The Fairy Tale in England, 1800–1870

Michael C. Kotzin Department of English Tel-Aviv University Ramat-Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel

THE FAIRY TALE IN ENGLAND, 1800-1870

The history of the fairy tale in England during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century follows the movement of a popular narrative form, told by the folk and printed in cheap, crude chapbooks, into the mainstream of children’s and, to a certain extent, even “adult” literature. Some aspects of the history have already been traced by folklorists and by historians of children’s books, but it is also of interest to the historian of adult literature and to the historian of culture. During this period the fairy tale was not restricted to the folk and the nursery; its history involves not only folklorists and educators but also many important writers of the period, and illustrates an interesing aspect of Victorian culture.

of the nineteenth century had been imported from foreign literary sources. There had been fairy tales in England before-they were drawn upon by Shakespeare, Spenser, Peele, and Jonson. But, as Katharine M. Briggs puts it, those stories became “scarce and fragmentary in England.”l In 1822 Wilhelm Grimm speculated that “it is probable that the greater

Most of the fairy tales available in England at the beginning

THE FAIRY TALE IN ENGLAND, 1800-1870 131

part of the stories known in Germany are indigenous in Great Britain also,” but after citing a few of the types of stories found in both countries, he had to add that “little, however, has as yet been collected or communicated. This department of literature has been filled up by translations from the French.” Grimm then summarized and discussed three “characteristic and genuine English stories” which had been printed by Benjamin Tabart earlier in the century: “Jack the Giant Killer,” “Tom Thumb,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.”2 The truth, as discover- ed by later folklorists, appears to be that by the nineteenth century there were few other “characteristic and genuine English stories’’ to collect-not much more than “Tom Tit Tot” (similar to “Rumpelstdt- skin,” AT 500) and “Dick Whittington and his Cat” (AT 1651). Richard M. Dorson says:

The fact had become painfclly evident, by the close of Vic- toria’s reign, that the treasure trove of fairy tales unearthed for nearly every European country, in replica of the Grimms’ discovery in Germany, would not be found in England . . . . Why had a blight struck Merry England? No one has yet produced a satisfactory answer.3 It seems to me that the most satisfactory answer was advanced

by Edwin Sidney Hartland, who observed in 1890 that whereas there are few English fairy tales, there is a considerable body of folktale material of the legend type, such as the Robin Hood tales. Hart- land’s theory was that Puritanism was responsible: the English Non- conformists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries objected to the fantastic, obviously untrue stories and killed off much of the earlier native t r a d i t i ~ n ; ~ the subsequent vacuum, it seems, was later filled by fairy tales which had first been published in France. Whether or not that was the way it happened, the fact is that it was the imported tales which were common in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England. They themselves encountered resistance, especially from en- lightened rationalists. However, though the resistance temporarily pre- vented the tales from becoming accepted as children’s literature, it could not prevent them from being translated and published, from appearing in chapbooks, and thence from entering the oral folk corpus.

The first fairy tales to be translated into English in the eighteenth

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century were those found in the Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arubian Nights Entertainment. First collected in about 1550, the Arabic stories in the volume were translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704, and from French to English by 1708 (and possibly as early as 17045). Their Oriental exoticism was a main reason for the popularity of these stories, but some of them, most notably “Aladdin,” became associated with the fairy tale tradition-which, like them, came to England from France. In 1707 and 1716 there were separate translations of the courtly, literary Les Contes des Fges of Marie Catherine d’ Aulnoy, which had appeared in France in about 1700. In 1729 there appeared a translation by Robert Sarnber of the eight folk fairy tales masterfully transcribed by Charles Perrault or his son which had been published in France in 1696-97 with the inscription Contes de ma rne‘re Z’Oye, and became known in English as Mother Goose.

All of these collections were reprinted during the eighteenth century, in part or in full, and so were translations of selections from other collections of fairy tales, including the forty-one volume Le Cabinet des Fges (1785-89), which included “Beauty and the Beast.” The forces of enlightenment could not keep these stories out of the country. But they could keep them from entering whatever “recommended” lists there might have been for children. When John Newbery, the first publisher of children’s books, entered the trade in the mid-’forties, he became known not for imaginative fairy tales, but for moral, in- structive tales, which were to be the dominant acceptable children’s fare for the rest of the century and the beginning of the next. When the fairy-type stories were printed by the official presses, they usually were made heavily didactic. And Newbery’s followers were even more oppressively moral than he had been. He was interested in entertaining children as well as educating them. (It was he, in fact, who attached the name of Mother Goose to nursery rhymes.) But his followers had more limited goals. Mostly women, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer, they advocated strictly didactic and factual literature for children and opposed anything imaginative. Mrs. Trimmer said that Mother Goose would only “fill the minds of children with confused notions of wonderful and supernatural events.”7 The state of affairs which existed at the turn of the century is indicated


by a letter which Mrs. Trimmer printed in her magazine, The Guardian ofEducation (1802-06). Referring to the most popular fairy tale in the world, an unidentified correspondent said that “Cinderella” “is perhaps one of the most exceptionable books that was ever written for children. . . .It paints some of the worst passions that can enter into the human breast, and of which little children should, if possible, be totally ignorant; such as envy, jealousy, a dislike to mothers-in-law and half- sisters, vanity, a love of dress, etc. etc.” 8

