Abstract
‘As the “boy is the father of the man,” it may not be amiss to draw the attention of our young readers to the boyhood, if we may so term it, of England’, the Boys of England announces in 1866. Picturing a liberal history of continual ascent, the author marvels ‘What magic has transformed the howling young savage of the wilderness — the wolf-hunter of English woods and hills — into the brave yet refined, muscular yet withal gentle boy reader of this Journal?’3 It was not just cheap boys’ weeklies that presented English youth as the apex of evolutionary development, and marvelled at the process that had brought them there. Many juvenile magazines were fascinated by that same quest for origins — with tracing national, racial, cultural and linguistic roots.
The beginning of all nations must be ever buried in obscurity, or, at all events, blended with fables and legends.1
I prick up my ears like an old horse at sound of the hunt, whenever there is the slightest reference to what is called folk-lore.2
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Notes
Egoff, Children’s Periodicals in the Nineteenth Century: A Survey and Bibliography (London: Library Association, 1951), 28–43. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1999), IV, 3rd edn, cols 1903–1920, provides another useful list of children’s magazine titles.
See also Diana Dixon, ‘Magazines for Children’, in Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, ed. J. Don Vann and Rosemary VanArsdel, 2 vols (New York: Modern Language Association, 1978–1989), II (1989), 91–98.
AJM, 4 (Nov. 1867), 1–3 (1). Contributors were paid 10s. a page for original work, and 5s. for translation — considerably better rates than those paid by the Monthly Packet. However, Margaret Gatty’s editorial terms — £10 a month for the first year’s sales up to 15,000 — were much poorer than MacDonald’s. See Christobel Maxwell, Mrs Gatty and Mrs Ewing (London: Constable, 1949), 148.
On the new philology, see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1760–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 165–67
George W. Stocking Jr, Victorian Anthropology (Macmillan: New York, 1987), 21–22.
See letter to C. T. Gatty, 13 Mar. 1874, in Horatia K. F. Eden, Juliana Horatia Ewing: Her Books and Letters (London: S.P.C.K., 1896), 194–96 (195).
See Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Language, Religion, Art and Custom, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1873); and Lang, ‘Mythology and Fairy Tales’, 618–31.
See also Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968),
On the mythology of female tale-telling more generally, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995).
See Barbara Onslow, Women and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 26, 165,
June Sturrock, ‘Establishing Identity: Editorial Correspondence from the Early Years of The Monthly Packet’, VPR, 39 (Fall 2006), 266–79.
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© 2008 Caroline Sumpter
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Sumpter, C. (2008). Myths of Origin: Folktale Scholarship and Fictional Invention in Magazines for Children. 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_3
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