Copyright © 1988 by Michael Patrick Hearn
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in 1988 and in softcover in 1990 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Victorian fairy tale book.
Summary: A collection of classic Victorian fairy tales by such authors as John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde.
1. Fairy Tales—Great Britain. 2. English fiction—19th century.
[1. Fairy tales. 2. Short stories]. I. Hearn, Michael Patrick.
PR1309.F26V48 1988 823’.8’08[Fic] 87-36039
eISBN: 978-0-307-81415-9
www.pantheonbooks.com
v3.1
PICTURE CREDITS
I am indebted to the following for helping me obtain examples of the original illustrations for these works:
Cynthia Hearn Dorfman, for “Goblin Market”; Barry Klugerman, for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens; The Library of Congress, for The King of the Golden River, “The Fairies,” “The Golden Key,” The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling-Cloak, “The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Deliverers of Their Country”; and The New York Public Library, for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” The Rose and the Ring, “Melilot,” and “Rocking-Horse Land.”
For Laura Jane Musser
M. P. H.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the following people who have helped, in one way or another, towards the completion of The Victorian Fairy Tale Book: Cynthia Hearn Dorfman, Michael Emyrs, Rodney K. Engen, Brigitte Heinrich, Daniel Hirsh, Barry Klugerman, C. A. McDonald, Bernard McTigue, Glenn Edward Sadler, Justin G. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Jane Yolen, and Jack Zipes. And of course Wendy, Mitch, and Helena.
M. P. H.
A lake and a fairy boat
To sail in the moonlight clear,—
And merrily we would float
From the dragons that watch us here!
Thy gown shall be snow-white silk,
And strings of orient pearls,
Like gossamers dipp’d in milk,
Should twine with thy raven curls!
Red rubies should deck thy hands,
And diamonds should be thy dow’r—
But Fairies have broken their wands,
And wishing has lost its pow’r!
THOMAS HOOD
“Song: For Music”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Picture Credits
Dedication
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER
by John Ruskin · illustrated by Richard Doyle
THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN
by Robert Browning · illustrated by George Cruikshank
THE ROSE AND THE RING
by William Makepeace Thackeray · illustrated by the author
THE MAGIC FISH-BONE
by Charles Dickens · illustrated by John Gilbert
MELILOT
by Henry Morley · illustrated by Charles H. Bennett
THE FAIRIES
by William Allingham · illustrated by Arthur Hughes
THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE AND HIS TRAVELLING-CLOAK
by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik · illustrated by John McL. Ralston
GOBLIN MARKET
by Christina Rossetti · illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
THE NECKLACE OF PRINCESS FIORIMONDE
by Mary De Morgan · illustrated by Walter Crane
THE GOLDEN KEY
by George MacDonald · illustrated by Arthur Hughes
THE STOLEN CHILD
by William Butler Yeats
THE SELFISH GIANT
by Oscar Wilde · illustrated by Walter Crane
THE BROWN OWL
by Ford Madox Ford · illustrated by Ford Madox Brown
ROCKING-HORSE LAND
by Laurence Housman · illustrated by the author
THE RELUCTANT DRAGON
by Kenneth Grahame · illustrated by Maxfield Parrish
THE DELIVERERS OF THEIR COUNTRY
by E. Nesbit · illustrated by H. R. Millar
From PETER PAN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS
by J. M. Barrie · illustrated by Arthur Rackham
ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND ILLUSTRATORS
About the Editor
Introduction
ONCE UPON A TIME—but not so long ago—the fairies were not welcome in the British nursery. The battle over Elfland raged for centuries. With the coming of Christianity to the British Isles towards the end of the Roman Era, the Celtic faërie kings and queens went underground as ancient local traditions were absorbed or transformed by the country’s new religion. Those who in the old legends were merely amoral were now, in the eyes of the early church fathers, evil.