Meanwhile, fairy tales had survived-not only those from the Arabian Nights, which benefitted from an Orientalism which they played a part in stimulating, but also others which came from France. These stories were kept alive primarily thanks to chapbooks (which several tales from the Arabian Nights also entered) and the folk that the chapbooks brought them to. The chapbook, mostly a seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century phenomenon, cheap, illustrated, containing almost all kinds of entertainment, from Bible stories to riddles and jokes, frequently written terribly, brought the imported Aladdin and Blue Beard, as well as the native Jack and Tom Thumb, to the English folk and, although not printed specially for him, to the English child.9 The chapbook brought the imported, printed stories into the native, oral and sub-literary traditions. Lower-class and countrydwelling children heard the stories from their elders and, if they could, read them in chapbooks. Wealthier and urban children heard them from their lower-class and country nurses and, if they could, also read them in chapbooks. In these ways the stories were available to the Romantics who, applying their beliefs in the primacy of the child and the value of imagination, came to the defense of the tales and attacked the official children’s reading.

strongly attacked the anti-fairy tale educators. He said:

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In a letter to Coleridge dated October 23, 1902, Charles Lamb

I am glad the snuff and pi-Po’s Books please. “Goody Two Shoes” is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and


Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowl- edge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a Horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a Horse, and such like: instead of that beautiful Interest in wild tales which made the child a man, while all the time he has suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possi- bility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history?

Damn them! ---I mean that cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child.10 Coleridge himself as a child had passionately read his father’s

copy of the Arabian Nights, and had read chapbook versions of “Jack the Giant-Killer,” The Seven Champions of Christendom, and other stories. Later he had defended fairy tales for children, basing has judgment on his own experiences. On October 16, 1797, he wrote Thomas Poole:

From early reading of fairy tales and about genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the vast, and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know of no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.11 Wordsworth also read and defended fairy tales. In The

PreZude he remembered being “a child not nine years old,”


and seeing “the shining streams / Of Fairy land, the Forests of Ro- mance” (Book Five, 474-477), and said that he “had a precious treasure at that time / A little, yellow canvas-cover’d Book, / A slender abstract of the Arabian Tales” (482-483). Earlier in the poem he criticized the current system of education by portraying a knowledge- able product of it (“. . . ’Tis a Child, no child, / But a dwarf Man ”- 294-295), and then said:

Meanwhile old Grandame Earth is grieved to find The playthings, which her love designed for him, Unthought of: in their woodland beds the flowers Weep, and the river sides are all forlorn.

(345-349) . . . . . . . . . . . . o h ! give us once again the Wishing-Cap Of Fortunatus, and the invisible Coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the forest with St. George! The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap One precious gain, that he forgets himself. 12

(364-369) For Wordsworth, Nature is the best educator; next best, it would seem, or at least better than what was taught in the schools, are fairy tales.

frequently were private), children’s reading continued to be “en- lightened” early in the nineteenth century, and the fairy tale was threatened even in its underground form as folk and chapbook literature. In 1809 Benjamin Tabart published some of the stories from Mother Goose, Countess d’Auhoy, and the Arabian Nights, some Robin Hood legends, the three native tales cited by Grimm and men- tioned above, and other legends and romances, under the title Popular Fairy Tales; or a Liliputian [sic] Library. But this collection did not help the cause of the fairy tale much, as is indicated by “Antiquities of Nursery Literature,” an important Quarterly Review article which an 18 18 second printing of it evoked from the pen of Francis Cohen, later Francis Palgrave and the father of Francis Turner Palgrave.

Despite the Romantics (whose writings about the fairy tale


Cohen [ Palgrave] claimed that nursery stories had changed, that children’s literature no longer was imaginative because fanciful stories were considered “too childish.” The forces of enlightenment had done their job well. And what is more, Cohen maintained, the core of adult popular reading material had also changed: nurses no longer read fairy tales, so did not know them as well as they used to themselves, and were less able to tell them t o children. “Scarcely any of the chap books which were formerly sold to the country people at fairs and markets have been able to maintain their ancient popularity; and we have almost witnessed the extinction of this branch of our national literature”: Gothic romances were read instead of legends, newspapers instead of broadside ballads. 13

