本书是柏杨惟一一部以儿童文学形式出现的作品，共由15个短篇组成，虽各自独立，又环环相扣，以希腊罗马神话、民间故事、圣经故事为主干，加上作者丰富的想像力，构成了富有神幻色彩的《天涯故事》。在天帝朱庇特攻破天宫结束原本由泰坦一族统治的宏大场面下，15个短篇相继展开，既可以看到为人类带来光明的使者——普罗米修斯，又能体验到小爱神丘比特的爱情之旅，以及那古老而神秘的爱琴文明……
作者：余培侠 托娅
这是一份送给中央电视台少儿频道3岁生日的礼物。这也是3岁的少儿频道献给全国小朋友、小观众和一切关爱她的人的礼物。因为有了先天孕育的饱满、良好宽松的生长环境、无数人的尽心呵护与养育，少儿频道身心健康地长大了。3年来，她走过的脚步又快又稳。虽然留在背后的小足印还不够清晰，但一个个却深深烙在热爱她的电视观众心里。
这是一份送给中央电视台少儿频道3岁生日的礼物。这也是3岁的少儿频道献给全国小朋友、小观众和一切关爱她的人的礼物。因为有了先天孕育的饱满、良好宽松的生长环境、无数人的尽心呵护与养育，少儿频道身心健康地长大了。3年来，她走过的脚步又快又稳。虽然留在背后的小足印还不够清晰，但一个个却深深烙在热爱她的电视观众心里。
本书将我们日常生活中一定要知道的基本经济原理编成童话故事，用生动有趣的语言给小朋友们讲述经济概念。另外为了减轻父母和老师们给孩子进行经济教育的负担，我们还预备拿出一套深入浅出地讲解经济原理的方案。从小就有经济概念的孩子会与众不同，他们目标意识强，观察社会的视野开阔，生活态度也积极健康，现在开始，让咱们一起来通过童话学习经济原理吧。
《邪童正史》是以“邪童”的眼光，来歪解一个个中国历史小故事，虽没有什么微言大义，但正由于没有什么负担，才使蒋方舟的历史故事写得格外“淘气”和讨人欢心，你绝对能被她逗得很高兴。
本书是剑桥大学博士卡洛林•奥斯汀专门为自己的三个孩子编写的励志故事集。这些故事活泼有趣，涉及的范围颇广，有做人，有做事，有梦想，有成长，有挫折，还有爱和感恩。每一个故事都具有丰富的教育意义，都蕴含着深深的母爱，仿佛一种神奇的力量，在不知不觉中激励孩子奋发向上，促进孩子对生活的方方面面进行更深层次的思考，从而获得更多的智慧、勇气和信心；还可以帮助他们挖掘潜能，开发情商，一天天完善自我，一步步走向成功。这本书绝不仅仅是一本普通的教子读本，父母完全可以和孩子一起阅读，一起思考，一起成长。
这是一个“活宝班”，大概和你们班差不多。老师们一说到这个班，头发根儿都发麻，直到棒棒老师的到来。于是，自然课被棒棒老师搬到了月亮上；大合唱的时候同学们的声音逃跑了；敲锣打鼓的大老鼠惊现教室，给大家送来了锦旗；有人将要被机器人踢出“悟空号”飞船；一包“消失粉”惹了大祸……平淡无奇的校园生活，忽然充满了奇妙幻想，很多事情都在悄悄改变。同学们疯狂地爱上了学校，爱上了这个棒棒老师。棒棒老师？她到底是何许人物，能让学生如此着迷？精彩故事一点点的带你去揭秘
柯云路的《童话人格》是一部边缘性的著作。它对世界上一些最著名的童话、神话故事进行了独特的解析，使我们突兀地看到了一些我们原本可能并不觉察的重大的决定人格的情结，诸如：“贾宝玉情结”、“托尔斯泰情结”、“辛巴情结”、还有“白雪公主情结”、“魔镜王后情结”、“灰姑娘情结”、“海的女儿情结”、“ 丑小鸭情结”等等。你曾被哪些情结所困扰？本书中柯云路将和你一起探讨这些问题。
美国著名歌星麦当娜最新童书系列，以史无前例的40多种语言、全球100多个国家和地区同时出版发行，堪称出版史上的奇迹。这是一部畅销全世界、深受各国儿童和家长青睐的、关注心灵成长的童书。
那里面的主人公“小英雄”，是一个罕见的明朗与和谐的形象，也只有这一篇作品充满了异乎寻常的乐观主义。
Charlotte's Web is an award-winning children's novel by acclaimed American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte. The book was first published in 1952, with illustrations by Garth Williams.
The novel tells the story of a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages praising Wilbur (such as "Some Pig") in her web in order to persuade the farmer to let him live.
Written in White's dry, low-key manner, Charlotte's Web is considered a classic of children's literature, enjoyable to adults as well as children. The description of the experience of swinging on a rope swing at the farm is an often cited example of rhythm in writing, as the pace of the sentences reflects the motion of the swing. Publishers Weekly listed the book as the best-selling children's paperback of all time as of 2000.
Charlotte's Web was made into an animated feature by Hanna-Barbera Productions and Paramount Pictures in 1973. Paramount released a direct-to-video sequel, Charlotte's Web 2: Wilbur's Great Adventure, in the US in 2003 (Universal released the film internationally). A live-action film version of E. B. White's original story was released on December 15, 2006. A video game based on this adaption was also released on December 12.
Plot summary
The book begins when John Arable's sow gives birth to a litter of piglets, and Mr. Arable discovers one of them is a runt and decides to kill it. However, his eight year old daughter Fern begs him to let it live. Therefore her father gives it to Fern as a pet, and she names the piglet Wilbur. Wilbur is hyperactive and always exploring new things. He lives with Fern for a few weeks and then is sold to her uncle, Homer Zuckerman. Although Fern visits him at the Zuckermans' farm as often as she can, Wilbur gets lonelier day after day. Eventually, a warm and soothing voice tells him that she is going to be his friend. The next day, he wakes up and meets his new friend: Charlotte, the grey spider.
Wilbur soon becomes a member of the community of animals who live in the cellar of Zuckerman's barn. When the old sheep in the barn cellar tells Wilbur that he is going to be killed and eaten at Christmas, he turns to Charlotte for help. Charlotte has the idea of writing words in her web extolling Wilbur's excellence ("some pig", "terrific", "radiant", and eventually "humble"), reasoning that if she can make Wilbur sufficiently famous, he will not be killed. Thanks to Charlotte's efforts, and with the assistance of the gluttonous rat Templeton, Wilbur not only lives, but goes to the county fair with Charlotte and wins a prize. Having reached the end of her natural lifespan, Charlotte dies at the fair. Wilbur repays Charlotte by bringing home with him the sac of eggs (her "magnum opus") she had laid at the fair before dying. When Charlotte's eggs hatch at Zuckerman's farm, most of them leave to make their own lives elsewhere, except for three: Joy, Aranea, and Nellie, who remain there as friends to Wilbur.
Characters
* Wilbur is a rambunctious pig, the runt of his litter, who loves life, even that of Zuckerman’s barn. He sometimes feels lonely or fearful.
* Charlotte A. Cavatica , or simply Charlotte, is a spider who befriends Wilbur, who at first seems bloodthirsty due to her method of catching food.
* Fern Arable, daughter of John Arable and Mrs. Arable, is the courageous eight-year-old girl who saves Wilbur in the beginning of the novel.
* Templeton is a gluttonous rat who helps Charlotte and Wilbur only when offered food. He serves as a somewhat caustic, self-serving comic relief to the plot.
* Avery Arable is the brother of Fern. He appears briefly throughout the novel.
* Homer Zuckerman is Fern’s uncle who keeps Wilbur in his barn. He has a wife, Edith, and a hired man named Lurvy who helps out around the barn.
* Other animals living in Zuckerman’s barn with whom Wilbur converses are a disdainful lamb, a goose who is constantly sitting on her eggs, and an old sheep.
* Henry Fussy is a boy Fern’s age whom Fern becomes very fond of.
* Uncle is Wilbur’s rival at the fair, a large pig whom Charlotte doesn’t consider to be particularly refined.
History
White's editor Ursula Nordstrom said that one day, in 1952, E.B. White handed her a new manuscript out of the blue, the only version of Charlotte's Web then in existence, which she read soon after and was hugely impressed with. Charlotte's Web was published three years after White began writing it.
Since E. B. White published Death of a Pig in 1948, an account of how he failed to save a sick pig (which had been bought in order to be fattened up and butchered), Charlotte’s Web can be seen as White attempting "to save his pig in retrospect."
When White met the spider who originally inspired Charlotte, he called her Charlotte Epeira (after Epeira sclopetaria, the Grey Cross spider, now known as Aranea sericata), later discovering that the more modern name for that genus was Aranea. In the novel, Charlotte gives her full name as "Charlotte A. Cavatica", revealing her as a barn spider, an orb-weaver with the scientific name Araneus cavaticus.
The anatomical terms (such as those mentioned in the beginning of chapter nine) and other information that White used came mostly from American Spiders by Willis J. Gertsch and The Spider Book by John Henry Comstock, both of which combine a sense of poetry with scientific fact. White incorporated details from Comstock's accounts of baby spiders, most notably the "flight" of the young spiders and also the way one of them climbs to the top of a fence before launching itself into the air. White sent Gertsch’s book to Illustrator Garth Williams. Williams’ initial drawings depicted a spider with a woman’s face, and White suggested that he simply draw a realistic spider instead.
