Sara Coleridge’s (1802–1852) Phantasmion (1837) is often identified as the first English fantasy novel (cf. Eilers), preceding George MacDonald’s Phantases (1858) by two decades. Its reception was modest, which Coleridge herself acknowledged when she wrote in her Memoirs that “to print a Fairy Tale is the very way to be not read” (Coleridge Memoir and Letters, 82). Detractors faulted its lack of a clear moral vision, with one reviewer writing, “the story has no backbone: no definite plan or purpose” (Davis, 78). Relatively more recent scholarship on Phantasmion has echoed this sentiment, although positioning this lack as a feature rather than a failure of the novel. Shirley Watters advises Phantasmion’s readers “to just enjoy the book without giving way to the ‘depraved craving…for personality’ to which Sara objected” (Watters, 38), while Dennis Low argues that “Sara Coleridge actively sought to achieve literary inconsequentiality” and considers this to be a feature of the book’s creative significance (Low). Hilary Newman counters this narrative, but focuses on Phantasmion as a serious work of literature via its structure, rather than having any theological or moral significance.
This paper puts forward a theological reading of Phantasmion that takes seriously Coleridge’s belief that a teacher’s job is “to give nature elbow room, and not to put swathes on [children’s] minds … to trust more to happy influences, and less to direct tuition” (Coleridge Memoirs and Letters, 45). Rather than extract moral lessons from the causes and effects of plot or character choices, or overread allegorical symbolism into the story, I propose that Phantasmion’s purpose lies in the way it is told. Its form and the story that unfolds from that form are expressions of Coleridge’s theology. They reflect the concerns she raises in her more traditionally theological works, and may be read as an alternative mode of theological exploration.
First, I will establish Coleridge’s preference for imaginative works in educating children. Her father, the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), was a key influence here. In her memoirs she recounts how he would tell her fairy tales until midnight. She felt he was the only adult who understood her struggle with night terrors (Coleridge Memoirs and Letters, 14, 20), and equipped her to face them. Later, Coleridge was diplomatic in her criticism of didactic manuals of virtue like Ann Fraser Tytler’s Mary and Florence: Or, Grave and Gay, but wrote that “it is not in such scraps, nor with such a context, however pretty in its way, that I should like to present the sublime truths of Christianity to the youthful mind.” Rather, “the Bible itself, that is, the five Books of Moses, and the four Gospels, with a mother’s living commentary,” is what she held to be the best means of teaching Christianity to children (Coleridge Memoirs and Letters, 83). Children did not need to be protected from the narrative complexity of the Bible. To a lesser extent, the fairy tale is also “wholesome food…for the childish mind” (Coleridge Memoirs and Letters, 84), and perhaps even “sacred duty,” as is written in Coleridge’s L’Envoy to Phantasmion (Coleridge Phantasmion, 17).
Second, Phantasmion’s narrative emphasizes the growth and sanctification of its protagonist, Prince Phantasmion. The prince is protected by a guardian fairy, Potentilla, who allows him to take on the qualities of various insects. He also suffers the loss of his parents and his best friend. Many of his adventures involve discerning between illusion and the truth, and navigating confusing romantic entanglements. It is not a straightforward path towards perfection, and even the story’s conclusion is ambiguous as Phantasmion has a momentary fear that his happy ending is not real. This ambiguity is reflected in Coleridge’s Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), which is a lengthy set of imagined conversations between various men and women regarding the doctrine of sanctification. The form of dialogue maintains an open conversation, rather than a closed set of doctrinal points. Taken together, these texts demonstrate Coleridge’s experimentation with the form of theological writing, and her lifelong concern with the formation of men and women within the Christian life.
Third, Phantasmion may be read as a “fairy story” in the Tolkienian sense of that word, in light of the framework J. R. R. Tolkien provides in his 1938 lecture, “On Fairy Stories”. Of particular importance is Tolkien’s definition of eucatastrophe, or “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” that does not deny “sorrow and failure” but does deny “universal final defeat” (Tolkien, 68). While this term is coined after Coleridge’s lifetime, there is such a turn away from certain defeat at Phantasmion’s climax. This turn is the sudden liberation of the female characters in the story, from a fairy held in a villainous king’s thrall, to a mother who has lost her daughter, to that daughter’s freedom from having to marry the holder of a magic pitcher. Their freedom brings about the defeat of evil in the kingdom, and begins to set their world right. Thus, a theological reading of Coleridge’s Phantasmion may reveal insights into how Coleridge viewed her own position as a woman practicing theology in the nineteenth-century.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Sara. Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement: Selected Religious Writings. Edited by Robin Schofield. Anthem Press, 2020.
———. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge. London: H. S. King, 1875. https://archive.org/details/memoirlettersofs00coleuoft
———. Phantasmion. Necropolis Press, 2013.
Davis, Allison Cooper. “Ponder and Believe: Interpretive Experiments in Victorian Literary Fantasies.” PhD Diss. The University of North Carolina, 2009.
Eilers, Michelle L. "On the Origins of Modern Fantasy." Extrapolation 41, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 317-337.
Low, Dennis. “‘The very way to be not read’: The Creative Significance of Literary Inconsequentiality in Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion.” The Coleridge Bulletin 12, (Winter 1998). https://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/MembersOnly/Low_STC_Phantasmion.html
Newman, Hilary. “The Structure of Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion, A Fairy Tale.” The Coleridge Bulletin 42, (Winter 2013). https://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/images/07_Newman_Hilary_-_Structure_of_Phantasmion.pdf
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” In The Tolkien Reader, 25-84. Ballantine Books, 1966.
Watters, Shirley. “Sara Coleridge and Phantasmion.” The Coleridge Bulletin 10, (Autumn 1997): 22–38. https://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/MembersOnly/SWatters_Phantasmion.html
Sara Coleridge's Phantasmion (1837) is often identified as the first English fantasy novel. It has usually been read as an intentionally inconsequential work, meant to be enjoyed for its own sake. This paper proposes an alternative reading of the novel, one that views it as part of Coleridge's larger body of theological work. Phantasmion's form as a fantasy novel and the story that unfolds within that form are narrative expressions of her theology. This argument is developed along three lines: First, Coleridge expressly wrote that narrative and fairy tales are the best mode through which children are educated on Christianity. Second, Phantasmion's emphasis on the sanctification of its protagonist anticipates the concerns of her later Dialogues on Regeneration. Third, reading Phantasmion through the lens of Tolkien's "eucatastrophe" reveals that recovering the agency of women is essential to the renewal and restoration of the world.