Epilogue

Abstract

As Rudyard Kipling’s nature spirit Puck points out, at the end of the nineteenth century the fairies had left England. Kipling’s construction of fairies as a species likely to become extinct is not original. We have seen how Nesbit presented the issue of extinction through her prehistoric fairy, and how nineteenth-century writers in general used fairies to point out the dangers of massive industrialization, from Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone (1841) to May Kendall and Andrew Lang’s That Very Mab (1885) at the end of the century. Whether the fairies were used to support a discourse on geology or to express concern about the latest scientific discoveries and the implications of scientific materialism, fairies appeared in many different kinds of publications to give a voice to the natural world, its history and the importance of its conservation.