Victorians had a real thing for fairies. There was a genuine fascination with all things tinker bell, at times bordering on (actually, embracing) belief itself. Recent explorations into this phenomenon include Carole G. Silver’s book Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness and the film FairyTale: A True Story, directed by Charles Sturridge and starring Peter O’Toole as Arthur Conan Doyle.

The nucleus of Victorian Fairy Painting is the catalog of an exhibition that originated in London at the Royal Academy of Arts and then traveled to Iowa (of all places) and Toronto, in 1998. When I say nucleus, I mean that the color plates of the catalog take up a decidedly minor part of the real estate between the covers. The first half of the book consists of a series of essays on different aspects of the subject, a number of them written by some heavier hitters than one is accustomed to encountering in an exhibition catalog, including: John Warrack, on “Fairy Music”, Lionel Lambourne on “Fairies & the Stage”, Russell Jackson on “Shakespeare’s Fairies” and Charlotte Gere on the general topic “In Fairyland.” All of these essays are well worth the reader’s time, especially a fine overview of book illustration by Pamela White Trimpe. The problem is that this is supposed to be an “art” book. The reader (and I do mean reader) is almost worded out by the time they get to the catalog proper. But the situation doesn’t change radically even there. The entries are arranged by artist, with a potted biography preceding each section; and every illustration has a discursive (not to say digressive) blurb. So, once again, text predominates. This is particularly irritating, since many of the illustrations are reproduced on such a small scale, that the detail, which is everything in this kind of artwork, is virtually inaccessible without the aid of a magnifying glass. One example, Arthur Hughes’ “The Fairies”, illustrating what the text describes as “the best known and most successful poem of the 19th century,” is so shrunken it could have been printed on a gossamer wing or a mustard seed. A full-scale reproduction could easily have been presented on the same page with only a minor re-formatting of the text. (The original isn’t that big.)

What we do get is enjoyable enough, I suppose. But certain artists are given pride of place (admittedly, they’re the big boys – John Anster Fitzgerald, Richard Doyle and Richard Dadd), while others aren’t even mentioned, let alone sampled. Where, for instance, are Laurence Housman, Alexander Mann, Walter Jenks Morton, and Amelia Jane Murray?

This is not a terrible production. It has many good things and would be a fine getting to know you book. But it’s not all it could have been. ( )