Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  Wells also avoids the biggest paradox of all. The time machine has a reverse gear. What if the traveler went into the past, met himself—or his ancestors—and changed both his and the planet’s future history? Over the seven years he wrote his story, Wells toyed with a trip to the past, and actually drafted a chapter in which his traveler returns to the Pleistocene period. In the end, he decided to keep his story simple. Simple, and wonderfully imaginative, the novel has never been out of print since its first publication in 1895, and who knows, it may still be in print—and enjoyed—in 802,701.

  L. FRANK BAUM

  THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (1900)

  Named “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairy tale” by the Library of Congress, the ageless morality tale of Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion continues to captivate readers young and old.

  L. Frank Baum (1856–1919; the L. stands for Lyman) was born in New York State, the son of a merchant enriched by the oil business. Baum went into journalism and published his first book for children in 1897. Thereafter, writing for the children’s market was his principal activity and, in 1900, together with the illustrator W. W. Denslow (1856–1915), he produced The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (first entitled “The Emerald City”). Baum later span off a series of “Oz” sequels and was one of the first generation of American writers to adapt his work for the screen, moving himself and his family to Hollywood to do so.

  Now more people have seen The Wizard of Oz than have read it. MGM’s epoch-making film of 1939 (the eighth movie to be based on the story), however, is fairly faithful to what Baum wrote and Denslow pictured. The book was conceived and published during one of the recurrent depressions in American commercial life, and one of the points that Baum makes in his 1900 preface is that his story is “modernized”—set in the uncomfortable present. This realism at the heart of the fantasy is something that makes it an innovative “fairy story.”

  The narrative opens on an impoverished farm, in a bleak landscape of the “great Kansas prairies.” An orphan, Dorothy is cared for by her Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. The description of Dorothy’s home is of a humble, dusty place, setting up a stark comparison to the glittering world she is to discover:

  There were four walls, a floor, and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.… There was no garret at all, and no cellar—except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose…

  And sure enough, a cyclone does come. It carries away the rackety old house, Dorothy and her faithful dog Toto inside, transporting it to the land of the dwarfish Munchkins in the republic of Oz. From there Dorothy and Toto set off along the yellow brick road for the Emerald City, where, she understands, she will find a wizard who can help her get home to Kansas. On the way she meets up with her famous three companions: a Scarecrow, a Tin-Woodman, and a (Cowardly) Lion.

  “That proves you are unusual,” returned the Scarecrow; “and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”

  After various adventures along the way, the quartet arrives at the magnificent city and is ushered into the chamber of the Great Wizard. Quickly though, they discover the him to be a fraud and a “humbug,” fed up with his pretenses and dreaming of his previous life as a circus clown. The Emerald City, too, is nothing but an illusion produced by the green spectacles worn by everyone who visits. The moral is clear. Help yourself—the traditional American remedy of self-improvement, which Dorothy and her companions eventually manage with some aid from the Good Witch of the South. And too, by her own efforts, Dorothy gets back to Kansas, realizing that however poor it is, she loves her humble home.

  Over the last half-century, in which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has become one of the best-known fairy stories in the world, scholars have got to work on it. No longer it is a text for children of all ages, but evidence for the inquisitive social scientist and historian. Baum, as has been said, was writing a period of severe economic depression and he had been very impressed, in 1894, by a hunger march on the White House by “Coxey’s Army,” named after the political organizer, Jacob Coxey. The unemployed, in their hundreds and sometimes thousands, marched across America to the capitol. Eventually their demonstration was broken up in Washington and the leaders arrested on charges of “trespassing on the White House lawn.”

  As such, some have interpreted the phony Wizard of Oz as representing the all-talk-and-no-action President of America, William McKinley. And, on their epic march up the yellow brick road (taken to be an allusion to the gold standard, which Coxey and other populists wanted to get rid of) Dorothy, the farm girl, represents the decent working classes; the Scarecrow represents the rural poor; and the Tin Man represents the toiling masses in the factories. The Lion is harder to fit in, although various “cowardly” leaders of the people have been proposed.

  It’s intriguing stuff—but not, in the end, particularly nourishing. While many things can be read into this much-loved tale of the real and unreal, the dream and nightmare, in the end it is incidental—albeit one that adds to the charm of this perennially fascinating work of imagination.

  1901–1945

  3 GOLDEN AGE OF FANTASY

  The early twentieth century saw a wealth of imaginary realms, from pulp space fantasies to chilling visions of a dystopian future, while the unprecedented violence of the World Wars was to alter fiction forever.

  J. M. BARRIE

  PETER PAN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS (1906)

  A London park becomes an after-dark wonderland, the realm of fairies, talking birds, walking trees, and a little boy who can never grow up.

  Not all great stories arrive fully formed—it is in the nature of the legendary to accrue incident and resonance as time passes. So it is with Peter Pan, and the first book to bear the name of the boy who never grows up does not tell the story twenty-first century readers might expect. There is no Wendy, Neverland, Captain Hook, no pirates, crocodile, Lost Boys, or Tinker Bell. There are fairies, for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is in essence a fairy story, one that turns a region of London into an after-hours wonderland.

  Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was published in 1906, by which time the character of Peter Pan was famous, being at the heart of J. M. Barrie’s (1860–1937) box-office record-setting 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. It was through the play that the story of Peter Pan developed its most familiar form. It was there that Hook, Wendy, and the rest were introduced. So then, when two years later Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was published, readers might have expected a version of the play in novel form, or perhaps a sequel to the play. Instead, it was something akin to what would now be called an “origin story.” The book was not even newly written, but had first appeared as Chapters 13–18 of Barrie’s 1902 novel, The Little White Bird. A book extracted from a book, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is more a thematically linked series of stories and incidents than a novel.

  The Little White Bird was written for adults. It is set mostly in turn-of-the-century London, around Kensington Gardens (the first U.S. edition was published with an additional subtitle—or Adventures in Kensington Gardens), and is narrated by a middle-aged, ex-army officer, Captain W__. The book tells the story of the captain’s friendship with six-year-old David and how the Captain brought the boy’s parents together. In a touch that now seems pre-postmodern, Captain W__ refers to his own writing of the text, at the end finishing the manuscript and giving the book to David’s mother.

  Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens begins with a Grand Tour of the Gardens, and while this does what it promises, introducing the famous land-marks—the Broad Walk, the Round Pond, the Serpentine—by the second paragraph the text has taken to whimsy. A lady sits by one of the garden�
�s gates selling balloons. She must hold onto the railings always, for if she lets go “the balloons would lift her up, and she would be flown away.” So far in this very middle-class world in which nurses and nannies take babies for “an airing in a perambulator,” and where older children sail stick boats, she has held her position more successfully than her predecessor.

  Strangely, even in the 1902 text, when Peter Pan is first mentioned, it is as if the reader already knows who he is. Writing about the notion that at night drowned stars appear in the Serpentine, Barrie first mentions his hero with the words: “If so, Peter Pan sees them when he is sailing across the lake…” Before he is properly introduced, it is established that Peter Pan has been famous for generations, that he was as legendary then as he is to us now: “if you ask your grandmother whether she knew about Peter Pan when she was a girl, she also says, ‘Why, of course I did.’”

  In Peter’s world, before children were babies they were birds, and Peter escapes at seven-days old from becoming fully human by flying out his nursery window and back to Kensington Gardens. He will never be any older, no matter how long he lives. After frightening every fairy he meets, Peter consults with the birds, and flies to the island in the Serpentine. There is a touch of Christian allegory—the reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply that they have perfect faith, and to have faith is to have wings—which rests oddly with the tale’s essentially pantheist heart: Peter is a much sanitized image of the Greek god Pan.

  On the island Peter meets Solomon Caw, depicted in Arthur Rackham’s first edition illustrations as a crow. The Bible mentions by name only three children of the historical Solomon, but a man who had 700 wives and 300 concubines might be assumed to have had far more. Barrie allots his avian Solomon the task of dispatching a multitude of young birds out into the world to turn into human babies. It is also Solomon who makes Peter realize that he has lost his faith, and so will never be able to fly again. Trapped on the island, Peter makes a reed pipe and eventually the birds build him a boat in the form of a gigantic thrush’s nest, which he uses to sail back into Kensington Gardens.

  He sleeps by day on the island but plays by night, not entirely successfully, with whatever he finds in the gardens: a hoop, a pail, a balloon, even a perambulator “near the entrance to the Fairy Queen’s Winter Palace.” Peter comes to know the fairies well, and plays his pipe for their balls and dances. They grant him two wishes, both of which he uses to fly home. The first time he sees his mother sleeping, he almost stays. On the second occasion he resolves to stay, but finds the windows barred, “his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm around another little boy.”

  As much as Peter can never grow up, nor can he ever go home, and so he makes his world with the fairies. We are told that “… there are fairies wherever there are children. Long ago children were forbidden the Gardens, and at that time there was not a fairy in the place.…” Barrie makes his fairy society a parody of the everyday world, with every rank from postman to princess represented. And while his fairies are mostly harmless, “they never do anything useful.”

  From ambulatory, sentient trees, which prefigure the Ents of The Lord of the Rings, to a fairy world in which love is determined by a doctor’s observations of physiological reaction, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens fuses fancy and satire with rich yet restricted imagination. The vision would only become unfettered when Peter took to the stage.

  The book ends in darkness, with the warning that it is not safe to stay in Kensington Gardens once the gates are locked for the night. That sometimes children perish of the “cold and dark” because Peter, riding on his goat, arrives too late to save them. In which case he digs a grave and “erects a little tombstone.” Peter, not entirely responsible at his tender age, has been too late several times.