Cohen regretted the disappearance of the old nursery stories. He defended their value and noted the sharing by many peoples of similar stories, pointing to the similarities of fairy tales and ancient myths. Cohen is an example of the descendants of eighteenth- century antiquarians who followed the brothers Grimm (to whom he refers with the highest praise) into the field of comparative folklore, and who contributed to a re-evaluation of the fairy tale. The total influence of the brothers Grimm in England alone was enormous. The English Romantics had less effect on the fate of the fairy tale in their own country than did their German contemporaries: and the product of German Romanticism most influential was the Kinder- und Hausmarchen, the great collection of folktales recorded by the brothers Grimm and published in Germany in 1812 and 1815. This collection, and a scholarly study of the origin and diffusion of the tales which was attached in 1822 to an 1819 edition of it, began the scientific collection and study of folktales, and in England influenced similar study (in the 1820’s, notably by Thomas Crofton Croker and Thomas Keightley). And despite Tabart’s earlier publication, it was this collection which also played the major role in stimulating the printing of fairy stories, for children as well as scholars. As Cohen noted, chapbooks were dying out; but the printing of fairy stories was soon to be made respectable AS he also noted, the folk were losing the tales; but children were gaining (or regaining) them.


In 1821, two years after Cohen’s article appeared, Edgar Taylor published an article called “German Popular and Traditionary Literature” in the New Monthly Magazine. In it he said:

There exists, at present, a very large and increasing class of readers, for whom the scattered fragments of olden time, as preserved in popular and traditionary tales, possess a powerful attraction. The taste for this speci’s of literature has particularly manifested itself of late; the stories which had gone out of fashion during the prevalence of the prudery and artificial taste of the last centruy, began, at its close, to re-assert every where their ancient empire over the mind. Our literati had fancied themselves, and persuaded the world to think itself, too wise for such amusements-they considered themselves as come to man’s estate, and determined, on a sudden, to put away childish things. The curious mementos of simple and primitive society, the precious glimmerings of historic light, which these invaluable relics have preserved, were rejected as beneath the dignity to which these philosophers aspired; and even children began to be fed with a stronger diet.

A better taste, say the patrons of these blossoms of nature and fancy, is now springing up. Our scholars busy themselves in tracing out the genealogy and mytho- olgical connexions of Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant Killer; and surely if the grave and learned embark in these speculations, we are justified in expecting to be able to welcome the era when our children shall be allowed once more to regale themselves with that mild food which will enliven their imaginations, and tempt them on through the thorny paths of education;-when the gay dreams of fairy innocence shall again hover around them, and scientific compendiums, lisping botanics, and leading-string mechanics, shall be post- poned to the Delights of Valentine and Orson, the beautiful Magalona, or Fair Rosamond. 14


In 1823, two years after he wrote this article, Taylor presented the first English translation of Grimm, called German Popular Stories and illustrated by George Cruikshank. In his preface Taylor indicated that folklore interests were among the reasons prompting him to publish the stories. But he also thought it important that the tales be made available to English children. Echoing his earlier statement, he said:

The popular tales of England have been too much neglected. They are nearly discarded from the libraries of childhood. Philosophy is made the companion of the nursery: we have lisping chemists and leading-string mathematicians: this is the age of reason, not of imagination; and the loveliest dreams of fairy innocence are considered as vain and frivolous. Much might be urged against this rigid and philosophic (or rather unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise, as our judgement or our memory: and so long as such fictions only are presented to the young mind as do not interfere with the important department of moral education, a beneficial effect must be produced by the pleasurable employment of a faculty in which so much of our happiness in every period of life consists. 15

After Taylor’s translation (and greatly because of it), ideas similar to those expressed earlier by the English Romantics began to be voiced more frequently. On January 16, 1823, Sir Walter Scott wrote Taylor a letter to thank him for his translation and to praise it. He said of the tales that “there is . . . a sort of wild fairy interest in them which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them. . . . Our old wild fictions like our own simple music will have more effect in awakening the fancy & elevating the disposition than the colder and more elevated compositions of more clever authors & composers.”16 Several of the reviewers of Taylor’s edition dealt with its antiquarian folklore qualities, but many also approached the collection as children’s


literature. A common reaction of a reviewer was that the tales re- minded himof those he knew during his childhood, and that he felt it good that they were available to children again. Such was the position of the reviewer in Gentleman’s Magazine, who recommended the book for children and adults, and of the one in London Magazine, who praised the stories as “delightful food for a child’s imagination,” and said: “It is the vice of parents now-a-days to lead their children’s minds with useful books. . . . Why should little children have grown- up minds?-Why should the dawning imagination be clouded and destroyed in its first trembling light? Is the imagination a thing given to be destroyed?-Oh

And yet, even with the immediate praise of the translation of Grimm and the popularity which led t o a second volume in 1826, it was not until the late 1830’s and the 1840’s that the Romantic ideas gained effective force, not until then that the fairy tale began to be generally recognized as good children’s literature, not until then that publication reflected and fed the newly established beliefs. In two “widely appreciated” l8 articles in the Quarterly Review in 1842 and 1844, Elizabeth Rigby (afterwards Lady Eastlake) pointed out that the recognition of the need for children’s books had not necessarily resulted in appropriate books for children. She said that although children now had libraries, which their great-grandmothers did not have, the books provided for them in those libraries are not necessarily better than the “fairy tales and marvellous histories” and “little tales of a moral tendency” which the ancestors had been able to obtain. Books today, she argued, do not separate entertainment and instruction, and fail to achieve either purpose. She reviewed those books which she considered bad, and she then listed examples of the kinds of books she considered good, including “Beauty and the Beast,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Grimm, and the Arabian Nights among those books which are good for entertainment.19 The kinds of books she wanted were being published increasingly frequently even as she wrote. From that time on, English bookshelves were filled more and more with translations of foreign folktales, with new collections of the few native stories that could be found, which early reviewers of Taylor’s Grimm had called for, and even with newly- composed fairy stories. 20


