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Telling Tales

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David Blamires

11. The Fairytales of Wilhelm Hauff

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1Although the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen came to dominate the world of fairytales in the second half of the nineteenth century, pushing Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy from centre stage, they were not the only collectors or authors of fairytales to gain an English-speaking public during this period. Other German collectors of traditional tales are dealt with elsewhere, but of those writers who composed their own tales Wilhelm Hauff heads the list. His Märchen, whether published as a book or separately, have kept a firm place in German children’s reading from the time of their first appearance right to the present day. Equally, there has been a steady stream of English editions over the same period. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods Hauff’s tales were better known than Hoffmann’s Nutcracker or Brentano’s fairytales.

2Wilhelm Hauff (1802-27) came late in the development of German Romanticism. Born in Stuttgart and educated at the University of Tübingen, he was tutor to the children of Baron von Hügel before devoting himself full-time to the pursuit of writing. He married early in 1827 and was in the midst of an active literary career when he caught typhoid and died tragically early, just a few days short of his twenty-fifth birthday. He had written several short prose works and a historical novel, Lichtenstein, in the wake of Sir Walter Scott, but his lasting claim to fame rests on his fairytales. Literary historians, however, tend to pass over this success with few words, concentrating instead on his writings for adults. This is a pity, as from this point of view Hauff is clearly a lesser Romantic writer, whereas in the annals of children’s books he is a major figure.

  • 1 Paul Roggenhausen, ’Hauff-Studien’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literatur, 157 (...)

3Hauff’s achievement here consists in the stories that he published in three successive years in the form of almanacks or keepsakes – Die Karawane (The Caravan) (1825), Der Scheik von Alessandria und seine Sklaven (The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves) (1826) and Das Wirtshaus im Spessart (The Inn in the Spessart Forest) (1827). Each of these collections is presented in the form of a framework story within which other tales are narrated. It is a narrative model that goes back to Boccaccio’s Decameron and was used most tellingly in the Arabian Nights. Hauff was not a collector of traditional tales like the Grimms, but composed his own tales on the basis of a rich fund of traditional and literary sources. He actually incorporated a small number of tales from other authors into the second collection, but these have not usually been included in English editions of Hauff. However, ’Abner, der Jude, der nichts gesehen hat’ (’Abner, the Jew, who Saw Nothing’) was taken almost literally from Voltaire’s Zadig, though with changes of names and locations, and ’Die Höhle von Steenfoll’ (’The Cave of Steenfoll’) is derived from ’The Nicker Holl’ in Robert P. Gillies’s Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean, which had been translated into German as Erzählungen eines Reisenden nach dem nördlichen Eismeer (Leipzig, 1826-27).1 These two tales do crop up in English, though not very often.

4For both the framework and the setting of individual tales Hauff made abundant use of the fashion for things oriental which, as far as literature is concerned, went back to the Arabian Nights. New German translations of the Arabian Nights by Joseph von Hammer and Max Habicht appeared in 1823-24 and 1825 respectively, so Hauff had an immediate influence. Both the framework and the separate tales of Die Karawane are set in the Middle East, while with Der Scheik von Alessandria Hauff has one of the slaves tell a story located in his German homeland – this is ’Der Zwerg Nase’ (’Dwarf Nose’). Das Wirtshaus im Spessart moves the framework to Germany, but includes one oriental tale, ’Saïds Schicksale’ (’The Adventures of Saïd’), among the otherwise German and Scottish tales. Many of Hauff’s stories have been published separately as well as in their original frameworks. This is the case too with the English versions.

5Not all of the stories are fairytales in the sense of tales in which magic plays a key part. Several are adventure stories recounting events that could conceivably have happened. That doesn’t mean that they tell ordinary events, but only that the events, however strange, do not depend on the supernatural. Thus, ’Die Geschichte von der abgehauenen Hand’(’The Story of the Severed Hand’), tells how the narrator was lured into committing a murder on a stranger’s behalf, supposing that he was in fact cutting off the head of a dead person so that it could be interred in a family crypt abroad. Similarly, ’Die Errettung Fatmes’ (’The Rescue of Fatima’) recounts a tale of abduction, treachery and rescue that, however extraordinary, depends on ingenuity of coincidence in the plot rather than on recourse to magic. Both these tales form part of Die Karawane.

6The Sheik of Alexandria contains a version of a widespread story motif in which the credulous inhabitants of a town, here called Grünwiesel, are led to believe that a dressed-up ape is actually an Englishman. Then, in ’The Story of Almansor’ Hauff provides a variation on the well-known theme in which a humble individual encounters and makes friends with the monarch, not knowing who he is, is taken to court to meet him and finally recognizes who his friend is. The theme is perhaps best known in English in the chapbook story ’The King and the Cobbler’. Hauff gives the tale a contemporary twist in that his Egyptian protagonist, Almansor, is taken to the lands of the Franks, where the emperor, never given a name, is known to Almansor as ’Petit Caporal’, the name by which Napoleon was affectionately known to his men.

7Hauff’s final volume, The Inn in the Spessart, breathes more the spirit of legends as far as its Western tales go, telling events that reflect folk beliefs, with varying degrees of involvement in the world of magic. However, ’The Adventures of Saïd’ is certainly a fairytale in the usual sense.

8In all three volumes the individual stories fit comfortably within the framework, whether they appear as first-person narratives and thus make some claim to credibility (as with ’The Severed Hand’) or whether they are third-person tales with a greater latitude of subject-matter. Hauff clearly enjoys the play of narrative perspectives, but narrative tone as well as narrative framework is a powerful unifying factor in his writing. His stories have lasted well because they are simply and straightforwardly told and maintain a steady narrative pace. While traditional fairytales avoid superfluous description and concentrate on the basics of the plot, Hauff allows himself more detail and patterns himself more on the style of the novella. His narrative settings are varied, as are his characters, including princes, merchants and slaves from Baghdad, Egypt, Basra and Constantinople as well as townspeople and peasants from Germany, especially the Black Forest, and Scotland. The oriental tales inhabit the periods and milieux of the Arabian Nights, while the Western tales reflect the conditions of rural and small-town life on the verge of the Industrial Revolution. In this respect the latter are close to the spirit of the traditional tales, though they are more specific in their settings.

