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Chemical bonding: fairy tales had a scientific value for the Victorians (Image: Jessie Wilcox-Smith (1863-1935)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images)

鈥淒RAGONS and fairies, giants and witches, have vanished from our nurseries before the wand of reason,鈥� wrote the poet Lucy Aikin in 1801, lamenting the triumph of facts over fancy in education. Her eulogy was premature. Although driven by science and technology, the Victorian era that followed was no enemy to fable. On the contrary, as Melanie Keene argues in Science in Wonderland, the 19th century was a golden age for fairy tales, and these tales also made scientific advances engaging for young audiences.

鈥淎lthough driven by science and technology, the Victorian era was no enemy to fable.鈥�

Of course, some adjustments were required. Jack and the Beanstalk, for example, was a poor primer for botany, and even worse for structural engineering. A historian at the University of Cambridge, Keene has meticulously documented the transformation of fable from the magical to the rational, and shows why it happened.

Probably the most obvious realm for revisiting myths was palaeontology, because newly discovered fossils evoked the bones of story-book monsters. In The Fairy Tales of Science (1859), John Cargill Brough sought to reclothe 鈥渉ard and dry鈥� technicalities 鈥渋n the more attractive garb of fairy tales鈥�, and his chapter on dinosaurs was true to his word, depicting a dual between a Hylaeosaurus and a Megalosaurus as an epic battle between 鈥渄ragons鈥�.

Fairies even featured in the teaching of new science. In Brough鈥檚 tales, electricity was an Amber Spirit put to work as a courier running up and down the transatlantic telegraph cable. Other authors associated fairies with insects, especially butterflies. And Albert and George Gresswell鈥檚 The Wonderland of Evolution (1884) depicted chance as an airy magic sprite.

Yet the strangest employment of fairies, at least to modern eyes, was in Lucy Rider Meyer鈥檚 1887 Fairy Land of Chemistry. The book鈥檚 premise, Keene writes, 鈥渨as that atoms should be thought of as fairies, whose behaviour, dress and even limbs reflected their chemical properties鈥�. For instance, Meyer asserted that chlorine fairies are 鈥渘ever a moment alone鈥� (due to the element鈥檚 reactivity), and she depicted water as two hydrogen fairies holding hands with an oxygen fairy. Meyer was both a chemist and a Methodist, and her fairy land was both scientific and spiritual.

There is an abyss between Brough鈥檚 demystification of palaeontology and Meyer鈥檚 spiritualisation of chemistry, and Keene sees this as characteristic of the anxieties of the era. To engage the wonders of science requires a suspension of disbelief. These authors hoped that children who grew up on scientific fables would be better able, as adults, to wield the wand of reason.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淥nce upon a time鈥