In examining the relationship between fairy tales and Victorian culture Molly Clark Hillard concludes that the Victorians were spellbound novelists poets and playwrights were selfavowedly enchanted by these tales. At the same time Spellbound The Fairy Tale and the Victorians shows that literary genres were bound to the fairy tale and dependent on its forms and figures to make meaning. But these spellbound literary artists also feared that fairy tales exuded an originative power that pervaded and precluded authored work. In part to dispel the fairy tales potency Victorians resolved this tension by treating the form as a nostalgic refuge from an industrial age a quaint remnant of the preliteracy of childhood and peasantry and a form fit not for modern gentlemen but rather for old wives. ampampnbsp Through close readings of the novels of Dickens Eliot and Charlotte Bront the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti the visual artistry of BurneJones and Punch and the popular theatricals of dramatists like Planche and Buckingham Spellbound opens fresh territory into welltraversed titles of the Victorian canon. Hillard demonstrates that these literary forms were all crosspollenated by the fairy tale and that their authors werehowever reluctantlypurveyors of disruptive fairy tale matter over which they had but imperfect control.