The wild ones

Fairies and other spirits have long haunted the words and images of English literature. AS Byatt looks beyond the bright-cheeked children and pretty dolls of Edwardian illustrators to explore the menace that lurks beneath
Lizzie, Lizzie, Have You Tasted for My Sake the Forbidden Fruit, 1933, by Arthur Rackham, Dulwich Picture Gallery
Innocence and inhumanity ... Lizzie, Lizzie, Have You Tasted for My Sake the Forbidden Fruit, 1933. Photograph: Private collection/Dulwich Picture Gallery

Fairies (and elves and dwarves) are inhuman, in both senses of the word. They resemble humans in some ways, and their world interpenetrates ours, but they have no human feelings. They also have no souls - some early thinkers relate them to the fallen spirits, not good enough for heaven, not bad enough for hell, who haunt the middle air. The 17th-century Scottish minister Robert Kirk wrote The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, a curiously practical account of their ways. Their bodies, he said, were of "congealed air", and they believed that every thing in the creation was alive in some way - "nothing moves but has another animal moving on it, and so on, to the utmost minutest corpuscle that's capable to be a receptacle of life".

Their relations with humans are also riddling. They trick, torment, mislead and sometimes torture. Some of them desire human souls, like the water spirit Undine, or Andersen's Mermaid; while some - the Rhinedaughters, the Nixie, La Belle Dame Sans Merci - tempt humans to ruin and death. Some modern inhumans, or half-humans, like the Peter Pan of Kensington Gardens, are half-tempted, half-repelled, by human love, motherhood, nurseries and "growing up". They are made into stories for children, but they did not begin there, and their charm, in both senses of that word, does not originate in the nursery.

They have haunted English literature from its beginnings, and have been imagined and drawn by painters and illustrators. The Dulwich Picture Gallery is opening a sumptuous exhibition, The Age of Enchantment, including works made between 1890 and 1930, the golden age of the illustrated book. It begins with the line drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, takes in the great illustrators - Rackham, Dulac, Nielsen, Ricketts - and ends with a look at the effect of the Ballets Russes on book design, as well as some delicious fairy pottery from Wedgwood.

The writers of the catalogue repeatedly refer to the Edwardian escape from the dark, serious drawing rooms of the Victorian era into fantasy, brightness, elegance - and, one might add, whimsy. The British, at the beginning of the 20th century, might be said to have been obsessed by childhood. A reviewer remarked that the great books of the time were arguably those written for children - by writers such as E Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, JM Barrie and Kenneth Grahame. Children and childhood became very real and very important. Nesbit not only created some of the most memorable, cantankerous inhuman creatures - the psammead, the phoenix - but wrote about real children, with real grumbles and anxieties. Kipling's children - Mowgli, Kim, Dan and Una in Puck of Pook's Hill - have independence, drama and lives that are taken seriously. There is a vein of writing, perhaps starting with Richard Jefferies's Wood Magic and Bevis: The Story of a Boy, that created an interwoven nostalgia for the countryside as it once was and for the pursuits of boyhood: camping, fishing, boating. This was the time of the founding of the Boy Scouts, at the end of the Boer war. The end of boyhood is a fall of man - in Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age, the end of happiness is the departure for public school. Grahame liked to believe that humans should return to being centaurs - half-untrammelled wild things. He created Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, animal boy-men, who encountered the inhuman Pan. And then there is the perennial Peter Pan himself, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. It is interesting that four days before the theatrical version of that story opened, Harley Granville-Barker and Laurence Housman opened Prunella - a Pierrot play for grown-up children. (There is some splendid work by Housman in the Dulwich exhibition.) Bernard Shaw remarked that Peter Pan was "really a play for grown-up people; for as you know, when we buy toys for children we take care to select the ones which amuse ourselves". Rupert Brooke saw the play at least 12 times.

The Victorian fairy painters knew all about the inhumanity of fairies. They inherited a supernatural world from Fuseli's visions of nightmare. The great, mad Richard Dadd painted both The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Come Unto These Yellow Sands and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania. His fairies swarm and are all sizes, like Kirk's minutest corpuscles. Their faces are strange, their preoccupations mysterious, their doings dangerous. Joseph Noel Paton painted (as many others did) the quarrel of Oberon and Titania. Some of his fairies are fleshly beauties, and some are gnomes and tiny deformed monstrosities that could have appeared in Bosch.

