Fairies were not altogether unknown in the Age of Reason, though the Royal Society kept no record of their delicate transactions. The little Betty of Steele’s paper, who terrified the maids with her accounts of “Fairies and Sprights”, must have learned them, as children do, from the “Grasshoppers’ Library”; for the pedlar had no such tales in print.

They were sometimes told as a mixture of ballad and fairy tale—a story with snatches of ballad rhyme. Children guarded them jealously, passing them on word for word, with none of the slips that a printer would have made.

Such a tale was “Child Rowland”, first set down by Jamieson in 1814,[18] as an old country tailor told it to him when he was seven or eight years old. But that old tailor had heard it in his own childhood, and so, doubtless had his great-grandfathers in theirs; for this tale of the three brothers seeking their lost sister, of her being stolen by the King of Elfland and kept under a spell, is the same that Shakespeare quoted in King Lear:

A child would remember the giant-formula, though he forgot every word of that “easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity” which Mr. Locke prescribed for him; he would remember the whole exquisite story: how the youngest brother found his sister, and what passed between them (most of it in rhyme) and how he fought with the Elf-King and broke the spell.

If Child Rowland had been the only story of its kind, Mr. Locke had yet to reckon with the fancies that a child might weave for himself out of common experience: the moving tree that casts the shadow of a pursuing giant, the wind that wears an invisible cloak, the enchanter sun who can pave any road with gold. These baffled all his efforts to drive fairies out of the nursery.

But printed tales, before Perrault, were few enough: in prose, the giant killers, “Hickathrift” and “Jack”; in rhyme, “Catskin” and “Tom Thumb” and “Whittington”. Like printed ballads, they favoured themes of action and reality. Catskin, the English Cinderella, did without a fairy godmother; Tom Thumb, although he tilted with the knights of the Round Table, never saw Fairyland till he died, and Whittington’s cat was a mere mouser, a poor relation of Puss in Boots.

The truth is that a child never asks himself whether a tale belongs to the dream world or to the world of reality, because either will serve his turn, and either may be true. Any setting convinces him if the adventure hold; and a tale that lost its imaginative colouring in the chap-books might regain it in a winter night.

Between 1690 and 1790, there is little change in “The Pleasant History of Thomas Hickathrift”,[19] and not a trace in print of the “astonishing image” that Coleridge remembered: the “whole rookery that flew out of the giant’s beard, scared by the tremendous voice with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic Tom Hickathrift”.[20] The nearest thing to it (in a chap-book of 1780) is the likening of the giant’s head, when it was off, to “the root of a mighty Oak.” But this image of the monstrous beard, a piece of pure myth, if it were not the addition of some imaginative teller, came down from a time when childlike men invented it to explain the giant shapes of trees. A child, recognizing the analogy, feels the same shock of surprise and pleasure as his forest-dwelling ancestors, and finds in this play of likeness and contrast, the source and sustaining interest of all giant tales. For there never was a giant without dwarfs to measure him, nor a dwarf that had not his giant; nor indeed is Jack’s fight with Blunderbore a more engrossing spectacle than Tom Thumb dancing a Galliard on the Queen’s left hand.[21]

Yet there is little of the fairy about Tom Thumb. He is a real child, mischievous, even thievish,—taking advantage of his size to creep into other boys’ cherry-bags and steal. His one poor trick of magic is to hang pots upon a sunbeam, his one adventure into romance, a mock-heroic episode at King Arthur’s court.

When Dr. Johnson “withdrew his attention” from the great man who bored him and “thought about Tom Thumb”, the escape was not from dull facts into a world of dreams, but from the pedantry of words into a simple realism.

Given a little creature in a land of giants, Tom’s experiences are strictly logical. He stands on the edge of a bowl in which his mother is mixing batter, and falls in. When his mother goes milking, she ties him to a thistle, and he is swallowed by a cow. A raven that spies him walking in a furrow carries him off “even like a grain of corn”.

