The nineteenth-century folk and fairy tale revival prompted many English translations of stories from Germany, Scandanavia, and the Middle East, as well as retellings of old British tales, and new English translations of the already popular French contes de fées by Madame d’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault. Fairies and fairy tales occupied the Victorian imagination, with fairy images and motifs appearing in all forms of literature and culture, from soap advertisements to realist fiction. By mid-century, authors like Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald were developing a modern British literary fairy-tale genre that combined contemporary narrative forms, such as the Bildungsroman novel, with the fairy-tale structure and blended modern concerns, such as child labour, nationalism, Darwinism, and technology, with fairy godmothers and magical castles. Like sensation fiction, the modern fairy tale of the 1860s and 1870s was also interested in the relationship between the self or soul and the body and in responding to the scientific, technological, and medical changes that brought that relationship into question. For example, Carroll's Alice is unsure ‘what [she’s] going to be, from one moment to the next’ since her body undergoes several transformations in a single day (91). With a democratic impulse, the opening of MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin insists that not one's birth but one's actions determine one's identity (47)—and yet the novel writes behavioural identity on the body via evolutionary theory, since ‘as [the Goblins] grew mis-shapen in body, so had they grown in knowledge and cleverness … [and] mischief’ (48–49). Likewise, due to their bad behavioural choices, Kingsley's ‘Doasyoulikes’ physically degenerate into large-jawed and coarse-lipped people and then ultimately into language-less apes (173–75).

Several Victorian authors used the literary fairy tale genre to negotiate the changing understanding of the disabled body and identity as well. In Mary de Morgan's 1877 ‘Through the Fire,’ for example, the crippled invalid protagonist, Jack, travels on the backs of fairies for adventures and, as a reward for using a magic wish to reunite fairy lovers rather than to cure himself, he receives from those lovers a magic silver belt that makes him ‘quite strong’ and ‘no longer a cripple’ (226).