9Hauff is a fine story-teller. He knows how to keep his reader’s attention as he unfolds his plots, punctuating the action with passages of dialogue and building up the suspense. The tales are varied in length, but all are longer than the norm established by the Grimms. They were designated originally as being for ’sons and daughters of the educated classes’, but only a handful seem calculated to appeal to children in terms of their protagonists’ ages. Dwarf Nose is twelve years old when his story begins (some editions say he is eight). Almansor is ten when the Franks come to Egypt. Most others are in their mid to late teens. What is also striking, but not often commented on, is the fact that all Hauff’s protagonists are male.

  • 2 Hauff is on record as not wanting there to be any love interest in the story by Gustav Adolf Schöl (...)

10Girls and women play only a limited role, and the conventional happy ending of the traditional fairytale with a marriage is largely absent. Exceptionally, Caliph Stork and Princess Owl marry when they have been transformed back into human shape, and similarly, at the end of ’The Rescue of Fatima’ Mustapha is married to Zoraida, the girl who had been abducted along with his sister.2 The female figures that do have a place in some stories play mainly victim roles. As we have noted, Fatima experiences abduction and enslavement before she is eventually rescued; but in ’The Severed Hand’ the only female figure is murdered in her sleep. In ’Dwarf Nose’ Mimi, the hero’s helper in the latter part of the story, has been bewitched into a goose. Many of the females in other stories suffer dreadfully or have witch-like characteristics. Despite all these negative features one can hardly claim that Hauff’s male figures, by contrast, have an easy time of it.

11The first of Hauff’s tales to appear in English was ’The Cold Heart’ (’Das kalte Herz’), and it has proved one of the most popular, being printed about a dozen times in a variety of forms up to 1914. In its original German format in Das Wirtshaus im Spessart it was divided into two parts, separated by ’Saïds Schicksale’ and ’Die Höhle von Steenfoll’, but the majority of English versions present it as a continuous story. ’The Cold Heart’ was published in two different translations in the same year. One was by C. A. Feiling and was included in Tales from the German, comprising Specimens from the most Celebrated Authors, translated by John Oxenford and C. A. Feiling (London: Chapman & Hall, 1844). The title and range of material translated indicate an educated adult readership. The other translation appeared in Popular Tales (Rugeley: John Thomas Walters; London: J. Burns, 1844), which also printed Karl Spindler’s ’S. Sylvester’s Night’ and Fouqué’s ’Red Mantle’. This was volume 4 of ’The Juvenile Englishman’s Library’, so we have one and the same story being presented from the start to two different kinds of readership. James Burns republished the story in Select Popular Tales from the German of Wilhelm Hauff in the following year. The Feiling translation was included in The Little Glass Man and Other Stories (New York: Cassell; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893). Other translations appeared in 1867 (by M. A. Faber, Leipzig: Tauchnitz), 1881 (by Percy E. Pinkerton, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Allen), 1886 (by S. Mendel, London: George Bell & Sons), 1890 (by Agnes Henry, London: Digby & Long), 1898 (retold by W. T. Stead in Books for the Bairns), 1903 (by Cicely McDonnell, London: Dean & Son), 1905 (by Sybil Thesiger, London: James Finch & Co.), 1910 (by L. L. Weedon, London: Ernest Nister; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.) and 1914 (London: Holden & Hardingham). Those by M. A. Faber and S. Mendel are clearly aimed at adults, but by the end of the century a child readership predominates.

  • 3 Barth, pp. 175-77.
  • 4 William Howitt, The Rural and Domestic Life of Germany (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, (...)

12The source for the second part of ’The Cold Heart’is Washington Irving’s ’The Devil and Tom Walker’ in Tales of a Traveller (1824).3 Hauff, however, tells the story as though it were an authentic legend from the Black Forest, and scholars took him at his word until very recently. When William Howitt was travelling through the Black Forest with his wife and friends, he described these ’wild and primitive regions’ with allusions to Hauff’s story, mentioning ’the haunts of the spirits Glassmännlein and Holländer Michel’, ’the busy wooden clockmakers of Friburg’ and ’the timber-floaters preparing their rafts, and setting forth on their voyage to the Rhine and to Holland’.4 A résumé of the story is included in Hezekiah Butterworth’s Zigzag Journeys to Northern Lands. The Rhine to the Arctic (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1883), pp. 84-91.

13The basis of Hauff’s tale is simple enough. A young charcoal-burner named Peter Munk attempts to make good financially through encounters with two supernatural denizens of the forest – the good-natured glass manikin and the more sinister giant, Dutch Michael. These two spirits represent the opposition of the Baden and Württemberg sides of the Forest, the charcoal-burners and the lumberjacks. Peter is granted three wishes by the glass manikin, but, as in most stories of this kind, he is foolish in what he asks for and eventually ruins himself through gambling. In the second part of the story he seeks out Dutch Michael and exchanges his living heart for a heart of stone. Because he now has no emotions, whether of sympathy for the plight of others or for any pleasure of his own, he causes suffering all around him till at last he kills his own wife for showing compassion to an aged traveller. The solitude to which Peter is now exposed leads him to seek once more the help of the glass manikin, who gives him a little glass cross and sends him to Dutch Michael to regain his heart. Peter’s contrition moves the glass manikin finally to forgive him and restore his wife and mother to life again.

  • 5 Volker Klotz, Das europäische Kunstmärchen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), pp. 208-2 (...)

14’The Cold Heart’ is Hauff’s longest tale from the almanacks. It focusses on opposing lifestyles and economic risks.5 Dutch Michael, the giant, embodies the dangers presented by big commercial interests and the world that stretches down the River Neckar and the Rhine to Rotterdam, where the timber-men get four times the price for their timber than in Cologne. But it is a material that is bought at the cost of the heart. Not only Peter is like this. As he reads the labels on Dutch Michael’s bottles of preserved hearts, he discovers that the giant also possesses the hearts of the sheriff in F., of Fat Ezekiel, the king of the dance-floor, the head forester, six corn usurers, eight recruiting officers and three money-dealers. This exploitative world derives from heartlessness and greed, to which everything is sacrificed. But Hauff regards it as reversible: his solution is conservative, a return to the humble life and the values of small-scale society. The glass manikin tells Peter after he has repented of his folly and wickedness: ’If you are true and honest you will honour your trade, and your neighbours will love and esteem you more than if you had ten tons of gold’ (Mendel’s translation).