As for his life at Court, there is example for it, “Tom being a dwarf”; nor was he the first mischief-maker to find his way there, nor the first poor man’s son that overcame his betters. But his method of attack was new; no champion in the annals of romance had beaten Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram and Sir Guy with no other weapon than a laugh.

At Court, Tom bears himself as to the manner born; wears the King’s signet for a girdle, creeps nimbly into the royal button-hole, and finds a place, sooner than most courtiers, “near his Highness heart”. At home, he is still the gentle scapegrace beloved of village folk. If he craves a boon of the King, it is to relieve the wants of his parents: and the boon,

amounts to the great sum of threepence,

There is a kind of natural magic in all this that a child can grasp without the help of a magician. Tom Thumb although he is wingless, can wear a fairy dress: an oak-leaf hat, a spider-woven shirt, hose and doublet of thistle-down and

Small creatures that creep among grass-blades seem to have furnished the rhymer with analogies. Tom’s house is but half a mile from the court, yet he takes two days and nights to make the journey; he sleeps in a walnut-shell, and his parents feast him three days upon a hazel-nut,

“A few moist April drops” are enough to delay his return, till his “careful father” takes a “birding trunk” and with a single blast, blows him back to court.

Last comes the notable account of his death, which tells how the doctors examined him through “a fine perspective glass” and found—

The rhyme is a dwarf epic, perhaps begun by some child that had found an ant-hill, or a thistle taller than himself; carried on, with a phrase here and a picture there from older tales, by the “careful father”, who set it to the unequal beat of little feet at his side.

But no child could endure the unhappy end. A second part and a third (both sorry imitations of the first) brought the “little knight” back to fresh adventures; and even the printers of instructive books understood the value of his name on a title-page.

Catskin,[22] long forgotten through the more glorious transformations of her French sister, could hold Dr. Primrose’s children with the old theme of disguise and changing fortune. Five parts in verse gave her whole history: how she was banished, like Cordelia, by an angry father; how she disguised herself in a hood of Catskin, and took service in a great house; how (following here the very print of the Glass Slipper) she went to the ball and danced with a Knight; and how, one day when she forgot her Catskin hood, the Knight, discovering her “in rich attire”, fell in love with her and married her.

English folk-tales, compared with others more magical, are like the toys that a child will make for himself out of a stick, beside the fine inventions of a conjurer; they appeal chiefly to practical interests, and leave much to the imagination. Jack killed Cormoran and Blunderbore and the giant with two heads before anybody thought of giving him a cap of knowledge, or shoes of swiftness, or even a magic sword. These things were the addition of a Second Part.

Indeed, a tale never was so plain that it gathered no colour in the telling. There was an old story of Whittington without a Cat,[23] and how the cat got into the story was more than the whole Society of Antiquaries could tell, though it met together in 1771 expressly to discuss the problem. In our own time, most antiquaries are agreed that the Cat found its way from Genoa or Persia or Portugal,—no matter whence,—and that it is a piece of folk-lore grafted upon authentic biography. Try as they will, they can get little nearer to the heart of the matter than Mr. Pepys, when he watched the puppet-show of Whittington at Southwark Fair, “which was pretty to see”, and remarked “how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too”.

The very truth underlying the modest fable of the Cat and the song of Bow Bells, had more power than the Wishing Hat of Fortunatus, and would have carried more fanciful embellishments; but it is never safe to lose sight of the double paradox of childish imagination—that reality is romance, romance, reality. If “Cendrillon” had never been done into English, Catskin or Cap o’ Rushes might have worn the Glass Slipper and ridden in a Pumpkin Coach. As it fell out, the little kitchen-maid surpassed them both,—the girl whose ragged dress was transformed at a touch into “drap d’or et d’argent, tout charmarez de pierreries.”

Cinderella’s biographer was no less a person than Charles Perrault, a member of the French Academy, and a friend of La Fontaine. He also wrote the famous “histories” of little Red Riding Hood and the Sleeping Beauty, of Hop o’ my Thumb (a distant kinsman of Tom Thumb), Puss in Boots, and others who have lived so long in English nurseries that their French names are forgotten.

