# The Invention of Modern Fantasy *Rabbit holes, goblin mines and the Well at the World's End* - Chapter: Chapter III - Date: 1850 – 1920 - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/victorian-invention/ > A Scottish minister's dream-romance, an Oxford don's rabbit hole and William Morris's invented kingdoms: how the Victorians and Edwardians created the fantasy novel. **Why it matters:** Between 1858 and the aftermath of the First World War, British and American writers invented the fantasy novel as a form of its own: the portal story, the invented secondary world and the children's classic. They also produced the first hobby war game, and the young Tolkien and Lewis began reading and writing inside this tradition. ## Quick answers **What happened in the era of The Invention of Modern Fantasy (1850 – 1920)?** A Scottish minister's dream-romance, an Oxford don's rabbit hole and William Morris's invented kingdoms: how the Victorians and Edwardians created the fantasy novel. **What are the key works of this period (1850 – 1920)?** Phantastes, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Well at the World's End, Little Wars, The Worm Ouroboros and The King of Elfland's Daughter. **Why does this period matter?** Between 1858 and the aftermath of the First World War, British and American writers invented the fantasy novel as a form of its own: the portal story, the invented secondary world and the children's classic. They also produced the first hobby war game, and the young Tolkien and Lewis began reading and writing inside this tradition. On a frosty afternoon early in 1916 a teenage schoolboy at Leatherhead station in Surrey bought a battered copy of a novel from the station bookstall. It was *Phantastes*, published nearly sixty years earlier by a Scottish minister named George MacDonald, and the boy, Clive Staples Lewis, would say for the rest of his life that it had "baptised" his imagination. A few months later another young Oxford man, Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien, went into the trenches of the Somme, and in 1917, recovering from trench fever, he began writing "The Fall of Gondolin," the first of the tales that would grow into his mythology. Both men were heirs to a revolution that had taken place in the decades before they were born. Between the 1850s and the First World War, writers in Britain and America invented the modern fantasy book: the dream-journey into another country, the nonsense world down a rabbit hole, the wholly imagined kingdom with its own maps and history, the children's classic about magic in the back garden. This is the chapter in which fantasy became a kind of novel. ## Through the wardrobe of dreams [George MacDonald](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/george-macdonald/) was a Congregationalist minister who had been eased out of his pulpit for unorthodox views, a lecturer, a friend of Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin, and a devoted reader of the German Romantics, above all Novalis. [Phantastes](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/phantastes/), subtitled *A Faerie Romance for Men and Women* and published in London in 1858 by Smith, Elder & Co., opens on its hero's twenty-first birthday, when a tiny fairy woman appears from an old secretary desk. The next morning, the water from his washbasin has become a stream running through his bedroom and his carpet is turning into grass. Anodos (Greek for "pathless") walks out into Fairy Land, a dream-logic country of forest spirits, an ominous Ash tree, a Marble Lady and his own sinister shadow. This is the first great adult [Portal Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/portal-fantasy/) in English: a person from our world who crosses into another, whose rules are moral and symbolic rather than physical. MacDonald went on to write for children with the same seriousness. *At the Back of the North Wind* (1871) and *The Princess and the Goblin* (serialized from November 1870, published 1872) are full of wise grandmothers, magic threads and a kingdom undermined by [goblins](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/goblin/) who hate songs and have soft feet. Tolkien later acknowledged that the goblins of *The Hobbit* owed a good deal to MacDonald's. MacDonald's last great fantasy, *Lilith* (1895), is darker still, a vision of death and redemption that points toward [Dark Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/dark-fantasy/). Among MacDonald's friends was an Oxford mathematics lecturer, Charles Dodgson. On a boating trip in the summer of 1862 he began improvising a story for the three young daughters of the dean of Christ Church, and in 1865 Macmillan published it, with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel, as [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/) by [Lewis Carroll](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lewis-carroll/). A sequel, *Through the Looking-Glass* (December 1871), gave the world "Jabberwocky," a monster-slaying ballad made of invented words, and a Lion and [Unicorn](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/unicorn/) fighting