Table Of ContentE F T
NGLISH AIRY ALES
AND
M E F T
ORE NGLISH AIRY ALES
a
ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales
Jack Zipes,Series Editor
Collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unearthed
a wealth of stories from around the world and published them in
English translations for the delight of general readers, young and old.
Most of these anthologies have been long out of print.
The ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales series brings back to
life these key anthologies of traditional tales from the golden age of
folklore discovery.Each volume provides a freshly typeset but otherwise
virtually unaltered edition of a classic work and each is enhanced by an
authoritative introduction by a top scholar.These insightful essays dis-
cuss the significance of the collection and its original collector; the
original collector’s methodology and translation practices;and the orig-
inal period context according to region or genre.
Certain to be of interest to folklorists,these classic collections are also
meant to serve as sources for storytellers and for sheer reading pleasure,
reviving as they do hundreds of folk stories, both reassuringly familiar
and excitingly strange.
forthcoming titles:
Creation Myths ofPrimitive America,by Jeremiah Curtin;
Introduction by Karl Kroeber
Folktales from Northern India, by William Crooke and
Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube;
Introduction by Sadhana Naithani
Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends,by Mary Frere;
Introduction by Kirin Narayan
Popular Tales and Fictions, by William Alexander Clouston;
Introduction by Christine Goldberg
Popular Tales of Ancient Egypt,by Gaston Maspero;
Introduction by Hasan El-Shamy
English Fairy Tale s
and
More English Fairy
Tale s
a
Joseph Jacobs
Edited and with an Introduction
by Donald Haase
Includes complete original illustrations by
John D. Batten
Santa Barbara,California
Denver,Colorado Oxford,England
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All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
- - - (hardcover)
- - - (e-book)
(cloth)
This edition reprints in its entirety and retains the original chapter sequence of
English Fairy Tales,collected and edited by Joseph Jacobs,published by David
Nutt,London,1890;and More English Fairy Tales, collected and edited by
Joseph Jacobs,published by David Nutt,London,1894.The texts of these edi-
tions have been altered only to fit an increased page dimension, to reflect con-
temporary typographical conventions, and to correct typographical errors and
other misleading errors in the texts.
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a
C
ONTENTS
Preface to this Edition vii
Introduction to this Edition ix
Bibliography xxxv
English Fairy Tales
Notes and References
More English Fairy Tales
Notes and References
Index to both volumes
About the Editor
a
P T E
REFACE TO HIS DITION
Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales ( ) and More English Fairy Tales
( ) are pioneering collections from the golden age of folktale collect-
ing, and they have been both berated and celebrated for the way they
have preserved the classic corpus of traditional English folktales.Because
of their canonical status, these two books have often been reprinted.
However, modern editions have shortchanged readers by underestimat-
ing the fascinating complexity and historical context of Jacobs’s work.
Like the influential collection of German fairy tales published by the
Brothers Grimm earlier in the nineteenth century,the two books of En-
glish fairy tales produced by Joseph Jacobs are hybrid texts where folk-
lore,children’s literature,and the eclectic scholarship of the Victorian era
intersect and assert their equal claims to attention.When late-twentieth-
century reprints strip away Jacobs’s important prefaces,notes,and refer-
ences in order to target the children’s book market, they remove from
view the vital intellectual dynamics and sociohistorical factors that
shaped his work.Similarly,the modern edition that preserves his schol-
arly apparatus but eliminates the original illustrations by John D.Batten
betrays the integrity of a collaborative project where the art does not sim-
ply decorate, but contributes to the synergy between collector and artist
in the interplay of story, image, and scholarship. In the case of Jacobs’s
first collection—English Fairy Tales—modern reprints have relied exclu-
sively on the third revised edition of that work,as published in .The
dominance of the third edition,however,has obscured the fact that En-
glish Fairy Tales was essentially a work in progress that Jacobs revised in
the course of its four editions published in , , ,and .Rare
as they are, these other editions of English Fairy Tales are significant
because they document Jacobs’s method of editing and adapting the tales
he collected.His revisions illuminate for us his priorities and concerns as
collector and adapter, and they help us to understand how the classical
Preface to This Edition
English fairy tale took shape in his hands.So,in order to draw attention
to the editorial history of Jacobs’s fairy-tale project, this dual edition
makes available the groundbreaking first edition of English Fairy Tales in
the form that it originally appeared and had its initial impact in .In
coupling that pioneering edition of English Fairy Tales with its sequel of
, More English Fairy Tales, this two-in-one volume provides readers
with a new resource for understanding, in context, the development of
the classic fairy tale in late Victorian England and for reassessing the
relationship of Jacobs’s canonical tales to the traditional English folktale
that they sought to preserve.
The texts of Jacobs’s two collections are reprinted here as they first
appeared in and , respectively.Typographical errors present in
the original editions have been corrected. In the case of English Fairy
Tales, a few misleading errors that affect meaning and that were correct-
ed in later editions have also been corrected here.A few minor errors in
puncuation and other obvious errors affecting the sense of sentences have
been corrected in both collections.However,inconsistencies in the texts
(for example,in spelling and capitalization),Jacobs’s mistakes in matters
of fact (like misdating the publication of English Fairy Tales in the pref-
ace to More English Fairy Tales),and mistakes he made in spelling foreign
words and titles have been left unaltered.
