Social dreaming, Dickens and the fairy tale

grantor: University of TorontoDickens played a key role in establishing the fairy tale as an important literary form for the Victorian middle class. The only two books on Dickens and the fairy tale (Kotzin 1972; Stone, 1979) take a psychoanalytical approach to the subject; I apply recent fairy-tale criticism to Dickens scholarship in order to discuss Dickens's social uses of fancy and the fairy tale. My first two chapters place Dickens in the cultural contexts of the fairy tale. First, I both introduce the fairy-tale heritage to which Dickens was exposed and outline the critical contexts of this thesis. As do Perrault and the Grimms, Dickens used the fairy tale to promote his social views. To Dickens, a liberal humanist, the fairy tale had a high cultural value because it helped readers maintain hope and humanity in a mechanical age. Secondly, my approach illuminates Dickens's role in the cultural dispute of the early nineteenth century over the value of the fairy tale for children, when writers battled for access to children's minds in the hopes of perpetuating their belief systems. In "Frauds on the Fairies" and 'Hard Times', Dickens not only defends fancy as socially necessary but satirizes the Christian and rational discourses of its attackers. In a sense, all of Dickens's works are defences of fancy, as my last three chapters show. First, I discuss how Dickens uses fairy-tale motifs in his novels to create plots, characters and setting, idealizing women and the home as cultivators of fancy. Secondly, I focus on Dickens's Christmas books and their "'Carol' philosophy" of fancy, social reform and domestic affections. Close reading, however, reveals his ambivalence towards his own solutions. Finally, I examine Dickens's periodicals, ' Household Words' and 'All the Year Round', which were based on his 'Carol' philosophy and featured his fairy tales. The popularity of these publications spread his views widely and both encouraged writers to experiment with the fairy tale and readers to consider it respectable and valuable. In part because of Dickens's influence, the fairy tale continues to play a leading role in children's literary education today.Ph.D