SF Caledonia
Monica Burns
That Very Mab
May Kendall and Andrew Lang
Published 1885
This issue’s SF Caledonia is a first for two reasons. For one, the book was written in collaboration by two different authors, and secondly, one of the collaborators was female (finally we’ve found one!) These two writers, May Kendall and Andrew Lang, were already established as writers but joined forces to create a fairy tale satire called That Very Mab which they published, at first anonymously, in 1885.
If you recognise the name Mab, then yes, it is indeed that very Mab you’re thinking of. She is the Fairy Queen featured in many works of British literature. She originates from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in a speech by Mercutio:
“O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you / She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate-stone”.
From within this speech is where Kendall and Lang got their title:
“This is that very Mab / That plaits the manes of horses in the night”.
Since Shakespeare drew a lot of his material from folklore and old stories, many people debate over the origins of Queen Mab prior to Shakespeare, often pointing to Celtic folklore, particularly the Irish Queen Medb (pronounced mev or maive). Regardless of her initial origins, she has clearly captured the imagination of many writers and poets after Shakespeare, including Ben Jonson, John Milton and Percy Shelley. So by the time May Kendall and Andrew Lang were writing in 1885, during an era enamoured with fairy stories, it was likely that readers would know exactly who Queen Mab was. Kendall and Lang add to the canon of Queen Mab literature, but they offer us a unique take on her. The story uses the queen of the fairies as a vehicle to satirically explore the absurdities and contradictions of modern life. The basic premise is that Queen Mab had left Britain long ago because the rise of Puritan Christianity in Britain made the fairies flee. She had resettled in the Polynesian island of Samoa. However, various warring parties of missionaries who invade and disrupt her new home drive Mab back to her roots. Flying upon a seagull, she returns to Britain to see what became of her former kingdom in the years of her absence. At first despondent at the lack of support among her former subjects, the animals and insects, she finds company in a wise but pessimistic owl, who interprets modern civilisation for her. Together, they make a study of analysing issues of science, religion, politics, art and philosophy. This makes up the basic framework for the plot of That Very Mab. All that follows are the events which Mab and the Owl see or become involved in, and their discussions about them.
As is often the case in philosophical fantasy and science fiction from the nineteenth century, the novel’s characters are not supposed to be three-dimensional people, but operate as archetypes, named only after their profession or a particular character trait. There are characters called only the Poet, the Bishop, the Nihilist and so on, which makes the world seem more like a fairy tale than a real representation of Britain. Kendall and Lang have a knack for making the reader take a second look at what they know of issues like science and politics, and marvel at absurd human fixations.
One contemporary response to the book was mostly favourable. When That Very Mab first came out, the critic, science-writer and novelist, Grant Allen, wrote a review in Longman’s Magazine (which regularly printed Lang’s work, so much so that readers mistook him for the editor). Allen identified the then-anonymous authors as a new writer, claiming that the writing “has a vein of its own; sometimes it is rollicking, sometimes it is plaintive, sometimes it is satirical, sometimes it is mystifying, but always it is clever and always pessimistic.”
Allen’s review opens with a puzzle on how That Very Mab should be categorised on the shelves. He comes to the conclusion:
“If I had to give it a name, I should say it was a satire, but a satire of the most comprehensive catholic description, since it addresses hard knocks to everybody all round with great impartiality, except only owls and fairies. And even the owls have a doubtful time of it.”
But more than130 years since the book’s publication and Allen’s review, there is an extra genre to add to the mix that did not then exist in the way we know it today: science fiction. In a similar way to other novels SF Caledonia has looked at so far, categorising nineteenth century novels as science fiction can be dubious at times, given that the genre did not necessarily exist under the definitions we have today. Certainly, That Very Mab could be slotted into the fantasy genre quite easily. Little details of fairy magic are sprinkled throughout the book, giving it an authentic fairy story feel to it amid the heavy satire. However, as SF Caledonia has discussed before, fantasy doesn’t necessarily directly equate with science fiction. As far as I’m concerned, to dub a book science fiction, it has to at least engage with some of the scientific thinking from its time. Though That Very Mab does this, it also goes beyond. Throughout the book we are made to believe that the Britain that Mab visits is a parodied version of the real Britain inhabited by Kendall and Lang. However, there is a surprising chapter near the end of the novel in which Parliament are debating colonising the moon “by emigration of the able-bodied unemployed”, and we learn that space travel and conquering planets has already been achieved, and there are ongoing turf-wars across the solar system. It is a neat science-fiction addition, where the rest of the book feels more like the late nineteenth century. It emerges from Parliament’s discussions that it is not a unified effort by the entire planet Earth to explore space, but individual countries claiming worlds for themselves, so basically extending the petty turf wars from Earth into outer space. MPs discuss “the recent annexation of Mercury by Russia, and the presence in Jupiter of a German emissary”.
