Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves
collected and edited: Jack Zipes
ISBN: 0415901405
Read June 18-22, 2016
An interesting collection of mostly lesser or unknown fairy tales by prominent Victorian authors (here meaning authors who were prominent in Victorian times, although most are unknown now). There are a few "known" tales sprinkled into the mix, and a few author names which are recognizable, even if the particular story is unknown. A few notable stories that I knew from before reading this collection: Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, Kenneth Grahame's The Reluctant Dragon, and Jean Ingelow's The Prince's Dream. Notable authors that people might recognize are: Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, Andrew Lang (of color fairy book fame) and Edith Nesbit, and Rudyard Kipling. I was thrilled to discover that so many of these favorite authors had written interesting (if not particularly always GOOD) fairy tales.
So what do we have here? A collection, with preface notes for each story (!) As a side note, I love a good preface note so very much - it adds so much to understanding and to context, and to placing the author and story into a framework to see why and how they did what they did. 22 fairy tales in all, from writers who were popular or well-regarded or at least prolific during the Victorian times, writing for children instead of adults, and MOSTLY not writing solely with a particular moral or societal axe to grind, but instead creating stories to entertain rather than to educate. Many of the stories also include the original artworks for covers or interior drawings, and those are less interesting to me, but nice to see included and replicated for art-lovers or scholars.
This was really fun, dense reading, and I deeply enjoyed it. More of most of these author's works can be found on Project Gutenberg or on Google Books, having been many years out of print and out of copyright.
Story summaries and thoughts;
1) Uncle David's Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies, by Catherine Sinclair.
Moralistic story of a lazy boy in the vein of Pilgrim's Progress, with a set of good and bad fairies and a boy-eating giant who just loves fat lazy boy for dinner. A happy ending that reinforces the value (and joy) in good clean fun and effort.
Very much like a Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Tale: treacly and mealy-mouthed and insufferably perfectly good boys and terribly bad lazy boys. The fairies and giant are an interesting touch, but could be easiily substituted with any sort of plot device without any changes necessary.
2) King of the Golden River/The Black Brothers, by John Ruskin
A hidden magical valley has beautiful weather until the landowning two brothers mistreat and abuse the visiting god of the winds one night. The youngest brother tries to intervene, but is beaten for his troubles. The winds then change and the valley withers, so the brothers head to the big city to swindle people there, taking work as cheating goldsmiths. When they are facing starvation, the youngest brother is forced to melt down his only prized possession: a gold cup bearing the face of a dwarf, but instead of gold, an actual dwarf emerges, and claims to be the king of the river in their original valley, and that anyone who reaches the spring at the top of the mountain with "holy water" will have unending riches and the valley will prosper again, but anyone who fails will be turned to a black rock. Obvs the older nasty brothers steal the birthright but they each fail in turn, and the younger thinks he fails because he squanders the holy water on the weak and suffering beings beside the river on the way up. But all is good, because charity is great or something, and everything ends beautifully (but they left the brothers to rot as stones - yay!)
This was a very interesting multi-part story, with complex fairy-tale underpinnings and a real sense of adventure and far-away-lands, and despite a bit of heavy-handed christlike suffering imagery at the end, it was a fun romp and a really great story. I would be shocked if no one had made it into a longer fantasy story - I'd like to do it myself.
3) Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, by George Cruikshank
Moralizing story where the stepmother is a gambler, and Cinderella's fairy godmother is a little person (referred to as a dwarf in the text) who is an anti-drink campaigner, who lectures the King himself about the refreshments to be served at the wedding reception.
Oh. My. God. Would have been funnier if it hadn't been so deadly earnest. What's funny is that the story troupes along with only the odd little side-light or comment to show the author is a dead bore and a kill-joy, UNTIL we get to the end, and fall straight into the rabbit hole where this dead-serious little person basically lays into the poor unsuspecting King, going on for almost a WHOLE page out of a roughly 12-page story, and entirely killing the pace and fun of the ending.
4) Heinrich/The Love of Gold, by Alfred Crowquill (best pseudonym ever for Alfred Henry Forrester)
Our main dude is a super-talented stonemason, but he doesn't love his work, he's just a work-a-holic with technical genius. He's hard at work late one evening and his just-finished gargoyle starts talking to him, and tells him the secret to gaining nearly limitless gold. Heinrich is all for it, and spends forver mining and digging and piling up gold - never thinking about the time he spends. He finally comes up for air and drops in on the gargoyle, who tells him he's a dumbshit and his whole life has gone by, and he goes and lives like a hermit in the mountains for a few weeks before he kicks it.
Interesting variant on the "don't waste your life" theme like the one seen in Golden Threads (the boy who gets the magic ball of his life's thread that he can pull out to make time pass quickly), but I was amused that the guy gets a few weeks of life to be a crazy holy hermit before he dies, so he can leave his greedy gold to the church as is only proper.
5) Bruno's Revenge, Lewis Carroll (from an earlier drafted version)
The author goes for a walk at a friend's manor fields, and interacts with a young fairy boy who is dissuaded from pulling a mean prank on his older sister for revenge.
Very quirky (as appropriate for Carroll, I suppose) and lighthearted and grounded - very much in the feel of Doctor Dolittle.
6) The Magic Fishbone, Charles Dickens
A king is given a magic fishbone to give to his daughter, who "will know when to use it" but keeps holding out despite many exaggerated difficulties. This is a short and very childlike and almost stream-of-consciousness or dream-like story, where the logic of adults is subverted and the child is the clever and conquering hero.
I really like this story, and the odd unsettling childish nature of the telling and the plot development. Very peculiar and quite individual. Extremely unlike his long work.
7) Cinderella, Anne Isabella Ritchie
Cinderella as a Regency romance, complete with foppish but sweet Prince Charming, and a delightfully vicious stepmother, and a neighboring Lady who acts the Godmother role with relish and an all-seeing eye.
Not particularly memorable, but a sweet homage to Cinderella in the vein of a classic Victorian romance, with all the mores and social climbing and details of dress and fashion that entail.
8) The Ogre Courting, Juliana Horatia Ewing
A nasty ogre lives as a local landowner, with a particularly nasty penchant for marrying beautiful young women and then having them mysteriously die within months or weeks. He sets his cap for Managing Molly, but she's more than a match for him, and manages him within an inch of his life.
LOVE this story. The only way it would be better is if it were called Managing Molly, and I'd like it a lot better. This one is really begging to be made into a picture book.
9) The Prince's Dream, Jean Ingelow
A young sheltered prince lives in a high tower room in the center of a great desert - all he knows are Bedouin and the herds they keep, until a stranger arrives for a brief stay and confirms for the Prince all the stories he's heard from the servants about Labour and Liberty and Gold.
A bit too allegorical for my tastes, but well-drawn, a fantasical Aladdin setting and with a light touch overall.
10) Charlie Among the Elves, Edward H. Knatchbull-Hugessen (what a name)
A slight story about a boy who takes a tumble down hill and is "captured" by the fair folk and spends an afternoon with them observing their amusements.
This one was unsettling, because all of the fair folk are in their more adult aspect, and the child has no agency or really character at all - he just sits and listens and watches, not allowed to participate or to comment by the adults. A very peculiar and slightly offputting story, with overtones of child-snatching and grooming behaviors.
11) A Toy Princess, Mary de Morgan
A solid fairy tale about a country where manners dictated no opinions or emotions to be shown, where the lovely sweet princess baby was replaced with an automaton by a kind fairy, who offers to reverse the switch when the girl reaches her majority, but the court and kingdom are stunned and disgusted with this open-hearted emotional and opinionated actual girl, and prefer to crown the automaton (with only a few mealy-mouthed stock phrases) as their ruler instead.
Saucy and sharp and beautifully crafted and neatly plotted and paced. A really excellent story, and I went onto Gutenberg to find some of her other works, and found them nearly as fine and enjoyable. Another good candidate for a good juvenile fantasy adaptation or a picture book.
12) The Day Boy and the Night Girl, George MacDonald
A witch finds and lures two pregnant ladies to her castle, and treats one to a sunny life and another to a shadowy night existence, then steals their infants after birth and sends one lady packing (the other one dies). The witch continues this regimen of night and day existence for the two children - the boy Photogen only knows of the day, and the girl Nycteris only knows of the night, until she grows ill and the children get old enough to start figuring things out on their own. They discover the opposite time, and are made frightened or weak because of it, but despite that, they work together to conquer the witch.
This is a freaking seriously amazing fairy tale, and I loved it unabashedly and wholeheartedly. I want to write something like this myself someday. It is beautiful and classic and delightful and perfect. The best out story out of the collection, by miles, and also one of the longer ones - 31 pages.
13) All My Doing - or Red Riding Hood All Over Again, Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton
Moralistic re-telling of Red Riding Hood set as a Victorian-era thriller/psychological horror story of a con man taking advantage of a naive child to sneak into and rob a rich manor house, nearly killing the grandmother and the girl's suitor.
Hoooooy boy does this lay the Victorian girl guilt on thick. This is some serious Uncle Arthur victim blaming bullshit here, and despite the fun trappings of a carefree girl being stalked and conned by a ruthless villain, the fun of the story is sucked right out by the militaristic insistence on feeling guilt and internalizing a sense of "female self-deprecation." Even with all of that leading up to the ending, the hand-wringing 'everything is ruined forever and it's all my fault' melodrama of the framing story and the narrator's coda left a nasty taste in my mouth.
14) Princess Nobody, Andrew Lang
A version of the classic "fetch the princess" quest tale, with the Prince a devoted but ugly person who is changed to become beautiful himself by fairy magic, and the princess basically a plot-point to allow the Prince to wander and suffer and encounter magical lands.
Eh. Very similar to many other stories where the hero has to find the macguffin. The pacing was also veeeeery draggy. I felt a little left down by my beloved Color Fairy Book collector.
