The Wiseacres shall like it as well as the children

As the 1989 publication of Mark West’s Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America would indicate, scholars of American children’s literature are currently engaged in the task of identifying American fantasy prior to L. Frank Baum’s landmark The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). However, West’s anthology contains only an excerpt from Christopher Pearse Cranch’s The Last of the Huggermuggers (1856). Happily, in Three Children’s Novels by Christopher Pearse Cranch, editors Greta D. Little and Joel Myerson have reproduced its complete text, as well as Kobboltozo: A Sequel to the Last of the Huggermuggers (1857), and a previously unpublished fantasy, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus; or, The Enchanted Clothes. These three stories affirm the very American quality of Cranch’s work and demonstrate his striking improvement as a writer of children’s fantasy. Though noteworthy for their humorous depictions of Americans and American culture, Cranch’s first two stories clearly derive from such classic sources as the early English “Jack tales,” Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. In contrast, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus is surprisingly original, well-written, and entertaining. Of all Cranch’s stories, it most clearly demonstrates his flair for literary caricature.

Cranch is, as the editors note, most well known today for his humorous sketches based on the works of the Transcendentalists (especially the cartoon of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” passage in Nature). Though educated to be a Unitarian minister, Cranch was never ordained. Instead, he dabbled in a number of areas: in the later 1830s, he served on the staff of the Western Messenger, a journal dedicated to promoting Transcendentalism in Ohio, Kentucky, and other “western” states; in the early 1840s, he contributed several poems to the Transcendentalists’ magazine The Dial; after his marriage to Elizabeth de Windt in 1843 he associated with the painters in the Hudson River School; in the 1850s he served as a correspondent from abroad for the New York Evening Post. But his aptitude for humor—evident as early as 1835, when he completed a parody of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” titled “Childe Christopher”—is the greatest asset of his juvenile fantasy stories. His droll commentary on American character considerably enlivens his prose.

Cranch composed and illustrated The Last of the Huggermuggers in the winter of 1854–55. After testing it on his children, he sent it to George William Curtis, whom he met in Europe. Curtis, author of the “Editor’s Easy Chair” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine from 1854–1892, found a publisher for Cranch’s fantasy at Phillips, Sampson. The book appeared in late December 1856, too close to Christmas to capitalize on its success. According to Little and Myerson, by April 1856, Cranch was at work on the sequel; he felt that Kobboltozo was “much better in subject, style, and in the designs” (xviii). It was published on 10 December, 1857, to brief but favorable reviews. Though Phillips, Sampson went out of business in 1859, both The Last of the Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo were reprinted throughout the nineteenth century.

Cranch alluded to his third work, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus, in a letter to a friend in March 1857, describing it as “a tale with an amusing shell and spiritual kernel with the motto ‘For the young a story, for the old an allegory’” (qtd. in Little and Myerson xx). However, Phillips, Sampson were retrenching, and the story was not published. Though Curtis claimed to have recovered the manuscripts and blocks at that time, they later disappeared. Cranch retained a rough copy of the story, but after 1870 there are no references to it in his papers. Little and Myerson note that a manuscript of Dr. Theophilus surfaced at a book sale in the 1980s. Whether it was the missing, finished copy or the rough version is unclear, but the editors have assembled a “conservatively emended edition” (xxxviii) for...