SOURCE: "Fantasy, Early Nineteenth-Century Reviewers, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge," in Victorian Fantasy Literature: Literary Battles with Church and Empire, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990, pp. 1-19.

In the following excerpt, Michalson illustrates the negative connotations Victorian critics associated with "fantastic" writing.

What, then, must be the effect of a confederated and indefatigable priesthood, who barely tolerate literature, and actually hate it, upon all those classes over whom literature has any influence!¹

Prickett Highlights What Distinguishes Victorian Fantasy from That of Other Eras:

[T]o see what is distinctively new about nineteenth-century fantasy we must look back at the period immediately preceding it. Out of a confluence of intermingled currents and eddies of thought we can, perhaps, select a number of streams which were to feed the reservoirs of Romanticism at the turn of the century. One is the idea of the 'Gothick'; another is a revival of religious mysticism...