From Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring to Kenneth Grahme’s The Reluctant Dragon and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, here are seventeen classic stories and poems from the golden age of the English fairy tale. Some of them amuse, some enchant, some satirize and criticize, but each one is an expression of the joy of living. Accompanied by illustrations from the original editions of these works this collection will delight readers both young and old. Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

This anthology brings together 14 of the best Victorian fairy tales, by major period writers as well as specialists in the genre, to show the vibrancy of the form and its ability to reflect our deepest concerns. From whimsy to satire, the stories reveal the preoccupations of the age and celebrate the value of the imagination.

This “darkly entertaining” story collection is “a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies" (United Press International). In the 1870s and 1880s, children’s literature saw some astonishingly bold and innovative writing by women authors. As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one that was startlingly subversive for its time. While writers such as Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie wrote nostalgic tales that pined for lost youth, their female counterparts had more serious—at times unsettling—concerns. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti’s unsettling anti-fantasies in Speaking Likenesses, the stories collected here are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary works of fiction, full of strange delights for readers of any age. "The editors’ intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres

This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.

Presents a new perspective on Victorian scientific discoveries and inventions; includes a range of Victorian scientific fairy-tales and stories; looks at why fairies and their tales were chosen as an appropriate new form for capturing and presenting scientific and technological knowledge to young audiences; examines a range of scientific subjects, from palaeontology to entomology to astronomy.--Provided by publisher.

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.

This book explores the interplay of childhood and the fairy tale as they both changed character in accordance with the historical transformations of the mid-nineteenth century. While the fairy tale was instrumental in the social construction of childhood, the latter for its part played an equally crucial role in altering the narrative structure of the fairy tale. So viewed, the story of childhood is closely intertwined with the fairy tale, and both with modernity as it changed its focus with the changing direction of the civilizing process. The liberating potential of modernity emerges when a broad spectrum of the marginalized, including children, begin to assert themselves and gain recognition as independent subjects of historical inquiry.