In his youth, Perrault had rebelled against the formal education of his day, and when he was little short of seventy, he turned from his serious works and produced a children’s book by which he is still remembered.

Fairy tales, indeed, were already popular in France, but they had become a part of that fantastic world into which the Court of Louis XIV had been transformed: a world of courtly shepherds and shepherdesses, who told “Contes des fées” (“mitonner”, Madame de Sévigné says they called it) to prove that they had gone back to the Golden Age.

Perrault knew better than to copy them. He wrote for a public at once more appreciative and more critical: the nursery society of which, in the introduction to his rhymed tales (1695) he wrote: “On les voit dans la tristesse et dans l’abbattement tant que le héros ou l’héroine du conte sont dans le malheur, et s’écrie de joie quand le temps de leur bonheur arrive”.

His knowledge of children alone might have carried him through, but his choice of a collaborator was an act of genius. When in 1697, the Contes were collected and published,[24] it was not to M. Perrault of the Academy that the “privelège du roy” was granted, but to his ten-years-old son, Perrault Darmancour. The device of anonymity was common among the early writers of children’s books, and some critics have suggested that it was beneath the dignity of an Academician to acknowledge the authorship of fairy-tales; but Mlle. L’Héritier, Perrault’s niece, who contributed one tale to the book, declared, before it was published, that little Darmancour could write fairy-tales “with much charm”; and Mr. Andrew Lang, following M. Lacroix, believed that the boy had a real share in the book. He detected the actual note of a child’s voice in the dialogue:

“Toc, toc, qui est là? C’est voire fille, le petit chaperon rouge—qui vous apporte une galette et un petit pot de beurre que ma mère vous envoye ... tira la chevillette, la bobinette chera”. But this, after all, is the language of fairy-tales. Here it is again, when the little princess finds the old woman spinning: “Que faites-vous là, ma bonne femme—je file, ma belle enfant.... Ha! que cela est joli ... comment faites-vous? Donnez-moy que je voye si j’en ferois bien autant”.

It is the language of fairy-tales; and that, of course, is child’s talk. But the father’s part is clear in the artistic handling of the tales, in the addition of “Moralités” after the manner of Æsop, and in asides of laughter or comment intended for grown-up ears,—a sly dig at the lawyers in “Le Maître Chat”, or at women, through the Ogre’s wife in “Le Petit Poucet”.

Some such partnership between youth and age there must be in all real children’s books; whether it be arranged between them is another matter. The wise writer will always take hints from the child, will remember the way he turns his phrases, the tones of his voice, the things that interest him; but if he remember his own childhood, it may serve as well.

These stories are all memories of childhood. As their more intimate title, “Contes de ma Mère Loye”, suggests, they were handed down for centuries, gathering new features by the way, till this boy of Perrault’s had them from his nurse. But no child could have written them as Perrault wrote. “Cinderella”—the “story of stories”: the boy could repeat it word for word; but if he had tried to set it down, he would have lost the thread at the point of transformation. Those dramatic strokes of the clock would have been forgotten in the music of the ball. This balance, this art of simplicity is the work of a man,—an academician, the writer who, in a French “Battle of the Books”, took up the cause of the Moderns against the Classics, and yet lived in the kindly reasonable humour that belongs to the Augustan Age.

Perrault’s Contes are essentially romantic; the Sleeping Beauty gives place only to Persephone,—she and her sleeping household, shut in by the great hedge of thorns; but every tale has quaint human touches which puts it precisely at the right angle to life: the little girl, her basket of goodies, and the sick grandmother, all things of experience; and then, with a quick turn of the “World Upside Down”—the Grandmother that was really a Wolf in bed. A nurse might have told it well enough; but the artist knew the true colours, the just economy of lines, and the point where one could turn from the pictures and listen for talk.

