#000508
The Victorian Fairy Tale Book
Michael Patrick Hearn (editor)
Part of Pantheon's Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, *The Victorian Fairy Tale Book* collects seventeen stories and poems from the golden age of the English literary fairy tale. Editor Michael Patrick Hearn gathers work by Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie and others — from Browning's *The Pied Piper of Hamelin* and Thackeray's *The Rose and the Ring* to Grahame's *The Reluctant Dragon* and Barrie's *Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens* — and frames them with an introduction and notes. Illustrations by masters such as Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane, Arthur Hughes and Maxfield Parrish complete the volume. It's a handsomely curated anthology for readers who love fairy tales, Victorian literature, and the history of children's books.
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The editor
Michael Patrick Hearn is an American scholar of children's literature and its illustration, best known for meticulous annotated editions including The Annotated Wizard of Oz, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn and The Annotated Christmas Carol, as well as work on the Andrew Lang fairy books. That editorial care shows in his selection and framing here.
The book
Published in 1988 in the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, the anthology assembles canonical and lesser-known Victorian fairy tales and verse, pairing each with period illustration and supplying context on the writers and their era. It captures a moment when British writers turned the fairy tale into a vehicle for wit, moral play and pure enchantment.
How to read it
Read it as a browsable treasury rather than a critical study — dipping into a story or poem at a time. Reviewers praised its "pure enchantment" and the quality of both selection and pictures, and it remains a fine single-volume introduction to the form.
For more context
Companion volumes in the same Pantheon series cover other national and folkloric traditions.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Michael Patrick Hearn (editor)
- Publisher
- Pantheon
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1988
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Colorado