'That Very Mab'

A satirical sequence opens with a fairy-queen's visit to a Pacific isle where European missionaries, merchants, and competing national flags impose new garments, laws, and rituals on island life. The work alternates imaginative episodes and polemical essays that probe the origins of religion, the clash between poetic imagination and scientific or palaeontological thought, the social consequences of machinery and commerce, democratic justice, and aesthetic values. Caricatured figures such as a nihilist, a democrat, and a professor debate bishops and statecraft, individual careers are traced amid political change, and the collection closes by uniting domestic reform and foreign policy in an allegorical finale.