The increased publication included new translations of Grimm in 1839, 1846, 1849, 1855, and frequently thereafter. There also were many reprintings, and a reviewer of one of the later editions of Edgar Taylor’s translation of Grimm indicates the popularity the tales had reached by 1847. He says that Taylor’s earlier claim that the tales were “out of fashion” is no longer true: “the more elegant guise in which our old friends present themselves radiant in their gay bindings and red and black title pages, would rather intimate that they are becoming very much the fashion.”21

The new fashion was also marked by translations of older collections of stories, such as the Arabian Nights in 1839-40 (by Edwin Lane) and the Pentamerone in 1848, and by publication of books which contained stories from such standards as Mother Goose, Madame d’ Aulnoy , and Grimm, native favorites, and newly-collected and sometimes newly-written stories. The collections included Felix Summerly’s (Henry Cole’s) Home Treasury, 1841-49; Ambrose Mer- ton’s (William John Thorns’s) The Old Story Books ofEngland, 1845 (whose introduction said: “Their design is to cultivate the heart, to enrich the fancy, to stir up kindly feelings, to encourage a taste for the beautiful, and to accomplish this by taking advantage of the youthful longing for amusement”22); and Anthony Montalba’s Fairy Tales from All Nutions, 1849 (the preface of which declared that England had “cast off that pedantic folly” of condemning fairy tales “as merely idle things, or as pernicious occupations for faculties that should be always directed to serious and profitable concern^"^^).

The most famous of a new group, writers of original fairy tales for children, as distinct from those who, like the Grimms, collected tales existing in oral tradition and in some instances “improved” upon them, was the Dane Hans Christian Andersen, whose first collection of fairy stories appeared in 1835, and who was first translated into English in 1846. F.J.H. Darton says: “The fairy-tale had at last come into its own. The story of its struggle without the aid of originality had culminated in such versions as Tabart’s and in the immediate success of Grimm. But now there was added the recognition that it was lawful, and even praise-worthy, to invent and re- lease fantasy, and to circulate folklore itself.”24


Although Andersen pioneered in the writing of fairy tales for children, he did not do so in the writing of original fairy tales in general, That innovation, like the work of the Grimms, emanated from the German Romantic Movement; and it too affected English literary history. Johann August Mus5us was adapting folktales for sophisti- cated adults as early as 1782, and Goethe used folklore motifs in his complex “Mahrchen” of 1795. But the originator of the Romantic fairy tale, or Kunstmh’rchen, in its most typical form was Ludwig Tieck. Tieck’s tales appeared in German from 1797 till 1811, and stimulated such other German Romantics as Waskenroder, Novalis, Brentano, la Motte Fouque, Chamisso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann to also transform folktales into fantasy literature for adults. 25

England was familiar with very little writing of this sort until 1813, when Madame de Sta’d introduced Englishmen t o German Romanticism in her book De 1’Allemagne. Even after that, not much was translated until after Taylor’s 1823 Grimm. Then a spate of translations appeared, the most notable being Thomas Carlyle’s Ger- man Romance: Specimens of its chief authors, with biographical and critical notes, published in 1827, one year after many similar collections. Thus, it is clear, extensive publication of this type of fairy tale preceded extensive publication of the folk and children’s tales. But the popularity of these stories increased markedly at the same time as that of the others blossomed. There was much publication of these too in the 1840’s, so that Tieck achieved his “banner year” in 1845.26

Furthermore, in the 1830’s, already noted as the decade of change, British writers were imitating the German fairy tales. In 1832, Fraser’s Magazine published “Dorf Juystein,” an imitation of Otmar’s “Peter Claus”; in 1830 Pocket Magazine published “The Man Without a Shadow. Tale from the German,” and in 1839 Blackwood’s and then the Mirror of Literature published James Roscoe’s “My After- Dinner Adventures with Peter Sch1emihl”-stories which imitated and took advantage of the popularity of Chamisso’s novel Peter Schlemihl. Carlyle’s “novel” of the 1830’s, Sartor Resartus, owes a debt to Goethe’s “Mxhrchen,” which Carlyle translated in 1825 and interpreted (as a “phantasmagory”) in 1832.27 And two American

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short story writers who started out in the ’thirties have been seen in the lines of Hoffmann and Tieck, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 28