White originally opened the novel with an introduction of Wilbur and the barnyard (which later became the third chapter), but then decided to begin the novel from a human perspective by introducing Fern and her family on the very first page. White’s publishers were at one point concerned with the book’s ending and tried to get White to change it.
The author’s granddaughter, Martha White, thinks many children don’t necessarily see the book as set in Maine. Charlotte's Web has become White's most famous book. However, White treasured his privacy and the integrity of the farmyard and barn that helped inspire the novel, which have been kept off limits to the public according to his wishes.
Reception
Charlotte's Web was generally well-reviewed when it was released. In The New York Times, Eudora Welty wrote, "As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done." Aside from its paperback sales, Charlotte's Web is 78th on the all-time bestselling hardback book list. According to publicity for the 2006 film adaptation (see below), the book has sold more than 45 million copies and been translated into 23 languages. It was a Newbery Honors book for 1953, losing to Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark for the medal. In 1970, White won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a major prize in the field of children's literature, for Charlotte's Web, along with his first children's book, Stuart Little, published in 1945.
Maria Nikolajeva (in her book The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature) calls the opening of the novel a failure because of White's begun and then abandoned human dimension involving Fern, which, she says, obscures any allegory to humanity, if one were to view the animals' story as such. Seth Lerer, in his book Children’s Literature, finds that Charlotte represents female authorship and creativity, and compares her to other female characters in children’s literature such as Jo March in Little Women and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. Nancy Larrick brings to attention the "startling note of realism" in the opening line, "Where's Papa going with that Ax?"
Illustrator Henry Cole expressed his deep childhood appreciation of the characters and story, and calls Garth Williams' illustrations full of “sensitivity, warmth, humor, and intelligence.” Illustrator Diana Cain Blutenthal states that Williams' illustrations inspired and influenced her.
There is an unabridged audio book read by White himself which reappeared decades after it had originally been recorded. Newsweek writes that White reads the story “without artifice and with a mellow charm,” and that “White also has a plangency that will make you weep, so don’t listen (at least, not to the sad parts) while driving.” Joe Berk, president of Pathway Sound, had recorded Charlotte’s Web with White in White’s neighbor's house in Maine (which Berk describes as an especially memorable experience) and released the book in LP. Bantam released Charlotte’s Web alongside Stuart Little on CD in 1991, digitally remastered, having acquired the two of them for rather a large amount.
In 2005, a school teacher in California conceived of a project for her class in which they would send out hundreds of drawings of spiders (each representing Charlotte’s child Aranea going out into the world so that she can return and tell Wilbur of what she has seen) with accompanying letters; they ended up visiting a large number of parks, monuments and museums, and were hosted by and/or prompted responses from celebrities and politicians such as John Travolta and then First Lady Laura Bush.
Maggie Kneen created full-color illustrations for a couple sections of the novel, which were published in picture book format as Wilbur's Adventure and Some Pig.
Awards and nominations
* Massachusetts Children's Book Award (1984)
* Newbery Honor Book (1953)
* Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal (1970)
* Horn Book Fanfare
Film adaptations
1973 version
Main article: Charlotte's Web (1973 film)
The book was adapted into an animated feature by Hanna-Barbera Productions and Sagittarius Productions in 1973 with a song score by the Sherman Brothers.
2003 sequel
This is the sequel to the 1973 film, released direct-to-video by Paramount Pictures.
2006 version
Paramount Pictures, with Walden Media, Kerner Entertainment Company, and Nickelodeon Movies, produced a live-action/animated film starring Dakota Fanning as Fern and the voice of Julia Roberts as Charlotte, released on December 15, 2006.
Video game
A video game of the 2006 film was developed by Backbone Entertainment and published by THQ and Sega, and released on December 12, 2006 for the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2 and PC.
The novel tells the story of a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages praising Wilbur (such as "Some Pig") in her web in order to persuade the farmer to let him live.
Written in White's dry, low-key manner, Charlotte's Web is considered a classic of children's literature, enjoyable to adults as well as children. The description of the experience of swinging on a rope swing at the farm is an often cited example of rhythm in writing, as the pace of the sentences reflects the motion of the swing. Publishers Weekly listed the book as the best-selling children's paperback of all time as of 2000.
Charlotte's Web was made into an animated feature by Hanna-Barbera Productions and Paramount Pictures in 1973. Paramount released a direct-to-video sequel, Charlotte's Web 2: Wilbur's Great Adventure, in the US in 2003 (Universal released the film internationally). A live-action film version of E. B. White's original story was released on December 15, 2006. A video game based on this adaption was also released on December 12.
Plot summary
The book begins when John Arable's sow gives birth to a litter of piglets, and Mr. Arable discovers one of them is a runt and decides to kill it. However, his eight year old daughter Fern begs him to let it live. Therefore her father gives it to Fern as a pet, and she names the piglet Wilbur. Wilbur is hyperactive and always exploring new things. He lives with Fern for a few weeks and then is sold to her uncle, Homer Zuckerman. Although Fern visits him at the Zuckermans' farm as often as she can, Wilbur gets lonelier day after day. Eventually, a warm and soothing voice tells him that she is going to be his friend. The next day, he wakes up and meets his new friend: Charlotte, the grey spider.
Wilbur soon becomes a member of the community of animals who live in the cellar of Zuckerman's barn. When the old sheep in the barn cellar tells Wilbur that he is going to be killed and eaten at Christmas, he turns to Charlotte for help. Charlotte has the idea of writing words in her web extolling Wilbur's excellence ("some pig", "terrific", "radiant", and eventually "humble"), reasoning that if she can make Wilbur sufficiently famous, he will not be killed. Thanks to Charlotte's efforts, and with the assistance of the gluttonous rat Templeton, Wilbur not only lives, but goes to the county fair with Charlotte and wins a prize. Having reached the end of her natural lifespan, Charlotte dies at the fair. Wilbur repays Charlotte by bringing home with him the sac of eggs (her "magnum opus") she had laid at the fair before dying. When Charlotte's eggs hatch at Zuckerman's farm, most of them leave to make their own lives elsewhere, except for three: Joy, Aranea, and Nellie, who remain there as friends to Wilbur.
Characters
* Wilbur is a rambunctious pig, the runt of his litter, who loves life, even that of Zuckerman’s barn. He sometimes feels lonely or fearful.
* Charlotte A. Cavatica , or simply Charlotte, is a spider who befriends Wilbur, who at first seems bloodthirsty due to her method of catching food.
* Fern Arable, daughter of John Arable and Mrs. Arable, is the courageous eight-year-old girl who saves Wilbur in the beginning of the novel.
* Templeton is a gluttonous rat who helps Charlotte and Wilbur only when offered food. He serves as a somewhat caustic, self-serving comic relief to the plot.
* Avery Arable is the brother of Fern. He appears briefly throughout the novel.
* Homer Zuckerman is Fern’s uncle who keeps Wilbur in his barn. He has a wife, Edith, and a hired man named Lurvy who helps out around the barn.
* Other animals living in Zuckerman’s barn with whom Wilbur converses are a disdainful lamb, a goose who is constantly sitting on her eggs, and an old sheep.
* Henry Fussy is a boy Fern’s age whom Fern becomes very fond of.
* Uncle is Wilbur’s rival at the fair, a large pig whom Charlotte doesn’t consider to be particularly refined.
History
White's editor Ursula Nordstrom said that one day, in 1952, E.B. White handed her a new manuscript out of the blue, the only version of Charlotte's Web then in existence, which she read soon after and was hugely impressed with. Charlotte's Web was published three years after White began writing it.
Since E. B. White published Death of a Pig in 1948, an account of how he failed to save a sick pig (which had been bought in order to be fattened up and butchered), Charlotte’s Web can be seen as White attempting "to save his pig in retrospect."
When White met the spider who originally inspired Charlotte, he called her Charlotte Epeira (after Epeira sclopetaria, the Grey Cross spider, now known as Aranea sericata), later discovering that the more modern name for that genus was Aranea. In the novel, Charlotte gives her full name as "Charlotte A. Cavatica", revealing her as a barn spider, an orb-weaver with the scientific name Araneus cavaticus.
The anatomical terms (such as those mentioned in the beginning of chapter nine) and other information that White used came mostly from American Spiders by Willis J. Gertsch and The Spider Book by John Henry Comstock, both of which combine a sense of poetry with scientific fact. White incorporated details from Comstock's accounts of baby spiders, most notably the "flight" of the young spiders and also the way one of them climbs to the top of a fence before launching itself into the air. White sent Gertsch’s book to Illustrator Garth Williams. Williams’ initial drawings depicted a spider with a woman’s face, and White suggested that he simply draw a realistic spider instead.
White originally opened the novel with an introduction of Wilbur and the barnyard (which later became the third chapter), but then decided to begin the novel from a human perspective by introducing Fern and her family on the very first page. White’s publishers were at one point concerned with the book’s ending and tried to get White to change it.
The author’s granddaughter, Martha White, thinks many children don’t necessarily see the book as set in Maine. Charlotte's Web has become White's most famous book. However, White treasured his privacy and the integrity of the farmyard and barn that helped inspire the novel, which have been kept off limits to the public according to his wishes.