The original editions of English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy
Tales used as the basis of this combined edition are housed in the Eloise
Ramsey Collection of Literature for Young People in the Purdy/Kresge
Library of Wayne State University. I wish to acknowledge with thanks
the generous assistance of Karen Bacsanyi, Robert P. Holley, and Diane
Paldan for making the volumes available and for facilitating the process
of scanning and copying them. I am grateful to the Office of the Vice
President for Research at Wayne State University, which provided sup-
port for this project. I am also very much indebted to Julie Arrigo and
Kaushalya Krishnamoorthy for their expert research assistance. Finally,
this is for Connie, whose support endures through thirty years of fairy
tales and more fairy tales.
a
I T E
NTRODUCTION TO HIS DITION
Joseph Jacobs prefaced his collection of English fairy tales with a defiant
rhetorical question: “Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of
their own?”(vii).While English Fairy Tales( ) and More English Fairy
Tales ( ) intended to disprove that claim,the fact remained that a dis-
tinctly English fairy tale did not become firmly established or widely
known until the Victorian era. By any measure, the English fairy-tale
tradition had paled in contrast to the remarkable tales found on the con-
tinent.By the early nineteenth century,other European cultures had pro-
duced vital fairy-tale traditions that were influential even beyond their
borders. Italy had given birth to the modern literary fairy tale with two
groundbreaking works:Giovan Francesco Straparola’s Entertaining Nights
( – ) and Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone ( – ). France
could boast an entire library of literary fairy tales published in the late sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries by writers such as Marie-Catherine
d’Aulnoy,Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier,and Charles Perrault. By the late eigh-
teenth century,the French stock of fairy tales was so rich and so extensive
that Charles-Joseph Mayer published a forty-volume collection of these
tales in the Cabinet des fées ( – ).Fueled by nationalism and radical-
ly new aesthetic theories, Germany had sent forth not only the monu-
mental collection of folktales edited by the Brothers Grimm, but also
highly original literary fairy tales penned by Romantic authors such as
Ludwig Tieck,Novalis,and E.T.A.Hoffmann.Moreover,the Grimms’
model of collecting and editing folktales had inspired similar collections
throughout Europe,so that by the time Jacobs published his English Fairy
Tales, collectors in France and Italy had documented over one thousand
tales in each of those countries,as Jacobs himself pointed out ( ,vii).
Although the Grimms’ stories appeared in many English translations,
adaptations,and editions throughout the nineteenth century,their perva-
sive presence in England only underlined the absence of a comparable
Introduction to This Edition
collection of indigenous English tales.In fact,in the first English transla-
tion of the Grimms’tales,Edgar Taylor had urged collectors “to preserve,
while it can yet be done, the popular stories... of the British Empire”
(Taylor , ).
English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales,which Jacobs described
“as the best substitute that can be offered for an English Grimm”( c,
),are a belated response to this call.With the eighty-seven texts that he
published in these two books,Jacobs intended to initiate a recovery of tra-
ditional English storytelling and to present his readers with “the nucleus
of the English folk-tale”—however incomplete the representation may
have been.As Jacobs noted,“[T]he eighty-seven tales... in my two vol-
umes must represent the English folk-tale as far as my diligence has been
able to preserve it at this end of the nineteenth century. There is every
indication that they form but a scanty survival of the whole corpusof such
tales which must have existed in this country” ( c, – ). Current
scholarship has shown that the English folktale had been suffocated by
the rationalist and utilitarian strictures of Puritanism and the Enlighten-
ment. Jacobs himself believed that specific socioeconomic and cultural
conditions had prevented English tales from becoming more widely
known.In he surmised,“The only reason,I imagine,why such tales
have not hitherto been brought to light,is the lamentable gap between the
governing and recording classes and the dumb working classes of this
country—dumb to others but eloquent among themselves.It would be no
unpatriotic task to help to bridge over this gulf,by giving a common fund
of nursery literature to all classes of the English people,and,in any case,
it can do no harm to add to the innocent gaiety of the nation”(vii–viii).In
,in the third revised edition of English Fairy Tales, Jacobs offered an
additional explanation. He reasoned that provincial life in England was
less “conservative and tenacious” than in France, Italy, or Germany and
therefore had been less hospitable to the transmission and preservation of
the oral tradition.According to Jacobs,not only had the English peasant
“never had so vivid a social life”as his counterparts on the continent,but
in more recent times “railways and the telegraph [had] disintegrated”life
in the English countryside ( , ).In this Jacobs echoed his contem-
porary Edwin Sidney Hartland,who explained that his own collection of
English Fairy and Folk Tales could “not pretend to be more than a presen-
tation, in a more or less literary form, of a few of the traditional stories,
formerly no doubt rife in this country,but now fast disappearing under the
stress of modern life”([ ],vii).
