IN POWDER AND CRINOLINE
As you page through the stories... you will find yourself in shadowy, dreamlike lands whose unfamiliar terrains and strange inhabitants can suddenly disclose similarities with our everyday world.—Lee Stantini
It was Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen who had the ‘capital’ idea for a volume of fairy-tales set in the time of ‘powder and crinoline,’ ‘peg-top trousers and Dundreary whiskers.’ British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch collected seven tales that ‘indicated,’ he wrote, ‘that urgent need in our literature’ ‘to people the Great Exhibition of 1851 with fairies and set them dancing around the crinolines and tall hats of that period.’
The waggish prose of Sir Quiller-Couch carries us swiftly through a world of sparkling artifice, and does full justice to Nielsen’s highly stylized, colored lithographs. Beneath his breezy manner, however, is a solid moral sense.
In a foreword to an edition retitled The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Fairy Tales, editor Lee Santini writes, ‘Mirroring the real world, fairy tale lands contain both good and evil, the logical and the nonsensical, reward and punishment. A relationship with the real is helpful to the young child who is always looking to extend his field of knowledge and, in some sense, to gain mastery of his environment. The fairy tale then, can point children in new directions of thought and help to confirm already established beliefs about the way in which the world operates. It is important for young readers to see fairyland wrong-doers suitably punished, the kind-hearted rewarded with the love of a prince or a princess, and the frivolous taught the merits of hard work. Children need to test the validity of such values—they need to know whether industriousness, honesty, and generosity truly are prized by society as their parents and teachers tell them. By affirming their standards children have been taught to respect, fairy tales bring a reassuring sense of order to an often confusing, chaotic world.’
The collection begins with a story called ‘Minon-Minette,’ but the main character is her suitor Prince Souci, who begins as a vapid young man, but undergoes magical trials that develop his character and prepare him to be a wise monarch and a good husband.
‘Felicia, or The Pot of Pinks’ tells the reward of a poor goose-girl whose generosity and compassion leads her to a startling discovery of her true royal identity.
‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ is perhaps the best known of this collection, borrowed from Andrew Lang’s popular Red Fairy Book. It hardly requires introduction: we cheer for the gardener boy and his love for the youngest princess, as he uses his good luck, cunning and wit to discover the secret of the twelve dancing princesses.
‘Rosanie, or The Inconstant Prince’ tells of the battle between two fairies for the crown. One proposes to produce a ‘Prince whom nothing in the world could make constant,’ and the other a ‘Princess whom no one could see and resist loving.’ Whose heart will be won or lost in the time of courtship?
‘The Man Who Never Laughed’ is adapted from an Eastern tale, and follows the ‘forbidden door’ tradition of more familiar fairy-tales such as ‘Bluebeard.’ One locked door opens to a strange new world of wealth and happiness, but what is behind another forbidden door?
‘John and the Ghosts’ is an amusing tale composed by Quiller-Couch and a friend during ‘an idle day’s yachting.’ A one-legged soldier employs admirable courage and ingenuity to flummox the ghosts and win the hand of the princess.
The concluding tale, ‘The Czarina’s Violet,’ is a puzzling addition to the collection. This satire is delightful but devoid of the supernatural. A German ambassador and the Russian czar are distracted from terms of treaty by the mystery of a Russian guard standing on a strange position on the palace grounds. Why has a guard been stationed there all these years? The investigation goes all the way to the Senior Field Marshal, but it is the old Nurse who remembers.
• detail from ‘She stopped as if to speak to him; then, altering her mind, went on her way,’ an illustration by Kay Nielsen for ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ in the fairy-tale collection In Powder and Crinoline by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch •
October 22, 2013