for the crown. Carroll's worlds are not dreamlike in MacDonald's spiritual way but logical to the point of madness, governed by puns, games of chess and cards, and rules that shift the moment you learn them. That is why they have been beloved of game designers ever since: Wonderland *is* a game world, a board on which a pawn advances to become a queen. Carroll established the playful, rule-bending strain of fantasy that runs through [Comic Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/comic-fantasy/) to [Terry Pratchett](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/terry-pratchett/). The same decade brought Charles Kingsley's *The Water-Babies* (1863), in which a chimney-sweep boy drowns and becomes a tiny water-creature. Kingsley wrote it partly as a satire in support of Darwin's *On the Origin of Species*. Victorian fantasy was never simply escapist; it was one of the ways the century argued about faith, science, class and childhood. ## Morris and the invented world If MacDonald and Carroll perfected the portal, [William Morris](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/william-morris/) invented the other great form of fantasy: the story set entirely in an imagined world. Morris was a poet, the designer whose firm made wallpapers and tapestries that still sell today, a socialist agitator and a passionate medievalist. With the Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon he translated the sagas, including the *Völsunga saga* (1870) with its dragon Fáfnir and its cursed ring (see [Myth, Epic & Saga](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/ancient-roots/)), and he twice traveled to Iceland to see the saga-steads. His late prose romances took that material somewhere new. *The House of the Wolfings* (1889), a tale of Germanic tribes resisting Rome written in a mixture of prose and verse, was a formative book for Tolkien. *The Story of the Glittering Plain* (1891), *The Wood Beyond the World* (1894), printed at Morris's own Kelmscott Press, and [The Well at the World's End](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-well-at-the-worlds-end/) (1896) are set in lands with no connection to our history or geography: kingdoms of walled towns, perilous woods and wandering knights, with magic real but sparing. Critics have called Morris the first writer to combine an invented world with the supernatural, which is to say the first writer of what Tolkien would later call a [Secondary world](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/secondary-world/) fantasy. In *The Well at the World's End* there is even a lord named Gandolf and a swift white horse named Silverfax; scholars have suggested Tolkien remembered them. Morris's deliberately archaic diction, his sense of landscape as something you walk through day after day, and his image of the quest as a long journey toward a distant, half-legendary goal are the foundations of [High / Epic Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/high-fantasy/). Morris was part of a much larger Victorian romance with the Middle Ages. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's *Idylls of the King* (1859–85) retold the Arthurian legend in twelve poems for a nation that saw itself in Camelot; the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Morris's close friends, filled Victorian galleries with Arthurian damsels and grail knights; Aubrey Beardsley decorated a new edition of Malory's [Le Morte d'Arthur](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/le-morte-darthur/) in the 1890s. Mark Twain answered from America with *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court* (1889), in which a factory superintendent is knocked on the head and wakes in sixth-century Britain, a comic portal fantasy that doubles as a satire of chivalry. The [Arthurian Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/arthurian-fantasy/) tradition that would flower in [T. H. White](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/t-h-white/) was firmly planted. Meanwhile, across the Channel and the North Sea, the Norse material that Morris loved was being turned into the grandest spectacle of the century. Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle *Der Ring des Nibelungen*, drawing on the Eddas and the *Nibelungenlied*, was first performed as a complete cycle at the opening Bayreuth Festival in August 1876. Its gods, giants, dwarves, dragon and all-powerful ring made Norse myth a European fashion, and Tolkien spent a lifetime being compared to it and irritably denying the resemblance. ## Fairy books and lost worlds The last decades of the century were a golden age of children's literature, and fairyland was its capital. In 1889 the Scottish scholar Andrew Lang and his wife Leonora (who did much of the translating and retelling) published *The Blue Fairy Book*, the first of twelve "colored" fairy books that collected tales from the Grimms, Perrault, the Nights and dozens of other traditions for British children (see [Grimms' Fairy Tales](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/grimms-fairy-tales/) and [Fairy-Tale Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/fairy-tale-fantasy/)). The series ran into the 1910s and put the whole world's folklore on the nursery shelf. Tolkien, who delivered the Andrew Lang Lecture on fairy stories in 1939, was among those who read them as a child. Adult readers wanted adventure, and they found it in the "lost world" romance. H. Rider Haggard's *King Solomon's Mines* (1885) and *She* (1887), with its immortal queen ruling a hidden African kingdom, combined imperial adventure, ancient ruins and the supernatural. Their plots, a small band of adventurers setting out with a map to find a treasure in forbidden country, are the plots of countless later adventures, and their imperial assumptions are a reminder of how deeply the genre's early "exotic" settings were shaped by the attitudes of empire. Rudyard Kipling's *The Jungle Book* (1894) and *Puck of Pook's Hill* (1906) mixed animal fable and English folklore; Kenneth Grahame, a Bank of England official, wrote "The Reluctant Dragon" (1898), a comic tale of a [Dragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/dragon/) who would rather write poetry than fight, and *The Wind in the Willows* (1908). The Edwardians kept the doors to other worlds swinging. E. Nesbit's *Five Children and It* (1902) placed magic in an ordinary English sandpit, the template for every later story of wishes going wrong. J. M. Barrie's play *Peter Pan* opened in London in December 1904 and became the novel *Peter and Wendy* in 1911. In America, L. Frank Baum's *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz* (1900), illustrated by W. W. Denslow, gave the United States its own fairyland, reached by cyclone from Kansas. Illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, whose color plates for *Rip Van Winkle* (1905) and *Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens* (1906) exploited new color printing, and Edmund Dulac made the gift book a luxury object and fixed the look of twisted trees, gnarled goblins and gossamer fairies that fantasy art would carry into the age of paperback covers. ## Pegāna and Barsoom Two new voices at the start of the twentieth century pointed fantasy in the directions it would take after 1920. The first was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, big-game hunter and chess champion, Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of [Dunsany](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lord-dunsany/). In 1905 he paid a London publisher to bring out *The Gods of Pegāna*, a book of invented scripture about gods who exist only while their creator, Mana-Yood-Sushai, sleeps. The stories that followed (*Time and the Gods*, *The Sword of Welleran*, *A Dreamer's Tales*) created a whole cosmos of jeweled cities, doomed thieves and indifferent deities in prose like an incantation. Dunsany had no interest in maps or histories; he wanted wonder. His influence was immense. In 1919 the young H. P. Lovecraft read him, heard him speak on his American lecture tour that year, and began writing Dunsanian dream-tales of his own (see [Pulps, Weird Tales & Sword-and-Sorcery](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/pulp-and-weird/) and [H. P. Lovecraft](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/h-p-lovecraft/)). A thief in a Dunsany story creeping into a god's temple to steal a jewel is not far from a D&D thief creeping into a tomb, and Dunsany was one of the writers Gary Gygax would name in [Appendix N](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/appendix-n/). The second voice was American and far less refined. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a failed businessman writing pulp fiction for money, sold a serial called "Under the Moons of Mars" to *All-Story* magazine, where it ran from February to July 1912; in book form it became *A Princess of Mars*. Its hero, the Confederate veteran John Carter, is transported to Mars, Barsoom to its inhabitants, and fights four-armed green giants with a sword to win a princess. The same year Burroughs published *Tarzan of the Apes*. Burroughs invented the planetary romance and gave [Science Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/science-fantasy/) its template: a dying world of ancient ruins and warring cities, a physically superior hero, and cliffhangers. He showed that pulp magazines could sell fantasy adventure to a mass audience, which is exactly what they would do in the next chapter. ## War games on the nursery floor One of the most famous writers of the age contributed to the other strand of this museum's story. [H. G. Wells](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/h-g-wells/), author of *The Time Machine* and *The War of the Worlds*, published *Floor Games* in 1911, a book about building imaginary cities and islands with toys on the carpet, and in 1913 [Little Wars](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/little-wars/), rules for battles with toy soldiers and spring-loaded cannon. It was the first book to present tabletop war gaming as a hobby for ordinary people rather than a training exercise for officers. Wells, a lifelong critic of militarism, was well aware of