At this time other English writers began not so much to imi- tate the German literary models as to duplicate, in their way, the accomplishment of the German writers. Dickens owed little if anything to the German Romantics; he himself knew nursery tales from childhood on, and he drew upon those not only for Christmas Books (in which “he had a secret delight in feeling that he was . . . only giving them a higher form”29) such as A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845), but for his novels, too, as Ruskin realized possibly as early as 1841.30 Char- lotte and Emily Bront’e’, who perhaps were more influenced by the Germans, soon followed Dickens’ example, as did even so pronounced a realist as George Eliot in Silas Marner (1861). Unlike the German Romantics, who transformed fairy tales into the Kunstmiirchen, these English Victorians fused them with the “realistic” novel. Like the Germans, they created an adult genre not restricted by the naive style, simple happy endings, country settings, or utter supernaturalism of most fairy tales, but enlarged by the universal motifs and fantastic worlds of the tales. 31

Robert Southey wrote “The Story of the Three Bears,” a chapter “for the nursery” for The doctor, Gc. of 1837. Ruskin wrote The King of the Golden River in 1841 as “a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with a little true Alpine feeling of my and he allowed it to be published anonymously in 1851. Thackeray, who in 1833 had translated Hoffmann’s “The History of Krakatuk,” published The Rose and the Ring in 1854. Charles Kingsley published The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby in 1863. And in 1868 Dickens published his fairy tale for for children, “The Magic F i ~ h b o n e . ” ~ ~ Some of these works became “classics” of the nursery.

Important Victorian writers also joined the ranks of defenders of the fairy tale. In one of the brief essays worked into Vanity Fair (1847-48), Thackeray wrote:

Major English writers also were writing fairy tales for children.


Some time after this interview, it happened that Mr. Cuff, on a sunshiny afternoon, was in the neighborhood of poor William Dobbin, who was lying under a tree in the playground, spelling over a favouritecopy of the Arabian Nights which he had-apart from the rest of the school, who were pursuing their various sports- quite lonely, and almost happy. If people would but leave children to themselves; if teachers would cease to bully them; if parents would not insist upon direct- ing their thoughts, and dominating their feelings- those feelings and thoughts which are a mystery to all (for how much do you and I know of each other, of our children, of our fathers, of our neighbour, and how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or girl whom you govern likely to be, than those of the dull and world-corrupted person who rules him?)-if, I say, parents and masters would leave their children alone a little more,-small harm would accrue, althou h a less quantity of as in presenti might be acquired. 3 f

In 1850 The Prelude was published, making public the ideas of the recently deceased poet laureate. And during the 1850’s, Dickens’ journal Household Words included articles which defended fairy tales more specifically and extensively than Thackeray’s statement had by the poet and essayist R.H. Horne, the educator and literary scholar Henry Morley , and Dickens himself.

Horne opposed stories which contain excessive descriptions of death and violence, calling them immoral, but he defended stories such as those by Andersen, which “indirectly” (“through the heart and the imagination”) instill “the purest moral principles.” Morley said: “The mind has its own natural way of growing, as the body has, and at each stage of growth it asks for its own class of food. We injure minds or bodies by denying either. . . . Fairy tales. . . make the mind active, and indisposed for other work that does not give it enough exercise.” 35


Dickens’ own main article, “Frauds on the Fairies,” was prompted by the publication of Hop-0’-My-Thumb, the first of four fairy tales which George Cruikshank, who had illustrated many others, wrote and illustrated for a “Fairy Library” aimed at promulgating moral beliefs of his such as the need for total abstinence. Dickens wanted “to protest most strongly against alteration-for any purpose- of the beautiful little stories which are so tenderly and humanly useful to us in these times when the world is too much with us, early and In the article, he said of fairy tales: “It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. . . . In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.” He presented a parody didactic version of “Cinderella,” then ended by saying: “The world is too much with us, early and late. Leave this precious old escape from it, alone.” The paraphrase of Wordsworth recurs in Dickens’ comments about fairy tales. For Wordsworth man needed to have contact with nature; for Dickens he needs fairy tales, which are more than mere excape and more than teachers of such virtues as “forbearance,” but are “nurseries of fancy.” And Dickens felt that “a nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun.”37

Dickens presented his belief that fairy tales should not be tampered with, and especially that they should be made available to children, in novels as well as in his journal. In Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-50). Bleak House (1852-53). and especially Hard Times (1854, also in Household Words38), Dickens showed that children deprived of fairy tales are stunted emotionally and morally (Paul Dombey, the Smallweed children, the Gradgrind children), whereas children who have grown up with fairy tales or otherwise become familiar with them are full of life and virtuous (Florence Dombey , David Copperfield, Esther Summerson, Sissy Jupe). Dickens both argued and dramatized his belief in the need for fairy tales in utilitarian England.

