Nature under Glass: Victorian Cinderellas, Magic and Metamorphosis

Abstract

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