The Weekly Machen
The Evening News commissioned Arthur Machen to write the following short article to accompany a toy drive promoted by the paper. More information on that project follows Machen’s piece. In lesser hands, the result may have produced a dry, factual tone or an overly-sentimental one. However, in expert manner, Machen uses the brief space allotted him to argue for the rightful and needful place of the imaginative faculty in the interior life of a child. In doing so, he presents a theological study of man and creation. Today, awash in media on countless screens, we certainly need reminders of these realities.
The following article is not listed in the bibliography by Goldstone and Sweetser.
A Child in Fairyland:
What a Doll Brings to the Slums
by
Arthur Machen
November 1, 1911
“What a simple want this doll is,” writes Eugénie de Guérin, “so befitting the soul of a child, and even of any man! For everyone in affliction has his own doll, and rejoices at the faintest image of his vanished happiness.”
The “want of the doll” is indeed simple, and for that very reason it is amongst the most urgent of all wants. It would take its place of right in the lists of things foolish, irrational, unnecessary, and mischievous which the gradgrinds are continually dressing up; and it may safely be concluded that everything denounced by the “hard fact” people is entirely needful for the spirit of man.
Boots and clothes and food; all these are demanded for the bodily health of every child, and the benevolence of London does its best to see that even the poorest do not lack these things at Christmas-tide. But there is another region—that of the spirit—which must by no means be neglected; and it is to the spiritual and imaginative side of childhood that The Evening News and its readers are ministering in seeing that to the darkest places of the great dark city there shall enter at this coming Christmas a bright messenger from fairyland.
For we must consider that to the child, and more especially to the poor child who dwells amidst hard and unlovely circumstances and surroundings, a doll is the figure on which its owner drapes all the garments of fantasy. The mere puppet may be nothing in itself; indeed, the simpler doll is usually a greater favourite than the more costly and elaborate figure. But, according to the true theory of the universe, which is called the sacramental theory, humanity requires some visible and external peg (as it were) on which its whole internal and imaginative life depends. Man is not pure thought or pure spirit; he is a spirit manifested in a sensible and material form, and if you would reach that invisible part of him sometimes called his soul, you must do so very largely through the channel of his senses.
For the grown-ups, the world of art serves this purpose; but for the child there is nothing like a doll.
THE NEED OF IMAGINATION
It has always been my belief that one of the chiefest sources of the troubles of these days is the starvation of the imagination which inevitably goes on in an industrial community. Men pass their days in tending machines and go home at night to streets that look as if they had been turned out by machinery. All this, it appears, is inevitable; but at all events let us see that the souls of the children are not starved. We cannot give them the surroundings which most befit childhood; we cannot make the dreary east of London into a pleasant countryside, or change the stony, rigid streets into the winding way of an old English village; but we can send into the grey world an emissary from the regions ot enchantment, from the incredible heights and fairy seas and haunted groves of Mr. Barrie’s Neverneverland.
The dolls that The Evening News and its readers are to provide are destined to be the heroes and heroines of strange and wonderful and delightful adventures. They are to personate kings; and queens and princes of fairyland; and the children who win them will find that they have power to open the gates of that ugly and wicked prison which is called matter-of-fact, and lead the poor little prisoners away to the free land of fancy.
MAGIC IN BARREN PLACES
Without magic and enchantment the world is a barren place, a desolate wilderness to old and young alike; so let us send out our enchanters by the thousands, let us see that the poorest child in London possesses a weaver of spells who will make the grey road all golden, who will drape splendours and glories about the grim and squalid walls.
The winter sky may be dark and the air black with bitter rain and a piercing wind, but to the child who is the happy possessor of a doll the sun will rise all bright and shining on the happy Christmas morning, for in the world of the imagination there are no dark or dismal dawns.
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darklybrightpress.com 
Who knows Arthur Machen, who only knows a few early horror stories?
He writes of dolls as emissaries from Fairyland to slum children. But he himself was an emissary from the world of imagination in the line of Dickens, as Chesterton was to be.
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I love the sweetness of this! Imagination a wonder! What could be a greater stepping stone!
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