of the children’s books after the crisis was past. Nevertheless, unlike As with other matters, Dickens may have entered the battle


the Romantics, he had a considerable immediate effect: he helped insure victory. Fairy tales were being published as he wrote, and he contributed to their success. (Angela Bull points out that “Frauds on the Fairies” “was valued and quoted in introductions to fairy collection^."^^) And while their ideas were being accepted, the Romantics themselves were being cited. In 1853, the Athenaeum’s reviewer of a new translation of Grimm referred to Scott’s 1823 letter to Edgar Taylor, and said: “A considerable per contra to any aspect of triviality is to be found in the superior moral tendency. . . of these tales to that of professedly moral fictions. The former are less selfish and worldly-wise than the latter,-more truly good, and more spontaneous in their goodness.”40 In 1860, the anonymous author of a London Quarterly Review article on “Children’s Litera- ture” quoted Coleridge on the fairy tale, agreed with him, and went on to say: “After all, it is a great point in education to awaken the curiosity, and feed the fancy, because we thus give a child a sense of the greatness of the universe in which he has come to live.” Later, echoing Dickens’ image in Hard Times of the children in M’Choakumchild’s school being vessels waiting to be filled with facts, and akticipating “progressive” modern educators, he said:

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On the whole, we may conclude that the great purpose of children’s books is not so much t o impart instruction, as to promote growth. We must not think of a child’s mind as of a vessel. which it is for us to fill, but as a wonderfully organized instrument, which it is for us to develop and to set in motion. He will be well or ill educated, not according to the accuracy with which he retains the notions which have been impressed upon him from without, but according to the power which he puts forth from within, and to the activity and regularity with which the several feelers or tentacula of his nature lay hold on all that is to be seen and thought and known around him.

The writer suggests that the following question should be asked of good children’s literature: “Above all, does it make the eye glisten and the cheek glow, and the limbs of the little one move with delight?’’ of fairy tales he answers yes. 41


A mid-Victorian culmination in the acceptance of the fairy tale occurred in 1868, when the Edgar Taylor translation of Grimm was reprinted in one volume, complete with the Cruikshank illus- trations, and with a new introduction by no lesser a figure than John Ruskin. Ruskin, asserting that fairy tales are the best kind of literature for children, described the well-raised, well-educated child and said:

Children so trained have no need of moral fairy tales; but they will find in the apparently vain and fit- ful courses of any tradition of old time, honestly de- livered to them, a teaching for which no other can be substituted, and of which the power cannot be measured; animating for them the material world with inextinguish- able 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 t o remain such to all human thought-of the fates that happen alike t o the evil and the

Fairy tales have several characteristics which suggest why acceptance of them was appropriate for the Victorian period. Their rather domestic nature (even the Grimms put them in the nursery and the home), their apparently innocent tone (and portrayal of love and marriage without sex), their sympathetic renderings of children (who began to be recognized as victims of industrial society during the 'thirties and became central characters in novels by Dickens and then others43), the material success, upward social mobility, and reunification of families which mark their optimistic happy endings- all, we should think, could have led the Victorian pater-familias to allow them into the nursery and perhaps to enjoy them himself. And acceptance also involved other characteristics of fairy tales and of Victorianism.

The cause for which the Romantics spoke came t o have greater urgency as the conditions which provoked them to defend the fairy tale intensified during the Victorian period. The educational


theories of the Enlightenment were succeeded by those of its even less imaginative descendant, Utilitarianism; and the age of the city, industrialism, and science came fully into being. These conditions of England were objected to by Carlyle and by such followers and admirers of his as Ruskin, Dickens, and Kingsley. In discussing the fairy tale these men followed the Romantics by stressing its imaginative value in the new world. But they also reverted a bit to the position of the enemy: the educational values they pointed to in the tales, while not usually as simply and exclusively instructional as those the Enlightenment advocated, are more conventionally moral than those which had been defended by Wordsworth and Coleridge. With their statements in defense of the fairy tale (made more publicly than those of the Romantics had been), the Victorian men of letters probably contributed to its acceptance; and in those statements and elsewhere they reveal the imaginative-didactic synthesis which charac- terizes the Victorian acceptance of the fairy tale.

for the powers of the imagination and helped bring the Kunstmiirchen to England, and he was intensely moralistic. In their essays, both Ruskin and Dickens called for the reading of authentic, fanciful fairy tales; but they also pointed to the moral values of such tales, and they used their own imaginative fairy tales to teach moral lessons. In The King of the Golden River, Ruskin showed how sympathy for a dog is rewarded, and how an “inheritance, which had been lost by cruelty, was regained by Fishbone” learn and say to her father: “When we have done our very best, Papa, and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others.”45 Kingsley’s fanciful Water Babies, in which there is playful defense of the existnece of fairies, and support of the fairy tale itself, is even more pointedly moral than those stories. To “little books” about “little people” the hero prefers “a jolly good fairy tale, about Jack the Giant-killer or Beauty and the Beast, which taught him something that he didn’t know already” (ch. VIII). From his experiences this hero learns about kindness, cleanliness, and self-sacrifice, among other things-and a “Moral”

