Fairy Tales and Folklore

Fairy tales and folklore pervaded Victorian society. Fairy tales and folktales were rewritten and revised, translated, edited and collected, and illustrated, and their characters and motifs were found in art, literature, and science alike. The second half of the 19th century saw a dramatic rise in the publication of literary fairy tales, and folklorists collected and classified folktales. These publications appeared in various forms, climaxing with the folklorists Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales (1890) and Andrew Lang’s fairy books, published from 1889 to 1910, which gathered fairy tales and folktales from all over the world. Authors such as Lewis Carroll, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Laurence Housman, May Kendall, Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Louisa Molesworth, Mary de Morgan, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, Edith Nesbit, and William Butler Yeats wrote literary fairy tales. Fairy tales and folklore also informed Victorian fiction: references to supernatural creatures, such as changelings, fairies, elves, and gnomes, continued to be made in Victorian novels, which used character types, conventions, and plot patterns directly borrowed from classic fairy tales and folklore, as in the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. The 1860s sensation novels, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and fin-de-siècle gothic fiction, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), used references to fairy tales to probe gender relationships and investigate woman’s identity and the nature of female sexuality. This was also the case in fairy ballets, operas, and fairy plays or “extravaganzas,” which showcased more and more technologically complex and sensational magical transformations. At the same time, however, fairy tales and folktales were increasingly designed for juvenile audiences in the course of the 19th century. The publication of Edgar Taylor’s translation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales in 1823, published as German Popular Stories and illustrated by George Cruikshank, suggested that fairy tales were accepted in the nursery and paved the way for many Victorian collections of folktales and fairy tales aimed at young readers. Fairy tales were also used throughout the Victorian period to express anxieties or mediate knowledge, as in the case of popular science works. Although ballads, tales, legends, and myths had been collected and examined for over a century, leading to the development of taxonomies and indexes as in cabinets of natural history, late-Victorian anthropologists’ and ethnographers’ approach to fairy tales and folktales illuminated the period’s search for origins—the origins of fairies and those of human nature. The protean nature of fairy tales and folklore generally served to bridge the gap between old and new visions of the world: folktales and fairy tales could praise science and technology and map out new scientific methods; they could deal with the spiritual, belief, and faith; and they could even propose new definitions of humans—and particularly of women.

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