"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world?  It is that we have only known the back of the world.  We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.  That is not a tree, but the back of a tree.  That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud.  Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face?  If we could only get round in front." —G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Here's a precursor to the puppet that lives within us all, from Modern Magic by Professor Hoffmann, 1885.

From Matthew Flinders by Robert Thynne, 1896.  The text reads, "Behind this hand neither land nor strand.  Jim's discovery in the ice plain."  

From The Works of Charles Dickens, Household Edition.

An illustration from Poems by Charles Rosher (1897).

An illustration from The Sphinx-like Head by J. Harry Sugden (1896).  The caption reads: "With a loud shout of joy from me, and a despairing shriek from her, I hurled her down the crater."

You've heard of magic dust, woofle dust, pixie dust, fairy dust, and foo foo powder, but these aren't mere figures of speech, as we see in the Catalogue of Sharp & Smith, 1889, p. 670 — a genuine magic atomizer.

"The butter flies," from Virginia Illustrated by David Hunter Strother, 1857.

"'You are making phantoms to frighten yourself with,' he exclaimed."  From A Neglected Privilege by Maggie Swan, 1896.

An illustration from An African Millionaire by Grant Allen (1897).  The caption reads: "Césarine returned with a full, true, and particular list."

An illustration from Shafts from an Eastern Quiver by Charles Jodrell Mansford (1894).  The caption reads: "Within the transparent rock we saw the form of a woman."

"The sea had always possessed my thoughts": an illustration by Austin Osman Spare for Behind the Veil by Ethel Wheeler (1906).

From London Bridge to Lombardy by a Mmacadamised Route by W. R. Richardson, 1869.

An illustration from The Nightingale Dished Up on China Plates by Richard Andre (1899).

An illustration from Around the World on a Bicycle by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1887).  The caption reads: "A Quarry of Startled Dears."

Here's a precursor to James and the Giant Peach, from The Oxford Thackeray.

"Ventilating engines, commonly used at close ends in metal mines," from Frost and Fire by John Francis Campbell, 1867.

"The heart of the typhoon," from A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan by Mary Crawford Fraser, 1899.