genre: ‘The golden fagots’ appeared in Household Words (15 June 1850) and ‘The magic
fishbone’ in 1868.
In A Child’s History of England Dickens builds a conspiratorial alliance with the young
reader who is coaxed into perceiving the early Britons as savages civilised by the
Romans and converted by the Saxons into the English nation. Bold outlines— Henry
VIII is a ‘blot of blood and grease upon the history of England’, Judge Jeffries a ‘great
crimson toad, sweltering and swelling with rage’ as he looks down from a Wapping
window—and formulaic interventions—‘I daresay you think as I do’—encourage the
reader to view events through the individual lens superimposed by Dickens. This is
especially noticeable in the barbarous tendencies attributed by Dickens to the Irish: he
combines graphic details of revenge with heavily directive authorial comment: one king
has a ‘wild kind of name spelt in more than one wild kind of way’. Alternatively, he
voices scepticism when introducing detail he considers unreliable. Dickens, however, by
placing the child centrally in so many of his adult and family fictions, and by reworking
the fairy tale elements, achieved far more on behalf of child readership there, where the
child’s vision exists, than in what he wrote specifically for children.
Reworking folk and fairy tale for children, Browning (1812–1889) and Ruskin (1819–
1900) produced very different narratives: Browning’s father had previously written a
version of the Pied Piper story derived from the fifteenth century or even earlier; this was
only one of several versions with which Browning was familiar. He dedicated his poem,
The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842) to the son of the actor Macready in 1842. Its auspicious
progress as an anthologised narrative began in 1862, when it was first included by
Coventry Patmore in a book of verse for children. Ruskin’s prose fiction, written for the
child who later briefly became his wife, was intended as consolation after the deaths of
her three sisters from scarlet fever. Ruskin assuages doubts about materialism and
Philistinism in a restorative text, The King of the Golden River (1841), about a quest for
spiritual riches in keeping with his championing of heroic and social idealism.
Much more disparate elements from widely diverse sources reworked by Mark Twain
(Samuel Clemens 1835–1910) generated important new forms of fiction through parody
of Shakespeare, burlesque and use of the vernacular. In his regionalism he had been
influenced also by Bret Harte’s ‘new realm of discourse’, the world of hard-living,
subversive vagabonds (Ruland and Bradbury 1991:192). Regionalism provided new
possibilities for humorous and dramatic discourse incorporating the ‘stretchers’ or tall
tales of mockery and ironic dialect. His writing drew on the West and the rural
Mississippi Valley, but was charged with the energy of the rapidly changing world of
industrialised spread of population and wage slavery (replacing black slavery) once the
two coasts had been linked by rail in 1869. Twain both criticised and celebrated
American culture in burlesque and pessimistic irony in the adult fantasy A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), in Pudd’n head Wilson (1894) and What is Man?
(1906), and in the classic American boy’s story The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
Less to the taste of the American public and lacking Twain’s vigorous humour,
Hardy’s commissioned fiction for children failed to find publication for some ten years.
Our Exploits at West Poley (1883) written for the American periodical Youth’s
Companion, eventually appeared in The Household in six instalments beginning in
November 1892. As in his adult fiction, man is dwarfed by a landscape which inscribes
TYPES AND GENRES 411