National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

The enduring attraction of folklore and fairy tales can be attributed, at least in part, to their ultimate readability, both as texts to be enjoyed and as texts to be interpreted and reinterpreted. Folk and fairy tales have been variously read as subversive, as conservative; as historical artifacts, as timeless fantasies; as windows into the psyche, and as mirrors of material social struggle. We never tire, it would seem, of hearing, rewriting, and reinventing the fairy tale, perhaps because we recognize that the ways we read them tell us something significant about who “we” are or about who we believe ourselves to be.

In National Dreams, Jennifer Schacker argues that how we in the Western world encounter fairy tales today, particularly those of other nations and peoples, has much to do with how folk and fairy tales were collected and produced in nineteenth-century England. While it is widely recognized that the publication of texts such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen was influenced by German Romanticism and the search for a truly “national” German culture, it has been an assumption, Schacker points out, “that ‘the English have never used folklore to assert their patriotic identity’” (3). Or at least, Schacker suggests, not “in the way many of their European neighbours did” (3). Instead, Schacker convincingly argues that while the English may not have produced collections of English folk tales meant to define and shore up national identity, collectors and translators such as Edgar Taylor, T. Crofton Croker, Edward Lane, and George Webbe Dasent published collections of folk tales from other nationalities—and in so doing, “developed their own very powerful and enduring ‘tales,’ as they narrativized the social, cultural, and economic transformations that seemed to separate modern England from the ‘peasant’ cultures of other nations” (5). In their production of English versions of German, Irish, Arabic, and Scandinavian folklore, respectively, these collectors and translators allowed for a kind of transnational reading encounter, where “Against a background of orality, superstition, and rustic simplicity emerges a portrait of modern, literate, cosmopolitan Englishness” (12).

Schacker’s analysis of these texts is multivalent, as she focuses on “the translation of narrative traditions across semiotic, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries” (9). While she theoretically engages with issues such as translation, ethnicity, nationalism, gender, and class, she primarily pays close attention to the publication history of the tale collections themselves, focusing on their authors, on the editorial decisions made by these authors on behalf of their projected audience, and on the relationship between the texts and, where relevant, their accompanying illustrations. Thus, in her analysis of T. Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland (1825), she links the ambiguity of Croker’s narration in the tales—in which it is impossible to distinguish if the first-person narration refers to Croker himself, to an imagined collector of tales, to a native informant, or to a participant in a storytelling event—to a complex overarching argument about the work performed by Croker’s text in terms of shaping English bourgeois subjectivity. The ambiguity of Croker’s narration, Schacker argues, allows Croker to reflect upon “the art of storytelling and the complexity of ‘belief’” (56). Croker’s comments in his conclusion to the collection that “When rational education shall be diffused among the misguided peasantry of Ireland, the belief in such supernatural beings must disappear in that country, as it has done in England” (quoted in Schacker 57) reveal the importance of collections such as these as educational tools and the ways in which such texts placed the English reader—importantly, often children and people of the lower- and working-classes—“squarely in a position of critical authority and cultural superiority” (Schacker 48). Although Schacker argues, citing Croker’s own Anglo-Irish heritage and the “profound ambivalence” revealed in his work to the object of his study (68), that Croker’s position in regards to Irish culture might have been more complex than...