Perrault must have followed every footstep in the tales with the eager sympathy of the boy at his side. Together they hid with Little Thumb under his father’s stool, and heard the poor parents’ desperate shift to be rid of their children. They were with the tiny hero when he filled his pockets full of small white pebbles, and made the trail by which he and his six brothers found their way home; and they joined in the hopeless search of the second adventure, when Little Thumb dropped crumbs instead of pebbles, and the birds ate them. That brings the story to the very heart of interest: when the hungry boys, lost in the forest at nightfall, fancied they heard on every side of them the howling of wolves coming to eat them up. For then Little Thumb, the youngest and smallest and cleverest of them all “climbed up to the top of a tree, to see if he could discover anything; and having turned his head about on every side, he saw at last a glimmering light, like that of a candle, but a long way from the forest.” This is matter of romance, though there is nothing in it beyond Nature. But—that “glimmering light” threw its beams from an Ogre’s window, and there was yet to come the Adventure of the Seven League Boots: those boots that would fit a foot of any size, from the Ogre’s to Little Thumb’s; in which either Perrault père or Perrault fils could go seven leagues at a step.

No copy remains of the first translation of Perrault’s tales by Samber (1729),[25] nor of John Newbery’s edition; but a seventh edition appeared in 1777, under the title of “Mother Goose’s Tales”, and an eighth in 1780. At the close of the century, Harris printed another, “Englished by G. M. Gent”, of which copies are still found. The book fits a very small hand, and though every trace of gold be rubbed off the covers, the Dutch paper pattern can still be seen through diamond patches of colour. The frontispiece shows an old woman with her distaff, seated by the fire, telling stories to a group of children; and there are quaint woodcuts in the text.

The welcome given in court circles to fairy-tales marked the beginning, or rather, a special phase of romantic interest; but this had little to do with children. Such tales, originally simple, caught the elaborate grace of their new setting, and borrowing variations from the newly-translated eastern stories, ran into an endless series in the Cabinet des Fées. In English they were represented chiefly by the Contes of Madame la Comtesse D’Aulnoy, which were translated before Perrault’s.[26] These were common as nursery chap-books in the second half of the century.

Nothing could be more unlike the simplicity of Perrault. Madame D’Aulnoy’s stories are rich in embroideries of the folk-tale themes. She makes something very like a novel of her “L’Oiseau Bleu”; but the adventures of the bird-lover are well known in such ballads as “the Earl of Mar’s Daughter”, and no artifice can hide the traces of an old “cante-fable”. The wicked step-mother of all fairy-tales transforms the prince into a bird; but the spy set to watch the princess at last falls asleep, and then the princess opens her little window and sings:

“These,” explains Madame la Comtesse, “are her own words, which it has been thought best to keep unchanged”. Elsewhere she is less concerned for her originals. Her “Finette Cendron” (the English “Finetta”) is an odd mixture of Perrault’s “Cinderella” and “Little Thumb”, in which both stories are spoilt.

Gold and silver are the meanest ornaments in these fairy novels; they have much of the glitter of a transformation scene. When the colours fade, there is only a confused memory of the setting; but fairies and talking animals remain. Children are not likely to forget “The White Cat”, “The Hind in the Wood”, or that lurker in dark corners of the nursery, “The Yellow Dwarf”.

As the century advanced, grown-up persons from time to time ventured into the unknown regions of romance; and it is odd to find that the more thrilling their discoveries in poetry and fiction, the more determined they were to hide them from children, or to cloak them with moral applications.

The rhymed “Moralités” which Perrault added to his tales were a tactful concession to public opinion. No moralist ever succeeded in reforming Puss in Boots, though one, early in the nineteenth century, claimed him as the ancestor of a Moral Cat. It is clear, however, that Perrault, left to himself, would have trusted his readers to find their own morals; for in the dedication to his Contes he says: “they all contain a very obvious moral, and one that shows itself more or less according to the insight of the reader.”

The task of reconciling parents and children upon the vexed question of the supernatural was achieved by Madame le Prince de Beaumont, with her educational or moral fairy-tales.

