Abstract
‘The custom, in periodicals, of sustaining interest by happily-conceived divisions of the plot, may perhaps be traced to this subtle artifice of Scheherazade’, James Mew observes in the Cornhill Magazine in 1875.1 Mew was not the first writer to make the analogy between the skills of the fairytale narrator and those of the magazine novelist: for Dickens, Mrs Gaskell was famously ‘my Scheherazade’, spinning artfully rationed weekly instalments for the readers of Household Words.2 In fact, both echoed enterprising editors from the previous century, who made literal links between Scheherazade and serialisation. While the first English novel serialised in a newspaper, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, was still running in the Original London Post, the Churchman’s Last Shift was entertaining its readers with ‘The Voyages of Sinbad’. Three years later, in 1723, the Arabian Nights began appearing thrice-weekly in Parker’s London News. Making good use of its heroine’s mastery of pleasurable postponement, the serialisation took over three years to come to completion.3
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Notes
Letter to Gaskell (1851), cited in Winfred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 123.
For details of these serialisations, see Robert D. Mayo’s invaluable The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 59. On the Nights nineteenth-century reinventions and serialisations, see Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981), 11–14Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 237–92.
Lang, ed., The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans Green, 1889), xix.
See Bottigheimer, ‘The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literature World’, in A Companion to the Fairy Tale, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 57–70.
Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 142.
Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 73–98
Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. edn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 8, 21.
On the Grimms’ editorial revisions, the influence of print and the questionable nature of some of their ‘folk’ sources, see John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985)
Jack Zipes, When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition (Routledge: New York, 1999), 61–79
Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
On challenges to that Romantic legacy, see The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Regina Bendix, ‘The Uses of Disciplinary History’, Radical History Review, 84 (2002), 110–14
Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folk Song’, 1700 to the Present (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).
Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Universitly Press, 1994), 118. This is Mitzi Myers’s term. For further evidence of the use made of the fairy tale by didactic writers in the early nineteenth century, see Grenby, ‘Tame Fairies’.
Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems of Representation and Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 75, 105.
In fact, in the 1820s-1830s, fairy and folkloric material (including tales from Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions) was also republished in cheap Gothic anthologies: see the appendix to Franz J. Potter, The History of Gothic Publishing 1800–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 179–89.
Taylor, German Popular Stories, Translated from the Kinder und Haus Märchen, Collected by M. M. Grimm, From Oral Tradition, 2 vols (London: C. Baldwyn, 1823–26), I, v.
Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (London: Bullen, 1902), 69–70. I am grateful to David Dwan for this reference. Although, as Warwick Gould and Deidre Toomey note, the Irish Times is significant here for its Unionist and conservative politics, the newspaper also carries a symbolic weight beyond its political affiliation. See Yeats, Mythologies, ed. Gould and Toomey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 27 and 238.
‘Author’s Preface’ to 2nd volume, repr. in Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, a new and complete edition ed. T. Wright (London: Tegg, 1870), xxx.
See Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London: Pimlico, 1999), 114–53.
Ashton, Chapbooks in the Eighteenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1882), v–xii.
Satu Apo, The Narrative World of Finnish Fairy Tales (Helsinki: Swedish Academy of Science and Letters, 1995), 41.
Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London: Palmer, 1928), 43–44.
‘The String of Pearls’ was serialised in People’s Periodical, Nov. 1846 to Mar. 1847; ‘The Twelfth-Cake Goblin’ appeared 26 Dec. 1846, 185–8. In 1840, a gruesome tale of cannibalism, bearing a close relationships to the Grimms’ ‘The Juniper Tree’ also found its way on to the front pages of Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times: see Rosalind Crone, ‘Violent Crime Reporting’, in ‘Violence and Entertainment in Nineteenth-century London’ (unpublished doctoral thesis: University of Cambridge, 2006). On the phenomenal circulation of Lloyd’s publications, see Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution. (London: Penguin, 1965), 213.
Ruskin, Introduction, German Popular Stories, with Illustrations after the Original Designs by George Cruikshank (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), x.
‘Memoir for Laura’, cited by Winifred Gérin in Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 21.
MacDonald, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’ in A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare (London: Sampson Low, 1893), 313–22 (313).
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© 2008 Caroline Sumpter
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Sumpter, C. (2008). Serialising Scheherazade: An Alternative History of the Fairy Tale. In: The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227644_2
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