Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History

by Patrick C. Fleming

Many Disney films adapt works from the Victorian period, which is often called the Golden Age of children’s literature. Animating the Disney’s Literary History explores Disney’s adaptations of Victorian texts like Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Author Patrick C. Fleming traces those adaptations from initial concept to theatrical release and beyond to the sequels, consumer products, and theme park attractions that make up a Disney franchise. During the production process, which often extended over decades, Disney’s writers engaged not just with the texts themselves but with the contexts in which they were written, their authors’ biographies, and intervening adaptations. To reveal that process, Fleming draws on preproduction reports, press releases, and unfinished drafts, including materials in the Walt Disney Company Archives, some of which have not yet been discussed in print.

But the relationship between Disney and the Victorians goes beyond adaptations. Walt Disney himself had a similar career to the Victorian author-entrepreneur Charles Dickens. Linking the Disney Princess franchise to Victorian ideologies shows how gender and sexuality are constantly being renegotiated. Disney’s animated musicals, theme parks, copyright practices, and even marketing campaigns depend on cultural assumptions, legal frameworks, and media technologies that emerged in nineteenth-century England. Moreover, Disney’s adaptations influence modern students and scholars of the Victorian period. By applying scholarship in Victorian studies to a global company, Fleming shows how institutions mediate our understanding of the past and demonstrates the continued relevance of literary studies in a corporate media age.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published February 26, 2025

Reviews

[Susan Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

More academic than I’d prefer, but I did gain some interesting knowledge thru reading. I’m a Disney fan, but do acknowledge its shortcomings.

[Bhav · Rating 5 out of 5]

kind of insane how this book is lowk a culmination of my degree what do you mean this mentions like a book from every module i’ve sat?? what do you mean i’m reading this for my diss??
anyways love it and hope to revisit for funsies post diss

[Daniel Butcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

From BetweenDisney.com

I find myself on a ledge between two worlds of Disney between books. I have academic training, have written academic pieces to those standards of citation and scrutiny, and I teach history while not actually doing research at the moment. But I do put a lot of examination of sources into my teaching. I also love to read Disney books that come from a number of publishers that don’t require citation or peer review, as they are meant for the general public or Disney fans. It’s been one of my stated goals to support the increase of academic study of Disney history (and culture), mostly due to my own background and interests.

And I feel like the floodgates on this movement are opening with an increase in university presses publishing Disney-focused books. There is now an academic conference out there for the study of Disney. And what’s this 2025…an academic journal!

As academic Disney studies spreads, I ask myself, can the regular Disney fan who has been entertained by books from corporate, independent, and general audience presses still be entertained and informed?

Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History by Patrick C. Fleming investigates the connection between Disney's animated films and shorts, largely but not exclusively under Walt Disney’s production, and literary works and authors from the 19th-century Victorian Period. The book is connected through chapters covering four large themes: Disney and the Victorian Tradition, Disney and connections to Alice in Wonderland, the impact on Disney content by Hans Christian Anderson and his works, and finally, Victorian influences on Disney depictions of princesses and pirates, including in recent films. Each of these large chapters go beyond just discussions on actual literary works and the threads connecting them to on-screen adaptations, but also investigate how these works would have been seen by Walt Disney and his animators, the lives of Charles Dickens and Anderson in the public eye and parallels to Walt Disney himself, and how modern views of princesses conflict with historical and literary Victorian ideals on the big screen in films like Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Fleming provides a serious, well-researched, cited, and reviewed literary academic review. He weaves a story about how the Victorians impacted the Disney content that fans love. As a history guy and not a literary criticism fan, I was worried that I would be out of my depth. I view myself in this arena as a Disney fan and not a scholar, as I opened the academic monograph. I am thrilled to say that Fleming held my attention, made the literary review portions of his text accessible to me, and others. And Fleming provided a large amount of history, both 19th-century English and Disney, to engage this history lover. For example, his discussion on princesses describes the key archetypes of Victorian literary princesses, and then uses the real examples of Queen Victoria and her daughters to illustrate expectations, including how they fulfilled the models and pushed against social ideals.

Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History by Patrick C. Fleming is a serious academic study of Disney's creative endeavors and how Victorian literature helped form, I think one could say even inspired, some of the most important Disney films of numerous Disney eras. It is also an interesting study of entertainment archetypes and history. And best of all, as academic study of Disney grows, it is the type of book that most Disney history fans will find accessible while finding something new…like a discussion on the history of international copyright laws before the creation of Mickey Mouse!