John Anster Fitzgerald painted a series of sleeping figures - an artist, some young girls - dreaming drugged visions of wraiths, demons and insect-like tormentors. He painted rats, white mice and sinister-looking flowers. His world is brightly coloured, almost hectic. His fairies are not kind. They persecute small creatures, torture snails and robins. If their faces are doll-like, it is because their feelings are alien. His Ariel lies on a branch of blossoming hawthorn in a diaphanous, flowery garment that seems to sprout out of him/her. It has a pretty face and mad, protuberant blue eyes - like a china doll come unpleasantly to life. It is not human. It is weird. The creatures relate to that disturbing Victorian poem, "Goblin Market", which attracted illustrators from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Housman and Rackham. Housman's goblins have things in common with Grahame's human animals, except that they are nasty: half-mole, half-imp, or half-rat, half-dwarf. They have dangerous rodent teeth in black visages. Rackham's goblins have a certain comic, nursery quaintness, a darker version of Beatrix Potter.

The Dulwich exhibition begins with decadence. Decadence means Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Here is the iconic illustration by Beardsley for Wilde's Salome: the live Medusa holding up the severed head of the dead Medusa (more feminine than she is). A decorative sash of blood falls into a pool beneath the head, in which sprouts a phallic flower. It is elegantly wicked. There is also an illustration from Beardsley's unfinished novel Under the Hill, an erotic fantasy about a temptress under something between the Venusberg and Pook's Hill. Beardsley's icy mixture of sadism and purity of line could be argued to be grown-up in some sense. But what are we to make of the children of the Edwardian woodcamp and barred nursery?

In the writers, more than in the illustrators, there is a very disturbing relationship between "nature", childhood, childishness and a kind of nasty cruelty. It is not a strong alien malice like that of the Victorians. Take Maurice Hewlett, whose book The Lore of Proserpine is an apparently factual account of his relations with the fairy world. As a small boy he saw in the woods a fairy child his own age. It is throttling a rabbit, for pleasure, "the way children squeeze a snap-dragon flower to make it open or shut its mouth". Hewlett observed that the fairy's "cruel fingers, as if by habit, continued the torture, and that in some way he derived pleasure from the performance". Hewlett is interested in the fairies precisely because their nature has other laws, which include indifference to cruelty. John Cowper Powys, an Edwardian pagan who believed that we all share a primeval nature with the ichthyosaurus, had - and executed - sadistic fantasies as a boy, such as skinning a hare alive. He records these things because they are of absorbing interest. GK Chesterton, the incarnation of bluff good nature and Christian virtue, drew sadistic pictures throughout his schooldays and makes dark remarks in his autobiography about adult fantasies of hurt. In Orthodoxy, he has a chapter called "The Ethics of Elfland" in which he argues with perverse ingenuity that the natural world and the religious world are closer in their nature to "magic" than they will ever be to science, which cannot account for the marvellous.


Another creator of inhuman things and powers was Algernon Blackwood, a maker of centaurs and of malevolent moving trees and forests, a recorder of the desire for extreme discomfort outside the warm hearth and the tea table.

It is interesting, in this context, that Lord Baden-Powell, creator of the Boy Scouts, who delighted in his friends' elegant photographs of beautiful boys bathing naked in streams, had a compulsive desire to witness executions. He would travel days and miles to be present at one, and was deeply disappointed if he was too late. He married late in life - a girlish woman - as did Kenneth Grahame, whose bride was over 30 but came to her wedding barefoot, in an innocent muslin dress, with a withering string of daisies artlessly thrown round her neck, like an ersatz fairy. Grahame may have sent the wonderful tales of the Wild Wood to his only son - who was usually somewhere else, being cared for by a nanny - but he wholly failed to allow for, or to understand, the boy's transition to being a grown-up. He refused to believe that his son's sight was limited, sent him to Rugby and Eton, both of which he hated and had to leave, and to Oxford, where he could not cope with adult life or exams. He died violently, stretched across a railroad in front of an approaching train, at night. His parents maintained that it was an accident.


