The Shaving of Shagpat by George Meredith (1856). When the publication in 1704 of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights proved immensely popular, it was followed by more collections (Turkish Tales in 1707 and Persian Tales in 1714), which proved to be just as commercially successful, and the exotic oriental fantasy was here to stay. Meredith himself became a prolific author of serious contemporary love stories and of sonnets, but it is for his first book that anyone interested in fantasy literature remembers him. He was twenty-five when he wrote it, a newlywed with a young child, and was perhaps hoping to catch the coattails of the boom in orientalism that so captivated the Western world. Whatever his hopes were, the novel flopped badly, and it quickly made its way to the remainder stalls, and Meredith never wrote another fantasy. His tale, though, is lovely, teeming with colorful supernatural events and monstrous jinn, lush with oriental scenery and vivid characters. The adventure gives us a heroic barber who seeks to follow the seemingly helpful advice of the sorceress Noorna bin Noorka, and shave the celebrated and revered Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi, the son of Shullum, “a veritable miracle of hairiness.” There is a profusion of “jeweled cities far,” and enormous armies that raise the desert into crimson dust, withered crones with joints as sharp as a grasshopper’s, and a lofty mountain “by day a peak of gold, and by night a point of solitary silver.” Through it all, Meredith’s ironic wit is a pure delight, rewarding the reader’s time with a singular vision of a world that never actually existed.

—Charles Vess.