Allegorical persons often appeared in the court adaptations with names and images drawn from classical authority. Mlle. L’Héritier had already foisted into the old folk-tale of “Diamonds and Toads” a fairy called “Eloquentia Nativa”; but Madame de Beaumont’s tales were simpler and more convincing. From the parental point of view she had undoubted advantages over her predecessors in the fairy-tale, for, in the words of an editor of the Cabinet des Fées, she “devoted herself entirely to the education of children”.

Born in 1711, six years after the death of Madame D’Aulnoy, she spent a great part of her life in London. Her Magasin des Enfans, published in 1757,[27] properly belongs to the type of moral miscellany introduced by Sarah Fielding’s Governess[28]; but the schoolroom setting could not spoil fairy-tales which, however obvious their moral purposes, had refreshing touches of humour. In her intercourse with English children, Madame de Beaumont had somehow acquired a belief in the educational value of nonsense.

Charles Lamb’s rhyme of “Prince Dorus” is simply an adaptation of Madame de Beaumont’s “Prince Désir”; her story of “The Three Wishes” found in so many chap-books, is a well-known “droll”, and there are playful touches in her most serious tales.

Yet a child might venture a protest on discovering that the little white rabbit in “Prince Chéri”, that leaps into the King’s arms as he rides hunting, is an educational fairy in disguise; and it is impossible not to sympathise with the prince who, in spite of a ring that pricks whenever he is naughty, becomes a scapegrace, and has to undergo a Circeian transformation ere he is reformed.

Like all successful gouvernantes, Madame de Beaumont can be severe. Her fairy in “Fatal et Fortune” deserves a place in Spartan folklore; this is how she answers the mother who pleads for a son doomed to misfortune:

“Vous ne savez pas ce que vous demandez. S’il n’est pas malheureux, il sera méchant!”

One at least of Madame de Beaumont’s tales is worthy of Perrault. “Beauty and the Beast” would decide her title to nursery fame, if she had written nothing else. In 1740, Madame de Villeneuve had spun out the same theme at extraordinary length; but the story as children know it first appeared in the Magasin des Enfans, and it bears all the marks of a genuine folk-tale.

It was late in the century before the Arabian tales,[29] translated from the French of M. Galland in 1708, appeared in English children’s books. In France, they received a welcome surpassing that of the fairy-tales, and produced a fantastic literature of supposed translations, in which Eastern imagery and the incidents of Western folk-lore were curiously mixed. Yet the new pattern was not altogether incongruous. Dwarfs and magicians were the stock figures of romance; the Quest of the Talking Bird, Singing Tree and Yellow Water was but a variant of the Fortune-Seeker’s adventures; the Magic Mirror a commonplace of fairy-tales; and there were old ballads, like “The Heir of Linne”, with Arabian, Persian and Turkish variants.

Eastern stories, nevertheless, had more in common with Court fairy-tales than with those of natural growth. They were woven, like oriental carpets, for Kings’ palaces, and the “Folk” elements were simply repeated as a part of the design. Children as yet knew nothing of these visions of splendour and terror, which turned the French Court from its pose of simplicity, and coloured the whole fabric of the Cabinet des Fées.

But the British tendency to moralise was never stronger than in the eighteenth century, and eastern fables and aphorisms were rich in illustrations of philosophy. Thus, for the greater part of the century, the English oriental tale was moralised, and if children came into any part of their legacy, it was either by courtesy of the moralist, or through illicit traffic with the pedlar.

Neither Steele nor Johnson mentions these tales among children’s books; but the “precious treasure” of Wordsworth’s childhood, a “little yellow canvas-covered book”,[30] although it was but “a slender abstract of the Arabian tales,” was within the reach of other children. Wordsworth tells how he and another boy hoarded their savings for many months to buy the “four large volumes” of “kindred matter”. Failing in resolution, they never got beyond the smaller book; yet this, if it had only the tales of the Merchant and the Ginni, the Fisherman, the Sleeper Awakened and the Magic Horse, would build them a city of dreams. Whereas it almost certainly contained the Voyages of Sinbad,[31] and the two apocryphal tales, never doubted by children, “Aladdin” and “The Forty Thieves”.