15Burns’s anonymous translator attempts a close rendering of the story, but occasionally omits a sentence or reference that he (or she) thinks distracting for the English reader. There are also occasional additions at the beginning, where there are three short paragraphs describing the Black Forest. The translator appears to have had problems transcribing proper names from the German gothic typeface, so ’Ezechiel’ appears throughout as ’Eyekiel’, ’Winkfritz’ shows up as ’Winkfrity’, and the neighbours ’Grethe and Bethe’ become ’Trethel and Bertha’. Similar mishaps occur in some of the other tales.

16C. A. Feiling also published in 1844 a translation of ’Der Zwerg Nase’ as ’Nose, the Dwarf’. This was the first of many renderings of this popular story. Later translators had a tendency to convert the simple name into a nickname, for example, ’Nosey’ (the Burns translator), ’Longnose’ (Pinkerton, Mendel). The story is included in all the larger collections of Hauff’s stories in English, and Andrew Lang printed a version in The Violet Fairy Book (1901). Butterworth has a summary in Zigzag Journeys. The German original was published in Der Scheik von Alessandria, but the setting of the story is actually Germany.

17The protagonist of ’Dwarf Nose’ is a twelve year old boy called Jacob, who is abducted by a nasty old woman, bewitched into slavery as a squirrel for seven years and then escapes, but in the shape of an ugly dwarf with a long nose. He does not realize how much time has passed and, on making contact again with his mother and father, is rejected by them as a charlatan. Eventually he is able to trade on the skills he has learnt with the old woman and becomes a cook in the duke’s household. On one of his shopping expeditions he buys a goose, which turns out to be Mimi, the daughter of the enchanter Wetterbock, whom a wicked fairy has turned into a goose. Meanwhile, Dwarf Nose has achieved considerable fame through the excellence of his culinary skills, and is challenged by one of the duke’s guests to produce a pâté souzeraine, something he has never heard of before. Mimi helps him to find the necessary secret ingredient, the herb Niesmitlust (Sneeze-with-pleasure), which he realizes is the same herb that had released him earlier from his squirrel shape in the hateful old woman’s house. He eats the herb and regains his true human form. He and Mimi escape from the duke’s palace, and Jacob takes Mimi back to her father, who disenchants her and rewards him with sufficient gifts to buy a shop and become rich and happy. Jacob does not marry Mimi, but returns to his parents (though he must now be about twenty-two years old).

18Unlike most traditional fairytales, ’Dwarf Nose’ does not end with a radical transformation of the hero’s situation. It concludes merely with a heightened version of his status at the beginning of the tale. Jacob was the son of market stall-holders; now he has money for a shop of his own. The relative status of rich aristocracy and ordinary working person remains intact. There is no revolution, no breaking through class barriers, only a modest improvement in material welfare. Yet Jacob has suffered a great deal to reach this position. It is hard to see him as needing to be taught a lesson, since at his mother’s market stall he does no more than scold the horrid old woman for handling and sniffing at the vegetables in such a way as to make other customers unwilling to buy them. Is his behaviour justified or is it to be regarded as impudent? Is it offensive enough for him to lose seven years of his adolescence, be subjugated to the whims of an elderly crone and transformed into the position of a mere animal? Jacob’s new life is ambiguous. In being forced by his mother to help the old woman carry her vegetables home he begins the transition from poverty to affluence, for though her house is small and dilapidated from the outside, inside it is all splendour, and the old woman has a multitude of guinea-pig and squirrel servants scurrying at her beck and call. Jacob is physically transformed and can no longer call his life his own, but over seven years he is trained in a variety of ways and finishes by acquiring all the skills of a first-rate cook. Only at this stage does he encounter the magic herb that turns him back into human shape, though badly distorted.

20. Frontispiece (illustration to ’The Stone-cold Heart’) of W. Hauff, Longnose the Dwarf, and Other Fairy Tales (1881).

19This training and consequent alienation from parents reflects in fairytale terms what must have been, in Hauff’s time, a common experience for children put into service or apprenticeship and thus severed from their families. The disagreeable old woman is a projection of all the fears that this kind of training must have held for children. She is the embodiment of the arbitrary power of the employer. She buys six heads of cabbage from Jacob’s mother, but by the time they are in her house they have changed frighteningly into human heads. Jacob had thought, when she was at the market stall, that her own head had too thin a neck and might fall off, and he is also disgusted by her long nose. When he is partially disenchanted and escapes from her, it is only to find that he too has a long nose and a head that grows directly from his body without a neck. This deformity of Jacob’s expresses symbolically his unease with the change from childhood to adulthood. He has learnt the skills that enable him to earn his living, but he is not yet emotionally independent. The long nose is a metaphor for his sexual embarrassment, as his hunched back exemplifies his inability to stand tall.

20The translators of ’Dwarf Nose’ had problems with names in the story and with descriptions of food. Lucy L. Weedon, in Fairy Tales by Wilhelm Hauff (London: Ernest Nister; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1910), probably had the deftest solutions for the two mysterious herbs Magentrost and Niesmitlust, which she called ’trencher-man’s mint’ and ’the cook’s delight’. These read so much more suggestively than the literal ’stomach comforter’ and ’Sneeze-with-pleasure’ of Feiling or ’stomach-hope’ and the untranslated ’Niessmitlust’ of Burns.

21Most translators make a conscientious attempt at rendering the tales faithfully, but J. G. Hornstein’s free adaptation in Caravan Tales and Some Others (London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd., [1912]) is a complete travesty. The story is renamed ’The Wonder Child’, and the setting is transferred to Bagdad, presumably to make it congruent with the other oriental tales. The boy is now simply called ’the Wonder’, but the enchanted house and its inhabitants appear as grotesque, unpleasant human beings rather than guinea-pigs and squirrels. The boy doesn’t learn different skills during the period of his enchantment, but eventually just manages to totter out of the house. Later he is helped by Habeeba, one of the former female servants of Dame Nose, using the contents of a little casket from the witch’s kitchen, to make a meal for the caliph. When they are fetched to see the caliph after having been praised for their efforts, they are magically transformed into handsome people again. The transferral of the story to Bagdad is totally arbitrary, and Habeeba is an unsatisfactory substitute for the goose, Mimi. Hornstein has responded only on a superficial level to Hauff. He completely fails to understand the disturbing symbolism of the story.

