A large readership still exists for what were once known as “popular and traditionary tales” — what we might today call fairy tales, folktales, wonder tales, orMärchen.From the early Victorian period to the present, written versions of such tales have been mainstays of popular and children’s literature. Celebrated as imaginatively liberating, psychologically therapeutic, or as windows onto particular cultures, fairy tales are generally embraced as products of something larger than an individual consciousness, older than the medium — writing — in which we experience the stories. But we have inherited more than a taste for “popular tales” from our nineteenth-century predecessors:...

In rhetoric that is nothing short of revolutionary, Grimms’ fairy tales have been described as a “landmark” both in writing and illustration for children,¹ ending “the fairy tale war” in England and marking the moment when fairy tales “emerged unassailable” as reading for children,² ushering “a new era of imagination into English juvenile literature,”³ acting as “a challenge to the anti–fairy tale movement in Britain,” or even instigating “the revolt of the fairies and elves.”⁴ In fact, such descriptions refer not to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s ownKinder- und Hausmärchen[Children’s and Household Tales] but to the first English...

InGerman Popular Stories,Edgar Taylor and George Cruikshank discovered that field-based folklore research, pioneered by the brothers Grimm, had inherent imaginative appeal. Oral narratives “collected” and transformed into reading material were engaging and artistically inspiring, and the figure of the storyteller—imagined as an elderly peasant woman—provided the basis for a new fantasy of cross-cultural encounter. Within two years of the initial appearance ofGerman Popular Stories,a new field-based tale collection was published in London: Thomas Crofton Croker’sFairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland(1825).

The text Croker produced bears a formal resemblance to...

Edward William Lane’s translation ofAlf Layla wa Layla—known in English as 1001Nightsor as theArabian Nights—was commissioned by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) and published by Charles Knight, first in thirty-two periodic installments (1838–40) and subsequently in three extensively annotated and illustrated volumes (1839–41). At 2s. an installment or 45. 6d. a volume, Lane’s treatment of theArabian Nightswas situated squarely in the midst of the philanthropically driven effort to bring literature to the masses. In these forms, theArabian Nightswas indeed the “chosen plaything” of many...

From the vantage point of 1858, LondonTimeseditor and Cambridge professor George Webbe Dasent had a tale to tell about modern literary study:

[J]ust at the close of that great war which Western Europe waged against the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon; just as the eagle—Prometheus and the eagle in one shape—was fast fettered by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of...

English readers of the early to mid-nineteenth century provided a warm reception for collections of foreign folktales. In the case ofGerman Popular Stories,the English enthusiasm for the Grimms’ tales outdid that of German readers and left Jacob and Wilhelm searching for Edgar Taylor’s magic formula. AlthoughFairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Irelandwas translated into German, it was found most resonant by nineteenth-century English readers. TheArabian Nightsmay have found its first European home in France, but it was nineteenth-century Englishmen who most vigorously debated its proper form and the nature of its culture...