Fairy Tales by Three American Nineteenth-Century Writers: Richard Henry Stoddard, Horace E. Scudder, and Elizabeth Stoddard

In the antebellum US, the predominant modes in American children’s literature were didacticism and moralism, and although translations of the Grimms’s and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales were available, many American authors and publishers regarded fairy tales as unsuitable for the modern needs of a new nation. Nevertheless, there were American writers who, inspired by Andersen’s tales, actually fought for the fairies and published fairy tales in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s: the poet and editor Richard Henry Stoddard published Adventures in Fairyland in 1853; the man of letters and editor Horace E. Scudder Seven Little People and Their Friends in 1862, Dream Children in 1864, and Stories from My Attic in 1869; and the short-story writer and novelist Elizabeth Stoddard Lolly Dinks’s Doings in 1874. It could indeed be argued that these writers were instrumental in bringing about as well as recording important shifts in attitude in and towards American children’s literature during these three decades. Although, or rather precisely because, their literary exploits reached far beyond children’s literature, they helped establish it as a significant literary realm: after the Civil War, American children’s literature was considered worthy of the imaginative efforts of the best American writers, of reviews in prestigious journals, and of publication in quality periodicals. In this paper, I will explore a few of the nineteenth-century American fairy tales in terms of didacticism, imagination, and nation building.