Fantasy, Fear and Reality: Tracing Pathways Between Carroll, Kingsley, and MacDonald Leading to the Inklings

This chapter focusses on the links and developments in thinking from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the work of Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald leading to the Inklings. The work of all of these writers is defined as fantasy, yet there is a strong relationship with the social and political realities of the times. For example, the influences of Romanticism, Darwinism and Social Darwinism pulse through their texts culminating in the elements of Modernism in the twentieth century. The discussion takes the position that no literary and/or philosophical movement begins or ends abruptly nor in a singular way, but that thinking develops and crosses over demonstrating the complexity of seemingly simple writing for children.