And then there is the master of them all, James Barrie. What are we to make, not so much of the stage pantomime Peter Pan, but of the horrifying work that preceded it and gave birth to it, the book The Little White Bird, about the soulless lost boy, Peter Pan, who inhabited Kensington Gardens? This tale is told by a sweetly beneficial bachelor who does good to a family that has a little boy called David. He worms his way into the parents' affections by inventing an imaginary son for himself, called Timothy, whom he then kills off in order to be able to "give" his clothes to David. He takes David to Kensington Gardens and tells him about the fairies who live there (beautifully painted by Rackham) and about the lost Peter Pan who flew out of his nursery one night because he knew all children had been free birds before they were caught in cots. Peter has left it too late to go home - there is a new little boy, and the window is barred. Like Grahame's Golden Age children, David will eventually vanish away to school and the direction of growing up. But before that, there is a climactic scene in which the narrator is allowed to have David to himself for a whole night, to undress him and wash him, finally to be asked to take him into his bed. He writes of "this little boy, who in the midst of his play while I undressed him, had suddenly buried his head on my knees ... Of David's dripping little form in the bath, and how when I essayed to catch him, he had slipped from my arms like a trout."

Barrie himself, as is well known, had insinuated himself into the Llewellyn-Davies family, whose pleasures and park visits and fantasy life he autocratically stage-managed. He became the guardian of the five boys when they were orphaned. The Little White Bird was told to them and written for them. It is a strange mixture of saccharine and soulless. Barrie's chilling portrayal of Peter's inhumanity almost gets out of hand - the narrator sweetly describes the little graves Peter makes in the gardens for babies who fall out of the perambulators and die, but he then insinuates that Peter may sometimes have buried them alive. "I do hope that Peter is not too ready with his spade. It is all rather sad." Worse is his own heartlessness. He is annoyed with David's mother for discovering that he has put David's combinations on with the buttons at the front. He punishes her by sending a photo he has taken of David being hanged from a tree. Executions again.

I think this is queerer and odder than simply pederasty, acknowledged or unrecognised. I think it is symptomatic of this world of overgrown boys in which women are dangerous, need to be disarmed. The Manchester Guardian reviewer of the first performance of the stage play saw immediately that it was as Shaw said, designed for grown-ups - and saw its message as being about girls (Wendy, the successor to the Mamie of Kensington Gardens) practising the solemn art of motherhood. It is odd, in retrospect, that when I first saw the play as a small child, I identified only with the mourning mother in the empty nursery and not at all with the fantastic flying children. I worried about her for weeks. It has been pointed out that the females of the Never Never Land are the spiteful fairy Tinkerbell, hostile to the maternal Wendy, and the tricksy mermaids in the lagoon, hunted by the Lost Boys, whom they tried to drag down and drown. Rupert Brooke, daydreaming in Cambridge, turned Trinity Street into the mermaids' lagoon, and King's College Chapel into the treetop house.

The Little White Bird was given as a present by WH Hudson, a great writer of the English earth, to the small David Garnett, son of the translator of Tolstoy, who was a real wood-child, running wild in Kent, building tree-houses, with the uncontrolled Olivier sisters. Garnett returned it to Hudson, saying he thought it was a nasty book.

The illustrations in the Dulwich exhibition are beautiful, varied, imaginative and, on the whole, elegant and witty, rather than carrying the surreptitious note of danger the high Victorians put into their depictions of the inhuman. I remember as a child not responding to these works of art precisely because they were too good - they did not coincide with my imagined travels in imaginary worlds. They were too finished. This is true of the delicious Kay Nielsen coloured illustrations, somewhere between art nouveau, Persian miniatures and japonaiserie. It is not true of the great Edmund Dulac, who used colour - newly available to book illustrators - to make things intensely unreal, even surreal, and mysterious. His gouache We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On is a masterpiece in many blues, with vanishing shapes in a sea of changing cobalt light and a cloaked figure in the foreground - also blue - who is at once a mountain, a wave and a magician. I discovered for the first time Sidney Sime, whose mermaid is seized with wrath, whose Felon Flower is menacing, whose imagination was mysterious and whose work was informed by his five years in inky blackness as a boy in a Yorkshire coal mine. Charles Robinson's innocent pretty children, underwater in a goldfish bowl, wet versions of Barrie's flyers, look forward to the sweet faces of the heroines of Disney cartoons. Faces are another thing Dulac does wonderfully - his Scheherazade, his Circe, his Fairy Godmother, are both remotely lovely and full of strangeness. Robinson prefigures Disney's Snow White, whose face in its sweet lifelessness maddened me as a little girl, as the sweet westernised faces of modern Japanese animators irritate me now. They are like dolls - which brings us back to the doll-like menace of the fairies of John Anster Fitzgerald, who knew what he was doing. The relations between innocence and inhumanity, slyness and sweetness, arrested development and magic are a neverending mystery.

·The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries 1890-1930 is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, from November 28 until February 17. Details: 020-8693 5254.