31:3 Book Reviews

general, the current introduction is strong when sketching in the historical

background and surveying the thematic content of the selection, less precise
when it comes to discussing formal elements. As for scholarly appartus for the
volume, there is precious Uttle. How often these days do we see publishers
label their anthologies "selected and introduced by," and we wonder where have
all the editors gone. One minor effect of this change is that footnote material must now go into the introduction, as when Orel gives a one-quarter page
parenthesis affirming that Doyle's "Brazilian Cat" could not possibly have been
a puma. The subversion of the editor also costs us a chance to see the provenance of the stories, other than the year the story was published.
Given
Orel's emphasis on publishing history and on the audience's role in developing
the genre, we might at least expect to know which joumals the stories were
originally published in. Butto retum to the issue broached at the outsetthe
main question remains this: if Orel was the selector of the set, was he also
titler of the volume? Thirteen of the seventeen stories date from 1880 on,
eleven from 1890 on. I move we retitle the volume Late Victorian Short Stories: An Anthology, thereby crowning an heir to Hal Gerber's 1967 collection.
The English Short Story in Transition 1880-1920.
Michael Case
Boise State University
VICTORIAN FAIRY TALES
Jack Zipes, ed. Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and
New York: Metheun, 1987. Cloth $40.00 Paper $25.00

Elves.

In his study of fairy tales. Breaking the Magic Spell, Jack Zipes distinguishes
between folk tales in the oral tradition and literary fairy tales or Kunstmdrchen.
The oral tale, Zipes argues, appeals to a popular, peasant or
working-class audience while the literary tale is designed for an audience of
middle-class children and their parents. In Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt
of the Fairies and Elves Zipes has collected twenty-two literary fairy tales
published in England between 1839 and 1902.
With its helpful introduction, biographical notes, and extensive bibliography
Victorian Fairy Tales is one of those unusual books that appeals equally to the
scholar and to the reader for pleasure. Stories by Dickens, Lewis Carroll,
Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Ruskin, and Wilde will be refreshing to those who
know these writers primarily by their longer or more famous works. Too, Victorian Fairy Tales can easily serve the purpose for which many of these stories
were originally intendedreading aloud to school-age children.
In his introduction, as in his earlier book on fairy tales, Zipes discusses how
the literary fairy tale reflects and seeks to shape social mores and values.
He notes that while the literary fairy tale became very popular in Europe
during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the genre was considered

31:3 Book Reviews

suspect in England both on Calvinist and on Utilitarian grounds.

General
middle-class approval of fairy tales as proper reading for children was not
possible until English romantic writers, including Southey, Lamb, and Coleridge, had created a shift in taste.
Even then fairy tales in translation
prepared the way for native English texts.
Although a strong party still
opposed the fairy tale as idle amusement, others like Charles Dickens came to
defend the genre as an antidote to educational methods and social pressures
that stifled children's imaginations. Victorian readers unsympathetic to this
defense of fantasy still could tum to the numerous didactic fairy tales of the
period.
In his editorial comments Zipes explores two social uses of Victorian fairy
tales; he distinguishes between those tales designed primarily to reinforce
good middle-class virtues such as honesty, diligence, and respect for social
constraints and those that criticized British society or offered a Utopian
alternative to a deeply flawed culture. The two stories that most purely represent this dichotomy are Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton's "All My Doing, Or Red
Riding-Hood Over Again" and Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince."
"All My Doing" would hardly be recognizable as a fairly tale were it not for
its subtitle; it is not an indulgence in imagination but rather a cautionary
tale about imagination and responsibilityindeed, the villain masquerades as an
artist. Underneath this artist's disguise, which the villain uses to deceive a
young girl, lies the ruthless thief. Having disregarded warnings and practical
advice, the girl becomes indirectly responsible for both property loss and the
loss of her prospective lover, who is wounded by the thief. His leg having
been amputated, the young man must forgo a promising career in the Indian army.
Zipes's inclusion of this tale and others less obviously in this vein suggests
that the didactic fairy tale offers the critic a field for understanding the
connections among social roles, moral values, and art in Victorian England.
Clearly Childe-Pemberton's work trades in the staples of Victorian culture and
tells us much about the relative placement of women, of artists, and of the
builders of empire in Victorian ideology.
"The Happy Prince,' published in 1888, six years after "All My Doing,' is also
a moral tale, but with a very different message. In Wilde's story a swallow
leaves the world of domesticity to migrate to Egypt ("I love travelling, and my
wife, consequently, should love travelling also," the swallow proclaims);
alighting on the statue of a prince the swallow finds the statue crying over
the sufferings of the poor. Though his heart is lead, the prince must weep.
At the prince's request, the swallow distributes to the poor the sapphires of
the statue's eyes and even the goldleaf that covers him. At last the swallow
dies of cold and the statue's heart is broken; but the town councilors predictably and hardheartedly consign the whole to be melted down. Only in heaven are
bird and prince rewarded. Wilde's tale, different as it is, can be taken as a
point by point inversion of "All My Doing." Domesticity is presented in two
guisesas stasis and in the context of grinding poverty; art is valued posi-

tively but culturally misunderstood; and Egypt is a distant and beckoning goal,
not subject to conquest, but a submerged image of paradise.
Other stories in Victorian Fairy Tales are less obviously political and cautionary than "All My Doing" and "The Happy Prince." Kenneth Grahame's "The
Reluctant Dragon" (now a Disney Studios video) pokes fun at the conventions of
the fairy tale dragon and knight are equally averse to violence, despite the
villagers' lust for a good fight. The dragon, in truth, prefers writing sonnets to breathing fire, St. George is much less fierce than reputed, and the
whole ends in a jolly banquet. Rudyard Kipling's "The Potted Princess" is an
equally charming tale drawing upon Indian legend and refusing overt moralizing.
A surprising number of these stories suggest the limits of sexual stereotyping
and explore the ways boys and girls may exhibit the virtues conventionally
assigned to the other sex. Both George MacDonald's "The Day Boy and the Night
Girl" and Mary Louisa Molesworth's "The Story of a King's Daughter" show girls
who are courageous and boys who must learn tenderness and human sympathy.
Similarly, Mary De Morgan's "The Toy Princess" criticizes the conventions of
female passivity as does Evelyn Sharp's "The Spell of the Magician's Daughter."
Victorian Fairy Tales presents an array of stories delightfully told, and at
the same time the collection reveals how thoroughly these fairy tales were
imbued with the social and cultural questions of their time. The great majority of the stories here were published after 1870; reading them together may
suggest further avenues for investigation and may add an important dimension to
our understanding of late Victorian culture. On a more immediate level, however, the book is both pleasant reading and a pleasure to look at. Zipes has
included at least one of the illustrations originally published with each tale.
Particularly outstanding are those by Walter Crane, Richard Doyle, Ernest
Shepherd (the illustrator for A. A. Milne), and Alice B. Woodward. The book
itself is beautifully designed, with outstanding ornamental capitals in the
pre-Raphaelite manner.
Mary Ellis Gibson
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
VICTORIAN PUBLISHING
N. N. Feltes. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels.
University of Chicago Press, 1986. $18.95

Chicago and London:

Most accounts of the Victorian publishing industry have been unremittingly

empirical; most expositions of Marxist literary theory have been conducted at
the highest levels of abstraction. In Modes of Production of Victorian Novels,
N. N. Feltes attempts a Marxist-structuralist analysis of the transformation of
the English novel in the interval from 1836 to 1910. In 98 pages of denselyargued prose, Eeltes explains the demise of the three-decker and the develop-