Yet a wealth of fairy lore still survived in French and English medieval romances and ballads. King Arthur and his chivalric knights consorted with fays, Sir Gawain battled with the Green Knight, Thomas the Rhymer was spirited off by the Queen of Elfland, and fair maidens were deflowered by Young Tam Lin, the Elfin Knight. Even so, by the Elizabethan age, the very existence of fairies was widely disputed. In 1584, Reginald Scot argued in his Discoverie of Witchcraft that only “sicke folke, children, women and cowards” still believed such superstitious nonsense. The preaching of the Gospel had, he said, largely driven out most of the old legends. But ancient beliefs were not so quickly uprooted. King James VI of Scotland was so outraged by Scot’s treatise that he wrote his own repudiation, Daemonologie, declaring the reality of fairies and brownies; and on ascending the throne of Great Britain as King James I, he ordered The Discoverie of Witchcraft publicly burned.
The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a renaissance of fairy literature in England. The works of Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Robert Herrick, John Lyly, and, of course, William Shakespeare eagerly explored the wonders of fairyland. However, with the exception of Spenser, whose Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) was lovingly modeled on the old romances, these poets did not take elfin tradition seriously. Thus the powerful Queen Maeve of Irish legend became Mab, the fairies’ midwife, in Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps the clearest expression of the Elizabethan decadent attitude to fairyland is Drayton’s Nimphidia (1627), his parody of courtly romance, in which the diminutive fairy knight Pigwiggen
quickly Armes him for the Field,
A little Cockle-shell for his Shield,
Which he could bravely wield:
Yet it could not be pierced:
His Speare a Bent both stiffe and strong,
And well-neere of two Inches long;
The Pyle was of a Horse-flyes tongue,
Whose sharpnesse naught reversed.
The old fairy lore, if remembered at all, was now considered fit only for children and peasants and circulated as old wives’ tales and in chapbooks, the cheap pamphlets hawked about the provinces by itinerant dealers, offering the histories of Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer.
The Puritans had no patience with such petty amusements. In their pursuit of a temporal state based upon the Word of God, they denounced all forms of popular literature as pernicious trash. Hugh Rhodes warned parents in The Book of Nurture (1554) to keep their
boys and girls “from reading feigned fables, vain fantasies, and wanton stories, and songs of love, which bring much mischief to youth.” In A Candle in the Dark (1656), Thomas Ady told parents to beware of old wives “who sit talking, and chatting of many fake old stories of Witches, and Fairies, and Robin Good-Fellow … all which lying fancies people are more naturally to listen after than the Scriptures.”
Religious zealots all but exiled the fairies from Britain’s shores. With the Revolution of 1688, after which even the celebrating of Christmas was outlawed, “Farewell, rewards and fairies!” resounded throughout the land. Yet even Puritan literature was not wholly free of the fairies’ spell: no matter what its pious intent, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), with all its fearsome giants and marvelous monsters, was no more than an allegorical fairy tale.
Meanwhile, the fairies found refuge in France, at the court of Louis XIV. Bored with the popular novels of the day, the lords and ladies who attended Mme. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s salon coddled one another with fairy tales. So fashionable did these diversions become that Le Cabinet des fees (1785–1789), the authoritative collection of these stories, reached forty-one volumes by the fall of the Ancien Régime. Designed to entertain their upper-class audience, they tended to be overwrought extravaganzas, and consequently most have long been forgotten. The best, composed by a minor member of the French Academy named Charles Perrault, still endure. His classic retellings of “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” “Bluebeard,” and “Puss in Boots” appeared in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, which was first published in English in 1729 and became popularly known as “Tales of Mother Goose.” Although variants of these stories were known prior to Perrault, so charming were his versions that they immediately entered the world’s folklore. While retaining the simplicity and directness of the oral originals, Perrault transformed them according to the high standards he set for a literature designed specifically for children. Dedicating the small volume to a niece of Louis XIV, Perrault removed all the licentiousness that he felt had marred earlier versions and might corrupt the virtue of princesses. In the manner of La Fontaine’s fables, he appended little morals in verse to each selection, but happily his well-meant lessons do not intrude on the graceful storytelling.
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.
The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library) Page 1
