The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library) (2 page)

The term “fairy tale” apparently did not exist in English prior to 1699, when Mme. D’Aulnoy’s
contes des feés
(popularly known in England as “Tales of Mother Bunch”) were first translated. It has proved a threadbare phrase to describe so vast a form. It rarely concerns fairies, what J. R. R. Tolkien dismissed as “that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested.…
Faerie
contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.” Perhaps a more accurate translation is “tale of enchantment,” which thus embraces every story in which occurs, according to Joseph Jacobs, “something ‘fairy,’ something extraordinary—fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.”

While both Mother Goose and Mother Bunch were readily welcomed to many British firesides, not everyone approved of these foreign fairies. The Age of Reason was quickly advancing upon the nursery. While arguing for the introduction of instruction through amusement, John Locke, in
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693), cautioned against fairy tales, chap-books, and old wives’ tales, which with all their wild bugaboos might damage impressionable infant minds; the only book he thought fit for boys and girls was Aesop’s fables.

Considering both the advent of the Enlightenment and the persistence of English Puritanism throughout the eighteenth century, it is no surprise that there was no great revival of the writing of fairy tales in Great Britain
concurrent with that in France. If one did appear in some children’s book, it had to reflect Lockean philosophy. Sarah Fielding included two in
The Governess
(1749), but with the stiff warning from Mrs. Teachum that “Giants, Magic, Fairies and all Sorts of supernatural Assistances in a Story, are only introduced to amuse and divert: For a Giant is called so only to express a Man of great Power; and the magic Fillet round the Statue was intended only to shew you, that by Patience you will overcome all difficulties. Therefore, by no means let the Notions of Giants or Magic dwell upon your Minds.”

“Fairy tales,” the
Monthly Review
noted in 1788, “were formerly thought to be the proper and almost the only reading for children; it is with much satisfaction, however, that we find them gradually giving way to the publications of a far more interesting kind, in which instruction and entertainment are judiciously blended, without the intermixture of the marvelous, the absurd, and things totally out of nature.” This decline of the old nursery lore in favor of contemporary moral stories was promoted by such pious journals as Sarah Trimmer’s
Guardian of Education
(1802–1806), arguing that “there is not a species of Books for Children and Youth … which has not been made some way or other an engine of mischief,” and that none was more mischievous than the fairy tale.

As the century progressed, the war against the fairy tale found a formidable ally in an American, Samuel Griswold Goodrich. When a boy in Connecticut, Goodrich was given a collection containing “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack the Giant-Killer,” and “some other tales of horror” he found “calculated to familiarize the mind with things shocking and monstrous” and “to make criminals of a large part of the children who read them.” To combat such nursery stories, Goodrich began in 1827 to publish, under the pseudonym “Peter Parley,” a series of “reasonable and truthful” books for boys and girls. Designed “to enlarge the circle of Knowledge, to invigorate the understanding, to strengthen the moral nerve, to justify and exalt the imagination,” these books became internationally successful. Clearly juvenile literature was expected to be as wholesome as a breakfast food.

But there were also powerful defenders of the fairy tale in this age of unbelief. Charles Lamb was outraged to find that moral and educational stories had all but “banished the old classics of the nursery.” “Damn them!” he wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802 about the instructional tales’ authors, “those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child … Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history?” Coleridge himself avowed that “from my early reading
of fairy tales … my mind had been habituated
to the Vast.
… I know of no better way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.” And his fellow poets, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and others, paid the tales they had known in their own childhood the great compliment of making free use of fairy lore in their verse.

Oddly, however they may have adored the old stories, the English Romantics left it to their German contemporaries to revive the form. Thus the
Kunstmarchen
, the German art fairy tale, evolved into as rich and grand a tradition as the French
conte des fées
a century earlier. But it was the
Volksmärchen
, the local folktale, as recorded by Jakob Ludwig and Wilhelm Karl Grimm between 1812 and 1814, that most significantly altered world literature. The first edition in English,
German Popular Stories
, appeared in 1823, to be quickly followed by a second volume in 1826, both translated by Edgar Taylor. These books did more than any other to usher a new era of imagination into English juvenile literature. Despite the scholarly apparatus of the volumes, Taylor was mindful to have, as he admitted to the Grimms, “the amusement of some young friends principally in view,” and therefore he was “compelled to conciliate local feelings and deviate a little from strict translation.” “Here was once again the true unadulterated fairy tale,” declared Charlotte M. Yonge, the novelist, “and happy the child who was allowed to revel in it—perhaps the happier if under protest, and only permitted a sweet daily taste.” The extraordinary reception of the Grimms’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales (first available in English in 1846) encouraged the publication in England of many other collections of the world’s folk and fairy tales. British folklorists, following the Grimms’ example, now began the great task of preserving their native oral literature before it passed from the memory of the common people. And the time was now ripe for a revival in the writing of original fairy tales in England.

The coronation of Victoria in 1837 marked the arrival of a golden age for the literary British fairy tale. Even though initially there was still considerable resistance to these innocent amusements, by the queen’s fiftieth jubilee fairy tales were no longer regarded as the engines of mischief Mrs. Trimmer had called them, but rather, as Edward Salmon declared in
Juvenile Literature As It Is
(1888), “as engines for the propulsion of all virtues into the little mind in an agreeable and harmless form.” Clearly, their authors were mindful of the criticisms of earlier nursery lore. The new fairy tales were cleansed of the savagery and ethical ambiguity that had characterized many traditional stories: here there were no ogres who cut off children’s heads, as there were in Perrault’s “Hop o’ My Thumb,” and no rewards for the liar, as in “Puss in Boots.” Even when not overtly moralizing, these tales were always moral.
Good always triumphed over Evil in these optimistic fantasies. By the time of Victoria’s death in 1901, hundreds of new fairy books had been published, a surprising number of which have become classics, remarkable for their abundant invention, literary distinction, and philosophical depth.

