The Great British Fairytale

In National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England, Jennifer Schacker boldly claims that the England of the nineteenth century had no real fairy tales of its own and so had to depend on the collections of folk and fairy tales passed on to them from other nations. Recognizing the political and economic potential of fairy tales in other European countries, English publishing houses sought to translate and print these foreign tales for their English audiences. Schacker argues that in the process, fairy tales became powerful vehicles for conveying cultural knowledge in England. In addition to serving as moral or etiological stories for children, the way they were translated and fine-tuned allowed the English to position themselves as intellectually superior to their foreign neighbors. This, in Schacker’s view, helped build an English national identity that ushered them into the twentieth century.

The object of Schacker’s study is the folklore book or collection of traditional tales. All of these volumes were chosen by English publishing houses, she argues, because they had already achieved huge popularity in their native lands. Schacker specifically analyzes the contributions of four major works to the creation of a national identity in nineteenth-century England. These collections include, German Popular Stories translated by Edward Taylor from Grimms’ original Kinder und Hausmarchen, Fairy Legends and Traditions of Southern Ireland by T. Croffton Croker, Arabian Nights translated (and rewritten) by Edward Lane; and Webbe Dasent’s Popular Tales From the Norse. Schacker contends that rather than asserting their own patriotic identity through fairy tales, the English came to understand themselves, as well as foreign nations, through the literature of their European neighbours. By placing emphasis on compilers as situated between two cultures, Schacker examines their influence on the text in framing audience perception of the Other. Adeptly darting between folklore, Victorian studies, children’s literature and publishing history, National Dreams emerges as a cohesive and focused work on the role of folklore collections in nineteenth-century England.

Schacker’s examination of these folklore collections leads her to conclude that they owe their popularity in England to elitist attitudes valuing literacy over morality. The tale collections of foreign nations were compiled by collectors of oral folklore, who then rewrote the tales in a literary style for their English audiences. These collectors often changed parts of the story, sanitized the language to make them appropriate for children, or incorporated what they considered “literary elements” that were lacking in the originals. This process allowed the English to distinguish themselves from other nations on the basis of their literacy, relegating the oral tales of foreign cultures to the genre of “folklore”.

Schacker is attentive to the textual frameworks, context, aims, publishing details, and cultural history of each tale collection. In her analysis of German Popular Stories, she emphasizes translation issues, collector/compiler troubles, history of publication, and notes that the English version did better than the original Grimms’ at press. She examines Croker’s famous methodology and less studied colonialist stance when she writes about Fairy Legends and Traditions from Southern Ireland. For Arabian Nights, Schacker explores the implications of Lane’s Arabian scholarship and an Egyptian national context for the English. Taking a cue from Propp, she closely analyzes the structure and conventions of Popular Tales From the Norse, as well as national particularities within an Indo-European heritage of language and literature.

Schacker also includes illustration histories that suggest how the traditional accompanying artwork can be seen both as part of the text and as essential to helping formulate the image of the Other. “In the analysis of fantasy,” she writes, “ethnocentrism often shapes the underlying conception of the real.” Her critique of Richard Dorson is noteworthy; she criticizes the way he tried to downplay the degree to which proto-folklorists had catered to popular reading tastes. She offers instead the notion that their very popularity can be seen as a driving force in textual histories of these tale collections. Schacker’s provocative conclusion brings the study of nineteenth-century fairy tales to the present day. She asks her readers to consider contemporary uses of “multicultural folklore” in the classroom, which are often intended to educate children about foreign cultures. In doing so, she forces us to question the assumption that folktales from other countries give us unmediated insight into the Other.

Schacker has smoothly developed her rigorous research into a volume of value to folklore scholars and others interested in literary history in the making of national identities. In a work that successfully incorporates theory from such diverse fields as literature, folklore, history, sociology, political science, and humanities, Schacker demonstrates how these folklore collections, when considered through the multifaceted lenses of these disciplines, represent an intellectual movement in nineteenth-century England.

Review by Anna B. Creagh, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England by Jennifer Schacker. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. 198 + notes, bibliography, notes, index, illustrations.