摘要：The fairy has been neglected in scholarship; seen as being a frivolous branch of British literature, fairy texts have seemed until recently to be trivial productions with no real relevance to the real world. Laura Forsberg's article is the latest in a series of scholarly re-evaluations of the fairy's role in nineteenth-century culture, and she convincingly demonstrates that there is more to the fairy than first meets the critical eye. Forsberg's central preoccupation is with what she terms Victorian "fairy science" (660). The scientific works on which she focuses, including Edwin Lankester's Half-Hours with the Microscope: Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Microscope as a Means of Amusement and Instruction (1859) and Mary Ward's Microscope Teachings: Descriptions of Various Objects of Especial Interest and Beauty Adapted for Microscopic Observation (1864), believed that users of the microscope should employ the fairy "lens" to engage with the mysterious miniature worlds unveiled by the instrument. Empirical facts, in these texts, she argues, were often secondary to the sense of wonder generated by the user's imaginative interpretations of the miniscule life forms presented to them. Forsberg suggests that there were two ways to look at the world "scientifically": "either through the dry objective lens of empiricism or through the rich imaginative lens of the fairy" (660). The microscope itself becomes a key sight in this dispute, since: "On the one hand, the microscope was an instrument of rigorous scientific empiricism strictly opposed to fanciful ideas about fairies," while on the other "the microscope serves as a portal into the unknown and mysterious world of miniature life (639). Because the microscope only allowed users a partial view, it encouraged them to embellish on the tantalizing glimpses they had seen by adding imaginative flourishes to empirical fact (652-53). The microscope allowed users – both amateur and professional – to perceive a "scientific fairyland" in samples of pond scum, a speck of dust, or any number of items or substances they chose to examine. It combined an objective and subjective view of the world to create accounts which tempered rational explanation with magical interpretation, thus emphasizing the wonder still to be discovered in quotidian experiences
