From Rags to Witches - The grim tale of children's stories

The history of fairy tales

Once upon a time, fairy tales were not for children.

Told and retold by countless storytellers, the versions we are familiar with can be very different from the ones that entertained our ancestors by the fireside. Those were stories of sex, death and curses, so morally outrageous that in 1604 the Catholic Church placed one fairy tale collection on its Index of Forbidden Books.

Fairy stories began to be seen as a threat to children as new theories about childhood and education developed. A new genre of moral children’s books was born, intended to promote rational thought and Christian morality. Instead of princesses in enchanted castles in faraway places and long ago times, stories were set in the modern world where naughty children met wretched fates and pious children gave heartfelt deathbed speeches warning of the perils of Hell.

East Midlands Connections

But good fairy stories triumphed. The first English-language publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories from 1846, was translated by Nottingham’s Mary Howitt, who was so captivated by his stories that she learnt Danish specifically to translate them. A successful children’s author of the time, her best-known poem is The Spider and the Fly.

Children’s books became beautiful in the 19^th century, when iIlustrators such as Kate Greenaway became household names. Manuscripts and Special Collections owns a scrapbook of her pencil sketches, given to the University of Nottingham in remembrance of her childhood years spent at Rolleston in Nottinghamshire.