Once upon a time, a long, long ago time, when we were children, there was a canon of fairy tales seemingly as old as time itself; the characters in our heads looked much like those we encountered in those first illustrated anthologies. Then, as we grew up, the stories changed, fleshed out and twisted around in our imaginations, and filtered through the narrations of others. And we heard new tales, a whole magical universe of fables, myths, legends, fantasies and folklore - archetypal wondrous stories. Wonderland, an exhibition of prints by East London Printmakers at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, hints at this marvelous, limitless universe in the way that each picture is essentially a still from the artist’s own version of a story, each story linking out to other stories and other imaginations, budding out of each other forever and ever and ever.

Like fairy tales, the prints work on different levels. For children, they act as introductions to the stories, and most are accompanied by a series of questions bullying the impressionable into considering themes and morals; a heavy-handed approach, given that these yarns are already so successful in smuggling morality into kids’ subconscious while their guard is down.

But, while some of these prints do simply take a childish glee in the vivid images thrown up by fantastical tales - Rapunzel’s tower, the evil queen being danced to death in red-hot iron shoes - most, whether depicting Hansel and Gretel, the Lithuanian saga of a bear called Misha, or Haruki Murakami’s The Dancing Dwarf, also work on a meta-level, as considerations of form.

The most common subject of the prints is the manner in which the wondrous tale interacts with the imagination. Clearly, such tales can be escapist – Louiz Kirkebjerg Nielsen draws Thumbelina as a small figure overwhelmed by an unwelcoming city, “wishing for wings to be free”. They are also used to make sense of the world, an idea explored in the work of Ellie Curtis & Nick Morley: for ‘Banished’ Ellie drew a woman with three noses and mice for feet, and a clawed man with faces in his knees; Nick positioned them on a background; the viewer is invited to make up a story to explain what’s going on. Maureen Valfort’s ‘Once Upon A Tree’ - a silhouette of a tree with fairytale beings in its branches - makes a similar point.

Fact and fiction blend in these imaginative constructs. Katie Jones, in ‘Stove’, uses the history of the Crystal Palace and the stories that grew up around it to show a reality swept up and deformed in myth. And it’s not simply a case of us creating stories - they create and form us, in turn. Samuel Lawson’s ‘Echoes of Shadows’, for instance, is thick with images from the African folklore that shaped him as a child.

While Wonderland’s assortment of stories is rather hazily defined, they share common motifs and narrative forms. Katy Goutefangea addresses these patterns in a series of etchings, ‘Both Sides of a Story I - V’, formalising that struggle between the hero and his oppressors that invariably resolves itself into a happy ending. These basic familiar patterns give the stories an essential timelessness. Robert Stokes draws attention to this durability in his ‘Vicky Page, The Red Shoes’, based on Powell & Pressburger’s 1948 movie, itself inspired by a Hans Christian Anderson story.

In short, it’s an exhibition that is very much worth a look in this season of make-believe and wonderment, particularly if you’re feeling rather cynical about it all, and need to renew your faith in a happily-ever-after.

Wonderland. Till 10 January. V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA. Admission free. Ring 020 8983 5200 or visit www.museumofchildhood.org.uk for details.