Last week, I listened to an episode of The Literary Life Podcast with Dr. Vigen Guroian on Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature. I was already familiar with his book Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination and had perused it several years ago, but hearing him discuss it himself was a great refresher on this topic.
The show notes link to his article in Touchstone magazine, The Fairy Tale Wars which goes into more detail on some of the topics he touched on. And it references an article by Dickens that I also read entitled Frauds on the Fairies from October 1, 1853 and which the first paragraph honors the fairy tales passed down in various retellings.
It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force–many such good things have been first nourished in the child’s heart by this powerful aid. It has greatly helped to keep us, in some sense, ever young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender track not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with children, sharing their delights.
Dickens goes on to lament how illustrator Mr. George Cruikshank has altered versions of fairy tales so that he can incorporate moral lessons on “Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the sale of spirituous liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education” to which Dickens protests that Cruikshank has “no greater moral justification in altering the harmless little books than we should have in altering his best etchings”.
One of my favorite lines in the essay was his recalling this bit of lore: “ like the famous definition of a weed; a thing growing up in a wrong place”. The opinions Cruikshank interpolates into the esteemed fairy tales may be good, but they are in the wrong place, Dickens argues. That use of the word interpolates carries the same meaning that Charlotte Mason warned about teachers and parents placing themselves and their thoughts in between the text and the student so that a disruption between the mind of the writer and the mind of the student occurs.
From School Education, p.177
Again, as I have already said, ideas must reach us directly from the mind of the thinker, and it is chiefly by means of the books they have written that we get in touch with the best minds.
I’m not aware of Dicken’s theology of how these good traits come to readers of fairy tales, but I do know that Charlotte Mason attributed this to the work of the Holy Spirit.
…but the great recognition, that God the Holy Spirit is Himself, personally, the Imparter of knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius, is a conception so far lost to us…
