One thing that is fascinating (to YHB, at least) about the Victorian and Edwardian children’s fantasists is that they are working in a fairy-tale tradition that is very heavily invested in the monarchy, and many of the writers are opposed to the monarchy. This plays out in interesting ways among the socialists and radicals (such as Oscar Wilde and E. Nesbit and um, I’m thinking) and in different interesting ways among the tories and loyalists (such as Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling), but it’s an interesting backdrop in all of it. American writers, too, have to deal with the traditions—princesses, castles, grand viziers, bad baronets, the whole shtick—and not only are they pretty nearly all anti-monarchists, but they are living in a world without baronets and they grew up without baronets themselves.\n
So, they have some choices. They can give up the baronets and write about modern no-nonsense American fairies, they can go ahead and buy into the baronets and live with the whole tory shtick, or they can subvert the paradigm<\/I>. Yay! Subvert the paradigm! Yay!\n
Excuse me.\n
So. L. Frank Baum chooses the third (and best!) of these options, most of the time. Oh, in his Great Book he chooses the first option, and writes about fairy scarecrows and tin men and wizard\/aerialists, but later on he makes excellent mock of monarchies and monarchists, in part by making Dorothy and Trot and Betsy into Princesses in gingham.\n