from a German collection that was itself based on French publications, and in 1823
Edward Taylor continued the importation of German fairy tale narrative when he
translated and published the first of two volumes of the Grimm’s tales as German
Popular Stories. Illustrated by Cruikshank and provided with scholarly notes, its lively
stories enchanted children, and the Grimm’s scholarly reputation overcame the
objections of doubting parents. In 1848 Taylor also translated Giambattista Basile’s
Neapolitan Pentamerone (1634, 1636 et seq.), which like German Popular Stories, was
illustrated by Cruikshank. He edited both the German and the Italian fairy tales heavily
to remove objectionable features, some violent episodes in the case of Grimm, sexual
references in the case of Basile.
Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish tales entered the English tradition in 1846 and
soon gathered a large and enthusiastic English following. Norse material entered in 1857
when the Heroes of Asgard was printed, and Asbjørnsen and Moe’s enchanting
Norwegian fairy tales were translated in 1859 as East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon.
There had also been imports from other parts of the British Isles, like Crofton Croker’s
Irish fairy tales (1825–1828) and various collections of Scottish tales.
Each of the translations listed above represented a form of republication, but true
republication began in earnest with renamed and reprinted collections of stories and
fairy tales containing material taken from English-language books already published in
England. Benjamin Tabart’s Popular Tales (1804 et seq.) was one such early
republication, and the genre flourished increasingly as the century wore on. The Fairy
Tales of All Nations (1849) reappeared as The Doyle Fairy Book (1890), while Mrs
D.M.Craik’s Fairy Book (1863) retold stories from Perrault, d’Aulnoy and Grimm.
When Andrew Lang’s colour Fairy Books appeared between 1889 and 1910, they
codified fairy tale narrative in English. The formative importance of Lang’s books for the
English can hardly be overestimated, for they became a mother lode for many twentieth-
century ‘authors’ of fairy tales for children. Lang himself firmly believed that fairy tales
represented an ‘uncontaminated record of our cultural infancy’ (cited in Rose 1993:9),
and all twelve of his fairy volumes—Blue, Brown, Crimson, Green, Grey, Lilac, Olive,
Orange, Pink, Red, Violet, and Yellow —were ‘intended for children’, whom he hoped
would like ‘the old stories that have pleased so many generations’ (Blue Fairy Book:
preface).
Concurrent with Lang’s colour Fairy Books were Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales
(1890) and More English Fairy Tales (1894) which were followed by Celtic Fairy Tales
(1892, 1894) and Indian Fairy Tales (1892), but ultimately Lang’s fairy tales, with their
more accessible prose style, dominated English fairy tale tellings and writings.
The nineteenth century had also seen a return to tales about fairies. John Ruskin can
be said to have initiated the movement with his extraordinary fantasy, The King of the
Golden River (1851). The story’s three German-named protagonists, Hans, Schwartz and
Gluck, suggest Germanic imaginative ancestry for the book, while its elaborate plot and
magical devices link it to French tales about fairies, that flourished in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), another quasi-tale about fairies, united
adventure tale qualities to fairyland characteristics and ‘seems like a prospectus for
future generations of children’s fiction’ (Carpenter 1985:38). The alternative reality it
TYPES AND GENRES 155