Reception
Charlotte's Web was generally well-reviewed when it was released. In The New York Times, Eudora Welty wrote, "As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done." Aside from its paperback sales, Charlotte's Web is 78th on the all-time bestselling hardback book list. According to publicity for the 2006 film adaptation (see below), the book has sold more than 45 million copies and been translated into 23 languages. It was a Newbery Honors book for 1953, losing to Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark for the medal. In 1970, White won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a major prize in the field of children's literature, for Charlotte's Web, along with his first children's book, Stuart Little, published in 1945.
Maria Nikolajeva (in her book The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature) calls the opening of the novel a failure because of White's begun and then abandoned human dimension involving Fern, which, she says, obscures any allegory to humanity, if one were to view the animals' story as such. Seth Lerer, in his book Children’s Literature, finds that Charlotte represents female authorship and creativity, and compares her to other female characters in children’s literature such as Jo March in Little Women and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. Nancy Larrick brings to attention the "startling note of realism" in the opening line, "Where's Papa going with that Ax?"
Illustrator Henry Cole expressed his deep childhood appreciation of the characters and story, and calls Garth Williams' illustrations full of “sensitivity, warmth, humor, and intelligence.” Illustrator Diana Cain Blutenthal states that Williams' illustrations inspired and influenced her.
There is an unabridged audio book read by White himself which reappeared decades after it had originally been recorded. Newsweek writes that White reads the story “without artifice and with a mellow charm,” and that “White also has a plangency that will make you weep, so don’t listen (at least, not to the sad parts) while driving.” Joe Berk, president of Pathway Sound, had recorded Charlotte’s Web with White in White’s neighbor's house in Maine (which Berk describes as an especially memorable experience) and released the book in LP. Bantam released Charlotte’s Web alongside Stuart Little on CD in 1991, digitally remastered, having acquired the two of them for rather a large amount.
In 2005, a school teacher in California conceived of a project for her class in which they would send out hundreds of drawings of spiders (each representing Charlotte’s child Aranea going out into the world so that she can return and tell Wilbur of what she has seen) with accompanying letters; they ended up visiting a large number of parks, monuments and museums, and were hosted by and/or prompted responses from celebrities and politicians such as John Travolta and then First Lady Laura Bush.
Maggie Kneen created full-color illustrations for a couple sections of the novel, which were published in picture book format as Wilbur's Adventure and Some Pig.
Awards and nominations
* Massachusetts Children's Book Award (1984)
* Newbery Honor Book (1953)
* Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal (1970)
* Horn Book Fanfare
Film adaptations
1973 version
Main article: Charlotte's Web (1973 film)
The book was adapted into an animated feature by Hanna-Barbera Productions and Sagittarius Productions in 1973 with a song score by the Sherman Brothers.
2003 sequel
This is the sequel to the 1973 film, released direct-to-video by Paramount Pictures.
2006 version
Paramount Pictures, with Walden Media, Kerner Entertainment Company, and Nickelodeon Movies, produced a live-action/animated film starring Dakota Fanning as Fern and the voice of Julia Roberts as Charlotte, released on December 15, 2006.
Video game
A video game of the 2006 film was developed by Backbone Entertainment and published by THQ and Sega, and released on December 12, 2006 for the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2 and PC.
Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection is commonly known today as Grimm's Fairy Tales (German: Grimms Märchen). It popularised fairy tales which had in part been taken from the Italian fairy tale writers Giambattista Basile and Giovanni Francesco Straparola.
Composition
In 1803, the Grimms met the Romantics Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim at the University of Marburg. These two men stirred in the brothers an interest in ancient fairy tales. In Kassel they started to collect and write down tales that they alleged had been handed down for generations. Among their sources were Dorothea Viehmann, and two Huguenot families, Hassenpflug and Wild, who introduced them to several tales of French origin. The most important sources were the works of the Italian fairy tale writers Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, on which most the fairy tales were based. The Brothers Grimm praised Giambattista Basile as the first writer to have collected fairy tales into a book only for fairy tales.
On December 20, 1812 they published the first volume of the first edition, containing 86 stories; the second volume of 70 stories followed in 1814. For the second edition, two volumes were issued in 1819 and a third in 1822, totalling 170 tales. The third edition appeared in 1837; fourth edition, 1840; fifth edition, 1843; sixth edition, 1850; seventh edition, 1857. Stories were added, and also subtracted, from one edition to the next, until the seventh held 211 tales.
The first volumes were much criticized because, although they were called "Children's Tales", they were not regarded as suitable for children, both for the scholarly information included and the subject matter. Many changes through the editions – such as turning the wicked mother of the first edition in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel to a stepmother, were probably made with an eye to such suitability. They removed sexual references, such as Rapunzel's innocently asking why her dress was getting tight around her belly, and thus naively revealing her pregnancy and the prince's visits to her step mother, but, in many respects, violence, particularly when punishing villains, was increased.
In 1825 the Brothers published their Kleine Ausgabe or "small edition," a selection of 50 tales designed for child readers. This children's version went through ten editions between 1825 and 1858.
Influence of the book
The influence of these books was widespread. W. H. Auden praised it, during World War II, as one of the founding works of Western culture. The tales themselves have been put to many uses. The Nazis praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners, and so strongly that the Allied forces warned against them. Writers about the Holocaust have combined the tales with their memoirs, as Jane Yolen in her Briar Rose..
The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence. Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, the English Joseph Jacobs, and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales. There was not always a pleased reaction to their collection. Joseph Jacobs was in part inspired by his complaint that English children did not read English fairy tales; in his own words, "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed".
Three individual works of Wilhelm Grimm include Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (Old Danish Heroic Lays, Ballads, and Folktales) in 1811 Über deutsche Runen (On German Runes) in 1821. Die deutsche Heldensage (The German Heroic Legend) in 1829.
List of fairy tales
The code "KHM" stands for Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the original title. All editions from 1812 until 1857 split the stories into two volumes.
Volume 1
Frontispiece used for the first volume of the 1840 4th edition
* KHM 1: The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich (Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich)
* KHM 2: Cat and Mouse in Partnership (Katze und Maus in Gesellschaft)
* KHM 3: Mary's Child (Marienkind)
* KHM 4: The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was (Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen)
* KHM 5: The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids (Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein)
* KHM 6: Trusty John or Faithful John (Der treue Johannes)
* KHM 7: The Good Bargain (Der gute Handel)
* KHM 8: The Wonderful Musician or The Strange Musician (Der wunderliche Spielmann)
* KHM 9: The Twelve Brothers (Die zwölf Brüder)
* KHM 10: The Pack of Ragamuffins (Das Lumpengesindel)
* KHM 11: Brother and Sister (Brüderchen und Schwesterchen)
* KHM 12: Rapunzel
* KHM 13: The Three Little Men in the Wood (Die drei Männlein im Walde)
* KHM 14: The Three Spinners (Die drei Spinnerinnen)
* KHM 15: Hansel and Gretel (Hänsel und Gretel)
* KHM 16: The Three Snake-Leaves (Die drei Schlangenblätter)
* KHM 17: The White Snake (Die weiße Schlange)
* KHM 18: The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean (Strohhalm, Kohle und Bohne)
* KHM 19: The Fisherman and His Wife (Von dem Fischer und seiner Frau)
* KHM 20: The Valiant Little Tailor (Das tapfere Schneiderlein)
* KHM 21: Cinderella (Aschenputtel)
* KHM 22: The Riddle (Das Rätsel)
* KHM 23: The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage (Von dem Mäuschen, Vögelchen und der Bratwurst)
* KHM 24: Mother Hulda (Frau Holle)
* KHM 25: The Seven Ravens (Die sieben Raben)
* KHM 26: Little Red Riding Hood or Little Red-Cap (Rotkäppchen)
* KHM 27: Town Musicians of Bremen (Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten)
* KHM 28: The Singing Bone (Der singende Knochen)
* KHM 29: The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs (Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren)
* KHM 30: The Louse and the Flea (Läuschen und Flöhchen)
* KHM 31: The Girl Without Hands (Das Mädchen ohne Hände)
* KHM 32: Clever Hans (Der gescheite Hans)
* KHM 33: The Three Languages (Die drei Sprachen)
* KHM 34: Clever Elsie (Die kluge Else)
* KHM 35: The Tailor in Heaven (Der Schneider im Himmel)
* KHM 36: The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack ("Tischchen deck dich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack" also known as "Tischlein, deck dich!")
