Between 1840 and 1870 the fairy world enjoyed an enormous vogue in English painting, literature, and theatre. This is the first serious book on a subject that attracted artists such as Turner, Millais, and Landseer, as well as a number of extraordinary specialists such as Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald. The book accompanies an exhibition showing in London, Iowa, and Toronto. Fairy painting was close to the centre of Victorian subconscious. No other type of painting concentrates so many of the opposing elements in the Victorian psyche: the desire to escape the great hardships of daily existence; the stirrings of new attitudes towards sex, stifled by religious dogma; a passion for the unseen; psychological retreat from scientific discovery; the latent refulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography. -- from the Introduction