Beginning in 1804 with Nathan Drake's 'Henry Fitzowen', The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy traces the development of the genre through the stories and poems of Coleridge, Keats, Dickens, Disraeli, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson and Vernon Lee, until the end of the century and Richard Garnett's 'Alexander the Ratcatcher'.

Each text has been chosen to illustrate the development of the various aspects of fantasy in British Literature - the comic, the sentimental, the erotic and the allegorical - and the contribution that these authors made to the emergence of the genre.