* KHM 37: Thumbling (Daumling) (see also Tom Thumb)
* KHM 38: The Wedding of Mrs. Fox (Die Hochzeit der Frau Füchsin)
* KHM 39: The Elves (Die Wichtelmänner)
o The Elves and the Shoemaker (Erstes Märchen)
o Second Story (Zweites Märchen)
o Third Story (Drittes Märchen)
* KHM 40: The Robber Bridegroom (Der Räuberbräutigam)
* KHM 41: Herr Korbes
* KHM 42: The Godfather (Der Herr Gevatter)
* KHM 43: Frau Trude
* KHM 44: Godfather Death (Der Gevatter Tod)
* KHM 45: Thumbling's Travels (see also Tom Thumb) (Daumerlings Wanderschaft)
* KHM 46: Fitcher's Bird (Fitchers Vogel)
* KHM 47: The Juniper Tree (Von dem Machandelboom)
* KHM 48: Old Sultan (Der alte Sultan)
* KHM 49: The Six Swans (Die sechs Schwäne)
* KHM 50: Sleeping Beauty or Little Briar-Rose (Dornröschen)
* KHM 51: Foundling-Bird (Fundevogel)
* KHM 52: King Thrushbeard (König Drosselbart)
* KHM 53: Little Snow White (Schneewittchen)
* KHM 54: The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn (Der Ranzen, das Hütlein und das Hörnlein)
* KHM 55: Rumpelstiltskin (Rumpelstilzchen)
* KHM 56: Sweetheart Roland (Liebster Roland)
* KHM 57: The Golden Bird (Der goldene Vogel)
* KHM 58: The Dog and the Sparrow (Der Hund und der Sperling)
* KHM 59: Frederick and Catherine (Der Frieder und das Katherlieschen)
* KHM 60: The Two Brothers (Die zwei Brüder)
* KHM 61: The Little Peasant (Das Bürle)
* KHM 62: The Queen Bee (Die Bienenkönigin)
* KHM 63: The Three Feathers (Die drei Federn)
* KHM 64: Golden Goose (Die goldene Gans)
* KHM 65: All-Kinds-of-Fur (Allerleirauh)
* KHM 66: The Hare's Bride (Häschenbraut)
* KHM 67: The Twelve Huntsmen (Die zwölf Jäger)
* KHM 68: The Thief and His Master (De Gaudeif un sien Meester)
* KHM 69: Jorinde and Joringel (Jorinde und Joringel)
* KHM 70: The Three Sons of Fortune (Die drei Glückskinder)
* KHM 71: How Six Men got on in the World (Sechse kommen durch die ganze Welt)
* KHM 72: The Wolf and the Man (Der Wolf und der Mensch)
* KHM 73: The Wolf and the Fox (Der Wolf und der Fuchs)
* KHM 74: Gossip Wolf and the Fox (Der Fuchs und die Frau Gevatterin)
* KHM 75: The Fox and the Cat (Der Fuchs und die Katze)
* KHM 76: The Pink (Die Nelke)
* KHM 77: Clever Gretel (Die kluge Gretel)
* KHM 78: The Old Man and his Grandson (Der alte Großvater und der Enkel)
* KHM 79: The Water Nixie (Die Wassernixe)
* KHM 80: The Death of the Little Hen (Von dem Tode des Hühnchens)
* KHM 81: Brother Lustig (Bruder Lustig)
* KHM 82: Gambling Hansel (De Spielhansl)
* KHM 83: Hans in Luck (Hans im Glück)
* KHM 84: Hans Married (Hans heiratet)
* KHM 85: The Gold-Children (Die Goldkinder)
* KHM 86: The Fox and the Geese (Der Fuchs und die Gänse)
Volume 2
Frontispiece used for the second volume of the 1840 4th edition
* KHM 87: The Poor Man and the Rich Man (Der Arme und der Reiche)
* KHM 88: The Singing, Springing Lark (Das singende springende Löweneckerchen)
* KHM 89: The Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd)
* KHM 90: The Young Giant (Der junge Riese)
* KHM 91: The Gnome (Dat Erdmänneken)
* KHM 92: The King of the Gold Mountain (Der König vom goldenen Berg)
* KHM 93: The Raven (Die Rabe)
* KHM 94: The Peasant's Wise Daughter (Die kluge Bauerntochter)
* KHM 95: Old Hildrebrand (Der alte Hildebrand)
* KHM 96: The Three Little Birds (De drei Vügelkens)
* KHM 97: The Water of Life (Das Wasser des Lebens)
* KHM 98: Doctor Know-all (Doktor Allwissend)
* KHM 99: The Spirit in the Bottle (Der Geist im Glas)
* KHM 100: The Devil's Sooty Brother (Des Teufels rußiger Bruder)
* KHM 101: Bearskin (Bärenhäuter)
* KHM 102: The Willow-Wren and the Bear (Der Zaunkönig und der Bär)
* KHM 103: Sweet Porridge (Der süße Brei)
* KHM 104: Wise Folks (Die klugen Leute)
* KHM 105: Tales of the Paddock (Märchen von der Unke)
* KHM 106: The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat (Der arme Müllersbursch und das Kätzchen)
* KHM 107: The Two Travelers (Die beiden Wanderer)
* KHM 108: Hans My Hedgehog (Hans mein Igel)
* KHM 109: The Shroud (Das Totenhemdchen)
* KHM 110: The Jew Among Thorns (Der Jude im Dorn)
* KHM 111: The Skillful Hunstman (Der gelernte Jäger)
* KHM 112: The Flail from Heaven (Der Dreschflegel vom Himmel)
* KHM 113: The Two Kings' Children (De beiden Künigeskinner)
* KHM 114: The Clever Little Tailor (vom klugen Schneiderlein)
* KHM 115: The Bright Sun Brings it to Light (Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag)
* KHM 116: The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht)
* KHM 117: The Willful Child (Das eigensinnige Kind)
* KHM 118: The Three Army Surgeons (Die drei Feldscherer)
* KHM 119: The Seven Swabians (Die sieben Schwaben)
* KHM 120: The Three Apprentices (Die drei Handwerksburschen)
* KHM 121: The King's Son Who Feared Nothing (Der Königssohn, der sich vor nichts fürchtete)
* KHM 122: Donkey Cabbages (Der Krautesel)
* KHM 123: The Old Woman in the Wood (Die alte im Wald)
* KHM 124: The Three Brothers (Die drei Brüder)
* KHM 125: The Devil and His Grandmother (Der Teufel und seine Großmutter)
* KHM 126: Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful (Ferenand getrü und Ferenand ungetrü)
* KHM 127: The Iron Stove (Der Eisenofen)
* KHM 128: The Lazy Spinner (Die faule Spinnerin)
* KHM 129: The Four Skillful Brothers (Die vier kunstreichen Brüder)
* KHM 130: One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes (Einäuglein, Zweiäuglein und Dreiäuglein)
* KHM 131: Fair Katrinelje and Pif-Paf-Poltrie (Die schöne Katrinelje und Pif Paf Poltrie)
* KHM 132: The Fox and the Horse (Der Fuchs und das Pferd)
* KHM 133: The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces (Die zertanzten Schuhe)
* KHM 134: The Six Servants (Die sechs Diener)
* KHM 135: The White and the Black Bride (Die weiße und die schwarze Braut)
* KHM 136: Iron John (Eisenhans)
* KHM 137: The Three Black Princesses (De drei schwatten Prinzessinnen)
* KHM 138: Knoist and his Three Sons (Knoist un sine dre Sühne)
* KHM 139: The Maid of Brakel (Dat Mäken von Brakel)
* KHM 140: My Household (Das Hausgesinde)
* KHM 141: The Lambkin and the Little Fish (Das Lämmchen und das Fischchen)
* KHM 142: Simeli Mountain (Simeliberg)
* KHM 143: Going a Traveling (Up Reisen gohn) appeared in the 1819 edition
o KHM 143 in the 1812/1815 edition was Die Kinder in Hungersnot (the starving children)
* KHM 144: The Donkey (Das Eselein)
* KHM 145: The Ungrateful Son (Der undankbare Sohn)
* KHM 146: The Turnip (Die Rübe)
* KHM 147: The Old Man Made Young Again (Das junggeglühte Männlein)
* KHM 148: The Lord's Animals and the Devil's (Des Herrn und des Teufels Getier)
* KHM 149: The Beam (Der Hahnenbalken)
* KHM 150: The Old Beggar-Woman (Die alte Bettelfrau)
* KHM 151: The Twelve Idle Servants (Die drei Faulen)
* KHM 151: The Three Sluggards (Die zwölf faulen Knechte)
* KHM 152: The Shepherd Boy (Das Hirtenbüblein)
* KHM 153: The Star Money (Die Sterntaler)
* KHM 154: The Stolen Farthings (Der gestohlene Heller)
* KHM 155: Looking for a Bride (Die Brautschau)
* KHM 156: The Hurds (Die Schlickerlinge)
* KHM 157: The Sparrow and his Four Children (Der Sperling und seine vier Kinder)
* KHM 158: The Story of Schlauraffen Land (Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland)
* KHM 159: The Ditmars Tale of Wonders (Das dietmarsische Lügenmärchen)
* KHM 160: A Riddling Tale (Rätselmärchen)
* KHM 161: Snow-White and Rose-Red (Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot)
* KHM 162: The Wise Servant (Der kluge Knecht)
* KHM 163: The Glass Coffin (Der gläserne Sarg)
* KHM 164: Lazy Henry (Der faule Heinz)
* KHM 165: The Griffin (Der Vogel Greif)
* KHM 166: Strong Hans (Der starke Hans)
* KHM 167: The Peasant in Heaven (Das Bürli im Himmel)
* KHM 168: Lean Lisa (Die hagere Liese)
* KHM 169: The Hut in the Forest (Das Waldhaus)
* KHM 170: Sharing Joy and Sorrow (Lieb und Leid teilen)
* KHM 171: The Willow-Worn (Der Zaunkönig)
* KHM 172: The Sole (Die Scholle)
* KHM 173: The Bittern and the Hoopoe (Rohrdommel und Wiedehopf)
* KHM 174: The Owl (Die Eule)
* KHM 175: The Moon (Der Mond)
* KHM 176: The Duration of life (Die Lebenszeit)
* KHM 177: Death's Messengers (Die Boten des Todes)
* KHM 178: Master Pfreim (Meister Pfriem)
* KHM 179: The Goose-Girl at the Well (Die Gänsehirtin am Brunnen)
* KHM 180: Eve's Various Children (Die ungleichen Kinder Evas)
* KHM 181: The Nixie of the Mill-Pond (Die Nixe im Teich)
* KHM 182: The Little Folk's Presents (Die Geschenke des kleinen Volkes)
* KHM 183: The Giant and the Tailor (Der Riese und der Schneider)
* KHM 184: The Nail (Der Nagel)
* KHM 185: The Poor Boy in the Grave (Der arme Junge im Grab)
* KHM 186: The True Bride (Die wahre Braut)
* KHM 187: The Hare and the Hedgehog (Der Hase und der Igel)
* KHM 188: Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle (Spindel, Weberschiffchen und Nadel)
* KHM 189: The Peasant and the Devil (Der Bauer und der Teufel)
* KHM 190: The Crumbs on the Table (Die Brosamen auf dem Tisch)
* KHM 191: The Sea-Hare (Das Meerhäschen)
* KHM 192: The Master Thief (Der Meisterdieb)
* KHM 193: The Drummer (Der Trommler)
* KHM 194: The Ear of Corn (Die Kornähre)
* KHM 195: The Grave-Mound (Der Grabhügel)
* KHM 196: Old Rinkrank (Oll Rinkrank)
* KHM 197: The Crystal Ball (Die Kristallkugel)
* KHM 198: Maid Maleen (Jungfrau Maleen)
* KHM 199: The Boots of Buffalo Leather (Der Stiefel von Büffelleder)
* KHM 200: The Golden Key (Der goldene Schlüssel)
The children's legends (Kinder-legende) first appeared in the G. Reimer 1819 edition at the end of volume 2).
