A Feast of Fairy Tales

Something there is that does not love an anthology. Any collection reflects the editor's interests, conforms to publisher's economic constraints, and results in a compromise with which readers can always quibble. Nevertheless, each of these anthologies achieves what must surely be the goal of any good anthology: to direct the reader back to the original texts from which the selections have been made. In each case, the editor's judicious selections will whet the reader's appetite for books that probably have not left library shelves for fifty years or more.

The nineteenth century experienced an explosion of interest in folk and fairy tales. Through the publication and subsequent translations into English of the work of Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, fairy tales and their literary offspring, the kunstmärchen, became arguably the most important form of children's literature. These three anthologies of Victorian kunstmärchen should deservedly be added to the bookshelf alongside Jonathan Cott's pioneering Beyond the Looking Glass (1973) and U. C. Knoepflmacher's A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and Other Victorian Fairy Tales (1983) as excellent sources for interested readers and scholars who wish to sample the rich array of this popular form.

Each of the editors approaches the genre in a somewhat different fashion. Since Hearn and Zipes both limit their selections to English authors, there is a healthy overlap of writers and specific tales: John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, Charles Dickens's "The Magic Fishbone," and Kenneth Grahame's "The Reluctant Dragon" appear in both collections, along with different tales by Mary De Morgan, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, Laurence Housman, and Edith Nesbit. Since West's collection focuses solely on American authors, his selections make a fascinating companion volume to the other two. Before Oz provides a sense of the cross-fertilization that took place between English and American children's authors.

Hearn's collection begins with The King of the Golden River (written in 1841 but not published until 1851), which he argues was the first important Victorian fairy tale. Because of the significance of the tale in the development of the genre, it is ubiquitous with anthologizers, appearing in both Zipes's and Hearn's collections as well as in those edited by Cott and Knoepflmacher. But given the availability of the Dover edition with the full set of Richard Doyle's illustrations, its constant anthologizing seems redundant. The real value of these recent collections is their recovery of overlooked or more-difficult-to-obtain tales. Both editors have uncovered some underappreciated authors and interesting, if obscure, tales, such as Henry Morley's "Melilot" in Hearn, and Evelyn Sharp's "The Spell of the Magician's Daughter" in Zipes. Sharp's school story, The Making of a Schoolgirl (1897), has been recently reissued, and after reading her tale in Zipes, one wishes that the same could be done for her four collections of fairy tales. Hearn quotes the artist Charles Bennet, best known for his archetypally Victorian version of The Fables of Aesop (1857), who praises Morley's fairy tales as "fuller of notions, conceits, and good honest daring absurdity than anything modern I know." That Bennet was Morley's illustrator is simply another reason in favor of reprinting one of his own two fairy-tale collections.

While all three editors provide succinct introductory essays that discuss the development of the kunstmärchen, the real purpose of these volumes is to reprint primary texts. The scholarship in each of these volumes is intentionally brief, but it is certainly solid and directs the interested reader to additional primary and secondary material. Of the three, Zipes's bibliography is the most extensive and serves as a fine source of information for any reader wishing to familiarize himself with the...