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  THE LOST WORLD (1912)

  Professor Challenger embarks on a suspense-filled search for prehistoric creatures in the wilds of the Amazon, but his troop soon finds itself marooned among dinosaurs and the savage ape-people.

  By 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859−1930) was a hugely successful author, but he felt hampered by the vast popularity of his great detective, Sherlock Holmes, and wanted to try something new. The Lost World is the first, and most enduringly popular, of Doyle’s “Professor Challenger” series in which the popular Victorian author aimed “to do for the boy’s book what Sherlock Holmes did for the detective tale.”

  The fantasy draws on the author’s own fascination with dinosaurs (iguanodon footprints had been discovered in Crowborough, Sussex, near the author’s home in 1909) as well as the contemporary real-life expeditions of archaeologist and explorer Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett. Doyle was also highly influenced by the prehistoric realms created in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), but with its introduction of the extinct giants, The Lost World sets the standard for all future man-meets-monster adventures.

  Doyle’s narrator is a brash, young journalist, Edward “Ed” Malone of the Daily Gazette. Ed’s Scottish editor, McArdle, sends him out to get a story on an eccentric professor who thinks he has discovered a secret valley containing prehistoric monsters. This is none other than Professor Challenger—a man notorious for physically assaulting newspaper reporters.

  At a meeting of the Zoological Society, Challenger and his great opponent, the skeptical Professor Summerlee, agree to mount a scientific expedition to the Amazon and the secret valley in its remotest region. They take with them a professional explorer, the cool-headed Sir John Roxton (“the essence of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert, open-air lover of dogs and of horses”). Malone goes along too, to write the expedition up as a scoop for his paper.

  The explorers travel up the great river (an area not well explored at this time)—experiencing adventures all the way—until they discover the “lost world.” They take photographs of dinosaurs and fight a pitched battle against the “Ape-men.” On their return home, they present their findings to the Zoological Society, which refuses to believe them, until they present some very compelling evidence:

  [He] drew off the top of the case, which formed a sliding lid.… An instant later, with a scratching, rattling sound, a most horrible and loathsome creature appeared from below and perched itself upon the side of the case.… The face of the creature was like the wildest gargoyle that the imagination of a mad medieval builder could have conceived. It was malicious, horrible, with two small red eyes as bright as points of burning coal. Its long, savage mouth, which was held half-open, was full of a double row of shark-like teeth.

  The novel retains some unpleasant descriptions of non-European ethnicity, ideas typical of Doyle’s age, which can be interpreted as being uncomfortably linked to the evolution of species that is a central theme of the novel. However, while some passages of The Lost World undeniably stoop to racial stereotypes by today’s standards, Doyle was also an active human-rights campaigner in his day, and his book The Crime of the Congo (1909) exposed the merciless enforced labor inflicted on indigenous people in the Congo Free State.

  EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

  AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1914)

  Prehistoric men and beasts are discovered in the subterranean world of “Pellucidar,” buried within Earth’s hollow interior in a pulp classic from the creator of Tarzan and John Carter.

  At the Earth’s Core is the first volume in what was to become a classic pulp science-fiction series from Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), based on the subterranean world of “Pellucidar.” Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875 and, after being discharged from the armed forces on health grounds, took on a number of low-wage jobs throughout the 1900s to support his family. He read numerous pulp-fiction magazines and decided to try his hand at writing. His brand of science-fiction adventure story found success at the All-Story Magazine and allowed him to write full time, creating, in 1912, Tarzan of the Apes, the character who would make his fortune. It was his Pellucidar series, however, that pushed
the boundaries of the literary imagined realm.

  At the Earth’s Core sees the series’ hero, David Innes, a mine owner, traveling to the Sahara accompanied by Abner Perry, the inventor of a mechanical device—the “Prospector”—used for boring deep underground. By means of their machine, the young men have discovered that the earth is actually hollow—concentrically within its sphere there is another smaller sphere, or world, called Pellucidar, lodged some five hundred miles beneath the earth’s crust. Pellucidar has its own miniature sun, cosmos, and geography, which are all elaborated upon in detail in subsequent installments of the series. The description of the adventurers arrival is typical Burrovian kitsch:

  Together we stepped out to stand in silent contemplation of a landscape at once weird and beautiful. Before us a low and level shore stretched down to a silent sea. As far as the eye could reach the surface of the water was dotted with countless tiny isles—some of towering, barren, granitic rock—others resplendent in gorgeous trappings of tropical vegetation, myriad starred with the magnificent splendor of vivid blooms.

  The local population, tyrannized by the all-female avian reptile Mahars who keep Pellucidarian humans for food and slavery, and the romantic involvement between Innes and Dian the Beautiful (who is attempting to escape the hated clutches of Jubal the Ugly) are all covered in this initial incarnation, but it is cut off inconclusively. However, in the next in the series, Pellucidar (1915), Innes is able to trail a long telegraph wire behind the Prospector through which he relays his subsequent adventures back to the surface of Earth, and Burroughs’s millions of readers.