the irony, and he closed the book by contrasting his bloodless toy battles with the waste and misery of the real thing. A year later, the real thing came. The line from Prussian [Kriegsspiel](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/kriegsspiel/) through Wells to D&D is traced in its own chapter, [From Kriegsspiel to Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/from-wargames-to-roleplay/). ## Earendel in the trenches The Great War broke the Victorian world and scattered its young writers. Tolkien, an Oxford undergraduate in philology, had in September 1914 written a poem about Éarendel, a mariner whose ship sails into the sky as the evening star, the seed of his entire mythology. He was commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers, fought at the Somme in 1916, and lost all but one of his closest school friends to the war. Invalided home, he began in 1917 to write *The Book of Lost Tales*, including "The Fall of Gondolin," a story of an elven city destroyed by an army of monsters, [balrogs](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/balrog/) and dragons of iron. Christopher Tolkien would publish these early tales decades later (see [Christopher Tolkien](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/christopher-tolkien/) and [The Silmarillion](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-silmarillion/)). Lewis, too, went to the trenches and was wounded in April 1918, during the German spring offensive. In the war's aftermath fantasy took stranger turns. The Cottingley fairy photographs, taken in 1917 by two young cousins in Yorkshire, were championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in *The Strand Magazine* at Christmas 1920, a sign of how badly a grieving nation wanted to believe in something beyond the material world. In America James Branch Cabell's sly romance *Jurgen* (1919) was prosecuted for obscenity after New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice seized its printing plates in January 1920; Cabell and his publisher won the case two years later. And in 1922 an English civil servant at the Board of Trade, [E. R. Eddison](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/e-r-eddison/), published [The Worm Ouroboros](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-worm-ouroboros/), a gorgeous, archaic epic of the war between Demonland and Witchland, set (after a perfunctory frame story) on a fictional version of Mercury. It has no allegory and no moral, only heroes who love battle for its own sake. Two years later Dunsany published [The King of Elfland's Daughter](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-king-of-elflands-daughter/) (1924), a novel of a mortal prince who marries an elf princess. Both books are the last flowering of the Morris tradition before the pulps and Tolkien changed everything, and both would be rediscovered by paperback readers in the 1960s. ## What came next By 1920 the fantasy novel existed, but it was still a rare, literary, often expensive thing, the province of aesthetes, children and eccentric aristocrats. It was about to meet the mass market. In the next chapter, [Pulps, Weird Tales & Sword-and-Sorcery](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/pulp-and-weird/), cheap magazines printed on wood-pulp paper created a new audience for tales of the strange, and a Texan writing for *Weird Tales* invented a barbarian named Conan. At the same time, in Oxford, the young veterans Tolkien and Lewis were becoming professors, and their story is told in [Tolkien, Lewis & the Inklings](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/inklings-age/). ## Facts - C. S. Lewis bought a copy of [Phantastes](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/phantastes/) at a railway station bookstall in 1916 and later said it had 'baptised' his imagination. - The Princess and the Goblin was serialized in Good Words for the Young from November 1870 before its 1872 book publication; its goblins shaped Tolkien's. - William Morris's The Wood Beyond the World (1894) was first printed by his own Kelmscott Press, and in 1969 it became the third volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. - The first complete Ring cycle opened the first Bayreuth Festival on August 13, 1876, with Das Rheingold. - Lord Dunsany paid for the publication of his first book, The Gods of Pegāna (1905), taking a commission on its sales. - Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars was serialized in All-Story from February to July 1912, launching the swashbuckling planetary romance. - The Cottingley fairy photographs, first taken in 1917, were championed by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Strand at Christmas 1920. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia: Fantasy literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_literature) - [Wikipedia: Golden Age of Children's Literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Children%27s_Literature) - [Project Gutenberg: The Wood Beyond the World](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3055) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.