Such a book was a maker of magicians. The child that possessed it found himself richer than Ali Baba, for he knew the magic formula that would open all the treasure-caves of the East. He was the shipmate of Sinbad, that sailor of enchanted seas; the fellow of Aladdin, possessing the ring and lamp that gave him mastery over slaves “terrible in aspect, vast in stature as the giants”, who could carry him a thousand leagues while he slept, or build in a single night a palace “more splendid than imagination can conceive”.

The tastes of Wordsworth and his schoolfellows were probably more catholic than those of the little De Quinceys, who discussed in the nursery the relative merits of the Arabian Nights, and dared to question the judgment of Mrs. Barbauld, “the queen of all the bluestockings”, because she preferred “Aladdin” and “Sinbad” to all the rest.[32] Most children would agree with her, for even the cave where they measured gold like grain lacks the splendour of the garden in which the trees “were all covered with precious stones instead of fruit, and each tree was of a different kind, and had different jewels of all colours, green and white and yellow and red.”

The palace, though all its storeys were of jasper and alabaster and porphyry and mosaics, was not half so dazzling as this garden of jewels.

As to “Sinbad”, it may be, as De Quincey judged, “a mere succession of adventures”; to a child, it is a second Odyssey. The giant that throws masses of rock at Sinbad’s raft is a brother of the Cyclops; Proteus is one with the Old Man of the Sea. But the adventures of Odysseus are plain and straight compared with the extravagant splendours of this merchant-adventurer. He walks by a river of dreams (which is yet a real river) till he finds the tall vessel that pleases him; but once afloat with black slaves and pages and bales of merchandise, he cares less for the occupation of traffic than for “the pleasure of seeing the countries and islands of the world”.

This is the very desire of the child; nor did dream-islands ever yield romance in greater profusion. One, indeed, is no island, but a great fish, on whose back the sand has been heaped up till trees have grown upon it; no sooner is the sailors’ fire alight than the solid ground sinks under their feet. In another, Sinbad descries from the top of a tree a “white object of enormous size”, the egg of a Roc, that gigantic bird whose wings obscure the sun.

Sir John Mandeville might have set down the adventures of the rhinoceros and the elephant, the valley of diamonds or the river of jacinths and pearls; but his account could never compare with this for reality.

These voyages among the islands, from El-Basrah to Sarandib, though they are set down in the language of myth, are as easy to trace upon a map as the wanderings of Odysseus between Troy and Ithaca. Nor is the Eastern story-teller without a Homeric interest in things seen and discovered, both great and small: a thousand horsemen clad in gold and silk, or a letter sent by the King of Sarandib to Harun Er-Rashid, written “on the skin of the Khawi, which is finer than parchment”, in writing of ultramarine.

The quality of realism is indeed one of the distinguishing features of Eastern romance. Sinbad’s account of the building of his raft from the planks and ropes of the wrecked ship almost reads like an entry in Crusoe’s journal, and there is the characteristic opening which simulates a narrative of fact: “In the time of the Khalifeh, the Prince of the Faithful Harun Er-Rashid, in the city of Baghdad”. All the sounds and colours of the East are in the setting of these tales, all the details of life and traffic; and yet it is never out of keeping with the supernatural. Wizards and fairies simply move among the natural inhabitants of bazaars or palaces,—a thing in no way surprising to a child; and forms of enchantment surpassing the illusions of a dream rise up in existing cities.

In a realistic age, such a setting would atone for the elements of unreality; yet the authors of the Tatler and Spectator (those gentle schoolmasters of grown-up children) held it of less account than the aptness of the stories to “reflection” and philosophy. For this they could forgive “that Oriental extravagance which is mixed with it”; but the more philosophical the tale, the less it needed a real background and moving figures. Vague allusions took the place of description, and incidents were turned to illustrate particular virtues or to point the arguments of Mr. Locke. Thus treated, the stories were said to be “writ after the Eastern manner, but somewhat more correct.”