147

Carlyle represents the two aspects of the position: he spoke

Dickens had the heroine of “The Magic

148 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE ~~ ~ ~

46 follows the “parable” to drive some of the lessons home for readers. Even Thackeray, who could not write his fairy tale without making it in part a mock-fairy tale and who objected to the simple morality of virtue rewarded, embued The Rose and the Ring with delightful fantasy and with the moral that “misfortune” is a useful and perhaps necessary condition for the molding of character.

and didactic impulses, which Walter E. Houghton calls the “moral attitude” of “ e n t h u ~ i a s m , ” ~ ~ connects with the Victorian acceptance of fairy tales as well as with the defense and writing of them. The enjoyment derived from works like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass could also be derived from fairy tales, and so, it was believed, could morality. The typical fairy-tale defeat of evil by good with subsequent rewarding of virtuous heroes supports this view, and the fact that folk fairy tales sometimes are not moral usually was ignored by their defenders.

stressed, and adults reacted to them as they did to the extremely popular romantic escapist literature of the period. The author of an 1855 article on “German Story Books” says that he pleads “guilty to a very childlike love of storybooks. . . . Although the days of our childhood are over and gone, we are by no means insensible to the charms of Cinderella.” He summarizes the uses the fairy tale was put to by such Germans as the Grimms, Mus’%~s, and Tieck, then says: “The Volksmzhrchen form the wonder-land, ever bright, and beautiful, and grand, into which the popular mind escapes from the dull and dusty paths of a toil-worn existence.”48 He is speculating on the function of fairy tales for German peasants, but he also indicates their attraction to Victorian Englishmen. The youthful Tennyson responded to the attraction in his poem “The Sleeping Beauty” (1830). However, to a later enlargement, published in 1842 as “The Day Dream,” he added material so that the poem would not merely be an enchanting diversion but a love poem, “earnest wed with sport.” Though the attempt to justify this romance seems half-hearted, it

On the other hand, if someone such as Cruikshank went too far in

In general, the common Victorian merging of imaginative

Occasionally the imaginative qualities of fairy tales were

still demonstrates Tennyson’s sensitivity to the spirit of the age. 49


the direction of morality, simply exploiting the imaginative surface of fairy tales and using them as propaganda for extremist morality, then he was vulnerable to sharp attack from someone else, such as Dickens. Some Victorians may have turned to fairy tales for escape, and some may have valued them for their didactic potential; but most who wrote or defended them, and can be taken as representa- tive of their supporters, truly conceived of them as “earnest wed with sport,” and celebrated the marriage of imaginative play and morality.

NOTES

‘“Introduction,” Folktales of England, ed. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue (Chicago and London, 1965), pp. xxiii-xxvi. And see her “English Fairy Tales,” Internationaler Kongress der Volkserzzhlungs- forscher in Kiel and Kopenhagen, ed. Kurt Ranke (Berlin, 1961), pp. 38-43.

’“Notes,” Crimm’s Household Tales, trans. ar,d ed. Margaret Hunt (London, 1884), 11, 501.

3Foreword, Folktales of England, p. vi.

4English Fairy and Other Folktales (London, [?1890 or 19061).

’See “Notes on Sales,” Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1930,324.

60n the bibliography of Mother Goose, see Percy Muir, English Children’s Books, 1600-1900 (London, 1954), pp. 45-52; and F.J.H. Darton, Children’s Books in England (Cambridge, 1958), p. 105.

’Quoted by Cornelia Meigs, Part One, A Critical History of Children’s Literature, ed. Meigs (New York, 1553), pp. 78-79.

‘Quoted in Darton, pp. 96-97.


9Chapbook versions of fairy tales were remembered in 1847 by a reviewer in the British Quarterly Review. Talking about the tales, he recalled “the days of their former popularity, when their fascina- tions were usually comprised within some half dozen gre yish-white pages, displaying a curious combination of large and small type-the proportion varying according as a story of greater or lesser length had to be compressed within the same inexorable limits; and adorned with woodcuts, which, as some scribes would say, ‘may be imagined better than described.”’ “German Tales,” British Quarterly Review, VI (1847), 189.

of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882); Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957); and John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1927), pp. 15-16,459-461. Lowes said: “A book of surpassing interest could (and should) be written on the neglected influence of these enormously popular books of the folk” (p. 461).

On the English chapbook, see John Ashton, Chap-books

‘OThe Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas (London, 1935), I , 326.

‘lLetters of Samuel Taylor CoZeridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1895), I , 16. And see 11-12, letter t o Poole of October 9, 1797, and n. on lecture of 1811; and Coleridge, The Friend (London, 1818), I , 252.

12The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1926), p. 160, pp. 150-154 (test of 1805-06).

13Quarterly Review, XXI (1819), 91-92.

14New Monthly Magazine, I1 (1821), 146-147

15‘‘Preface to the Original Edition,” German Popular Stories (London, 1869), p. xvi.


16The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H.J.C. Grierson (Lon- don, 1934), VII, 312.

17Gentleman’s Magazine, XCII, 2 (1822), 620-622; “Grimm’s German Popular Stories,” London Magazine, VII (1823), 91.

