“There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.”

This is the very first line of the novel, and it quickly goes on to note the lack of noteworthiness of such an idea in the realm of fairy-tale fiction. The statement functions as a setup for the quest story archetype within which the novel progresses, but its use as an opening line invites inversion. The concept is capitalized to draw attention to the sacredness of the idea; there may also be a hidden authorial allusion here, as “Desire,” with a capital, is the name of one of author Neil Gaiman’s most famous characters in the Sandman universe.

“Had you mentioned Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps, for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.”

In his introduction, Neil Gaiman states that he wanted the book to sound as if it was written in 1922; however, the narrator of the novel is looking back on events that have already happened. In this moment the narrator solidifies the events of the story as being set in the mid-19th century. Here they illustrate a discordance between science and magic, with writers and artists like Charles Dickens struggling to bridge the two.