1704–1717) was translated into English as Arabian Nights, chapbook purchasers
immediately signalled their approval of magic by buying them in large numbers.
Similarly, subsequent translations of Madame d’Aulnoy’s Contes des Fées, which
appeared in English translation as Diverting Works (1707) and A Collection of Novels and
Tales (1721) became well-known in English: for example, ‘The Yellow Dwarf’, ‘Finetta the
Cinder-girl’, and ‘The White Cat’.
In 1729 Robert Samber translated Perrault’s fairy tales as Histories, or Tales of Past
Times and completed the early eighteenth-century inventory of tales about fairies and
fairy tales in England. In his dedication to the Countess of Granville, mother of Lord
Carteret, Samber discussed the fairy tale as an improvement on Aesop’s fables: ‘stories
of human kind’, he wrote, ‘are more effectively instructive than those of animals’ (A 3v).
Perrault’s fairy tales’, he continued, were ‘designed for children’ yet the stories
themselves ‘grow up...both as to their Narration and Moral’ because ‘Virtue is ever
rewarded and Vice ever punished in these tales’ (A 4r). Samber meant his book to be
morally instructive, and he licensed no ‘poor insipid trifling tale in a tinkling Jingle’ with
a ‘petty Witticism, or insignificant useless Reflection’. Samber bridged the cultural gap
between France and Britain by giving some of Perrault’s characters English names (Red
Riding Hood’s Christian name became Biddy, and the bad girl in ‘The Fairy’ was called
Fanny), by defining an ogre (‘a giant that has long teeth and claws, with a raw head and
bloody bones, that runs away with naughty little boys and girls, and eats them up’ (43)),
and by offering a recipe for Sauce Robert in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (51).
Eighteenth-century English fairy tales specifically for children also existed in
chapbooks. Their format dispensed with frame tales and particularised vocabulary to
produce simplified narratives like ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Red Riding Hood’, and ‘The Blue Bird’
along with ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Sindbad’ to a broad reading public (Summerfield 1984:45, 55,
57).
When children’s literature was formally and self-consciously instituted in the mid-
eighteenth century, fairy tales remained an integral component of the moral lessons
composed for children. Thomas Boreman’s tiny four-penny book, The History of
Cajanus, the Swedish Giant (1742) offered a tongue-in-cheek biography of a seven-foot
tall Finnish giant, capable of remarkable fairy tale-like acts. Sarah Fielding also used
tales about fairies for The Governess—‘the story of the cruel giant Barbarico, the good
giant Benefico, and the pretty little Dwarf Mignon’ and ‘Princess Hebe... To cultivate an
early Inclination to Benevolence, and a love of Virtue, in the Minds of young Women’
(Fielding 1749: A 2r). Mrs Teachum, the governess of the title, viewed fairy tales with
some alarm and cautioned that ‘Giants, Magic, Fairies, and all sorts of Supernatural
Assistances in a Story, are only introduced to amuse and divert...’ and presented them
as ‘figures of a sort’ that stood for virtuous or vicious conduct (Fielding 1749:68).
Fairy tales had long been securely harnessed to moral education, as the full title of
Henry Brooke’s 1750 collection indicated: they contained ‘many useful Lessons [and]
Moral Sentiments’ (cited in Kamenetsky 1992:222). And although the word ‘moral’ was
absent from its title, Robin Goodfellow, a Fairy Tale (1770) did the same.
In this period a new visual code was in the process of being established in Europe, in
part codified by Lavater’s study of physiognomy. Lavater aimed to demonstrate that
character could be read from countenance, and in children’s literature that perception
152 FAIRY TALES AND FOLK-TALES