National Dreams: Folktale Collections and the English Mass Reading Public, 1820-1860

This dissertation addresses the intersection of folkloristics and popular publishing at a key moment in the histories of both fields. In early to mid-19th-century England, Folklore emerged as a distinct cognitive category, a topic of widespread fascination, and a scholarly pursuit. Simultaneously, conceptions of the mass reading public were shifting to embrace an increasing number of literate working- and middle-class consumers. In this environment, numerous collections of “popular tales” from foreign lands were first made available to English readers.

Chapter 1 focuses on the first English edition of Grimms' fairy tales, Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories, and the establishment of a broad-based reading audience for traditional narratives. Chapter 2 turns to T. Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland and the complexities of voicing in the representation of oral traditions on paper in a politically-charged environment. In Chapter 3, the relationship of fantastical narrative to ethnographic fact is explored in Edward W. Lane's annotated and illustrated treatment of the Arabian Nights. Finally, George W. Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse is self-consciously poised at a pivotal moment in the emergence of this discourse about national tale corpora and the establishment of precedents for their presentation and interpretation. Through consideration of the context in which these four collections were written and published, and attention to the modes of textual presentation and interpretive framing developed by these writers, the dissertation highlights the resonance of such material as popular and as children's literature. Presented as the dream-like projections of the “national mind” of their places of origin, imported corpora of tales inspired reflection on England's own national identity—as a nation of readers with critical perspective into traditions believed to be only half-consciously created. In this reflexive mode and in this experimental period, Taylor, Croker, Lane, and Dasent discovered the tremendous imaginative appeal of Folklore's scholarly processes and the rhetorical efficacy of traditional motifs, blurring the boundaries between fantasy and science, the popular and the learned—and establishing enduring precedents for the entextualization, organization, and interpretation of fairy tales.