A world where all fairies are “fabulous” is, of course, a world without dreams. When Miss Sprightly weeps on rising, because she cannot banish the thought of “the most pleasing dream which she ever had in her life”, the inexorable Mrs. Teachwell meets the situation with a simple formula: “Idle girl, make haste!” The Fabulous Beings whom she admits on sufferance are not more fairylike than “the smallest wax doll.”
Two lines from The Fairy Spectator betray the Rousseauist’s attitude to Fairyland:
“I will write you a Dialogue in which the Fairy shall converse, and I will give you a Moral for your Dream.”
CHAPTER VI
DEVICES OF THE MORALIST
Family authorship—Limitations of the little novel—the English setting in early woodcuts: Thomas and John Bewick—the first school-story: Sarah Fielding’s Governess—Stories of country and domestic life: The Village School and Jemima Placid—Other school-stories—Nature and Truth in The Juvenile Spectator—Adventures of animals—Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories—The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse—Keeper’s Travels—The Kitten of Sentiment—Adventures of things: The Silver Threepence and the Pincushion.
The great writers for children were neither Lilliputian nor Rousseauist. They emerged from a good company of aunts and mothers who, with a sprinkling of fathers, were driven into anonymous authorship by the demands of their own families: minor moralists, without any special gifts of art or imagination, who managed to draw live pictures from their own little world, and hit upon simple devices for holding attention and exciting interest.
They were mostly innocent of Theory, but an intimate acquaintance with the Child of Nature taught them in one way or another to avoid the unpardonable sin of dulness.
Little novels, following their grown-up prototypes with unequal steps, had their own limitations of setting and character. A nursery or a schoolroom is always a nursery or a schoolroom, and varies only according to particular houses and inhabitants. The few ways of escape (by a window, a chimney or a keyhole) into fairyland, were blocked in most eighteenth century houses, and the persons of moral tales, however lifelike, were apt, from contact with a narrow circle, to assume familiar characters.
Adventures of the milder sort might happen on the road to school, but the only changes of scene were from parlour to schoolroom, or from town to country. Any effort to exceed these by travels abroad landed the unsophisticated author in a hopeless confusion of unknown tongues and half-remembered directions.