English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales (review)

For the generations who grew up reading Joseph Jacobs's collections of fairy tales—side by side with the rainbow books of his arch-rival, Andrew Lang—it is a special pleasure to re-explore the English stories in this elegant edition replete with the original illustrations by J. D. Batten and an informative introduction by Donald Haase. For folklorists, storytellers, and Victorian scholars, the volume is a significant cultural artifact, encapsulating the approaches, practices, and debates about fairy lore so vigorously discussed in the 1890s, the golden age of folklore collecting in which it was produced.

Haase's introduction focuses, in part, on the problems of Joseph Jacobs's reputation. Something of a polymath, Joseph was underrated both because he produced so much in so many diverse areas, and, ironically, because he was often right—arguing against the prevailing opinions of his contemporaries—when the majority of his colleagues were wrong. Born in Sydney, Australia in 1854, Jacobs was a true cosmopolitan. Partially educated at Cambridge, he spent much of his life in Britain and ended it in New York in 1916, as a member of the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary and an editor of TheJewish Encyclopaedia. Editor of Folk-Lore from 1889 to 1900, scholar and interpreter of Jewish history, expert on the literary fable, translator, literary critic, and novelist, he produced a large number of important works in almost all of these areas. Yet the late Richard Dorson does not place him on the Great Team of British folklorists, and popular opinion does not rank him as high as Andrew Lang, another Victorian Jack of all trades.

Involved in many of the major debates and issues in the folklore studies of the end of the nineteenth century, Joseph had much to say about the origin, nature, and dissemination of folktales. He was a diffusionist, arguing for the transmission and spread of folklore by various groups of people as well as for the reversibility of print and oral traditions at a time when the dominant approach was the evolutionist bias of the survivalists. This powerful group, anthropologically oriented (as opposed to Jacobs's sociohistorical bent) looked at folk materials primarily as repositories or survivals of the ideas of primitive societies and believed, not in transmission, but that complex tales could be reinvented in various places at different times. Today's theories support Jacobs on many points, agreeing that tales have social contexts, that each story is an individual act of creativity, not a spontaneous creation of a mythical Folk, that print-media and social intercourse may explain the similarities in widely dispersed tales, and that particular tales have specific origins. But Jacobs's contemporaries saw him as eccentric in his views and difficult in personality; his debates with Edwin Sidney Hartland and especially with Andrew Lang bristle with personal antagonism on all sides. While Haase praises Jacobs for the "controversial, progressive, and even modern ideas that characterize his work" (xxx), Jacobs's contemporaries did not. Equally important, Jacobs's deliberate crossing of the boundaries between folklore and children's literature has been attacked by purists in both camps. What Haase sees as a challenge to "conventional thinking about folklore, children's literature, and Victorian culture" (xxx) has been viewed by folklorists as vulgar popularizing and by literary critics as poor, slangy writing. Jacobs, not interested in authenticity in these fairy-tale collections but in "transmitting an appealing story in speakable language" (xix) and, moreover, in making tales accessible to children of all classes, has offended both his contemporaries and later critics.

It is not always easy to defend Jacobs's alterations of the 87 English tales he assembled. Like the Brothers Grimm, whom he emulated (as did almost all the other English folklorists), he rewrote, revised, and polished the materials he found...