Johnson followed the same method, but with more profound philosophy, in the Rambler; and it was in this “moralised” form that Eastern tales came, straight from the pages of the Spectator and the Rambler, into the first books which John Newbery devised “for the Amusement and Instruction” of children.

Thus the story of Alnascar, the Persian Glassman,[33] is printed in the last section (“Letters, Poems, Tales and Fables”) of A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies: or, a Private Tutor for little Masters and Misses (1763); and the Twelfth Day Gift (1767) has Johnson’s tale of Obidah and the Hermit,[34] here called “The Progress of Life”.

Nor was there any attempt to choose the lighter and more entertaining stories for children. Such a tale, for example, as Will Honeycomb’s of Pug’s adventures (Spectator, 343), which Addison borrowed from the Chinese Tales, never found its way into the early children’s miscellanies, though Mrs. Barbauld, at the close of the century, produced a somewhat similar series of adventures in Evenings at Home.

In France, as in England, there were Eastern tales which came half way between the romance of pure adventure and the “Moral Tale”. Marmontel chose an Eastern setting for two of his stories; but English writers for children not unnaturally preferred Johnson’s “oriental” examples of conduct and duty, and were willing to sacrifice interest to moral significance.

Johnson himself would have advised them better. “Babies do not want to hear about babies,” he told Mrs. Thrale; “they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.”[35]

He expressly warned her against the nursery editions which contained, as a substitute for genuine romance, his own moralised “Eastern tales”. But the Great Cham’s remarks upon children’s books were not published with his works, and parents went on buying the books which he declared that children never read.

Mrs. Sheridan’s Nourjahad (1767) appeared as a nursery chap-book in 1808, and Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of “Murad the Unlucky” (one of the Popular Tales), gives similar contrasted examples of wisdom and folly.

Minor moralists were unnumbered. Mr. Cooper, the author of Blossoms of Morality, having by his own account “accidentally met with a French edition of the Arabian Nights during a trip on the Continent”, and being “induced to wade through it, having no other book at hand”, was so far moved by the entertainment as to select and adapt some of the tales “for Youth”, under the title of The Oriental Moralist.[36]

A remark at the close of “Prince Agib and the Adamantine Mountain” gives a fair example of his treatment: “It may not be amiss to remind my youthful readers that an unwarrantable curiosity, and a degree of obstinacy too natural to young people, were the causes of the third Calender losing his eye”.

The author of The Governess; or, Evening Amusements at a Boarding School, though she allows Persian stories, admits that whenever she found “a sentiment that would answer her purpose”, she did not hesitate to “make it breathe from the lips of the Eastern Sage”.

The Grateful Turk, one of Thomas Day’s moral tales, appeared in the same year as Mrs. Pilkington’s Asiatic Princess, and Miss Porter followed with The Two Princes of Persia, “adapted to youth”. Alluring titles, such as “The Ruby Heart” and “The Enchanted Mirror” were another means of recommending improving histories.

Yet the oriental tale suffered less than native romance and folk-lore, by this sort of adaptation. Perhaps the Jinn, being “the slaves of him who held the lamp”, or “of him on whose hand was the ring”, were more helpless than other spirits in the power of the Moralist.

English fairies were not so submissive; indeed they played strange tricks with the little didactic works that bore their names.

Already (in 1746) Tom Thumb had turned pedagogue and published his “Travels”,[37] a barefaced introduction to Topography. Tom Thumb’s Folio (1768) was followed in 1780 by Tom Thumb’s Exhibition, “being an account of many valuable and surprising curiosities which he had collected in the course of his travels, for the instruction and amusement of the British Youths”.

This is somewhat more entertaining than the “Travels”, having an odd humour of its own; but the Tom Thumb of the Exhibition has changed his fairy dress for a schoolmaster’s gown, and lies in wait for pupils “in a large commodious room at Mr. Lovegood’s, number 3 in Wiseman’s Buildings, at the upper end of Education Road”.