22The year after ’Dwarf Nose’first appeared in English another of Hauff’s most popular fairytales made its entry in a little book entitled The Christmas Roses and Other Tales from the German (London: Joseph Cundall, 1845). In German it is called ’Die Geschichte von dem kleinen Muck’and is part of Die Karawane. The title presents a problem for English translators because of the negative associations of the protagonist’s name in English. The anonymous translator of the Cundall book avoids this in the title, which is ’Story of a Manikin’, but calls the hero Midge, probably through a confusion of Muck with the German Mücke, ’fly’. The same false association was made by the translator of the Burns Select Popular Tales, who called him Little Fly. Other translators provided different spellings for the name, for example Mouck (the Ward, Lock edition, 1862), Mook (Pinkerton, 1881; Hornstein, 1912), Mouk (McDonnell, 1903; Weedon, 1910), though Mendel (1886), Thesiger (1905) and the Cassell/Unwin edition (1893) stick with the German spelling Muck.

23The ’Story of Little Muck’ is a true fairytale in structure, but with features that distance it somewhat from the conventional happy ending of the traditional fairytale. It is set in Nicaea (in Turkey) and has a double framework in that the narrator within the framework of Die Karawane, namely, the merchant Muley, presents it as his own father’s retrospective account of Little Muck’s youth, for at this stage Little Muck is an old bachelor, living alone and coming out of his large house just once a month, only to suffer the mocking attentions of the neighbourhood’s naughty boys, including the narrator’s. Little Muck’s history thus appears as an explanation and retails a supposed real experience. As a boy Muley had been soundly beaten for his treatment of Little Muck before his father told his story.

24This is a tale about alienation. Little Muck is, and remains, a physical oddity, the size of a dwarf, but with a head much larger than ordinary. However, at the age of sixteen he still behaves like a happy-go-lucky child. He lives alone with his father, and when the latter dies he is penniless and has to leave home. Upset and hungry after three days’ walking, he is eventually taken in by an old woman who feeds all the neighbourhood’s cats and makes an exception for this one human being. Later he is blamed for the damage the cats cause in the old woman’s absence. One day when she is again away, a little dog leads him into her bedroom and then into a hidden chamber, where he accidentally breaks the lid of a crystal vessel. He feels forced to run away and takes with him a pair of large slippers and a walking stick. These turn out to have magical properties: the slippers carry him swiftly wherever he wishes to be, and the walking-stick is a kind of geiger-counter before its time, being able to locate hidden gold and silver. By means of the slippers Little Muck gains a post as messenger in the king’s household, but when he discovers hidden treasure and shares it, his fellow servants take against him and accuse him of stealing from the king’s treasury. On being put into prison, Little Muck reveals his secrets to the king, but because he does not reveal all of the conditions needed to use the magic slippers, the king is made a fool of when he tries them out, and he consequently banishes him. Little Muck then discovers magic figs that cause donkey’s ears and long noses to grow on those who consume them, together with figs that remove these disfigurements. (This motif is found also in Fortunatus and the Grimms’ story ’The Nose’.) By selling the first figs, Muck manages to deform the whole royal household. Then, disguised as a doctor, he produces the antidote, regains his slippers and walking-stick from the king, refuses to heal him and escapes. Since then Muck has lived a prosperous, but solitary life, a man whose experience of life has led him to shun humankind.

25There is an underlying sadness about this tale. At the outset Little Muck is, in the words of the Burns edition, ’a playful child’, ’stupid’ and ’silly’, but at the end, despite some gains from his magical devices, he is disillusioned with his fellow men. From beginning to end his physical deformity and outsize clothes provoke hostile reactions, teasing and ridicule, though he is cheerful, trustful and generous in deed and mood. Even the old woman who feeds him treats him less well than her cats and dogs: ’Upon the whole, [Muck] lived as lonely a life as in his father’s house; for, saving his mistress, he saw nothing but cats and dogs the whole day’. He is accused both by her and by the king’s servants of misdeeds of which he is totally innocent. Despite eventually getting the better of the king and taking revenge on him, Muck’s success at the end of the story is simply material. It is difficult to know just what Hauff intended by this ending. Was it a condemnation of the generality of people for their inability to treat human difference with sympathy? Is it impossible for those who are different ever to achieve complete happiness? Little Muck is certainly different from the usual simpleton of traditional fairytales who marries a princess and lives happily ever after.

26In addition to introducing ’Little Muck’ to the British reading public, Joseph Cundall also published ’The False Prince’ in another collection, The King of the Swans, and Other Tales (1846), of which the title story was by Rudolphi and which contained another tale by A. L. Grimm, a contemporary but no relation of the Brothers Grimm. ’Das Märchen vom falschen Prinzen’ is another tale from Die Karawane that enjoyed great popularity in English. It tells how an upstart tailor called Labakan uses a fine robe that he has been asked to alter and impersonates a young prince, attempting to win the latter’s inheritance. Labakan at first succeeds in convincing the prince’s father of his identity, but fails with his mother. The sultaness proposes a test to establish the identities of the rival prince and tailor: each must make a caftan. Naturally, the tailor makes the best, and the prince expostulates that needlework is not a proper test for a prince. The sultaness thereby recognizes him as her son, but the sultan has to be convinced by a second test which a fairy puts forward: the two young men have to choose between two caskets, one bearing the words ’honour and renown’, the other ’riches and happiness’. The real prince selects the former, Labakan the latter, and the contents of the caskets confirm the rightness of their choice. The prince finds a golden crown, which grows immediately to fit him, while Labakan gets a large needle and a ball of thread. The prince spares Labakan’s life, but forces him to return home. There too he is berated, beaten and sent away. He decides to renounce all ambitions to greatness, sells his casket and sets up again elsewhere as a tailor. The needle turns out to be a magic one that can sew by itself, as a result of which Labakan wins much custom and achieves the riches and happiness that the fairy’s casket.granted.

27What are the implications of this tale? Like Dwarf Nose, Labakan does not achieve a change of social status at the end of the story, no matter how clever he is in tricking the prince and arriving first at the meeting-place with the sultan. He retains the ambitions of the workman – ’riches and happiness’ – rather than adopting the ideals of the aristocracy – ’honour and renown’. His identity is unmasked by the fairy, but he is not over-severely punished for the crisis that his untoward desires cause. He may be banished by the prince and beaten by his master and workmen, but the fairy nonetheless provides him in the end with a magic needle – the fairytale equivalent of the new machinery that was revolutionizing contemporary industrial progress – by means of which he realizes his material ambitions. Labakan is an ambivalent sort of hero: his aspirations are shown to be reprehensible in the stark form in which he envisages them (escaping from the social status into which he was born), but his shrewdness in competing with the aristocracy takes him far enough, given the prince’s magnanimity, to improve his own material situation, if only to a moderate degree. He concludes by reflecting that ’honour and renown are often dangerous things’. Labakan’s final success is dependent on two things – the fairy’s gift (not immediately recognized) and the prince’s magnanimity. However, the fact that he achieves his success through secret means, employing no one else, is perceived as dubious and reflects in fairytale terms the suspicion that new machinery provoked in the real world that Hauff was living in.

