“Lonely, tender, passionate heart”: Melancholy and Isolation in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875)

Recently, the life and work of Dinah Mulock Craik has gained critical interest. In her work on the golden age of children’s literature, Marah Gubar positions Craik within a “chorus of critically neglected women writers” (2009:40), celebrating her as a literary pioneer in utilising child narrators and (potentially) influencing later authors like Frances Hodgson Burnett (40). Likewise, Claudia Nelson also highlights her role as “literary benefactor”, advocating George MacDonald’s David Elginbrod to her publishers (2015: para. 23). The revival of Craik’s work is, ultimately, epitomised in the 2013 special issue of Women’s Writing focusing specifically on “Rereading Dinah Mulock Craik” and Karen Bourrier’s recent biography Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (2019). Earlier reinvestments in Craik’s work tended to focus on a gendered analysis (Showalter, 1975; Mitchell, 1983; Richardson, 1993; Philipose, 1996); however, as Bourrier notes in her introduction to the special issue, “the majority of scholars at this critical moment are coming to Craik’s work through a disability studies perspective” (2013:292). These disability focuses likewise cover a range of topics such as interdependency (Stoddard Holmes, 2007), gender and disability (Sparks, 2013; Bourrier, 2016), narratological approaches to prosthesis (Hingston, 2013, 2019), and the impact/power of genre (Walker Gore, 2019; Wheeler, 2019), among others. This emerging body of work, though, often takes up the disabled body as an object of study, overlooking the broader structural elements that contextualise Craik’s work and shape discourses of disability in the late nineteenth century. The Little Lame Prince follows the life of Prince Dolor of Nomansland, the titular prince, who becomes both orphaned and physically disabled at a young age. His throne is usurped by his uncle, and he is sent to live out the rest of his days in a door-less, inescapable tower he calls Hopeless Tower. Through the magical gifts afforded him by his magical godmother, Stuff-and-Nonsense, including a travelling cloak, he is able to learn about the world outside the tower. After his uncle’s death, he is rescued and reinstated as the rightful king, and enjoys a long and relatively happy reign. Rather than focus on the prostheticisation of Dolor through his magical gifts, as other scholars have (see Hingston), in this chapter I turn to the novel’s use of confinement, concerns over nervous diseases and related eugenic imperatives, and anxieties about political unrest to examine how Craik challenges and reinforces discourses of disability. Like The Princess and the Goblin discussed in Chap. 1 , The Little Lame Prince utilises fantasy as a means to critically examine themes, discourses, and systems that have managed disabled populations. Where eugenics, degeneration, and hysteria are central to McDonald’s novel, eugenics, confinement, and melancholia serve to structure Prince Dolor’s dis-topian world.