The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library) Read Free

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 hischildhood! 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
,