The story or ‘history’ of Tom Thumb is the oldest English fairy story that we have in printed form. Other fairy tales may well be older – indeed, almost certainly are if we trace the antecedents of stories such as ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ back some 4,000 years – but the oldest extant […]
Of Oscar Wilde’s various short works for children, ‘The Happy Prince’ (1888) occupies a special place as his signature tale, and is perhaps Wilde’s definitive statement about the relationship between inner and outer beauty. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a sad tale that clearly owes much to earlier fairy stories, especially […]
In some ways Scandinavia’s answer to the tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, ‘The Tinder Box’ was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s first fairy tales. ‘The Tinder Box’ contains a number of common fairy-tale tropes: the magic helper with the ability to grant wishes, the ‘rags to riches’ motif, […]