* KHM 201: Saint Joseph in the Forest (Der heilige Joseph im Walde)
* KHM 202: The Twelve Apostles (Die zwölf Apostel)
* KHM 203: The Rose (Die Rose)
* KHM 204: Poverty and Humility Lead to Heaven (Armut und Demut führen zum Himmel)
* KHM 205: God's Food (Gottes Speise)
* KHM 206: The Three Green Twigs (Die drei grünen Zweige)
* KHM 207: The Blessed Virgin's Little Glass (Muttergottesgläschen) or Our Lady's Little Glass
* KHM 208: The Little Old Lady (Das alte Mütterchen) or The Aged Mother
* KHM 209: The Heavenly Marriage (Die himmlische Hochzeit) or The Heavenly Wedding
* KHM 210: The Hazel Branch (Die Haselrute)
Later additions
* Von der Nachtigall und der Blindschleiche
* Die Hand mit dem Messer
* Wie Kinder Schlachtens miteinander gespielt haben
* Der Tod und der Gänsehirt
* Der gestiefelte Kater
* Von der Serviette, dem Tornister, dem Kanonenhütlein und dem Horn
* Die wunderliche Gasterei
* Hans Dumm
* Blaubart
* Hurleburlebutz
* Der Okerlo
* Prinzessin Mäusehaut
* Das Birnli will nit fallen
* Das Mordschloß
* Vom Schreiner und Drechsler
* Die drei Schwestern
* Schneeblume (Fragment)
* Vom Prinz Johannes (Fragment)
* Der gute Lappen (Fragment)
* Die treuen Tiere
* Die Krähen
* Der Faule und der Fleißige
* Der Löwe und der Frosch
* Der Soldat und der Schreiner
* De wilde Mann
* Die heilige Frau Kummernis
* Das Unglück
* Die Erbsenprobe
* Der Räuber und seine Söhne
Composition
In 1803, the Grimms met the Romantics Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim at the University of Marburg. These two men stirred in the brothers an interest in ancient fairy tales. In Kassel they started to collect and write down tales that they alleged had been handed down for generations. Among their sources were Dorothea Viehmann, and two Huguenot families, Hassenpflug and Wild, who introduced them to several tales of French origin. The most important sources were the works of the Italian fairy tale writers Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, on which most the fairy tales were based. The Brothers Grimm praised Giambattista Basile as the first writer to have collected fairy tales into a book only for fairy tales.
On December 20, 1812 they published the first volume of the first edition, containing 86 stories; the second volume of 70 stories followed in 1814. For the second edition, two volumes were issued in 1819 and a third in 1822, totalling 170 tales. The third edition appeared in 1837; fourth edition, 1840; fifth edition, 1843; sixth edition, 1850; seventh edition, 1857. Stories were added, and also subtracted, from one edition to the next, until the seventh held 211 tales.
The first volumes were much criticized because, although they were called "Children's Tales", they were not regarded as suitable for children, both for the scholarly information included and the subject matter. Many changes through the editions – such as turning the wicked mother of the first edition in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel to a stepmother, were probably made with an eye to such suitability. They removed sexual references, such as Rapunzel's innocently asking why her dress was getting tight around her belly, and thus naively revealing her pregnancy and the prince's visits to her step mother, but, in many respects, violence, particularly when punishing villains, was increased.
In 1825 the Brothers published their Kleine Ausgabe or "small edition," a selection of 50 tales designed for child readers. This children's version went through ten editions between 1825 and 1858.
Influence of the book
The influence of these books was widespread. W. H. Auden praised it, during World War II, as one of the founding works of Western culture. The tales themselves have been put to many uses. The Nazis praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners, and so strongly that the Allied forces warned against them. Writers about the Holocaust have combined the tales with their memoirs, as Jane Yolen in her Briar Rose..
The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence. Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, the English Joseph Jacobs, and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales. There was not always a pleased reaction to their collection. Joseph Jacobs was in part inspired by his complaint that English children did not read English fairy tales; in his own words, "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed".
Three individual works of Wilhelm Grimm include Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (Old Danish Heroic Lays, Ballads, and Folktales) in 1811 Über deutsche Runen (On German Runes) in 1821. Die deutsche Heldensage (The German Heroic Legend) in 1829.
List of fairy tales
The code "KHM" stands for Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the original title. All editions from 1812 until 1857 split the stories into two volumes.
Volume 1
Frontispiece used for the first volume of the 1840 4th edition
* KHM 1: The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich (Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich)
* KHM 2: Cat and Mouse in Partnership (Katze und Maus in Gesellschaft)
* KHM 3: Mary's Child (Marienkind)
* KHM 4: The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was (Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen)
* KHM 5: The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids (Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein)
* KHM 6: Trusty John or Faithful John (Der treue Johannes)
* KHM 7: The Good Bargain (Der gute Handel)
* KHM 8: The Wonderful Musician or The Strange Musician (Der wunderliche Spielmann)
* KHM 9: The Twelve Brothers (Die zwölf Brüder)
* KHM 10: The Pack of Ragamuffins (Das Lumpengesindel)
* KHM 11: Brother and Sister (Brüderchen und Schwesterchen)
* KHM 12: Rapunzel
* KHM 13: The Three Little Men in the Wood (Die drei Männlein im Walde)
* KHM 14: The Three Spinners (Die drei Spinnerinnen)
* KHM 15: Hansel and Gretel (Hänsel und Gretel)
* KHM 16: The Three Snake-Leaves (Die drei Schlangenblätter)
* KHM 17: The White Snake (Die weiße Schlange)
* KHM 18: The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean (Strohhalm, Kohle und Bohne)
* KHM 19: The Fisherman and His Wife (Von dem Fischer und seiner Frau)
* KHM 20: The Valiant Little Tailor (Das tapfere Schneiderlein)
* KHM 21: Cinderella (Aschenputtel)
* KHM 22: The Riddle (Das Rätsel)
* KHM 23: The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage (Von dem Mäuschen, Vögelchen und der Bratwurst)
* KHM 24: Mother Hulda (Frau Holle)
* KHM 25: The Seven Ravens (Die sieben Raben)
* KHM 26: Little Red Riding Hood or Little Red-Cap (Rotkäppchen)
* KHM 27: Town Musicians of Bremen (Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten)
* KHM 28: The Singing Bone (Der singende Knochen)
* KHM 29: The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs (Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren)
* KHM 30: The Louse and the Flea (Läuschen und Flöhchen)
* KHM 31: The Girl Without Hands (Das Mädchen ohne Hände)
* KHM 32: Clever Hans (Der gescheite Hans)
* KHM 33: The Three Languages (Die drei Sprachen)
* KHM 34: Clever Elsie (Die kluge Else)
* KHM 35: The Tailor in Heaven (Der Schneider im Himmel)
* KHM 36: The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack ("Tischchen deck dich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack" also known as "Tischlein, deck dich!")