Here he examines, under the lens of an “Intellectual Perspective Glass”, the unreasonable things which please a child. For example, unripe apples or gooseberries thus scrutinized, “instantly appear to be changed into a swarm of worms and other devouring reptiles”.

From this it is tempting to infer that the same merciless glass had discovered, instead of the traditional wren or robin, that “little feathered songster called the Advice Bird” which a child might see at the Exhibition. Such a lens, focussed upon Whittington’s Cat, would doubtless prove it a figment, or applied to a magic sword, might instantly change it to a piece of rusty iron.

Old ballads suffered the same transforming process. Robin Goodfellow,[38] dragged from his haunts to show “a virtuous little mortal” the way to Fairyland, took on the likeness of a Philosopher, the better to fool his victims.

Fairyland, he asserts, is “neither a continent nor an island, and yet it is both or either. It exists in the air, at a distance of about five feet and a half or six feet at most from the surface of the Earth”.

The solution of this pleasing riddle is found in a diagram of the human frame, whereon the Fairyland of Philosophy is shown to exist nowhere but in a man’s head, hard by those notable tracts, the “Land of Courage” and the “Land of Dumplins”.

A knavish sprite, this, who can find matter for jests in a fairy revolution; for by his account, “the reigning Monarch Fancy, and Whim, his royal Consort” have usurped the throne of Oberon; and Imagination is their eldest son.

In such an age, the boldest outlaw would have much ado to rescue Robin Hood; and since Robin could point but a one-sided moral, the writer of little books forgot his virtues and published his “Life” as a “Warning-piece”. He, forsooth, “did not know how to work”, had “neglected to learn a trade”, and being justly outlawed, skulked with his “gang” in Sherwood Forest, living “what they called a merry life”.

The Two Children in the Wood afforded ampler scope for moral contrasts. Addison’s praise had included even the pretty fiction of the robins, on the authority of Horace and his doves; but the makers of toy-books were not satisfied with this. They expunged the robins and prepared two prose versions of the ballad, one expanding the story into a novel of domestic life, and the other marring it with a happy ending.[39]

The novel, an amusing medley, deals in an underplot with the adventures of the wicked Uncle at sea, laying bare a past about which the ballad was silent; the rest is concerned with the home life of the two children, and contains a chapter of stories told for their benefit. At the end (by way of reparation, perhaps) the ballad itself is printed. The novelist carries enough moral ballast to float it all, and anticipates its effect in rhyme:

But of all these “restorations”, none was a greater outrage than the attempt of a nursery moralist to rebuild the Enchanted Castle of Romance.

“The History of the Enchanted Castle; or, The Prettiest Book for Children” appeared in Francis Newbery’s list in 1777, and was reprinted for Harris early in the nineteenth century. On the title page it is further described as “the Enchanted Castle, situated in one of the Fortunate Isles and governed by the Giant Instruction. Written for the Entertainment of little Masters and Misses by Don Stephano Bunyano, Under-Secretary to the aforesaid Giant”.

The wheel has come full circle: folk-tales, ballads, romances, not one of the forms of popular literature has escaped. Here at last is the giant himself surrendering his stronghold to the moralist, delivering up captives and stolen, treasure, engaging Secretaries, and parcelling out the Enchanted Castle into a Picture Gallery, Museum and Library.

The parallel between the Giant Instruction and Giant Despair is sufficiently obvious; but the giant’s under-secretary, with official sagacity, turns it to account. He boldly proclaims himself “a distant relation of the famous John Bunyan, the pious and admired author of the Pilgrim’s Progress”, and proceeds to explain the symbolic pictures and curiosities in the Castle, after the manner of Mr. Interpreter.

Yet there is one rare thing among the oddities of this little book; a statement of aim which involves direct criticism of existing children’s books. This betrays the Giant’s intention to make children “as capable of thinking and understanding what is what (according to their years) as their Papas and Mammas, or as the greatest Philosophers and Divines in the whole Country”.

To this end it is forbidden to present even “very little Masters and Misses” with “idle nonsensical stories” and “silly unmeaning rhymes”.

It is little wonder that Wordsworth, remembering