May Kendall Andrew Lang 1 hr 54 min read

Queen Mab of the fairies returns to a Victorian England that has traded wonder for progress, and finds it wanting.

In this 1885 satire, Andrew Lang and May Kendall send the fairy queen on a tour of modern Britain, religion, democracy, machinery, science, the successful merchant, casting a mischievous outsider's eye on the certainties of the age. Whimsical in form but pointed in intent, it uses fairy-tale distance to poke at politics, faith, and Darwinian anxiety. Read it for a witty Victorian fantasy-of-ideas, closer to Swift than to the nursery.

In its time

Published in 1885, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

1 hr 54 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).