* KHM 37: Thumbling (Daumling) (see also Tom Thumb)
* KHM 38: The Wedding of Mrs. Fox (Die Hochzeit der Frau Füchsin)
* KHM 39: The Elves (Die Wichtelmänner)
o The Elves and the Shoemaker (Erstes Märchen)
o Second Story (Zweites Märchen)
o Third Story (Drittes Märchen)
* KHM 40: The Robber Bridegroom (Der Räuberbräutigam)
* KHM 41: Herr Korbes
* KHM 42: The Godfather (Der Herr Gevatter)
* KHM 43: Frau Trude
* KHM 44: Godfather Death (Der Gevatter Tod)
* KHM 45: Thumbling's Travels (see also Tom Thumb) (Daumerlings Wanderschaft)
* KHM 46: Fitcher's Bird (Fitchers Vogel)
* KHM 47: The Juniper Tree (Von dem Machandelboom)
* KHM 48: Old Sultan (Der alte Sultan)
* KHM 49: The Six Swans (Die sechs Schwäne)
* KHM 50: Sleeping Beauty or Little Briar-Rose (Dornröschen)
* KHM 51: Foundling-Bird (Fundevogel)
* KHM 52: King Thrushbeard (König Drosselbart)
* KHM 53: Little Snow White (Schneewittchen)
* KHM 54: The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn (Der Ranzen, das Hütlein und das Hörnlein)
* KHM 55: Rumpelstiltskin (Rumpelstilzchen)
* KHM 56: Sweetheart Roland (Liebster Roland)
* KHM 57: The Golden Bird (Der goldene Vogel)
* KHM 58: The Dog and the Sparrow (Der Hund und der Sperling)
* KHM 59: Frederick and Catherine (Der Frieder und das Katherlieschen)
* KHM 60: The Two Brothers (Die zwei Brüder)
* KHM 61: The Little Peasant (Das Bürle)
* KHM 62: The Queen Bee (Die Bienenkönigin)
* KHM 63: The Three Feathers (Die drei Federn)
* KHM 64: Golden Goose (Die goldene Gans)
* KHM 65: All-Kinds-of-Fur (Allerleirauh)
* KHM 66: The Hare's Bride (Häschenbraut)
* KHM 67: The Twelve Huntsmen (Die zwölf Jäger)
* KHM 68: The Thief and His Master (De Gaudeif un sien Meester)
* KHM 69: Jorinde and Joringel (Jorinde und Joringel)
* KHM 70: The Three Sons of Fortune (Die drei Glückskinder)
* KHM 71: How Six Men got on in the World (Sechse kommen durch die ganze Welt)
* KHM 72: The Wolf and the Man (Der Wolf und der Mensch)
* KHM 73: The Wolf and the Fox (Der Wolf und der Fuchs)
* KHM 74: Gossip Wolf and the Fox (Der Fuchs und die Frau Gevatterin)
* KHM 75: The Fox and the Cat (Der Fuchs und die Katze)
* KHM 76: The Pink (Die Nelke)
* KHM 77: Clever Gretel (Die kluge Gretel)
* KHM 78: The Old Man and his Grandson (Der alte Großvater und der Enkel)
* KHM 79: The Water Nixie (Die Wassernixe)
* KHM 80: The Death of the Little Hen (Von dem Tode des Hühnchens)
* KHM 81: Brother Lustig (Bruder Lustig)
* KHM 82: Gambling Hansel (De Spielhansl)
* KHM 83: Hans in Luck (Hans im Glück)
* KHM 84: Hans Married (Hans heiratet)
* KHM 85: The Gold-Children (Die Goldkinder)
* KHM 86: The Fox and the Geese (Der Fuchs und die Gänse)
Volume 2
Frontispiece used for the second volume of the 1840 4th edition
* KHM 87: The Poor Man and the Rich Man (Der Arme und der Reiche)
* KHM 88: The Singing, Springing Lark (Das singende springende Löweneckerchen)
* KHM 89: The Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd)
* KHM 90: The Young Giant (Der junge Riese)
* KHM 91: The Gnome (Dat Erdmänneken)
* KHM 92: The King of the Gold Mountain (Der König vom goldenen Berg)
* KHM 93: The Raven (Die Rabe)
* KHM 94: The Peasant's Wise Daughter (Die kluge Bauerntochter)
* KHM 95: Old Hildrebrand (Der alte Hildebrand)
* KHM 96: The Three Little Birds (De drei Vügelkens)
* KHM 97: The Water of Life (Das Wasser des Lebens)
* KHM 98: Doctor Know-all (Doktor Allwissend)
* KHM 99: The Spirit in the Bottle (Der Geist im Glas)
* KHM 100: The Devil's Sooty Brother (Des Teufels rußiger Bruder)
* KHM 101: Bearskin (Bärenhäuter)
* KHM 102: The Willow-Wren and the Bear (Der Zaunkönig und der Bär)
* KHM 103: Sweet Porridge (Der süße Brei)
* KHM 104: Wise Folks (Die klugen Leute)
* KHM 105: Tales of the Paddock (Märchen von der Unke)
* KHM 106: The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat (Der arme Müllersbursch und das Kätzchen)
* KHM 107: The Two Travelers (Die beiden Wanderer)
* KHM 108: Hans My Hedgehog (Hans mein Igel)
* KHM 109: The Shroud (Das Totenhemdchen)
* KHM 110: The Jew Among Thorns (Der Jude im Dorn)
* KHM 111: The Skillful Hunstman (Der gelernte Jäger)
* KHM 112: The Flail from Heaven (Der Dreschflegel vom Himmel)
* KHM 113: The Two Kings' Children (De beiden Künigeskinner)
* KHM 114: The Clever Little Tailor (vom klugen Schneiderlein)
* KHM 115: The Bright Sun Brings it to Light (Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag)
* KHM 116: The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht)
* KHM 117: The Willful Child (Das eigensinnige Kind)
* KHM 118: The Three Army Surgeons (Die drei Feldscherer)
* KHM 119: The Seven Swabians (Die sieben Schwaben)
* KHM 120: The Three Apprentices (Die drei Handwerksburschen)
* KHM 121: The King's Son Who Feared Nothing (Der Königssohn, der sich vor nichts fürchtete)
* KHM 122: Donkey Cabbages (Der Krautesel)
* KHM 123: The Old Woman in the Wood (Die alte im Wald)
* KHM 124: The Three Brothers (Die drei Brüder)
* KHM 125: The Devil and His Grandmother (Der Teufel und seine Großmutter)
* KHM 126: Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful (Ferenand getrü und Ferenand ungetrü)
* KHM 127: The Iron Stove (Der Eisenofen)
* KHM 128: The Lazy Spinner (Die faule Spinnerin)
* KHM 129: The Four Skillful Brothers (Die vier kunstreichen Brüder)
* KHM 130: One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes (Einäuglein, Zweiäuglein und Dreiäuglein)
* KHM 131: Fair Katrinelje and Pif-Paf-Poltrie (Die schöne Katrinelje und Pif Paf Poltrie)
* KHM 132: The Fox and the Horse (Der Fuchs und das Pferd)
* KHM 133: The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces (Die zertanzten Schuhe)
* KHM 134: The Six Servants (Die sechs Diener)
* KHM 135: The White and the Black Bride (Die weiße und die schwarze Braut)
* KHM 136: Iron John (Eisenhans)
* KHM 137: The Three Black Princesses (De drei schwatten Prinzessinnen)
* KHM 138: Knoist and his Three Sons (Knoist un sine dre Sühne)
* KHM 139: The Maid of Brakel (Dat Mäken von Brakel)
* KHM 140: My Household (Das Hausgesinde)
* KHM 141: The Lambkin and the Little Fish (Das Lämmchen und das Fischchen)
* KHM 142: Simeli Mountain (Simeliberg)
* KHM 143: Going a Traveling (Up Reisen gohn) appeared in the 1819 edition
o KHM 143 in the 1812/1815 edition was Die Kinder in Hungersnot (the starving children)
* KHM 144: The Donkey (Das Eselein)
* KHM 145: The Ungrateful Son (Der undankbare Sohn)
* KHM 146: The Turnip (Die Rübe)
* KHM 147: The Old Man Made Young Again (Das junggeglühte Männlein)
* KHM 148: The Lord's Animals and the Devil's (Des Herrn und des Teufels Getier)
* KHM 149: The Beam (Der Hahnenbalken)
* KHM 150: The Old Beggar-Woman (Die alte Bettelfrau)
* KHM 151: The Twelve Idle Servants (Die drei Faulen)
* KHM 151: The Three Sluggards (Die zwölf faulen Knechte)
* KHM 152: The Shepherd Boy (Das Hirtenbüblein)
* KHM 153: The Star Money (Die Sterntaler)
* KHM 154: The Stolen Farthings (Der gestohlene Heller)
* KHM 155: Looking for a Bride (Die Brautschau)
* KHM 156: The Hurds (Die Schlickerlinge)
* KHM 157: The Sparrow and his Four Children (Der Sperling und seine vier Kinder)
* KHM 158: The Story of Schlauraffen Land (Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland)
* KHM 159: The Ditmars Tale of Wonders (Das dietmarsische Lügenmärchen)
* KHM 160: A Riddling Tale (Rätselmärchen)
* KHM 161: Snow-White and Rose-Red (Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot)
* KHM 162: The Wise Servant (Der kluge Knecht)
* KHM 163: The Glass Coffin (Der gläserne Sarg)
* KHM 164: Lazy Henry (Der faule Heinz)
* KHM 165: The Griffin (Der Vogel Greif)
* KHM 166: Strong Hans (Der starke Hans)
* KHM 167: The Peasant in Heaven (Das Bürli im Himmel)
* KHM 168: Lean Lisa (Die hagere Liese)
* KHM 169: The Hut in the Forest (Das Waldhaus)
* KHM 170: Sharing Joy and Sorrow (Lieb und Leid teilen)
* KHM 171: The Willow-Worn (Der Zaunkönig)
* KHM 172: The Sole (Die Scholle)
* KHM 173: The Bittern and the Hoopoe (Rohrdommel und Wiedehopf)
* KHM 174: The Owl (Die Eule)
* KHM 175: The Moon (Der Mond)
* KHM 176: The Duration of life (Die Lebenszeit)
* KHM 177: Death's Messengers (Die Boten des Todes)
* KHM 178: Master Pfreim (Meister Pfriem)
* KHM 179: The Goose-Girl at the Well (Die Gänsehirtin am Brunnen)
* KHM 180: Eve's Various Children (Die ungleichen Kinder Evas)
* KHM 181: The Nixie of the Mill-Pond (Die Nixe im Teich)
* KHM 182: The Little Folk's Presents (Die Geschenke des kleinen Volkes)
* KHM 183: The Giant and the Tailor (Der Riese und der Schneider)
* KHM 184: The Nail (Der Nagel)
* KHM 185: The Poor Boy in the Grave (Der arme Junge im Grab)
* KHM 186: The True Bride (Die wahre Braut)
* KHM 187: The Hare and the Hedgehog (Der Hase und der Igel)
* KHM 188: Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle (Spindel, Weberschiffchen und Nadel)
* KHM 189: The Peasant and the Devil (Der Bauer und der Teufel)
* KHM 190: The Crumbs on the Table (Die Brosamen auf dem Tisch)
* KHM 191: The Sea-Hare (Das Meerhäschen)
* KHM 192: The Master Thief (Der Meisterdieb)
* KHM 193: The Drummer (Der Trommler)
* KHM 194: The Ear of Corn (Die Kornähre)
* KHM 195: The Grave-Mound (Der Grabhügel)
* KHM 196: Old Rinkrank (Oll Rinkrank)
* KHM 197: The Crystal Ball (Die Kristallkugel)
* KHM 198: Maid Maleen (Jungfrau Maleen)
* KHM 199: The Boots of Buffalo Leather (Der Stiefel von Büffelleder)
* KHM 200: The Golden Key (Der goldene Schlüssel)
The children's legends (Kinder-legende) first appeared in the G. Reimer 1819 edition at the end of volume 2).
