In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England
  • Jennifer L. Holberg (bio)
Jennifer Schacker . National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

As the landscape of nineteenth-century England grew ever more industrialized, so in many ways did its creative landscape, particularly in the sense that the imaginative power that was thought to have accompanied England's rural past had long disappeared. Thus, Charlotte Brontë writing at midcentury could have Jane Eyre observe:

"The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. "And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don't think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more."

(104)

The "men in green" may indeed have deserted England and its literature, and yet, as Jennifer Schacker very ably illustrates, English readers remained firmly under the cultural sway of foreign popular tale collections, as rendered by English translators and compilers. These tale collections, like the successful Grimms'Märchen to which all of Schacker's [End Page 270] examples respond in some way, were not only popular with a wide reading audience, but they also provided "a space in which to encounter and then reflect upon national identities and differences" (2). These narrative collections, she argues, bear examination for two reasons: first, because "most often, popular tales were cast as sources of insight to the national character of their respective places of origin, drawing on the rhetoric and ideology of Romantic nationalism, social evolutionism, and comparative philology. These 'national dreams' . . . were regarded as offering insight to foreign minds, hearts, and history" (11). But secondly, and more importantly for Schacker, though these tales were offered as a way for nineteenth-century readers to gain understanding of foreign cultures, they also help deepen our own understanding of nineteenth-century Englishness itself.

Schacker's scholarship is rigorous and wide-ranging, and she is clearly conversant and comfortable with a number of academic fields, including folklore, Victorian studies, publishing history, and children's literature. Her study focuses on four popular foreign tale collections that she takes as representative: Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories (1823), T. Croften Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), Edward Lane's Arabian Nights (1839–41), and George Webbe Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse (1857). Devoting a chapter to each work, she presents a carefully nuanced picture of the context and aims of each book as well as the background and goals of its author. And Schacker is as admirably attentive to both textual and publishing details as she is to cultural history. Thus, for example, she provides equally fascinating accounts of Taylor's stylistic work as the first English presenter of the Grimms as she does of Lane's ideological commitment to placing the Arabian Nights in a specifically Egyptian national context. At the same time, her study is theoretically sophisticated; one especially notable instance comes in her treatment of Croker. In her subtle analysis of Croker's Irish tales, she examines not only the methodology for which he has traditionally been remembered, but also how he seems to utilize, but ultimately subvert, a colonialist stance. In each case, Schacker has chosen provocative works, ones that allow her to deliver on her primary aim of describing the "national dreams" of nineteenth-century England. Indeed, her summary of the underlying issues addressed by these texts demonstrates how these popular tales firmly inform many of the most vexed of Victorian debates:

Whether seen primarily as a window to preindustrial society, and thus to England's past, as in German Popular Stories; to the worldview of England's neighbors, and thus to current Irish-English relations, as in [End Page 271] Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland; to the manners, customs, and imaginations of Egyptians, and thus to the contrast of East and West, as in the Arabian Nights; or to national particularities within an Indo-European heritage of language and literature, as in Popular Tales from...

pdf

Share