Managing the Play of Belief Within Children's Fantasies

This chapter brings together two strains of Victorian fictional play with fairies, the transformation of fairies into quasi-angels on the one hand and its loose corollary, that children must believe not only in fairies but in St. Nicholas/Santa. The dominant mode of Victorian fairies in fiction devised for children increasingly rehabilitated the earlier dangerous fairy of folklore by a kind of cultural fiat; fictional fairies became more likely to match their (imagined) ethereal and miniature beauty with a pure-hearted commitment to virtue, both for themselves and for the humans they aid. Of course, if fairies were really angels, children would be morally wrong not to believe in them, and thus the sweep of fairy propaganda operated as a form of compelled belief—the very sort of belief which has no real or lasting power over a child’s thought. The demands upon a child reader for belief in nonsense (fairies, Santa) in this period betray a significant cultural anxiety, revealed in this chapter through stories which insist on magic, such as E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (1907) and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904); stories which create new Santa substitutes drawn from Hoffmann’s magical godfather, Drosselmeyer, in The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), such as Ewing’s “Christmas Crackers” (1871) and Horne’s The Good-Natured Bear (1846) ; stories with false Santas, such as Field’s “The Mouse and the Moonbeam” (1889) and Corkran’s Down the Snow Stairs (1879); and, last, Burnett’s “Behind the White Brick” (1874), in which Santa explains himself to a disbelieving child.