* KHM 201: Saint Joseph in the Forest (Der heilige Joseph im Walde)
* KHM 202: The Twelve Apostles (Die zwölf Apostel)
* KHM 203: The Rose (Die Rose)
* KHM 204: Poverty and Humility Lead to Heaven (Armut und Demut führen zum Himmel)
* KHM 205: God's Food (Gottes Speise)
* KHM 206: The Three Green Twigs (Die drei grünen Zweige)
* KHM 207: The Blessed Virgin's Little Glass (Muttergottesgläschen) or Our Lady's Little Glass
* KHM 208: The Little Old Lady (Das alte Mütterchen) or The Aged Mother
* KHM 209: The Heavenly Marriage (Die himmlische Hochzeit) or The Heavenly Wedding
* KHM 210: The Hazel Branch (Die Haselrute)
Later additions
* Von der Nachtigall und der Blindschleiche
* Die Hand mit dem Messer
* Wie Kinder Schlachtens miteinander gespielt haben
* Der Tod und der Gänsehirt
* Der gestiefelte Kater
* Von der Serviette, dem Tornister, dem Kanonenhütlein und dem Horn
* Die wunderliche Gasterei
* Hans Dumm
* Blaubart
* Hurleburlebutz
* Der Okerlo
* Prinzessin Mäusehaut
* Das Birnli will nit fallen
* Das Mordschloß
* Vom Schreiner und Drechsler
* Die drei Schwestern
* Schneeblume (Fragment)
* Vom Prinz Johannes (Fragment)
* Der gute Lappen (Fragment)
* Die treuen Tiere
* Die Krähen
* Der Faule und der Fleißige
* Der Löwe und der Frosch
* Der Soldat und der Schreiner
* De wilde Mann
* Die heilige Frau Kummernis
* Das Unglück
* Die Erbsenprobe
* Der Räuber und seine Söhne
Hans Christian Andersen (Danish pronunciation: [ˈhanˀs ˈkʰʁæʂd̥jan ˈɑnɐsn̩], in Denmark he is referred to using the initials: H. C. Andersen) (April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", and "The Ugly Duckling".
During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide, and was feted by royalty. His poetry and stories have been translated into more than 150 languages. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.
During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide, and was feted by royalty. His poetry and stories have been translated into more than 150 languages. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.
Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, is a novel by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature.
The book became tremendously popular as soon as it was published (John Gay said in a 1726 letter to Swift that "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"); since then, it has never been out of print.
Plot summary
The book presents itself as a simple traveller's narrative with the disingenuous title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, its authorship assigned only to "Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, then a captain of several ships". Different editions contain different versions of the prefatory material which are basically the same as forewords in modern books. The book proper then is divided into four parts, which are as follows.
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
Mural depicting Gulliver surrounded by citizens of Lilliput.
May 4, 1699 — April 13, 1702
The book begins with a short preamble in which Gulliver, in the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history prior to his voyages. He enjoys traveling, although it is that love of travel that is his downfall.
On his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and awakes to find himself a prisoner of a race of people one-twelfth the size of normal human beings, less than 6 inches high/15 cm high, who are inhabitants of the neighbouring and rival countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court. From there, the book follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput, which is intended to satirise the court of George I (King of England at the time of the writing of the Travels). Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the country to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, where he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship which safely takes him back home. The Building of residence that Gulliver is given in Lilliput is of note, as in this section he describes it as a temple in which there had some years ago been a murder and the building had been abandoned. Swift in this section, is revealing himself as a member of the Freemasons; this being an allusion to the murder of the grand master of the Freemasons, Hiram Abiff.
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer by Richard Redgrave
June 20, 1702 — June 3, 1706
When the sailing ship Adventure is steered off course by storms and forced to go in to land for want of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 72 feet (22 m) tall (the scale of Lilliput is approximately 1:12; of Brobdingnag 12:1, judging from Gulliver estimating a man's step being 10 yards (9.1 m)). He brings Gulliver home and his daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. The word gets out and the Queen of Brobdingnag wants to see the show. She loves Gulliver and he is then bought by her and kept as a favourite at court.
Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be built for Gulliver so that he can be carried around in it. This box is referred to as his travelling box. In between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King. The King is not impressed with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the usage of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his "travelling box" is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box right into the sea where he is picked up by some sailors, who return him to England.
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
August 5, 1706 — April 16, 1710
After Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, he is marooned near a desolate rocky island, near India. Fortunately he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but utterly unable to use these for practical ends.
Laputa's method of throwing rocks at rebellious surface cities also seems the first time that aerial bombardment was conceived as a method of warfare. While there, he tours the country as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by blind pursuit of science without practical results in a satire on the Royal Society and its experiments.
While waiting for passage Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. He also encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are immortal, but not forever young, but rather forever old, complete with the infirmities of old age. Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a Dutch trader who can take him on to Japan. While there, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor grants. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
September 7, 1710 – July 2, 1715
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a 35ton merchant man as he is bored of his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions to his crew who he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His pirates then mutiny and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue on as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes first upon a race of (apparently) hideous deformed creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses (in their language Houyhnhnm or "the perfection of nature") are the rulers and the deformed creatures ("Yahoos") are human beings in their base form. Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and he is expelled. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England. However, he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.
Composition and history
It is uncertain exactly when Swift started writing Gulliver's Travels, but some sources suggest as early as 1713 when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot and others formed the Scriblerus Club, with the aim of satirising then-popular literary genres. Swift, runs the theory, was charged with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus. It is known from Swift's correspondence that the composition proper began in 1720 with the mirror-themed parts I and II written first, Part IV next in 1723 and Part III written in 1724, but amendments were made even while Swift was writing Drapier's Letters. By August 1725 the book was completed, and as Gulliver's Travels was a transparently anti-Whig satire it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied so his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise (as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets). In March 1726 Swift travelled to London to have his work published; the manuscript was secretly delivered to the publisher Benjamin Motte, who used five printing houses to speed production and avoid piracy. Motte, recognising a bestseller but fearing prosecution, simply cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput or the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to book II, and published it anyway. The first edition was released in two volumes on October 26, 1726, priced 8s. 6d. The book was an instant sensation and sold out its first run in less than a week.
Motte published Gulliver's Travels anonymously and, as was often the way with fashionable works, several follow-ups (Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput), parodies (Two Lilliputian Odes, The first on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extinguish'd the Palace Fire...) and "keys" (Gulliver Decipher'd and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd, the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's Tale of a Tub in 1705) were produced over the next few years. These were mostly printed anonymously (or occasionally pseudonymously) and were quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with any of these and specifically disavowed them in Faulkner's edition of 1735. However, Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five Verses on Gulliver's Travels which Swift liked so much that he added them to the second edition of the book, though they are not nowadays generally included.
