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But the struggle between instruction and delight was at its fiercest in fantasy. Throughout the nineteenth century, fantasy wavered between the didactic and the subversive – sometimes even in the same text. Sinclair’s “Uncle David’s Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies,” for instance, an interpolated tale in Holiday House, preaches industry and temperance while slyly undercutting its own earnestness. Similarly, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), lampoons didacticism through parody and associates instruction with savagery, yet the novel begins and ends on a sentimental note, drawing the reader’s attention to the sanctity of childhood as a hallowed destination for “pilgrim[s],” as the introductory poem puts it.

As Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn (2016) – among others – observe, fairy tales, which initially addressed a multigenerational audience, were appropriated as children’s literature from the mid eighteenth century forward; The Governess is one of many early texts to incorporate literary fairy tales for didactic purposes. (Fielding instructs readers in reading fantasy not “to let the Notion of Giants or Magic dwell upon your Minds; for by a Giant is meant no more than a Man of great Power; and the magic Fillet round the Head of the Statue was only intended to teach you, that by the Assistance of Patience you may overcome all Difficulties” [2005, p. 86].) Traditional and literary fairy tales were used to teach lessons from teetotalism, as in George Cruikshank’s 1854 Fairy Library, to environmentalism, as in John Ruskin’s 1850 The King of the Golden River, to Christian Darwinism, as in Charles Kingsley’s 1863 The Water-Babies and George MacDonald’s 1883 The Princess and Curdie. Simultaneously, such texts often implicitly critique Victorian society; when at the end of The Princess and Curdie the city of Gwyntystorm falls into the abyss, victim of its citizens’ lust for gold, the warning for readers is clear. Significantly, MacDonald is chastising adults, not the child reader. Such moments make didacticism’s subversive potential apparent in a way that some eighteenth-century children’s writers would certainly have disapproved of.

Spurred by an awareness of the flaws of the adult world, some Golden Age writers were drawn to fantasy as a place where they could not merely commune with children but temporarily become honorary children themselves, a state implicitly deemed superior to adulthood. Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Ruskin, and Kenneth Grahame have all struck biographers as men who found the demands of adult life (particularly adult sexuality) difficult, while Nesbit has been portrayed as a kind of permanent girl, partly because she sometimes makes cameo appearances in this guise in her children’s fiction. Yet Golden Age fantasy is by no means exclusively escapist – or, for that matter, exclusively aimed at children. As with other genres of its moment, its readiness to engage, in ways both humorous and trenchant, with significant questions and social controversies from child labor (The Water-Babies) to woman suffrage (The Marvellous Land of Oz) tells us much about the era’s understanding of children and adults alike.