end of the eighteenth century. A hundred years before, John Locke had warned against
elves, gnomes and goblins (in tales about fairies), but by the end of the century, it was
fairy tales that came under attack, as in Mrs Trimmer’s essay, ‘Mother Goose’s fairy
tales’, in her magazine The Guardian of Education (1803:185–186).
Enlightenment pedagogical principles left little room for imaginative constructs
(Steinlein 1987:115) and led to the ‘censorship of everything fanciful’, yet many authors
recognised that imaginative tales induced a love of reading in children, and that,
furthermore ‘much good advice and information can be conveyed in a Fable and a Fairy
Tale’ (dedication of Oriental Tales [1802] cited in Jackson 1989:195– 196).
All of the practices and controversies that centred on fairy tales marked the genre in
nineteenth-century English children’s literature. For instance, the question of the
educational value of fairy tales versus their putatively damaging consequences met head
on in the Peter Parley-Felix Summerly debate. Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Peter Parley
books (1827 et seq.) grew directly out of eighteenth-century utilitarian principles and
were relentlessly useful and didactically informative. Sir Henry Cole, under the pen
name of Felix Summerly, opposed Goodrich’s objections with the playful fantasy of
stories in his Home Treasury (1843–1845) (Darton 1932/1982:219–251). This debate
was never resolved, and both of these trains of thought survived into the twentieth
century.
The maternality that had been imputed to fairy tales by both French and German
theoreticians, if one may dignify the rank sexism that passed for reasonable fact with
that word, lived on in the titles of fairy tales for children. Perrault’s tales were attributed
to Mother Goose and Mme d’Aulnoy’s to Queen Mab or Mother Bunch, and along the
way, other fictive female relatives took their place among the authors of fairy tales: Aunt
Friendly, Aunt Louisa and Mme de Chatalain.
National identity played a far smaller role in the project of valorising fairy tales in
England than it did in Germany and in other countries that were either emerging from
domination by foreign governments, like Finland and Norway, or amalgamating from
disparate units, like Italy and Germany. But the dynamics of the publishing trade
played a very large part in determining the contents of the scores, perhaps hundreds, of
fairy tale collections that English booksellers purveyed to the English child.
Chapbooks remained a feature of nineteenth-century fairy tales for English children.
Ross’s Juvenile Library delivered small two-penny 48-page books like Fairy Tales of Past
Times from Mother Goose (1814–1815) into young hands. The wolf became Gaffer Wolf,
Blue Beard’s wife used part of the estate she inherited on the death of her uxoricidal
husband to marry her sister to a young gentleman and to buy military commissions for
her brothers.
Moralisation continued to mark nineteenth-century fairy tales, but it was far more
limited than it had been in the eighteenth century. For example, Cruikshank used
‘Cinderella’ as an anti-drink platform and Charles Dickens credited fairy tales with
inculcating ‘forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and aged, kind treatment
of animals, the love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force’ (cited in Townsend
1974:92).
Translations of other national fairy tale collections poured into England, enriching its
store of available fairy material. In 1749 The Fairy Tales of all Nations entered England
154 FAIRY TALES AND FOLK-TALES