The first Victorian fairy tale of lasting importance was a youthful work by John Ruskin. He fell in love with
German Popular Stories
at ten years old, and his admiration did not dim with the years. He later praised the Grimms’ tales for children for “animating for them the material world with inextinguishable life, fortifying them against the glacial cold of selfish science, and preparing them submissively, and with no bitterness of astonishment, to behold, in later years, the mystery—divinely appointed to remain such to all human thought—of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good.” This high purpose Ruskin retained in the fairy tale he himself wrote,
The King of the Golden River
, which was (he admitted) “a good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with a little Alpine feeling of my own.” Composed in 1841 to amuse twelve-year-old Effie Gray, his future wife, it was not published until 1851, and then anonymously. He later scoffed at this early effort in his autobiography,
Praeterita
(1889), judging it “totally valueless.… I can no more write a story than compose a picture.” Yet, of all his many writings,
The King of the Golden River
may ensure Ruskin’s immortality.

Borrowing patterns and motifs from German folklore, particularly “The Golden Goose” and “The Water of Life,” Ruskin spun a classic ecological parable, enriched with his fervent observations of Nature. In this simple fairy tale lie the seeds of the mighty social consciousness that blossomed in his mature writing: the Black Brothers’ selfish (and thus sinful) materialism is severely punished, and the good youngest brother is rewarded for selflessly restoring the regenerative balance between Man and Nature. Ruskin also refined the paganism of the Grimms’ tales by introducing a medieval Christian argument, buffered by English Romanticism, that Nature was God’s picture book addressed to Mankind, with “the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him.”

When a boy, Ruskin had been as charmed by the pictures in
German Popular Stories
as by the text. The book was the first illustrated edition of Grimm in any language, and its plates by George Cruikshank revolutionized juvenile book illustration. Here were, as William Makepeace Thackeray argued, “the first real, kindly agreeable, and infinitely amusing and charming illustrations for a child’s book in England.”

Throughout his life Ruskin remained a loyal defender of Cruikshank’s etchings for Grimm (and appropriately
The King of the Golden River
was illustrated by one of Cruikshank’s most gifted disciples, Richard Doyle).
Ruskin generously provided the introduction to a reissue of Taylor’s translation with the original pictures. Learning that Cruikshank was desperately in need of money in 1866, Ruskin proposed that the two collaborate on a collection of the critic’s favorite fairy tales. To test the artist, he sent him the Grimm version of “The Blue Light” and Robert Browning’s retelling of the German legend “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” perhaps the greatest fairy tale written for children in English verse. (The poet had composed it to amuse a friend’s son and only reluctantly included it in 1842 in
Dramatic Lyrics.
) Cruikshank completed the two etchings, but Ruskin abandoned the project, concluding that “the dear old man has … lost his humour. He may still do impressive and moral subjects, but I know by this group of children [in the “Pied Piper” plate] that he can do fairy tales no more.” Ruskin was too harsh: Cruikshank’s etching is a charming illustration, and it is here published for the first time with Browning’s poem.

Despite these few triumphs of early Victorian fairy lore, many people still adhered to the old principle of instruction through amusement by providing what Thackeray called “abominable attempts” to “cram science down [children’s] throats as calomel used to be administered under the pretence of a spoonful of currant-jelly.” Utilitarians had no use for fairy tales. Among the voices raised at this time in defense of the old nursery stories, none was more eloquent than that of Charles Dickens. Unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens never forgot his earliest childhood reading. “Little Red Riding-Hood,” he confessed, “was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” On recalling the first time he read
The Arabian Nights
, Dickens found “all things become uncommon and enchanted to me! All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans!” References to fairy tales abound everywhere in his novels.
Hard Times
(1854) decries the injustice done to people denied works of fancy in their childhood. “Now, what I want is Facts,” declares Thomas Gradgrind, the proprietor of a model school. “Facts alone are wanted in life … nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” Consequently, none of his children “had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn … or that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb … and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.” The dismal results of such intense instruction are the Smallweeds of
Bleak House
(1853), boys and girls who have “discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables,” and thus “bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.”

Woe to him who dared to alter the tales beloved by Dickens in his
childhood! When Cruikshank rewrote the old favorites “to inculcate, at
the earliest age
, A Horror of Drunkeness, and a recommendation of Total Abstinence from All Intoxicating Liquors” in his
Fairy Library
(1853), Dickens charged “fraud on the fairies.” He believed that more than ever, in this utilitarian age, the stories must remain in their true, original state to continue “in their usefulness … in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact.”

Dickens’ interest in fairy tales was by no means limited to those he had read in his childhood. He was acquainted with Andersen’s works through his own children, and the Danish writer was his houseguest on a trip to England.
Household Words
, Dickens’ magazine, reviewed new collections and published originals by Henry Morley, an editor and noted literary scholar. Morley believed that “there is in all literature nothing that can be produced which shall represent the essential spirit of a man or of a people so completely as a legend or a fairy tale.” He collected the stories he told his own children as
Fables and Fairy Tales
(1860) and
Oberon’s Horn
(1861). Their illustrator, Charles Henry Bennett, aptly assured the writer, “Your fairy tales are fuller of notions, conceits, and good honest daring absurdity than anything modern I know.” Morley’s highly inventive tales deserve to be better known today.