The fairy tales that families gave each other as Christmas books were rarely gentle. In them, an ogre cuts his own daughters' throats and a mother follows Death to take back her child, and the artists who drew these scenes seldom looked away. Several of them lived through stories nearly as dark as the ones they illustrated.
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How Fairy Tales Found Their Pictures
For centuries, fairy tales lived only in spoken form. In the 1800s, collectors in Germany, Norway and Russia wrote them down, writers such as Andersen added new ones, and publishers suddenly needed pictures. For illustrators, the tales offered a subject that let them draw the impossible.
What they could show depended on printing. The early editions carried small black engravings. Color woodblocks then brought bright, flat pages, and in the early 1900s a photographic process could copy a watercolor almost exactly. Luxury gift books for Christmas followed, and with them the golden age of illustration.
The twelve images below all illustrate tales, one per illustrator with a single exception, and the best known come last. They share what the tales kept in print, death, cruelty and fear, and the choice each artist made to draw it rather than hide it.
12. George Cruikshank, Rumpelstiltskin, from German Popular Stories (1823)
Rumpelstiltskin has just heard his own name. The tiny man with the long beard and the pointed cap stamps in fury on the floor of a royal hall, while a queen on her throne and her courtiers look on. In the German tale, guessing that name was the queen's only way to keep the child she had promised him.
In 1823, English readers had never seen this story in their own language. The plate comes from German Popular Stories, published in London that year, the first English translation of the tales collected by the Grimm brothers. The translator, Edgar Taylor, kept only part of the collection, and the pictures were etched by the London illustrator George Cruikshank.
Cruikshank leaned on the comic side of the tales, as his furious little man shows, and his plates did much to make the book a success. That success then crossed back to Germany. It pushed the Grimm brothers to publish a small illustrated selection of their own in 1825, and the pocket edition became a bestseller there.
Thirty years later, with his career slipping, Cruikshank returned to fairy tales, and this time he wanted them to preach. His Fairy Library, four books published between 1853 and 1864, rewrote each story as a lesson against drink. In his Cinderella, the king has all the wine, beer and spirits in the kingdom burned.
His friend Charles Dickens answered in public. On October 1, 1853, in his magazine Household Words, he published an essay called Frauds on the Fairies, where he wrote that Cruikshank was "of all men, the last who should lay his exquisite hand on fairy text."
Cruikshank replied in print the following year, and he let a fairy-tale hero sign for him. His pamphlet was called a Letter from Hop-o'-My-Thumb to Charles Dickens.
At a Glance
Artist: George Cruikshank (1792 to 1878)
Made: 1823 (design), this printing 1876
Medium: Etching, here reproduced as a printed book plate
Size: Not published
Where to see it: In the book German Popular Stories (London, C. Baldwyn, 1823) and its reprints, including a later edition in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
11. Virginia Frances Sterrett, "Ah, ha! you are at last in my domain, little fool!", from Old French Fairy Tales (1920)
A large toad rises out of a dark pool toward a girl sitting alone on a rock. The woman who painted it was nineteen, had almost no art training, and was already supporting her family with her brushes, because her mother was ill. Soon after she finished the book, she learned that she had tuberculosis, and from then on she painted against time.