28’The False Prince’ circulated widely in English. It actually appeared first in Burns’s Select Popular Tales (1845), and another version was published in George Vickers’s Grimms’ Goblins (1860-61) with the title ’The Tailor Prince’. It is also found in Tales of Wonder; or, the Inn in the Black Forest (London: Cheap Repository Series, 1861), the Ward, Lock editions (1862, 1884), where it is rather freely translated, Mendel’s very careful translation (1886, 1914), McDonnell (1903), Thesiger (1905) and Hornstein (1912). Hornstein’s version is an elaborated paraphrase of Hauff’s original and changes the end of the story, omitting the casket test and turning Labakan’s adventures into a dream that he has while falling asleep over working on Prince Selim’s robe. The story is thus robbed of much of its original significance. There are two different adaptations of the story in W. T. Stead’s Books for the Bairns. In no. 57 (October 1900) it is given the title ’The Mad Prince’, while in no. 160 (May 1909), in an adaptation by Frank Mundell, it is called ’Prince or Tailor?’ Yet another translation was included in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book (1903), this time called ’The Sham Prince’.

29Of all Hauff’s tales the most popular in English was ’Caliph Stork’, which was in fact the first story in Die Karawane. Its first appearance in English was in Burns’s Select Popular Tales, after which it was printed in all subsequent major selections or complete editions. It was also included in Grimms’ Goblins, Andrew Lang’s Green Fairy Book (1892) and no. 57 of ’Books for the Bairns’. It recounts how the Caliph of Bagdad and his Vizier acquire the means of transforming themselves into storks, but because they laugh while thus transformed they forget the magic word that will turn them back into human beings. This word is Mutabor, the Latin for ’I shall be changed’. An owl that is similarly metamorphosed advises them how to rediscover the word, but only on condition that one of them offers her his hand in marriage and so disenchants her. In this way the Caliph acquires a wife, not through any romantic attachment, but as an exchange for services rendered. Hauff’s source was the story of ’König Papagei’ (King Parrot) from the German translation of the Arabian Nights by Habicht, von der Hagen and Schall (Breslau, 1824).

30In Hauff the initial transformation into the form of storks is effected by a black powder and a piece of paper with writing on it in Latin, which the Caliph buys from a pedlar who claims not to know what either is. In the Burns edition of 1845 the pedlar is accurately described as ’a stout little man, with a swarthy face and tattered clothes’. The Ward, Lock edition chooses to add grotesque and unpleasant details:

He was a little man, dark, and with a hooked nose, and a cunning mouth which displayed two hideous yellow teeth, the only two he had. As soon as he appeared before the Caliph, he bent his forehead to the ground, and in an attempt to smile contracted his face into the most frightful grimace that ever distorted a human visage.

31A few lines further on, the translation identifies the man as a Jew, and the passage is revealed as a gratuitous piece of anti-Semitism. None of the other translations do anything of the kind, but stick scrupulously to Hauff’s text.

32Hauff himself might be accused of anti-Semitism in another of his stories, ’Abner, the Jew who Saw Nothing’. This is a close adaptation of ’Le Chien et le cheval’, the third chapter of Voltaire’s Zadig (1748), in which the man who identifies the tracks in the sand, grass, trees and rocks as a runaway dog and horse is simply an inhabitant of Babylon, an educated young man called Zadig. Hauff changes the location to Morocco and makes the man a Jew, providing an introductory paragraph:

Jews, as you know, are everywhere; and everywhere there are Jews: their falcon eyes spy out wherever an advantage is to be gained; and the more oppressed they are, the more cunning they become, while they glory in their very cunning. That a Jew, however, may sometime fall into disgrace owing to this very quality, witness Abner, as he one evening took his way through the Morocco gate (Burns edition, 1845).

33There was no necessity for Hauff to make these changes (aside from covering his tracks as regards his source), since in the world of the Arabian Nights Zoroastrians often play the role of magicians or wise men and likewise often elicit fear and hostility among those envious of them. ’Abner, the Jew who Saw Nothing’ was not widely translated into English – it appears only in Burns’s edition and Mendel’s translation. Its unpopularity is probably due to the fact that the tale contains no fairytale or adventure elements.

34Hauff seems fascinated by deformations of the body. Some of them are only temporary, as is the case with Dwarf Nose and Mimi, Caliph Stork, his vizier and Princess Owl, but others are permanent like those of Little Muck and the supposed Englishman in ’The Dancer of Grünwiesel’ (also known as ’The Young Englishman’). In addition, the narrator of ’The Severed Hand’ explains how he has come to lose his hand; and Peter Munk spends the latter part of his disastrous career without a heart. Hauff’s heroes are subjected to many vicissitudes, with varied outcomes. Those who cause a death, whether innocently (as in ’The Severed Hand’) or deliberately (as in ’The Ghost Ship’), suffer as a result. The deliberate attempt to change one’s economic fortunes is fraught with danger and never succeeds absolutely. The covetous brothers in ’The Stag Florin’ destroy their half-brother in attempting to gain his possessions, but fate destroys them too.

35One further fairytale of Hauff’s also gained wide circulation – ’The Adventures of Saïd’, the only oriental tale to feature in The Inn in the Spessart. It tells a series of adventures in which the hero narrowly escapes from imminent death, only to be plunged after an interval of calm into another threat. These hair-breadth escapes are implicitly linked to a silver whistle that Saïd’s dead mother had been given by a fairy and which Saïd was prematurely given by his father when he was sent to Mecca at the age of eighteen. The tale illustrates the pull between Saïd’s mother, who believes in magic, and his rationalist father, who does not believe that fairies can have any effect on human affairs. To begin with, Saïd’s escapes, in response to his blowing the whistle and achieving no sound, occur in ways that do not depend on magic, but on coincidence and human agency. However, half-way through the adventures, a lady who helps him in his troubles with the wicked merchant Kalum-Beck, who has virtually enslaved him, turns out to be the fairy friend of Saïd’s mother, and from now on the incidence of magic becomes more evident. Saïd’s final escape from death occurs in a shipwreck when he is rescued by clinging to the back of a large dolphin, which swims up the river to Bagdad and deposits him by the caliph’s palace. Here Saïd is welcomed by the caliph, his grievances against Kalum-Beck are put to right with the latter’s punishment, Saïd is reunited with his father, and the two of them are given a palace in Bagdad in which to live. The magical power of Saïd’s dead mother and her fairy friend has affinities with that of Aschenputtel’s mother in the Grimms’ fairytale. It enables the protagonist of the story to overcome extraordinary problems, but once they are solved it vanishes, and ordinary life resumes its place.

