For much of the nineteenth century the development of children's fantasy beyond the European fairy tale was a British concern. Although Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys was published in 1852, it was to be the end of the century before American writers became extensively involved in the development of children's fantasy, and while fairy tales continued to develop in continental Europe, the more fantastical tales which departed from fairy were increasingly likely to be British.

Why the British should have developed the fantasy mode is unclear. Selma Lanes argues for an ‘often unacknowledged longing on the part of adults for celestial fare for young children’, but this still leaves the question of Why Britain? One factor may be that for much of the late eighteenth century the British were both cut off from the rest of Europe, thanks to the Napoleonic wars, and expanding into the Far East. The appeal of the exotic, from continental Europe and elsewhere, clearly fed a desire for something else, which can be seen in the art of the period: from the Boydell Shakespeare painting project (predominantly of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest) begun in 1786 as part of an attempt to foster a school of British historical art, to the much later paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and the visionary artists like Richard Doyle, Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald, images of fairies and their cruelties have shaped many modern fantasies.

Victorian fantasy and fairy developed in Britain almost precisely alongside the great cultural shift which took place at the start of the nineteenth century, from a Britain which envied the civilization of others (from the French chef to the Chinese rooms in the Brighton Pavilion) to one which came to regard the cultural as well as material riches of the world as somehow British by right of innate superiority. Omnivorous collection of source material is one of the early hallmarks of the British children's fantasy in a period of intense cultural appropriation.