<p>"I Have Dreamed a Dream..." is an analysis of the three short stories "Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland", "The Door in the Wall" and "A Dream of Armageddon" by H.G. Wells. The essay makes a comparison of the three short stories from the perspectives of the dreamland, the inner struggle of the protagonist and the message of the story. The purpose is to show that the three seemingly similar short stories have different outcomes and deliver different messages to the reader. The essay finally presents a theory of how these messages coincide despite their differences.</p> / <p>"Jag har drömt en dröm..." är en analys av de tre novellerna "Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland", "The Door in the Wall" och "A Dream of Armageddon" av H.G. Wells. Uppsatsen gör en jämförelse av de tre novellerna utifrån tre perspektiv: drömvärlden, huvudpersonens inre kamp och historiens budskap. Syftet är att visa hur de tre till synes lika novellerna har olika resultat och presenterar olika budskap till läsaren. Uppsatsen framför slutligen en teori för hur dessa budskap överensstämmer trots sina olikheter.</p>

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a land and people that were at once more intimate and more alien: the races and landscapes of Fairyland. This Thesis attempts to situate the fairy folklore and literature from the Victorian era within the context of greater social and political ideologies of the age, specifically those pertaining to national identity, imperial power and race. In doing so it will analyze Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden concluding that the British self proposed by these works was an uncomfortable manifestation, and haunted by the anxieties and discontinuities that arose as imperial Britain attempted to navigate an identity within Victorian conceptions of race and power.

"I Have Dreamed a Dream..." is an analysis of the three short stories "Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland", "The Door in the Wall" and "A Dream of Armageddon" by H.G. Wells. The essay makes a comparison of the three short stories from the perspectives of the dreamland, the inner struggle of the protagonist and the message of the story. The purpose is to show that the three seemingly similar short stories have different outcomes and deliver different messages to the reader. The essay finally presents a theory of how these messages coincide despite their differences. / "Jag har drömt en dröm..." är en analys av de tre novellerna "Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland", "The Door in the Wall" och "A Dream of Armageddon" av H.G. Wells. Uppsatsen gör en jämförelse av de tre novellerna utifrån tre perspektiv: drömvärlden, huvudpersonens inre kamp och historiens budskap. Syftet är att visa hur de tre till synes lika novellerna har olika resultat och presenterar olika budskap till läsaren. Uppsatsen framför slutligen en teori för hur dessa budskap överensstämmer trots sina olikheter.