Strange and Secret Peoples

January 11, 1999
In this engaging and richly illustrated survey, Silver shows how popular superstitions, academic studies of folklore and widespread anxiety over modernization combined to bring magical creatures to life in the minds of Victorian Britons. Silver (The Romance of William Morris) examines representations of fairies and their supernatural kin in literature and painting, and finds that the influence of these so-called elementals extended well beyond the walls of middle-class nurseries. By placing fairy stories alongside both Stanley's sensational reports from the Congo and gross misapplications of Darwinian evolutionary theory, she reveals the stories to be warped historical records of a peculiarly charged moment in modern British culture. Silver demonstrates that fairies, dwarfs, ogres, banshees and other such members of the "elfin tribes" often took on the physical attributes of supposedly "primitive" peoples such as the Pygmies, and she shows how scientific efforts to establish the reality of fairies led, ironically, to the definitive refutation of their existence. While Silver rounds up what have become the usual suspects in academic studies of the supernatural (W.B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, to name a few), she also brings in less celebrated but equally colorful characters: romantic painter Henry Fuseli, "armchair explorer" R.G. Haliburton and kidnapped Pygmy Ota Benga, who in 1904 was displayed as the "missing link" in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo. Learned and engrossing, Silver's exhaustive study synthesizes intellectual history, literary criticism and earthy folk myth.