Stardust Study Guide

Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, the oldest of three children. When he was five, the family moved to Sussex. His parents moved to study Scientology, a religious affiliation that caused some issues for Gaiman—one headmaster forced seven-year-old Gaiman to withdraw from school due to his father’s role as a public relations official for the local Scientologist center. Gaiman was a prolific reader as a child, a habit that followed him into adulthood. He initially pursued a career in journalism but published several short stories, a biography of the band Duran Duran, and a book of quotations as he wrote for magazines. He began writing for comic books in the mid-1980s, and DC Comics hired him to write for them in 1987. There, he wrote the Sandman series of comics, which eventually became one of DC’s best-selling titles and some of Gaiman’s most famous work. Gaiman’s novels, like the Sandman series, have received mountains of praise and a number of awards. In addition to writing novels and children’s picture books, Gaiman has also written for and worked in film and television. He’s appeared as himself in The Simpsons and has written episodes for Doctor Who. He has been married twice and has four children.

Stardust begins in rural England in the 1830s, while Tristran’s story takes place in the mid 1850s. To set the scene, the narrator specifically notes several events that occurred in the late 1830s, such as Charles Dickens serializing Oliver Twist (which he did between 1837 and 1839), Samuel Morse inventing Morse Code, and Louis Daguerre taking the first Daguerreotype photograph of the moon in 1839. This coincides with the beginning of the Victorian era, so named for Queen Victoria, who ruled from June 1837 until January 1901. While fairy stories and legends have been around for centuries, particularly in English, Scottish, and Welsh traditions, the Victorian era in general saw a heightened interest in fairies. This is reflected, in part, in the era’s art—though the self-taught artist Richard Dadd painted perhaps the most famous fairy painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, many other well-known artists painted fairies as well, many of the images inspired by Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tristran also mentions the “penny dreadfuls” sold in Wall. Penny dreadfuls were cheap and popular serialized literature, marketed to working-class young men, that often told sensationalist stories about criminals or supernatural characters. They reached their height in the 1860s and ’70s and were accused of corrupting the youth by inspiring young men to engage in crimes.

While Gaiman draws from numerous literary works in Stardust, the most important of these is the novel’s epigraph, John Donne’s poem “Song: Go and catch a falling star.” Tristran’s story is a play on Donne’s poem and follows almost exactly what the poem’s speaker urges the reader to do: to go and try to catch a falling star, among other impossible tasks. The novel also references Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Coleridge, and William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Gaiman has said that he was inspired by a child by C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Magician’s Nephew), though he rejected the series’ overt Christian themes as he got older. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was also an important inspiration to young Gaiman, and as an adult, Gaiman lists science-fiction and fantasy writer Roger Zelazney (The Chronicles of Amber) as one of his biggest adult influences, alongside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Gaiman has said that he wrote Stardust in part because he believes adults deserve fairy tales too. Numerous authors have penned retellings of classic fairy tales or other literary works, including Marissa Meyer’s Cinder (a Cinderella retelling) and Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi (which draws inspiration from Snow White). Many of Gaiman’s other books are fantastical and yet tackle distinctly adult themes, notably The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Neverwhere.