translated into an equation of virtue with beauty. One stylistic consequence was that the
authors of fairy tales for girls increasingly described the facial appearance of characters
in their books.
Mme Leprince de Beaumont, whose arrival in England coincided with the commercial
development of books for children, elevated tales about fairies and fairy tales to religious
company in her Magasin des Enfants (1756). ‘La Belle et la Bête’ appeared between the
stories of ‘Adam and Eve’, and ‘Noah’. Like her predecessor, Sarah Fielding, she
employed the device of a frame tale: conversations between pupils and a governess.
Eleanor (or Ellenor) Fenn, the author of The Fairy Spectator (1789), in the guise of Mrs
Teachwell, used fairy tales for equally high moral ends. By the late eighteenth century,
primers began to include fairy tales as reading exercises for children, and children’s
magazines mixed fairy tales into a pot-pourri of rhymes, stories, and anecdotes
(MacDonald 1982:45, 110). Even the thoroughly amoral tales of The Thousand and One
Nights were transformed by the earnest efforts of English educators into books with
titles like Cooper’s Oriental Moralist (1790). The stories themselves, quite different from
the unobtrusive, almost logical metamorphoses of Western convention, restocked the
European inventory of the fantastic with new magic objects, enchanted places and a
dazzling array of startling transformations (Jan 1974:35). In the Enchanted Mirror, a
Moorish Romance (1814), for example, the properties of traditional magic mirrors were
adapted to the requirements of moral improvement, so that this one returned viewers’
gazes with images of how they were rather than how they appeared (cited in Pickering
1993:188), a further indication of the formative power of physiognomic thought on
literature.
Despite the scoffing dismissal of fairy tales by official pedagogy in the eighteenth
century—the Edgeworths commented in 1798 that they did not ‘allude to fairy tales, for
we apprehend these are not now much read’ (cited in Opie 1974: 25)—fairy tales
continued to grow in popularity (Pickering 1993:187). Even Sarah Trimmer, who would
later turn against fairy tales, acknowledged in The Guardian of Education that she had
enjoyed them as a child (Goldstone 1984:71).
The most frequently published individual fairy tale, ‘Cinderella’, provided a satisfying
rags-to-riches plot that answered a longing felt in many segments of society: for example,
among the newly literate but still poor buyers of chapbooks, as well as among the the
middle-class children who aspired to inclusion in yet more elevated social classes. The
‘Cinderella’ paradigm was as evident in Goody Two-Shoes (1765) as it was in Primrose
Prettyface (1785) but the tale contained within itself not only the hopeful promise of
social elevation, but also disturbing possibilities for frightening social inversion. The
French Revolution of 1789 and the bloody executions of the 1790s aroused suspicion
about ‘Cinderella’ plots suggesting rags-to-riches and evoked violent reaction. Sarah
Trimmer now criticised fairy tales, and especially Cinderella, whom she ‘accused of
causing... the worst human emotions to arise in the child’ (Goldstone 1984:71), and
conservative educators excised first Cinderella plots and then fairy tales themselves from
books of moral improvement. One result was that post-1820 editions of The Governess
appeared shorn of their fairy tale interludes.
These attacks on fairy tales echo those that occurred a hundred years before, but a
telling distinction separated criticisms of fantasy for children at the beginning and at the
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