Fairy tales weave a complicated dance between children’s stories and sophisticated adult commentary, often within the same story. Pinning down a definition of what constitutes a fairy tale can sometimes feel like nailing water to a tree, but certain elements are constant: there will always be magic, and magical creatures (although, as editor Michael Newton points out in the Introduction to Victorian Fairy Tales, “Often fairy tales include no actual fairy.”); there will be a problem that requires magical intervention of some sort. Outside of that, the field is wide open.
The Victorian Age is frequently painted as repressed and rigid, even to the point of covering their piano legs (not true); so for me, it was impossible to pass up a collection of fairy tales that promised to dispel that grim facade. I’m glad I raised my hand for this book. It’s an excellent example of the dance mentioned above, if a bit confusing in spots I’ll cover that towards the end. First, the good stuff (quite a lot!):
The aforementioned Introduction is thorough and thoughtful, moving from a context-setting discussion of fairy tales into a more specific discussion of “Sources, Inspirations, Origins, then to “Fairyland and the Real World.” It’s a long Introduction, and fascinating all on its own, but as with most Introductions I recommend reading it after consuming the rest of the book. Scholarly discussions, for me, tend to dry out the following entertainment — and I find it endlessly frustrating to be teased with references to the stories I’m about to read!
I have the same comment about “Note on the Texts,” “Select Bibliography,” and “A Chronology of the Literary Fairy Tale.” All very good, all very interesting — I loved the Chronology, especially, because I’m a geek about seeing facts laid out into this sort of context. Did you know that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was published the same year the first Women’s Suffrage Committee was founded? I didn’t. And A Christmas Carol came out the year after the Coal Mines Act, which stopped young children and women from working in the coal mines. And . . . well, read it for yourself.
Moving on to the stories themselves, the Prologue features “Rumpel-stilts-kin” by the Grimm Brothers and “The Princess and the Peas” by Andersen. These are short and potent, with a pointed jab or two at the rich and powerful; the irony is particularly strong in the latter story, to my way of thinking. I found myself mentally swapping “princess” with “lady/virgin,” which heightened the dryly sardonic tone of the tale considerably without taking away from the point already being made.
The following stories, beginning with Robert Southley’s “The Story of the Three Bears” and ending with Kipling’s “Dymchurch Flit”, range from similarly ironic to flat-out fun reading. Southley’s tale — one of the fun ones — has a very different protagonist than the young girl we’re used to seeing in modern versions: “She could not have been a good, honest old Woman . . . If she had been a good little old Woman, she would have waited till the Bears came home . . . But she was an impudent, bad old Woman, and set about helping herself.” I particularly enjoyed the typography in this story, with differing fonts showing the differing Bear voices. This story was intended to be read aloud to a child, with acted out emphasis, and reads as such.
Several of the stories in this collection were new to me, and completely delightful. There is a typical three-brother quest story by John Ruskin; there are deeper, slower, more philosophical stories by George MacDonald and Mary deMorgan–especially notable, to me, in that they deal with increased age as a strength rather than a weakness; there are amusing, ironic tales from Ford Maddox Ford, Andrew Lang, and Kenneth Grahame. The collection closes with a wonderful Rapunzel/Gulliver’s Travels mashup by E. Nesbit and a slightly difficult-to-read Kipling story laden with dialect — which bring me to my only real criticism of this book.
The footnote format was particularly irritating to me; not only must you turn to the back of the book to find the “Explanatory Notes,” they’re called out inline with asterisks rather than numbers, then sorted in the Notes only by page numbers. I dislike having to stop mid sentence to turn pages, and I especially dislike having to search for the note in question. In most cases, it was easy enough to pass over the asterisks, but in some cases, such as the Kipling story, I spent as much time looking up words and context as I did reading the tale itself. That being said, the “Explanatory Notes” were very well done, clear and concise, and for a word geek like me who grew up reading the dictionary for fun, entirely readable just by itself.
I do wish, as a matter of personal preference, that the “Select Bibliography” had been moved to the back of the book. It also would have been nice to have a bio of the editor, along with information on his other projects, the web site for Oxford University Press, and so on; the omission of clearly presented Internet-related resources in this day and age gives this book a very old-fashioned feel.
Considered only as a book of fairy tales, however, this collection is superb. Many of the stories are overtly political satire, and all are (thanks to the thorough front matter) as much a window into the time when they were written as simple entertainment. Whether you as a reader are interested in the historical analysis or more inclined towards a good book to relax with on a lazy afternoon, Victorian Fairy Tales is an excellent choice.
(Oxford University Press, 2015)
[Editor’s note: Dr. Newton is a member of the faculty at Leiden University, and the author of Age of Assassins: A History of Assassination in Europe and America, 1865-1981 (Faber and Faber, 2012) and edited The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (Penguin 2012).]