36English versions of this story begin with Burns’s Select Popular Tales, which presents a number of divergences from the original. There is some confusion with proper names, and Saïd’s father is referred to on several occasions as coming from Aleppo, though at the beginning he is correctly stated to live in Balsora (Basra). Such slips are not uncommon, but there are two deliberate changes of a more serious kind. Saïd’s escape on the dolphin is entirely omitted, thus reducing the incidence of magical implausibility; and at the end of the story Saïd marries ’the Grand Vizier’s lovely daughter’. In this latter addition the translator is probably picking up the conclusion of ’Caliph Stork’, but, as we have seen, Hauff’s usual practice was to avoid fairytale marriages at the end of his tales. The other translations follow Hauff’s original quite closely, though Hornstein retitles the story ’The Golden Whistle’, even though the original has a silver one.

  • 6 For details see Ruari McLean, Joseph Cundall. A Victorian Publisher. Notes on his Life and a Check (...)

37Although Hauff wrote ostensibly for the ’sons and daughters of the educated classes’, his tales appeal to children and adults alike. This dual readership is reflected in the variety of English versions of his tales, some of which are specifically aimed at adults, while others equally clearly are designed for children. Hauff first appears alongside other German writers in Tales from the German, translated by John Oxenford and C. A. Feiling, and the Walters/Burns edition of Popular Tales (both published in 1844). The same is true of Cundall’s two children’s books of 1845 and 1846. But the Burns Select Popular Tales (1845) is devoted wholly to Hauff and prints fourteen of his stories, including one (’The Portrait of the Emperor’) which does not come from the three almanacks. Both Burns and Cundall were enthusiasts for German literature. Burns published editions taken from the works of Musäus, Fouqué, Tieck, Lessing, Schiller, Caroline Pichler, Baroness Fouqué, Clauren and Christoph Schmid, dealing with literature for both adults and children. Cundall concentrated more on children’s books. Over the period 1845-51 he published Musäus’s Legends of Rubezahl (1845), A. L. Grimm’s The Two Talismans (1846), Berthold Auerbach’s Village Tales from the Black Forest (1846), the Grimm Brothers’ German Fairy Tales & Popular Stories (1846, i.e. Edgar Taylor’s Gammer Grethel), Alexander Weill’s Village Tales from Alsatia (1848), The Heroic Life and Exploits of Siegfried the Dragon Slayer (1848), Christoph Schmid’s Christmas Eve, or the Story of Little Anton (1849), Clara Fechner’s Nut-cracker and Sugar-Dolly (1849), Merry Tales for Little Folk, edited by Madame de Chatelain (1851), The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg (1851) and Theodor Hosemann’s A Laughter Book for Little Folk (c. 1851). In addition Cundall published a monthly periodical called The Playmate (1847), which had a second series in 1847-48, and both included German material. These books represent a remarkable achievement on Cundall’s part, as they brought a wide range of German children’s books to British readers.6

38After Burns and Cundall’s pioneering editions of Hauff the next British appearance of some of his tales was in Grimms’ Goblins (1860-61), where adaptations of ’The Caliph Stork’, ’Little Mouck’, ’The Tailor-Prince’ and ’The Magic Whistle’ were printed without any indication of Hauff’s authorship. All four stories are illustrated with a large vigorous colour wood-engraving after designs by Hablot K. Browne. Then in 1861 we have a selection entitled Tales of Wonder; or, the Inn in the Black Forest (London: Cheap Repository Series). The title substitutes for the little known Spessart (at least outside Germany) the more familiar Black Forest, and the framework is supplied by The Inn in the Spessart, while the actual stories are taken from The Caravan and The Sheik of Alexandria. These are ’The Prophecy of the Silver Florin’, ’The History of Caliph Chusid’ (i.e. ’Caliph Stork’), ’The Story of Little Muke’, ’The Story of the Spectre Ship’, ’The Rescue of Fatima’, ’Nosey, the Dwarf’ and ’The False Prince’. The selection gives a good idea of the varied content and mood of Hauff’s stories. There are no illustrations, so perhaps a mixed readership of adults and children was envisaged.

39In 1862 Ward, Lock and Co. published a different selection with the title The Caravan: a Series of Oriental Tales as the second part of a volume containing Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Other Popular Stories. This book, profusely illustrated by Bertall, was the first to be published in both Britain and the United States, and it was reissued in 1884. The selection contains ’The Caliph Stork’, ’The False Prince’, ’The Deliverance of Fatima’, ’Little Mouck’, ’The Haunted Ship’ and ’The Adventures of Saïd’. The first five tales are taken from The Caravan, while the last comes from The Inn in the Spessart, but the unifying factor, as the subtitle indicates, is the oriental setting of each of the tales. It is interesting to note how much overlap of content there is with these three publications of the early 1860s, but the translations are all different, anonymous and each with its own oddities or mistakes.

40The Tauchnitz publication in 1867 of M. A. Faber’s translation of ’The Cold Heart’ was noted earlier. The volume also contained two other tales by Hauff – ’The Beggar Girl of the Pont des Arts’ and ’The Emperor’s Picture’ – neither of which is a fairytale or included in the three almanacks. After Feiling in 1844 Faber is only the second translator to be identified and credited. The British Library catalogue notes a Mary Anne Faber as the author of Recollections of Indian Life (1910), and the two may well be the same person. The next translator identified herself more clearly. This was Elizabeth Still Harrington (i.e. E. S. Stanhope, Countess of Harrington), who brought out a slender volume containing free translations of The Storks and the False Prince (London: Henry Sotheran, 1875). These are simplified versions of Hauff’s two stories, which remove a good bit of the detail and description, but otherwise follow the plot fairly closely. Hauff’s name is not mentioned on the title-page. It is doubtful how widely this slight publication circulated.

