century fairy tales and tales about fairies were the particular province of girls. Even in
the subscription list of Thomas Boreman’s History of Cajanus (1742), which dealt with a
male giant, a breed more generally associated with boys’ interests (Wardetzky 1993:172–
198), girls none the less outnumbered boys by a slight margin. In France Mme L’Heritier
remembered that fairy tales and tales about fairies were for girls, fables for boys (cited in
Warner 1991:13). Shortly thereafter, Richard Steele, as Isaac Bickerstaff, described the
reading habits of his godson and his sister. The boy, he said, read fables, and Betty, his
sister, read fairy tales (Tatler 95, cited in Macdonald 1982:106). England’s Sarah
Fielding confirmed Mme L’Heritier’s observation when she produced The Adventures of
David Simple (1744) a character with whom boys and young men could easily identify, ‘a
moral Romance’ (A 2r) without a single reference to faerie; in The Governess, however,
she embedded ‘Fable and Moral’, but her ‘fable’ included stories of fairy magic.
This pattern of a highly gender-specific readership was broken with the mixed content
of Grimms’ Tales. Along with traditional fairy tales of magic and reversal of fortune that
culminated in a wedding, the Grimms included religious tales, nonsense tales, folk-
tales, aetiologies, moral tales, burlesques and animal tales. In expanding the ‘fairy tale’
canon to embrace many forms of the brief narrative (Märchen), the Grimms successfully
incorporated both boys and girls into their readership. But when, in the twentieth
century, the genre in effect contracted to a small corpus of girl tales like ‘Cinderella’,
‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, readership boundaries
similarly contracted to a primarily female audience.
Folk-talesThe definition of folk-tales is more fluid than that of fairy tales and tales about fairies.
The term ‘folk-tale’ normally embraces a multitude of minor genres, like nonsense tales,
aetiologies, jests, burlesques, animal tales and neverending tales, but there is good
reason to incorporate a discussion of chapbook romances within a consideration of folk-
tales in children’s literature. Guy of Warwick, Valentine and Orson, and Bevis of
Southampton typify medieval romances that were borne by printing presses into the
modern world and carried further on the backs of chapmen to new readers, both young
and old. In their medieval original forms their dragons, giants, kings, queens, wicked
mothers and faithful fairies provided a cast of characters that fit into the schema of the
modern fairy tale, but their sheer length distinguished them from the modern fairy tale.
When romances were refashioned for chapbook distribution, however, they were
shortened drastically, but kept their familiar panoply of royalty, giants and dragons.
Romances required dragons, as the adventure-filled Seven Champions of Christendom
indicates. Newly assembled in 1596–1597, it included an obligatory dragon, but did
without heroic romantic involvement, as befitted its cast of seven national saints as
protagonists. Fortunatus, another medieval romance, included Oriental magic in the form
of a bottomless purse of gold and a hat that could cause him to be transported
anywhere in the world. Thus romances were ready made for chapbook wear.
Another set of tales, Jack and the Giants, Tom Hickathrift, Robin Hood and Tom Thumb
embody and thematize the confrontation of small, weak, poor but witty hero against a
large, strong, rich, but stupid real or metaphorical giant. The early eighteenth-century
TYPES AND GENRES 157