Fairy tales don’t always have “fairy tale endings” and not everyone lives happily ever after. Michael Newton, in the introduction to his collection, Victorian Fairy Tales, provides a fascinating perspective on familiar and less-familiar stories from the 19th century—many of them written under the spell of the brothers Grimm and other folklorists who were documenting oral traditions before they faded away. Some of the authors are surprising, better known for anything but fairy tales. John Ruskin was a towering art critic but his opposition to an increasingly industrialized and environmentally unsound modern world is echoed in the story included here. Fairy tales were often brightly costumed critiques of society and human nature; they were the twilight to the bright day of realism, a place where the shadows of the unconscious and the uncanny were free to console and terrify.
