that novel are found in the Moral Tales for younger readers, in which the diverse speech
patterns of a female Quixote, a mannish bibber, Quakers and Welsh working women
provide textual play. While educational aims shape Edgeworth’s work for children, her
texts are animated by the vulnerable of European society, peasants, struggling émigrés,
displaced soldiers.
Castle Rackrent influenced Walter Scott (1771–1832) whose historical novels created
the precedent for the popularity of the fictional treatment of history in children’s
literature. By 1888 Scott had been voted the third most popular boys’ author. He
produced only one work specifically for children, Tales of a Grandfather (1827–1830), a
history of Scotland and of France.
In this respect his literary output resembled that of Dickens, whose A Child’s History
of England (1852–1854) is probably his least familiar work. Thackeray’s fairy tale, The
Rose and the Ring (1855) however, has not suffered eclipse and displays the fiction-
making powers evident in his major novel of the same period, The Newcomes (1853–
1855), which first appeared in periodical numbers. Like Dickens, Thackeray (1811–1863)
wrote seasonal fiction at Christmas. In both narratives he achieves a densely allusive
texture: in the adult work he conveys ‘that increased sense of social life as something
registered, lived and validated in newsprint’ (McMasters 1991:162); Thackeray’s frame of
reference included literature, art, European and colonial society, business and the press.
In both works the ironic wit and parody, the suppleness of the narrative role charge the
text with verbal energy. In The Newcomes, the reader is bombarded with a multiplicity of
encoded meanings, including three other languages besides infantile and adult English,
Cockney and London Jewish variants; characters study the ‘meaning’ of large canvases
or of named novels. In the children’s text, a pantomime fiction for a child absent from
the Twelfth Night party Thackeray’s daughters enjoyed in Rome, the manipulative
governess Gruffanuff, and the benign fairy Blackstick, together serve as counterparts to
the ‘wicked fairy’, Lady Kew, whose dynastic reign of terror darkens The Newcomes. In
The Rose and the Ring magical properties operate with apparent haphazardness, causing
bewildering experiences of love; the fairy tale conventions of godmother denied her
invitation to the royal christening and concealed identity of the beggar-maid reappear in
a pantomime medium of exuberant intertextuality and wordplay topical in its allusions
to the theatre, Christmas and the Crimea. Italian vegetable names and parody of both
major bards and minor authors in the guise of self-deprecating authorial pretension,
move frequently from prose dialogue to blank and rhyming verse. Barbara Wall
describes his ‘wild breathlessness’, as that of a narrator, ‘little more than a grown-up
boy’, engaging the double audience of children and adults (51).
The fairy tale was also used inventively by Dickens (1812–1870), who defended it
against propagandist exploitation by the illustrator Cruikshank, champion of
temperance. In a satirical essay, ‘Frauds on the fairies’ (1853), Dickens ridiculed the
profane versions of ‘sacred’ texts which had instilled gentleness and mercy in generations
of young listeners and readers; Dickens was incensed by the ‘intrusion of a Whole Hog
of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower garden’, protesting that within a generation
or two children would not know how to distinguish the authentic fairy tale from the
propagandist versions. ‘The world is too much with us, early and late’, intoned Dickens.
‘Leave this precious old escape from it, alone.’ Dickens wrote his own examples of the
410 MAJOR AUTHORS’ WORK FOR CHILDREN