Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain ed. by Michael Rosen (review)

Workers' Tales is a part of the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series edited by Jack Zipes. As such, it is a collection of stories originally published (with one exception) in Socialist periodicals between 1884 and 1914. The stories are selected and introduced by Michael Rosen, who is perhaps best known in the United States for authoring We're Going on a Bear Hunt (1989, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury), and is the former U.K. Children's Laureate, professor of children's literature, author of more than 100 books, and a television presenter and political journalist.

The book starts with a 19-page introduction that begins with an anecdote from Rosen's BBC broadcaster days of a miner reciting, "I go to work / to earn money / to buy bread / to build up my strength / to go to work / to earn money / to buy bread / to build up my strength / to go to work. …" Rosen interprets this recitation by means of the shared cultural imagery of bread, and argues, "This symbolic, emblematic, rhetorical way of speaking, drawing on shared images, can be found again and again in the stories in this collection. They were written by people who were part of a project—socialism—that they hoped would transform society" (3). The introduction establishes a broad context for the selected tales by offering a historical overview of British socialist publications between 1880 and 1920, socialist social and religious organizations, universal suffrage, and literacy. Rosen then turns to the genres of the tales themselves and briefly describes fable and allegory, moral tale, and mystery tale, with examples of each and dwelling briefly on the Victorian fondness for "morally and socially critical fairy and fantasy tales" (14) and references John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, william Thackeray, Oscar wilde, George Macdonald, and E. Nesbit.

The introduction ends with a list of genres and representative examples of that from the book. The list consists of (a) Tales that use traditional stories or traditional story forms: fairy tale, folktale, myth, and legend, (b) Allegorical Fairy Tales and Fables, (c) Moral Tales, and (d) Mystery Tales. Rosen's academic and personal interest in rhetoric is evident in the latter half of the introduction. He concludes the introduction thus:

This is socialism at its most hopeful, perhaps at its most innocent, untouched by world war, Stalinism, or the Holocaust. That innocence is hard to recycle, and it may be unwise to try, but I think there is another way in which these works have contemporary potential: in their apparent desire to lay bare the processes that make the majority of people's lives such a struggle. we can read in the stories the idea that the display of these processes would educate and motivate readers to join movements and work toward making a fairer, more just world.

(18)

The forty-five stories themselves are arranged chronologically. Author and date are supplied for each story. They range from half a page like "The Political Economist and the Flowers" (an allegory about the cruelty and illogic of social Darwinism) to serialized stories spanning many chapters and twenty pages (for example, Keir Hardie's "The History of a Giant: Being a Study in Politics for Very Young Boys" and "Jack Clearhead: A Fairy Tale for Crusaders, and to Be Read by Them to Their Fathers and Mothers"). The tales range from retellings of "Little Red Riding Hood" (112) to modernist stories that draw on motifs ("The Scarlet Shoes [The Story of a Serio-comic walking Tour and Its Tragic End]") to mock ethnography ("A Martian's Visit to Earth. Being a Literal Translation into English of the Preface to an Account by a Martian of His Visit to England" [204]). Rosen includes "Tom Hickathrift," originally published in More English Fairy Tales (1894) and writes that it "is included here because of the way in which its author-collector, Joseph Jacobs, makes explicit the socialistic outcome of the hero's...