in the previous chapter, in the second half of the nineteenth century, fairy tales were increasingly seen as primitive stories of mankind, gnomes, elves and fays resulting from people’s unscientific or uneducated reading of the natural world. The rise of folktale scholarship, moreover, manifest in the multiple attempts at collecting and classifying folk and fairy tales in the nineteenth century, from Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries (1828) to Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology (1891) at the end of the century, more and more constructed the fairy tale as more or less a natural material: once collected and catalogued, the tales could be observed by folklorists and anthropologists, as if with a magnifying glass or a microscope. Such works also underlined how fairy tales reflected primitive people’s beliefs and interpretation of the natural world. Analyses of the fairy tale of this type influenced children’s literature as well. In many mid-century children’s magazines, such as Margaret Gatty’s Aunt Judy’s Magazine or Charlotte Yonge’s The Monthly Packet, the connection between fairy tales and natural phenomena was often stressed, not simply providing children with rational explanations for natural processes that were believed to be supernatural, as seen with the example of Samuel Clark’s Peter Parley’s Wonders of Earth, Sea, and Sky (n.d.), but also explaining to children what led primitive peoples to create such fairy stories, as the following article highlights: Perhaps all these stories originally sprang from an allegorical way of describing the actions of nature… Of those which are most clearly what are called nature-myths, we may mention Thorn-rose (or, as it is often called in English, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’), which simply arises from an allegory of the Spring kissing the Earth into new life.3

As Philip Henry Gosse highlights, surprise, wonder and expectation partake of the Victorian naturalist’s work as he discovers terra incognita and unknown species — even in England. The naturalist’s quest, close to that of the knight of romance, seems to inhabit a fantastic world where magical spells may be cast at any time. Gosse’s Romance of Natural History (1860) makes explicit how, as unknown natural specimens were discovered in England, brought back from foreign countries, or even revealed by the microscope, nature constantly flirted with the impossible and the marvellous. His popular science book epitomizes how naturalists and natural history writings emphasized the endless possibilities and bizarre forms of nature, clothing the natural world with wonderful and fanciful garbs paradoxically as naturalists and scientists unveiled its secrets. As this book will underline, the rhetoric and images of Victorian natural history permeated Victorian culture, and Philip Henry Gosse’s Romance of Natural History is a significant case in point to start our survey of the narratives that popularizers of natural history were offering readers at the time. The title of Gosse’s book makes explicit how natural history was seen as fraught with imaginative potential, nature looking like ‘the enchanted imaginings of an author in a medieval romance’, in Lynn Merrill’s terms.2

Jane Loudon’s The Young Naturalist’s Journey; or, the travels of Agnes Merton and her Mamma (1840) relates a little girl and her mother’s expedition by train to visit menageries. Mrs Merton and her daughter see monkeys, mangoustes, lemurs, Virginian partridges and various sorts of other birds; they learn about flying squirrels, hawks, falcons and chameleons. The species they encounter have been brought to England from all parts of the world – Africa, America, the East Indies, Madagascar, Italy and Spain. The book, inspired by the Magazine of Natural History and aiming to adapt some of the papers published in the magazine, provides descriptions of the creatures the two women encounter, accompanied by illustrations, with mentions of the creatures’ origins and their eating habits. But what seems to interest the two women most is whether the creatures may be tamed. For most of the exotic animals kept in captivity the two women are shown illustrate how wild species may be domesticated. The issue of humans’ power over nature is thus at the heart of the narrative, domestication even becoming a means of saving endangered species, as one of the characters tells the women at the end of the journey: ‘as no attempt is made to tame [kangaroos], or breed them in confinement, in time the race must become extinct’.1

In C. M. Tucker’s Fairy Know-A-Bit; or, a nutshell of knowledge, fairy Know-a-Bit is an instructor to children, giving them lessons that merge didacticism with entertainment. By becoming an urban creature, fairy Know-a-Bit has gained an education, and her transformation traces the evolution of civilization. The scholarly fairy is much more evolved than her rural ancestors, and as such she becomes a suitable instructor to children – primitive creatures in need of an education. Tucker’s fairy Know-a-Bit is a good introduction to Edith Nesbit’s treatment of fairies in Five Children and It because evolutionary allusions inform Nesbit’s supernatural being who reluctantly acts as a teacher to children. Both writer and poetess,2 Edith Nesbit remains famous today for her children’s books, notably The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), the Psammead series (Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Story of the Amulet (1906)), The Railway Children (1906), The Enchanted Castle (1907) and The Magic City (1910). Her fiction often interweaves children’s reality with fantasy, using magical objects to spur the children’s adventures. Nesbit also wrote literary fairy tales (collected in The Book of Dragons (1900) and Nine Unlikely Tales (1901)), written for The Strand in 1899 and 1900, which merge the fairy-tale world with contemporary reality and recurrently highlight moral or cultural issues.3