Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction A tale of two fantasies 1. The phantom out of Oxford Street: Dickens’s fairyland 2. The Martian on Primrose Hill: Wells’s scientific romances 3. The bells of lost London: Orwell’s and Peake’s anti-fantasies 4. A pyramid of flesh on Villiers Street: New Worlds magazine and the Jerry Cornelius myth 5. ‘My home, the city’: Secondary-World London Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Charts a new history of London urban fantasy stretching from Charles Dickens, through H.G. Wells and Mervyn Peake to Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.

About the Author

Hadas Elber-Aviram is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, London, UK.

Reviews

Elber-Aviram lays down cobblestone by carefully shaped cobblestone, giving her readers not only the foundations but the path to see the intended fantastic in Dickens’ door-knockers, Wells’ radios, and Gaiman’s doors
*Mythprint*

Insightful ... Fairy Tales of London is an lucid piece of detective work in the field of literary genre.
*Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association*

Elber-Aviram leads readers through a sustained examination of almost two centuries of the urban fantasy tradition, grounding her analysis in the Victorian era and hearkening back to Dickens’s work in every chapter. This book will certainly be of interest to scholars of both rural and urban fantasy fiction, and Victorian periodical scholars will perhaps be inspired to consider rural and urban fantasy traditions in periodicals.
*Victorian Periodicals Review*

For scholars focusing on considerations of place and urban fantasy, and London in particular, this monograph represents a crucial text for charting the origins and approaches within the genre, whilst also wholeheartedly championing the potentiality of urban fantasy.
*Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction*

This ambitious and important book advances a persuasive new reading of 19th and 20th-century British Fantasy writing, exploring the dynamic between a tradition of Rural Imagination, typified by writers like Ruskin, MacDonald, Tolkien and C S Lewis and one of Urban Fantasy typified by Dickens, Wells, Orwell, Peake and China Mièville. It marks an important intervention into the on-going critical debate about writing of the fantastic.
*Adam Roberts, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK*