Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Page 10
The illustrated book is an essential dynamic in the history of fairy tale, for since the nineteenth century the stories have been principally transmitted through visual storytelling—on stage and screen as well as from the page. At the beginning of Through the Looking Glass, Alice’s creator specifically diagnoses one of the drawbacks of books for a child, when she reacts with impatience at her sister reading a book. Alice wants to know what’s in it, but when she peeps at it she thinks to herself, with a touch of that sturdy scepticism that helps her survive the ordeals of Wonderland, ‘What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?’
When Lewis Carroll dedicated Through the Looking Glass to Alice Liddell, he looked back at that golden afternoon when he first made up the story to amuse her and her siblings:
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast …
It shall not touch, with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy tale.
Although few would agree to apply the term to the Alice books today, they are the supreme success of a new kind of book, one with a crucial role to play in the unfolding history of the magic or wonder tale.
When the first Alice book appeared in 1869, illustrated journals and picture books were among the most innovatory, inspired, and idiosyncratic currents of British culture. From the start of his conception, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) determined that his story would have pictures, and he took his cue from the success of the Grimms in their first English appearance, which was illustrated by George Cruikshank, one of the Punch stable of cartoonists. John Tenniel was another and, in a momentous move for the fortunes of Alice, Carroll showed him his own preparatory drawings and asked him to improve on them (see Figure 9).
Pictures imprint more strongly than words: who ever forgets the illustrations that first rose from the pages of a book in childhood—of Alice swimming in a pool of her own tears? I remember how twisting branches and twiggy knobbly fingers seemed to stick out to grab me from a gnarled tree with a pointed, gleefully greedy face. The picture—by Arthur Rackham—frightened me terribly and gave me ideas about woods that I never would have had by myself, since I lived in a polite suburb of a city where forests were a remote and exotic thought (see Figure 3). I can bring up in my mind’s eye images from books I had as a child of moments that artists crystallized: the prince spurting blood as he’s caught by the thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, Hansel and Gretel holding hands as they look for the trail of breadcrumbs in the forest, only to find that the birds have eaten them.
Figure 9 ‘Who are you?’, the Caterpillar asks, but Alice doesn’t quite know. From Lewis Carroll’s manuscript copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 1862–4.
The Arabian Nights or Basile’s Pentameron had not implied a child audience, and the stories are raunchy and explicit in ways that would not meet the conditions of the nine o’clock watershed. Perrault’s Contes and Grimms’ Tales included children in their sights, but not exclusively. The first chapbooks did not single out child readers, but from the early nineteenth century, writers, collectors, editors, re-tellers, and publishers began aiming specifically at the young. How did the change happen, from Shakespeare’s dramas and the Grimm Brothers’ collection to this modern focus on fairy tales as a necessary but tricky tool in child development?
The rejection of fairy tales by critics such as Locke and Rousseau was moved by generally enlightened principles and rational ideals: bogeymen were traditionally used by nurses and parents to frighten children into good behaviour and the stories were full of scare figures—ogres, witches, monsters. The motifs of child-snatchers like the Sandman and witches were invoked as threats. Excitable young people were prone to nightmares, and adults should not over-excite them. Women were targets of these criticisms, bracketed with children on account of their work in child-raising, but also because they were seen as intellectually susceptible to foolish fantasies, too. The imagined popular—and foreign—origin of so many fairy tales also aroused condemnation among the educated. For example, when the Arabian Nights first appeared in English, Lord Shaftesbury protested against the enthusiasm of their reception: ‘[the tales] excite in them a passion for a mysterious Race of black Enchanters: such as of old were said to creep into Houses, and lead captive silly Women.’
Literary historians have consequently perceived a strong opposition between realistic fiction on the one hand and fantasy on the other, and made much of the resistance among educationalists to fairy tale, unless doctored to promote virtue. The rise of the novel of manners, of naturalistic representations in fiction and of a commitment to contemporary social settings (Auden’s ‘feigned histories’) accompanied a decline of esteem for fabulist forms and fantasy conventions. What Lewis calls the realism of presentation was admired, to the disadvantage of magic and enchantment. Fairy tales had however always had detractors, even among those who were writig them. Perrault was quick to present his tales as mere sornettes (trifles) and the earliest readers of the Nights, including one of their greatest imitators, Anthony Hamilton, also scoffed at the stories as old wives’ tales. Nonsense had its place, in the playground and the nursery; Richard Dawkins is only the latest critic to proclaim that putting fantasy behind one is part of growing up.
But children did not and do not turn to books for witty descriptions of manners and morals in the Pump Room at Bath. It needs no prior experience, by contrast, for the events recounted in fairy tales to make a child laugh or shiver spontaneously. Sometimes, in fact often, a child is the hero or heroine, so identification can be immediate. And children could be allowed to believe in magic and metamorphosis, though their elders had to put away such childish things, and believe only in the wonders of the Bible.
Caroline Sumpter, in her excellent book on the Victorian press, has however modified this traditional contrast in a most interesting way. She discusses how popular journalistic media in the eighteenth century had already adopted ‘the Fairy Way of writing’, and that fairy tales began circulating in the new periodicals: the Arabian Nights were serialized over several months to huge excitement—and imitation; printers like John Newbery began to re-tell home-grown legends and tales for child readers; and, from the heartlands of Romanticism, Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view).
The Romantic vision of childhood led to the triumph of the imagination, but also to the belief that the faculty of make-believe was a child’s special privilege—J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has escaped what Wordsworth called ‘the shades of the prison house’. Grown-ups yearned to regain that paradise—the land of the lost boys—and evoking this secondary world became a powerful spur to new fairytale fictions. These were often dreams of young protagonists putting warped adult society to rights: Alice is a supreme example, a little girl who, like the little boy in Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, questions adult folly. Some children in Victorian fairy tales are bad seeds, but most of them hold up ideals for a better world.
So fairy tale, while aimed especially at modern children, hovered as a form of literature between them and adults; it was, in many senses, always a crossover form of quite exceptional fertility, efflorescing into works by Hans Andersen, George MacDonald, E. Nesbit, Diana Wynne-Jones, and Neil Gaiman. The adult reader has never quit the scene: as parents, as grandparents, as teachers, as babysitters, we have continued to read and watch fairy tales alongside the young, simply for our own pleasure. Yet the implied childish angle of view shapes the characters and their transformations in the story. Pictures are crucial to the appeal made to the ideal child reader and, on the whole, the role of artists who helped create fairy tales has been neglected. Andrew Lang’s huge success with the Fairy Books owes a great deal to the richly detailed Pre-Raphaelite wood engravings by H.
J. Ford, with their elongated, graceful, and impossibly long-haired heroines in medieval jewels and costumes. Artists such as Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane, Lotte Reiniger, and Walt Disney have also defined the feel and flavour of the genre as much as the writers they have visualized for the page and the screen; they have also conducted a conversation among themselves, which continues: Edward Scissorhands could have been drawn by Rackham and neither artist’s work would look the way it does without Reiniger (see Figures 3, 12, 13, and 15).
Child Readers: The Story Nook and the Niche Market
In the very first printed fairy tales (Perrault in English chapbooks), the stories were illustrated with crude but pointed woodcuts: Jack tiny beside the enormous head of the giant, Bluebeard’s wife hauled by her hair, with the brothers tiny figures at full tilt in the background. But printing technology would soon make books with pictures one of the most exciting and successful ventures of the nineteenth century, and fairy tales began to be produced deliberately to appeal to an audience of young readers. Light-heartedness, humour, and a certain nonchalance helped adapt the matter of fairy tale to the new child audience. Fairy tales shifted to a comic register—‘pills for melancholy’. It is significant that when the Grimms were first translated and published in English by Edgar Taylor in 1823, Cruikshank set a mood of jolly good fun, or silly, whacky nonsense, in the spirit of nursery rhymes such as the story of ‘Old Dame Trot and her Marvellous Cat’.
Cruikshank’s frontispieces show a comical little grandpa roaring with laughter and kicking up his heels, and a venerable granny or Mother Goose gathering a rapt clutch of little ones around her knees.
In this way the Victorians nudged the material into the nursery. Cruikshank’s pictures draw us—the readers—into the scene of storytelling, just as the images of Old Mother Goose and Mother Bunch did in other books of fairy tales. His illustrations for the two volumes of Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories set a trend not only in this country but all over the world, because the tales were definitively presented for the entertainment of little ones, and amended and cut accordingly, the terrors defused by the artist’s genial caricatures of the ogres and other adversaries. The emphasis falls on the high spirits of the heroes and heroines, not on the ghastly ordeals they suffer. Cruikshank’s pictures are gay in the old sense: they give us sweet-faced heroines, plucky lads, and dancing elves. The magic animals are comical and endearing, the giants are goofy, their rage absurd and easily managed; and he does not illustrate the cruellest tales like ‘Snow White’ or ‘The Juniper Tree’ (see Figure 10).
The flow of stories began to form a new watershed in the territory of narrative, built of books made with children in mind, lavishly illustrated to increase their appeal. So successful was the attempt that copies of early children’s fairytale books have become scarce—especially copies that haven’t been damaged, the villain’s face scribbled over, the monster torn out. But survivors from their readers’ tough love spread a feast of wit and colour: harlequinades and concertinas, toy books like miniature theatres, pop-ups and sliding tabs bring the familiar plots to life with exuberant resourcefulness. These possibilities, growing more and more diverse through the nineteenth century, as brilliant twists to reproduction and printing technologies were developed, wrought a major change in the history of fairy tales.
Later, after Taylor’s edition proved such a success, Cruikshank made his own selection for a book called The Fairy Library, which came out in 1853–4; he tempered the tales and added others. His family was all too familiar with Gin Lane, and Cruikshank was an ardent campaigner against drink, the ravager of so many. In his version of ‘Cinderella’, the fountains flow with lemonade at her wedding.
Figure 10 Devices of enchantment: ‘Then the fox stretched out its tail again, and away they went … ’. ‘The Golden Bird’ by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1825–6.
Dickens instantly responded with a furious protest at his friend’s bowdlerization, as he saw it. He rose to the defence of the tales’ truth to life in an article called ‘Frauds on the Fairies’: ‘the little books [themselves], nurseries of fancy as they are, should be preserved. To preserve them in their usefulness, they must be as much preserved in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact. Whoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.’
But Dickens was not heard. After the transformation of the Grimms had taken place, many other fairytale collections were similarly de-fanged. The perception of them was startlingly mild, and indeed Dickens, that fierce champion of unadulterated fairy tales, seems to be unaware of ‘The Juniper Tree’ or even ‘Snow White’ when he declares: ‘It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force—many such good things have been first nourished in the child’s heart by this powerful aid.’
The age of the stories’ heroes and heroines begins to grow younger and younger alongside their readers. Dickens and Andersen both sought popular success by performing their stories live, often adding pictures: Dickens was a brilliant mimic and used a magic lantern; Andersen was a wizard at making paper cut-out figures.
Hans Christian Andersen is the most significant original creator of fairy tales of the Victorian period, when the genre settled as suitable children’s fare. He drew inspiration from his family—his travelling father (a fisherman), his fanciful grandmother, and his mother, a washerwoman on the margins of respectability. But he never fully admitted his indebtedness to them—Andersen’s vanity and snobbery are legendary. He was not however working alone as a literary innovator, either, and it was a friend and mentor who, aware of the literary fashions in Germany, encouraged the young writer to leave off his plodding epics and try his hand at wonder. Like Dickens and unlike the Grimms, Andersen consciously operated as an original author, and altered, expanded, and embroidered his source material, ranging from melodrama to jokiness, and putting an unmistakable stamp of his own: maudlin, even morbid stories like ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘The Little Match Girl’, and thrilling, peculiar adventures, like ‘The Tinder Box’ and ‘The Shadow’, are rightly considered classics.
The fairy way of writing, packaged and pictured for younger readers, became a mode of communicating moral values, political dreams, and even scientific knowledge. It provided Victorian, Edwardian, and, later, contemporary writers with a form through which they could express their experiences and ideals. Fairy tales settled into the canon of childhood education, and became recommended reading while growing up because they stimulate the mind’s capacity to visualize and follow a story, because they convey real conditions and teach wisdom in dealing with life’s experiences, especially the passage through adolescence. With these writers a golden age of writing for children began; the remarkable flowering of the form, especially in Britain, exhibits features consciously adapted from Perrault, Grimm, and the Arabian Nights; it exploits the possibilities of the wonders which fairytale inventors had naturalized in the landscape of the imagination.
Darkness Rising: Fairy Tale and Contemporary Art
The Grimms have been illustrated in a thousand ways by a multitude of artists since Cruikshank, and the tone is darkening, in the work of artists like Paula Rego who embrace the graphic tradition and its skills (see Figure 7). In 1969 the artist David Hockney chose six fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and illustrated them with intense, spare, spiky etchings. The tiny leather-bound book is a classic of visual storytelling; it was an immediate huge success, considered a breakthrough in print-making, a sign of Sixties energy and swinging London; its thirty-nine images constantly tour the world and continue to reappear in the illustrations and designs of other books, films, and operas.
Figure 11 How to hide from a cruel princess: ‘The fish swallowed the boy and dived to the bottom of the lake.’ David Hockney, ‘The Boy Hidden in a Fish’, from ‘The Little Sea Hare’, in Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, 1969.
The tale of ‘Fundevogel’ (Foundling Bird)—a miniature in the Grimm collection—brought out the virtuoso in Hockney. The pot in which Foundling Bird is going to be thrown is winking with bubbles of water on the boil; it looks utterly ordinary, but at the same time brimming with poisonous menace. This is the true spirit of the uncanny: the banal holds terrible secrets. Turn the page and the cook in profile holds up her spoon like a cudgel. Later, Hockney does the children’s transformations as they flee her: the rose and the church and the lake … each of them intensely filled with presence, even though the book in which they appear is smaller than a playing card.