Oh, he's not always been Neil Gaiman of course, that's just who he looks like this time, but he (or she) will always show up when there seems to be a need for the world's imagination to be pushed into believing in the things that go bump in the night or the light that can dazzle so bright. Gaiman? At the look in his eye and the strange little half smile on his lips? It's the look of a man with a secret, I'd say, of a man who's walked the paths of faerie at some point in his life and drifted around in time touching down here and there, being a visitor for a while and then moving on. In some ways you could say that Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust is a product of those more innocent (but not naïve) times, but that would be ridiculous because he is writing over a hundred years after they have gone by.īut you know, have you ever looked real close at Mr. So did stories of the mysterious places that offered entrance to the world of faerie that must be guarded at all times lest some unhappy mortal mistakenly wander where he shouldn't. It was around this time that stories telling of people travelling into faerie and losing their wits and time and becoming lost to our world forever became commonplace again. Whether the small winged creatures flying amongst frogs and song birds, impish devil faces that were more mischievous that demonic, or scenes of supernatural creatures like unicorns and gryphons, all became familiar presences on the canvasses of that time. Aside from people claiming to have photographed fairies, there was a general upsurge in art featuring fanciful portrayals of life in the land of the faerie. Perhaps what is most surprising is the depth of feelings that these events evoked.

With bucolic pastures giving way to ugly factories and the forests filled with dark nooks and crannies where all types of creatures could be found lurking being felled as raw material to be fed into the maw of industry, it's not surprising there would be some sort of reaction. From mediums conducting séances, a resurrection of druidic rites, a fascination with the darker forms of the occult, to a belief in fairies, they all reflected a concerted effort to counterbalance the emergence of the industrial revolution.Īs England shifted further away from her rural roots of landed gentry and noblesse oblige to an urban-based industrial economy with power and wealth in the hands of the mercantile class, people developed a romantic, idealistic view of what England used to be.

The late Victorian period in England produced an upswing in the belief of all things magical and mystical.

Stardust by neil gaiman