delineated came alive in George MacDonald’s classic tales about slightly allegorised fairy-
tale-like worlds, At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin
(1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1882). With these books, nineteenth-century tales
about fairies had transformed themselves into forms that would serve as models for
nineteenth- and twentieth-century high fantasy.
In the twentieth century, fairy tales in England’s children’s literature derived largely
from the canon established in the nineteenth century. Modern fairy tales of that pattern
can be said to have originated with ‘Uncle David’s nonsensical story’ in Catherine
Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839) (Townsend 1974:93).
USA
America’s English-language children’s books were almost exclusively of English
parentage until about 1850, yet fairy books remained conspicuously absent from
children’s reading, because American intellectuals, and especially the teachers among
them, rejected their magic as contradictory to the enlightened rationalism that underlay
and guided American political thought. Consequently, they equated tales about fairies
and fairy tales with Old World superstition, and held their kings and queens to be
antithetical to the concepts of equality on which the new country had been founded.
Hence, Perrault’s fairy tales remained unavailable in any American printing until Peter
Edes’s Haverhill edition of 1794, two full generations after their introduction into
England.
Italy, Spain, PortugalIn Italy Basile’s tales were published throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in Naples and several times in the eighteenth century in Bologna. Every
printing of fictional narrative provided material for the Italian chapbook trade, and many
of Basile’s tales found their way into the cheap press and thence to the semiliterate and
illiterate population, where they reinforced existing oral tradition and created new
narrative lines.
In Spain and Portugal, however, religious regulation and a rigid system of imprimaturs
proscribed publication of tales of magic from the early seventeenth century until the
beginning of the nineteenth century.
ReadershipFrom the eighteenth century onward, frontispiece illustrations always included both
boys and girls listening raptly to a woman telling, or sometimes reading, fairy tales, or to
a man, who was usually shown reading aloud. In the eighteenth and the first half of the
nineteenth century, the frontispiece was the only illustration to have formed an integral
part of books whose illustrations were otherwise sold separately and only bound in when
the text was taken to the bindery for finishing. Picturing boys as well as girls in these
pictures, the first a potential buyer would see, can be construed as a marketing device
to double the potential buyership, for, in fact, there is much evidence that eighteenth-
156 FAIRY TALES AND FOLK-TALES