41By the 1880s it had become the practice to name translators, and in 1881 we find Percy E. Pinkerton credited with a new small selection entitled Longnose the Dwarf, and Other Fairy Tales, by W. Hauff (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein & Allen). This was part of an ’Illustrated Library of Fairy Tales’ and once more used Bertall’s illustrations. In addition to the title story Pinkerton translated ’The History of Little Mook’, ’The Caliph turned Stork’, ’The Adventures of Said’, ’The Stone-Cold Heart’and ’The Story of the Silver Florin’. The first complete translation of Hauff’s fairytales was made by S. Mendel and published in 1886 by George Bell and Sons as part of ’Bohn’s Standard Library’. It was reprinted in 1914. It is a kind of companion piece to Margaret Hunt’s complete translation of Grimm’s Household Tales (1884), also published by Bell. Neither publication contains any illustrations, so an adult readership can be assumed. Mendel gives the most accurate translation of Hauff not only verbally, but also in the presentation of the stories with the frameworks and in the sequence intended by the author. A further translation probably designed for adult consumption was Agnes Henry’s The Cold Heart (London: Digby and Long, 1890), which again had no illustrations. It is not the most accurate of renderings, occasionally misunderstanding bits or omitting difficult passages.

42In 1893 T. Fisher Unwin published four of Hauff’s tales under the title The Little Glass Man and Other Stories. Feiling’s translations were used, uncredited, for ’The Little Glass Man’ itself and ’Nose, the Dwarf’, but translations from another, unknown hand were printed for ’Caliph Stork’ and ’Little Muck’. The selection is preceded by a rather silly introduction by L. Eckenstein, purporting to tell, by reference to the Blue Fairy and Gogul Mogul, ’How the stories were found’. This is a piece of mere whimsy, providing no factual information whatever.

43During the 1890s and 1900s we get a recurrence of the practice of Grimms’ Goblins, in which individual tales by Hauff are incorporated into general collections of fairytales. Andrew Lang included ’Caliph Stork’ in The Green Fairy Book (1892), ’Dwarf Long Nose’ in The Violet Fairy Book (1901) and ’The Story of the Sham Prince, or the Ambitious Tailor’ in The Crimson Fairy Book (1903). Lang had a whole bevy of female translators for these extensive collections of mainly traditional tales. They included his wife and several other women whose work is acknowledged in his prefaces, but it is generally not clear who translated which particular tale. However, we are told that Miss Blackley translated ’Dwarf Long Nose’, and it may be that she translated the other Hauff stories as well. Nowhere is Hauff actually credited with the authorship of the tales, but as Lang’s anthologies enjoyed a wide circulation and were often reprinted, these already well-known stories were increasingly understood as part of the vast stockpile of traditional tales. Both ’Caliph Stork’ and ’Dwarf Long Nose’ gained prominence through the black and white drawings of H. J. Ford (1860-1941), who illustrated all Lang’s fairy books and provided appealing, strongly imaginative designs. Lang’s books were imitated in a series of anthologies of mainly literary fairytales published by Hutchinson and Co. and illustrated by H. R. Millar. Two of Hauff’s tales were included in them. ’Fatma’ appeared in The Silver Fairy Book [1895] and ’The Adventures of Said’in The Diamond Fairy Book [1897], each in a new anonymous translation.

  • 7 For general information see Sally Wood, W. T. Stead and his Books for the Bairns’ (Edinburgh: Sal (...)

44While Lang’s books with their colour plates as well as black and white illustrations were aimed at middle-class children, W. T. Stead targeted a less well off readership with his magazine-style Books for the Bairns. The first of these pink paperbacks, issued monthly at a penny, was published in March 1896. The series purveyed simplified versions of popular material and usually consisted of sixty-four pages. Each was copiously illustrated with black and white drawings. The series opened with Aesop’s Fables, but no. 32 (October 1898) presented Coal-Munk-Peter and his Three Wishes (i.e. ’The Cold Heart’), and no. 57 (October 1900) had The Mad Tailor and the Caliph Stork. Two Tales from the East. Both credited the stories explicitly to Hauff, but they are simplified adaptations rather than faithful translations. Stead actually explains at the beginning of the second part of ’Coal-Munk-Peter’ that, while the first part is an abridgement of the original German story, the second has had to be retold from memory, as he lost his first version of it after reading it to his children. The illustrator for ’The Mad Tailor’ was Wilfrid Sayers, but both ’The Caliph Stork’ and ’Coal-Munk-Peter’ were dealt with by Stead’s usual collaborator, Brinsley Le Fanu (1854-1920). Rather oddly, Stead published a second version of ’The False Prince’ as ’Prince or Tailor?’ as no. 160 (May 1909) of Books for the Bairns, this being an adaptation by Frank Mundell. Incidentally, it was Allen Lane’s memories of reading Books for the Bairns as a child that prompted him to launch Puffin Story Books in 1940.7

45The period from the death of Queen Victoria to the First World War saw a further half dozen editions of Hauff’s fairytales, ranging from a reprint of Mendel’s translation to the Rev. E. J. Cunningham’s comic verse rendering of The Caliph Stork (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1905). This latter is an undistinguished Edwardian children’s book with monochrome illustrations by T. C. Gash on most of its twenty pages. At least it is not a version that pretends to enhance the original by turning into verse, as happened with Fouqué’s Undine. The casual nature of the undertaking is revealed in the concluding lines:

If a moral you think to see entwined
In the innocent web of our trifling verse,
Pray seek it, and possibly you may find;
If not, why, no matter; you’re none the worse.

46Both this and Stead’s approach in the Books for the Bairns show that translators felt no compunction in playing around with Hauff’s texts. It isn’t that they alter details because of the deeply felt moral and religious considerations of the Evangelicals, but that they don’t really grasp Hauff’s ambiguities and just want to prettify his tales.

47A collection of nine tales, explicitly stated to be ’translated and adapted’ by Cicely McDonnell, was published as Hauff’s Fairy Tales (London: Dean & Son, Ltd., 1903). Rather unusually, it included ’Almansor’, which had previously only figured in Burns’s 1845 edition and Mendel’s complete translation. McDonnell’s understanding of German is imperfect, and this is shown at several points in her version of what she calls ’The Dwarf’s Nose’. Later in the story she in fact calls him ’Longnose’. Not only does she continually simplify the story, but she converts the heads of cabbage into cauliflowers and refers to the herb (Kräutlein) of which the magic soup is made as ’the particular cabbage of which it is made’. The mysterious Magentrost and Niesmitlust are changed into marjoram and borage. The specks of dust seen in the sun (Sonnenstäubchen) which the old woman makes into her bread are rather engagingly, if desperately, translated as ’sunberries’. The book contains forty-one black and white illustrations by Fritz Bergen plus three full-page colour plates and a frontispiece depicting Little Mouk racing in his slippers. The other two plates show the caliph in the process of turning into a stork and Dwarf Nose unwittingly scaring his mother at her market stall.