15) The Story of a King's Daughter, Mary Louisa Molesworth
A beautiful and kind-hearted princess cannot bear cruelty or unkindness, even to animals, and she spurns her betrothed husband when he injures a castle dog. He is untouched by her strength of character until he is abducted into the enchanted forest, and turned into a ravening beast until an even dozen forest animals are willing to rest on his back while he carries them from the woods. Obvs the princess and her forest friends are the ones to do this, and he sufficiently repents and is redeemed by her character and her forgiveness.
A VERY unfortunately named princess: Aureole. Eeek. Also a nasty bit of commentary about how she's not willing to be the queen because she's a woman and that's obvs not a woman's place. Sigh. Other than that, I'm willing to believe the change of heart of the suitor because it's given time and foreshadowed, and it's nice to have the princess doing the saving every once in a while.
16) The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde
A gilded and be-jeweled statue of a prince sits in the middle of town, broken-hearted because he can see the needs of the poor and suffering, but can't do anything to help them. A sparrow stops by on his migration, and at the Prince's request, begins despoiling the statue to provide gems and gold to the needy people. The prince is rendered leaden and and bird freezes to death, and they get tossed in the rubbish by the city leadership.
Wilde and Hans Christian Andersen are horrid people who make me cry all the time, and I deeply resent the heavy-handed symbolism and heart-tugging. It makes the stories seem cheap and artificial and trying too hard, and I'm not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a story that purposefully and pedantically sets out to make me sad.
17) Wooden Tony, Lucy Lane Clifford
A couple in the Alps has a strange son who wanders about and makes odd whistles and music, but can't be bothered to work, or even to study or to learn anything. His father is a wood-carver, and hates him for being worthless and different, but his mother loves him and defends him as best she can. A traveling peddler stops by and offers to take the boy to the city and see if he can make a sensation of him with his odd music, but the man magically steals the song, and slowly turns the boy to wood and shrinks him down, and puts him into a cuckoo clock with one of his father's carvings. the story ends with his parents looking at him inside the clock, and knowing it is their son, but being unable to prove it or to save him.
This is like Victorian R. L. Stine craziness here. This is amazing horror, and a great creeping pace to it as you try and figure out where the story is going and what's going to happen to poor unfortunate Tony. I don't like the casual ableism - it's very easy to read Tony as being mentally handicapped, or having a processing disorder, and no one is willing to work with him, and people are very willing to take advantage of him or get rid of him, but it works for the story and is a very modern mindset to apply here. Still - a really great tale, and excellent atmosphere.
18) The Potted Princess, Rudyard Kipling
A clever Jack tale of a task set to rescue the princess from a pot, and all the emirs and sultans and rajas and princes learn arcane and powerful magics from the far ends of the earth in vain, and a potter's son walks up and just opens the pot. No magic - she was just in a pot.
This was funny and cute and slight, and the framing story was almost as funny.
19) The Rooted Lover, Laurence Housman
A gardener sees the princess and falls in love, and asks a local witch for help. She turns him into a fiery poppy and plants him in the princess's garden - if she picks him and wears him next to her heart, she'll fall in love with him and he'll be re-born as a man, but if not, he'll die when the flower dies at the end of the season. After many trials and an opposing suitor, the long-suffering poppy boy is rewarded at last when the princess sacrifices wealth and position to find and be with her dark-eyed red-haired dream lover.
An interesting twist where the boy becomes the flower, and a nice happy ending after lots of trials and suffering on each side, but I still don't like the "love spell" nature of the relationship. Would be interesting to try and adapt for a non mind-controlled version.
20) The Reluctant Dragon, Kenneth Grahame
A posh dragon, a very educated (but fight-loving) young boy, and Sir George all converge on the English countryside for a battle that ends up being entirely pro-forma, but none the less enjoyable.
I like this story more for the wry tones and asides and snarky commentary, but the basic story is cute and fun.
21) The Last of the Dragons, Edith Nesbit
A very emancipated princess and a reluctant knight make their way to the cave of the last dragon to entice it out with biscuits instead of her being forced to be captured and freed. Very much in the vein of Wrede's Dealing with Dragons concept, meshed with the Serendipity book The Muffin Dragon.
Cute and light.
22) The Spell of the Magician's Daughter, Evelyn Sharp
A fiesty magician's child daughter doesn't want to be a magician - she doesn't even study her spells, but she DOES want to be a princess. When she sees the young prince out in the woods, he's searching for the perfect princess, and she sets him up with a quest - creating a magic spell of course. Naturally because it's her first spell, she's got to go ahead of him and make sure everything's properly set up for him, so she travels the world with her wits and her cleverness, all the time he is following after the trail she's setting up. They finally meet at the end of the world, and they're all grown up, and quite fond of each other after their quasi-shared questing experience.
A really interesting story, and my second favorite after the MacDonald masterpiece. This one is more straightforward, but I really liked her fond telling of the characters, and the reveal of how they're all grown up now.
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