18Thomas Seccombe in DNB Supplement S.V. “Eastlake, Elizabeth.”

19c6Books for Children,” Quarterly Review, LXXI (1842), 55; “Children’s Books,” Quarterly Review, LXXIV (1844), 1-26.

2oIt should be noted that the war never ended, and the fairy tale continued to be objected to. But the balance of power shifted to the side of the pro-fairy tale forces at this time at least enough so that fairy tales as well as directly moral and didactic stories were readily available.

21bLGerman Tales,” British Quarterly Review. On the translations see Bayard Quincy Morgan, A Critical Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation, 1481-1 927 (Stanford, 1938), pp. 180-1 81.

22“Note to Reader” (Westminster, 1845), no p. Using the same pseudonym, Thorns coined the term “Folklore” in the Anthenaeum, 982 (1846), 862-863. In 1849 he foundedNotes and Queries.

23r‘Preface’’ (London, 1849), no p.

24Darton, p. 247.

25See Marianne Thalmann, The Romantic Fairy Tale: Seeds of Surrealism, trans. Mary B. Corcoran (Ann Arbor, 1964).

26Edwin H. Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck and England: A study in the Literary Relations of Germany and England During the Early Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1931), p. 71. Also see Morgan and,


for the years she covers, Violet A. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England 1750-1830 (London, 1929). In working on this and especially the following material, I also made use of an unpub- lished MS. by Eberhard Alsen, “The ‘German Tale’ in the British Magazines, 17 90-1 840.”

27Note to “The Tale by Goethe,” Fraer’s Magazine, VI (1832), 258. G.B. Tennyson connects Sartor Resartus with the Ger- man Mtirchen in his book Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Struc- ture, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work (Princeton, 1965), esp. pp. 189-193. I think Tennyson fails to distinguish suf- ficiently between Goethe’s “Mihrchen” (especially as read by Car- lyle) and the Mzrchen as written by others, so is a bit misleading.

28See Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Tales ofEdgar Allan Poe (Chapel Hill, 1908); and Eberhard Alsen, “Hawthorne: A Puritan Tieck,” unpubl. diss. (Indiana, 1967). Alsen finds similarity rather that influence.

Washington Irving had followed the Germans even more obviously. In “Rip Van Winkle” (1820) he imitated Otmar’s “Peter Claw,” and in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) he imitated a Mus’~us story. See Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1 900 (Madison, 1961), pp. 367-373.

29John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley (London, 1928), p. 317.

30See n. 32 below.

31The Victorians were anticipated by Scott, but he made less use of the fairy tale’s narrative aspects, and was less successful than they in mergng the unreal and the real in fiction.

In general, I would say that the fairy tale is at least as sig- nificant a source of the mythic and fantastic for Victorian novels as any other, including the Gothic novel-but this is not the place to


try to illustrate that, beyond mentioning that many critics have noticed the fairy-tale qualities of several Victorian novels.

as Tennyson (see n. 49) and Christina Rossetti (e.g., “Goblin Market”- 1862, “The Prince’s Progress”-1866).

Fairy tales were also used by some Victorian poets, such

32Praeterita, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1903), XXXV, 304.

33Part I1 of Holiday Romance, published in All the Year Round, February 8, 1868, 204-208; it appeared earlier that year in the American magazine Our Young Folks.

34Ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston, 1963), p. 47.

35Horne, “A Witch in the Nursery,” September 20, 1851, 608; Morley, “The School of the Fairies,” June 30, 1855, 510.

36Letter to Wills, July 27, 1853, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (Bloomsbury, 1938), 11, 479.

37“Frauds on the Fairies,” October 1 , 1853, 97-100.

38Where it was preceded by two months by an article in which G.A. Sala said that it is appropriate for children t o believe in the “existence of ogres, fairies, giants, and dwarfs,” and that if these beliefs are replaced by facts, the “child-minds” are “maimed.” “Little Children,” November 26, 1853, 290-291.

39Gillian Avery, with the assistance of Angela Bull, Nineteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children’s Stories, 1780-1900 (London, 1965), p. 43.

40Athenaeum, 1323 (1853), 284.

41London Quarterly Review, XI11 (1860), 482,486-487.


42“Introduction,” German Popular Stories, p. ix.

43See Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford, 1962), p. 50; and Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Baltimore, 1967)-which covers some of the same ground as I do but with a different purpose-, esp. pp. 91-93.

44 Works, I , 347 I

45Holiday Romance, 207.

46The Water Babies (London, 1882).

47The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1 8 70 (New Haven, 1947).

48“Gerrnan Story Books,” Chamber’s Journal, XXIV (1855), 316-319.

49Edward FitzGerald says of “The Day-Dream”: “The Pro- logue and Epilogue were added after 1835 (when the poem was written), for the same reason that caused the Prologue of the Morte d’Arthur, giving an excuse for telling an old-world tale.” The Works of Tennyson, ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson (London, 1913), p. 918. The poem is on pp. 104-108.

Documents

The Fairy Tale in England, 1800–1870