48In 1905 another extensive translation by Sybil Thesiger was published by James Finch and Co. It excluded ’The Haunted Ship’, but otherwise was as full as Mendel’s. The framework tale of The Caravan is presented at the end of that section with the separate title of ’The History of Orbasan, the Robber’. The book is attractively illustrated with sixteen strong black and white pictures by Dorothy Morris, each story being thus covered.

49The next edition to appear reverted to colour illustration and was the most ambitious production to date. Fairy Tales by Wilhelm Hauff, translated by L. L. Weedon and illustrated by Arthur A. Dixon, was a joint publication of Ernest Nister in London and E. P. Dutton and Co. in New York, appearing in 1910. It printed eleven tales, omitting only ’The Spectre Ship’, ’The Severed Hand’ and ’The Dancer of Grünwiesel’, stories of a particularly grotesque or gruesome nature. It is nonetheless one of the rare publications that include ’The Cavern of Steenfoll’. Lucy L. Weedon, who also translated a selection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Nister and Dutton, produced a fluent and idiomatic, if not always perfectly accurate translation of Hauff. Nister had his sights on a better class of purchaser than Dean and Son. His book is better printed and on a higher quality of paper, the binding is adorned with an art nouveau figure, and the book contains six colour plates, twelve full-page monochrome illustrations and many more similar vignettes by Arthur A. Dixon (fl. 1893-1920). The colour plates are taken from water-colour paintings showing a subtle range of hues and depicting a variety of lively scenes.

50The title-page of Caravan Tales and Some Others (London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1912), illustrated by Norman Ault, bears the dispiriting line ’Freely adapted and retold by J. G. Hornstein’. The contents present ’Caliph Stork’, ’The Death Ship’, ’Little Mook’, ’The False Prince’, ’The Golden Whistle; or the Fortunes of Saïd’ and ’The Wonder-Child’ (i.e. ’Dwarf Nose’). To these Hornstein adds an invention of his own – ’The Rusty Key’. He keeps to the plots of the first three and ’The Golden Whistle’ (though it is a silver whistle in the German), but ’The False Prince’ is foolishly altered. At the end of the story the casket test, which sharply brings out the difference between the nobleman and the tailor, is omitted. After the sewing test the court is invaded by Labakan’s master and workmen, anxious for revenge on one whose presumption has discredited their calling. Then another twist turns the whole sequence of adventures into a dream that Labakan has had, having fallen asleep when working on Prince Selim’s robe. Hornstein’s tricks with ’The Wonder-Child’ have already been dealt with earlier in this chapter. The book is illustrated with fifteen tipped-in colour plates by Norman Ault (1880-1950), which are carefully composed, but lack distinctiveness. Their small size may have been intended to evoke miniatures, but it robs them of impact.

51It seems appropriate that 1914, the year in which the war that changed the face of Europe began, should be marked by two editions that show the divergences in the reception of Hauff. One is a reprint of Mendel’s scrupulous, unadorned translation of the full corpus of Hauff’s fairytales, first issued nearly thirty years before in 1886 and now reissued in a cheap accessible format for the adult reader. The other is also a book designed for adults, which includes ’The Cold Heart’ along with Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (London: Holden & Hardingham). The large format, generously spaced typography and the many colour plates protected by tissue guards mark this out as a gift book. Hauff’s story is introduced by a two-page biography by H. Robertson Murray, who was possibly also the translator, though that is nowhere stated. Clearly, the illustrations matter more. They are by Forster Robson and consist of nine plates in full colour, with four more drawings reproduced in two colours. These latter are much more dramatic in impact and adroitly composed. By contrast the full colour plates are rather conventional. ’The Cold Heart’ was the first of Hauff’s stories to appear in English translation and did so twice in 1844, so it seems curiously appropriate that it should also be the last work of Hauff’s to be published before the outbreak of war.

52As with so many other German writers, the First World War created a hiatus in the reception of Hauff. A few stories survived the period because Hauff’s name was not attached to them, so they continued to be reprinted, for example, in Lang’s colour fairy books. As also occurred with Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse-King, an adaptation of ’Little Dwarf Nose’ and ’The Magic Whistle’ by E. Gordon Browne and illustrated by Florence Anderson, again not mentioning Hauff’s name, was published shortly after the war (London: J. Coker & Co., c. 1920). Not until the 1940s do we find further editions, and since then they have continued to appear frequently. What is interesting in all of this is the fact that Hauff has ceased to be presented as an author of interest to adults and children alike. He now appears in English only in editions designed for children and accompanied with illustrations in a wide variety of techniques and styles. The tales have nonetheless demonstrated their staying-power and continuing appeal to children and the artists who have illustrated them.

Notes

1 Paul Roggenhausen, ’Hauff-Studien’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literatur, 157 (1930), pp. 163-64.

2 Hauff is on record as not wanting there to be any love interest in the story by Gustav Adolf Schöll that he included in one collection, and he seems to have regarded love-stories as uninteresting for his intended child readers. See J. Barth, ’Zu Hauffs Märchen’, Wirkendes Wort, 41 (1991), p. 178.

3 Barth, pp. 175-77.

4 William Howitt, The Rural and Domestic Life of Germany (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1842), pp. 267-68.

5 Volker Klotz, Das europäische Kunstmärchen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), pp. 208-22, especially 216-18, provides a stimulating guide to the economic implications of Hauff’s tales.

6 For details see Ruari McLean, Joseph Cundall. A Victorian Publisher. Notes on his Life and a Check-list of his Books (Pinner: Private Libraries Association, 1976). The authorship of Nut-cracker and Sugar-Dolly is not given by McLean., but appears in Christine Pressler, Schöne alte Kinderbücher (Munich: Bruckmann, 1980), p. 152. The information about Schmid’s Christmas Eve comes from Gumuchian, Les Livres de l’enfance (London: The Holland Press, 1979), vol. 1, no. 1737.

7 For general information see Sally Wood, W. T. Stead and his Books for the Bairns’ (Edinburgh: Salvia Books, 1987).

Table des illustrations

Légende 20. Frontispiece (illustration to ’The Stone-cold Heart’) of W. Hauff, Longnose the Dwarf, and Other Fairy Tales (1881).
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