The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America

by John Goldthwaite

The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of
children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted.

Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat,
Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild
Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and
the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia
as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well.

Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Folklore

400 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 1996

Reviews

[Kyrie ⌒☆]

This was a bit of a let-down. Judging by the title, and what sense I could garner from the synopsis of the book (which is literally just the first few paragraphs of its introduction) I was expecting this to be a historical look at the evolution of fantasy stories.

In reality, it wasn't so much an academic piece as it was a collection of the author's opinions and beliefs about various stories.

More chapters read more like this:

Where she is, I think - and everyone else, too, for all one can tell from the pronouns - is in the rhyming soap opera that provides the trial's centerpiece. The "secret, kept from all the rest, / Between yourself and me" I would guess included at least one crack to Alice on what a muff Lord Newry was to have brought The Water Babies into the Deanery without first reading it himself. The cunning student, of course, had quickly hopped back into Mrs. Liddell's good graces by agreeing to spy on Uncle Charles. The evidence suggests he had been doing so for a year or more, gratis; but in her need to be rid of Dodgson she might have coached her protege to new heights of infamy.

than this:

Even in middle age, he could be found playing the wallflower, thinking his thoughts. Following an introduction at a gathering in 1879, Mark Twain remarked that next to Joel Chandler Harris, Dodgson was "the stillest and shyest full-grown man" he had ever met.

The author assumes or "evidence suggests" most of what is in this book, with very little actual evidence being supplied. For instance, the first quote, about the matter of the Knave's trial having anything to do with Lord Newry or The Water Babies, the author says, "I am indulging in storytelling here, but something very like this seems to have happened in the preceding year, as Dodgson was beginning his famous tale. On October 28 he reported of Mrs. Liddel, 'I have been out of her good graces ever since Lord Newry's business.' What Lord Newry's business might have been no one seems to know for sure. Hudson and Gardner call it a mystery.

The author is the type of person to read meaning into every single aspect of a story - clearly, every single character in Alice in Wonderland HAD to be informed by some person that Dodgson knew in real life! And that's to say nothing about how many times Dodgson apparently wrote himself into his own story.

The book is full of these moments, with no more justification than, "this is OBVIOUSLY where this comes from".

I mean...yes. Authors write what they know, and sometimes this includes turning people that they know into characters in their stories. Sometimes, an author intentionally crafts a web of metaphors that are aimed at teaching a moral or lesson through the story. But sometimes, a door is just a door.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that, with a few exceptions, the author seems to not like fantasy very much at all.

Very few of the stories written about have positive notes on them. The Adventures of Pinnochio has a pretty nice section, and the author goes to great lengths to defend The Story of Little Black Sambo and The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Alice in Wonderland has so many hidden cameos and was such a moral quandary, being an entirely made-up story written by a man of God (clearly, Dodgson wrote the story to become a god himself because he was going through a rebellious phase in life, but then later regretted it), that an entire chapter is dedicated to it.

But epic fantasy? (Or "closed fantasy", as the author refers to it.)

It is an escapist genre and marks, I think, a dead end in the descent of the tale. It has proven fruitful for fantasy writers over the past four decades, but it is so solipsistic that it can only go on replicating itself ad infinitum. And when you have read one sword & sorcery fantasy, I'm afraid, you have pretty much read them all.

The Lord of the Rings is written off as, "an interesting enough world to roam around in, but, unless one is nostalgic by disposition and tolerant to a fault, the book will pall rather rapidly. Tolkein himself is described as, "scratching about and mumbling to himself like his creature, the Gollum."

Peter Pan's purpose, "like that of Anderson's fairy tales, was to arouse pity and admiration for its author in a mutual catharsis immodestly staged as a public spectacle." And regarding the "clapping if you believe in fairies scene", "If this blackmail were not so embarrassingly silly, it would amount to child abuse." He mocks it for its only redeeming feature being that, at the end, people feel warm and happy.

The Chronicles of Narnia, he just tears to shreds. I can agree with some of the points brought up (like the fact that every female character who earns a place in the story is either evil, or has to jump through hoops to earn her way into the "Boy's Club"), but the way he dissects the story questions why anyone would enjoy it at all.

This is not a historical look at fantasy. This is pure opinion, and incredibly dismissive, at that.

The take-away from this book is that the ONLY fantasy that holds any merit whatsoever is fantasy that is written specifically to teach children. Bonus points if the story is teaching good, Christian morals. Fantasy that is written for escapism or pure enjoyment is worthless, and so are the people who read that sort of nonsense.

As someone who loves the genre, this book was just painful to read.

I'll admit that part of all of this is due to when this book was published - this came out back in 1996, before books like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone brought fantasy into a more accessible place in literature. Fantasy is in a better place now than it was 20 years ago.

I can only wonder what this book would be like if it were rewritten today.

**For something similar, but with a more positive tone, I'd recommend The Purpose of Fantasy: A Reader’s Guide to Twelve Selected Books with Good Values and Spiritual Depth. It's by no means a history of the genre, but it does give a brief summary of the history of each of the selected stories.

[Angie]

Whoa, this was in-depth and long and very, very researched. It read rather like a thesis that outgrew itself and went and became a book. In other words, not an easy or breezy read but thorough and interesting and it brought up old favorite authors as well as lesser-known ones. Obviously, you have your Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley and Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak but what about lesser knowns or those who have fallen out of favor? It was nice to see new names and smaller names here. It was also nice to see Uncle Remus mentioned because, I swear, half the time I feel like I hallucinated reading those stories for how little they come up. The book also convinced me that I really need to actually sit down and read Collodi's Pinnochio.

Man, though, the author had axes to grind with some of the literary lights and it made it a bit uncomfy in places. Namely, they were not a fan of C.S. Lewis or Tolkein (admittedly it was interesting to see someone else echo one of my own assessments on JRR) and they seemed a bit iffy on Lewis Carroll. Sometimes it was from a writing stand-point but other times it seemed downright personal. Weird.

[Sarah Fowler Wolfe]

Postmodern drivel where the author admits himself he sticks to no school of thought, applies no real rubric, and doesn't have a thesis. It's a large volume filled with his utter contempt not only for imagination, story, and morality but for apparently all kinds of literature for any age—including the Bible. What an awful book!

[Jeffrey]

While i don't always agree with Goldthwaite, his history of children's literature has so much to offer and I love his defense of Pinocchio, his trashing of Narnia and his including Comet in Moominland, Pogo and Babar!