There are two sections in particular which maintain coincidental foresight. This first is something I feel we might be saying in the future when Earth is forced to colonise the solar system after global warming ruins our own planet: an MP in the Parliamentary debate criticises “the gentleman so highly distinguished for youth and sanity, who has plunged us into oceans of disaster at home and abroad, and, not content with making the world we live in too hot to hold us, intends to make all the planets related to us in the Solar System too hot to hold us, as well.”
Another interesting prediction is when Mab and the Owl discuss early robotics: “She said that inanimate objects had no business to be clever, and that, if the mechanicians did not take care, they would shortly invent machines that would conspire together to assassinate them, and then share the profits.” Robots going rogue to overthrow their human creators—isn’t that a familiar science fiction plot?
Unfortunately, little is known about the particulars of Kendall and Lang’s collaboration—who wrote what, and who came up with which idea. However, Kendall and Lang seem to be the perfect literary match for one another. In their individual repertoires, they are both playful, intelligent, unconventional, satirical and they’re both interested in the scientific and the fantastic. Whether or not they were friends with one another after That Very Mab, they still kept in contact on a literary level at least. May Kendall condensed and adapted Gulliver’s Travels for the first of Lang’s fairy books The Blue Fairy Book, in 1889.
Andrew Lang
Of the two authors of That Very Mab, more information is known about Andrew Lang. Taking a step away from the unfortunate fact that women in history are often sidelined in favour of their male counterparts, in this case Andrew Lang was the bigger name out of the pair. He was a very well known journalist, novelist, poet and literary critic. Although he is not widely recognised nowadays, to give an idea of his fame and prolificacy during his lifetime, George Bernard Shaw once wrote “the day is empty unless an article by Lang appears”. He wrote 80 books as well as his frequent contributions to magazines, poetry and other works. He has no distinct magnum opus to his legacy, however he might be best remembered for being the editor of the hugely successful fairy books, published between 1889 and 1913 categorised by the colours of their covers, starting with The Blue Fairy Book. He also frequently wrote introductions to books, including all of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.
Lang was born in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders in 1844. Both sides of his family had notable ancestors. His maternal grandfather was the infamous Patrick Sellar, the Duke of Sutherland’s factor, who played a major role in the Highland Clearances, and his paternal grandfather was sheriff clerk to Sir Walter Scott. Lang went to school at Edinburgh Academy, then studied for his undergraduate degree in the University of St Andrews (where there is now a lecture series named after him), and afterwards went on to study as a postgraduate at the University of Oxford.
Contemporary reports of Lang’s personality express mixed feelings. Despite the claim by critic, Theodore Watts-Dunton, that “I never met a man of genius who did not loathe Lang”, Lang seemed to have made friends with a lot of famous people, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. However, his first meeting with Stevenson didn’t appear to have gone too well. Stevenson actually wrote this little poem about him, criticising his pretentiousness:
My name is Andrew Lang
Andrew Lang
That’s my name
And criticism and cricket is my game
With my eyeglass in my eye
Am not I
Am not I
A la-di da-di Oxford kind of Scot
Am I not?
Whether or not Lang ever knew about the poem, he and Stevenson went on to become life-long friends!
If this description of Lang’s writing—“fairy-tales written by an erudite Puck”—is anything to go by, then he must have been a fascinating character to have met. He lived well into his sixties, and died in Banchory, Aberdeenshire in 1912.
May Kendall (Emma Goldworth Kendall)
Sadly, there is not as much information on May Kendall as there is on Andrew Lang. Christened “Emma Goldworth Kendall”, she was born the daughter of a Weslyan minister and his wife in Bridlington, Yorkshire, in 1861. It is assumed that she spent most of her life in and around this region, and that she died in 1943 in York. She never married and had a long and prolific career as a poet, writer and social activist. Little is known of her schooling. However, from the amount of knowledge, intelligence and wit in her writing, it would be fair to assume she was well-educated. It is even suggested that she attended Somerville College, Oxford University.
Like many of literature’s great ladies, she was a champion for the rights and education of her fellow women. She was among those who the Victorians called a ‘New Woman’, a term used to describe the new feminist ideal of an educated, independent career woman who exercised control over her own life, which was against the conservative norms of Victorian society. The New Woman’s movement had a profound influence on feminism through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.
Kendall also took interest in social justice, particularly the working class. She worked closely with the Rowntree family in York (famous for their chocolate and confectionary firm), collaborating on research with Seebohm Rowntree, and publishing a book in 1913 called How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem. She eventually gave up her writing to focus her attention on social reform.