Faulkner's 1735 edition
In 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a complete set of Swift's works to date, Volume III of which was Gulliver's Travels. As revealed in Faulkner's "Advertisement to the Reader", Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) which reproduced most of the manuscript free of Motte's amendments, the original manuscript having been destroyed. It is also believed that Swift at least reviewed proofs of Faulkner's edition before printing but this cannot be proven. Generally, this is regarded as the editio princeps of Gulliver's Travels with one small exception, discussed below.
This edition had an added piece by Swift, A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson which complained of Motte's alterations to the original text, saying he had so much altered it that "I do hardly know mine own work" and repudiating all of Motte's changes as well as all the keys, libels, parodies, second parts and continuations that had appeared in the intervening years. This letter now forms part of many standard texts.
Lindalino
The short (five paragraph) episode in Part III, telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an obvious allegory to the affair of Drapier's Letters of which Swift was proud. Lindalino represented Dublin and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of William Wood's poor-quality copper currency. Faulkner had omitted this passage, either because of political sensitivities raised by being an Irish publisher printing an anti-British satire or possibly because the text he worked from didn't include the passage. It wasn't until 1899 that the passage was finally included in a new edition of the Collected Works. Modern editions thus derive from the Faulkner edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addendum.
Isaac Asimov notes in The Annotated Gulliver that Lindalino is composed of double lins; hence, Dublin.
Major themes
Gulliver's Travels has been the recipient of several designations: from Menippean satire to a children's story, from proto-Science Fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel.
Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.
Possibly one of the reasons for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many different people. Broadly, the book has three themes:
* a satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religions.
* an inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted.
* a restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books.
In terms of storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:
* The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on - he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
* Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses — he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behaviour of people.
* Each part is the reverse of the preceding part — Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant, the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's.
* Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part — Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.
* No form of government is ideal — the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and are equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.
* Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad — Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the novel's end.
Of equal interest is the character of Gulliver himself — he progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion and we may well have to filter our understanding of the work if we are to believe the final misanthrope wrote the whole work. In this sense Gulliver's Travels is a very modern and complex novel. There are subtle shifts throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in Houyhnhnm-land, as Yahoos.
Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often classified as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section (frequently bowdlerised) as a book for children. It is still possible to buy books entitled Gulliver's Travels which contain only parts of the Lilliput voyage.
Cultural influences
From 1738 to 1746, Edward Cave published in occasional issues of The Gentleman's Magazine semi-fictionalized accounts of contemporary debates in the two Houses of Parliament under the title of Debates in the Senate of Lilliput. The names of the speakers in the debates, other individuals mentioned, politicians and monarchs present and past, and most other countries and cities of Europe ("Degulia") and America ("Columbia") were thinly disguised under a variety of Swiftian pseudonyms. The disguised names, and the pretence that the accounts were really translations of speeches by Lilliputian politicians, were a reaction to a Parliamentary act forbidding the publication of accounts of its debates. Cave employed several writers on this series: William Guthrie (June 1738-Nov. 1740), Samuel Johnson (Nov. 1740-Feb. 1743), and John Hawkesworth (Feb. 1743-Dec. 1746).
The popularity of Gulliver is such that the term "Lilliputian" has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and delicate". There is even a brand of cigar called Lilliput which is (not surprisingly) small. In addition to this there are a series of collectible model-houses known as "Lilliput Lane". The smallest light bulb fitting (5mm diameter) in the Edison screw series is called the "Lilliput Edison screw". In Dutch, the word "Lilliputter" is used for adults shorter than 1.30 meters. Conversely, "Brobdingnagian" appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for "very large" or "gigantic".
In like vein, the term "yahoo" is often encountered as a synonym for "ruffian" or "thug".
In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms big-endian and little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes in memory; see Endianness. One of the satirical conflicts in the book is between two religious sects of Lilliputians, some of whom who prefer cracking open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, while others prefer the big end.
The book became tremendously popular as soon as it was published (John Gay said in a 1726 letter to Swift that "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"); since then, it has never been out of print.
Plot summary
The book presents itself as a simple traveller's narrative with the disingenuous title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, its authorship assigned only to "Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, then a captain of several ships". Different editions contain different versions of the prefatory material which are basically the same as forewords in modern books. The book proper then is divided into four parts, which are as follows.
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
Mural depicting Gulliver surrounded by citizens of Lilliput.
May 4, 1699 — April 13, 1702
The book begins with a short preamble in which Gulliver, in the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history prior to his voyages. He enjoys traveling, although it is that love of travel that is his downfall.
On his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and awakes to find himself a prisoner of a race of people one-twelfth the size of normal human beings, less than 6 inches high/15 cm high, who are inhabitants of the neighbouring and rival countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court. From there, the book follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput, which is intended to satirise the court of George I (King of England at the time of the writing of the Travels). Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the country to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, where he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship which safely takes him back home. The Building of residence that Gulliver is given in Lilliput is of note, as in this section he describes it as a temple in which there had some years ago been a murder and the building had been abandoned. Swift in this section, is revealing himself as a member of the Freemasons; this being an allusion to the murder of the grand master of the Freemasons, Hiram Abiff.
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer by Richard Redgrave
June 20, 1702 — June 3, 1706
When the sailing ship Adventure is steered off course by storms and forced to go in to land for want of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 72 feet (22 m) tall (the scale of Lilliput is approximately 1:12; of Brobdingnag 12:1, judging from Gulliver estimating a man's step being 10 yards (9.1 m)). He brings Gulliver home and his daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. The word gets out and the Queen of Brobdingnag wants to see the show. She loves Gulliver and he is then bought by her and kept as a favourite at court.
Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be built for Gulliver so that he can be carried around in it. This box is referred to as his travelling box. In between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King. The King is not impressed with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the usage of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his "travelling box" is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box right into the sea where he is picked up by some sailors, who return him to England.
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
August 5, 1706 — April 16, 1710
After Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, he is marooned near a desolate rocky island, near India. Fortunately he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but utterly unable to use these for practical ends.
Laputa's method of throwing rocks at rebellious surface cities also seems the first time that aerial bombardment was conceived as a method of warfare. While there, he tours the country as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by blind pursuit of science without practical results in a satire on the Royal Society and its experiments.
While waiting for passage Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. He also encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are immortal, but not forever young, but rather forever old, complete with the infirmities of old age. Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a Dutch trader who can take him on to Japan. While there, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor grants. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
September 7, 1710 – July 2, 1715
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a 35ton merchant man as he is bored of his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions to his crew who he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His pirates then mutiny and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue on as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes first upon a race of (apparently) hideous deformed creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses (in their language Houyhnhnm or "the perfection of nature") are the rulers and the deformed creatures ("Yahoos") are human beings in their base form. Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and he is expelled. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England. However, he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.
Composition and history
It is uncertain exactly when Swift started writing Gulliver's Travels, but some sources suggest as early as 1713 when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot and others formed the Scriblerus Club, with the aim of satirising then-popular literary genres. Swift, runs the theory, was charged with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus. It is known from Swift's correspondence that the composition proper began in 1720 with the mirror-themed parts I and II written first, Part IV next in 1723 and Part III written in 1724, but amendments were made even while Swift was writing Drapier's Letters. By August 1725 the book was completed, and as Gulliver's Travels was a transparently anti-Whig satire it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied so his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise (as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets). In March 1726 Swift travelled to London to have his work published; the manuscript was secretly delivered to the publisher Benjamin Motte, who used five printing houses to speed production and avoid piracy. Motte, recognising a bestseller but fearing prosecution, simply cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput or the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to book II, and published it anyway. The first edition was released in two volumes on October 26, 1726, priced 8s. 6d. The book was an instant sensation and sold out its first run in less than a week.
Motte published Gulliver's Travels anonymously and, as was often the way with fashionable works, several follow-ups (Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput), parodies (Two Lilliputian Odes, The first on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extinguish'd the Palace Fire...) and "keys" (Gulliver Decipher'd and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd, the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's Tale of a Tub in 1705) were produced over the next few years. These were mostly printed anonymously (or occasionally pseudonymously) and were quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with any of these and specifically disavowed them in Faulkner's edition of 1735. However, Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five Verses on Gulliver's Travels which Swift liked so much that he added them to the second edition of the book, though they are not nowadays generally included.
Faulkner's 1735 edition
In 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a complete set of Swift's works to date, Volume III of which was Gulliver's Travels. As revealed in Faulkner's "Advertisement to the Reader", Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) which reproduced most of the manuscript free of Motte's amendments, the original manuscript having been destroyed. It is also believed that Swift at least reviewed proofs of Faulkner's edition before printing but this cannot be proven. Generally, this is regarded as the editio princeps of Gulliver's Travels with one small exception, discussed below.
This edition had an added piece by Swift, A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson which complained of Motte's alterations to the original text, saying he had so much altered it that "I do hardly know mine own work" and repudiating all of Motte's changes as well as all the keys, libels, parodies, second parts and continuations that had appeared in the intervening years. This letter now forms part of many standard texts.
Lindalino
The short (five paragraph) episode in Part III, telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an obvious allegory to the affair of Drapier's Letters of which Swift was proud. Lindalino represented Dublin and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of William Wood's poor-quality copper currency. Faulkner had omitted this passage, either because of political sensitivities raised by being an Irish publisher printing an anti-British satire or possibly because the text he worked from didn't include the passage. It wasn't until 1899 that the passage was finally included in a new edition of the Collected Works. Modern editions thus derive from the Faulkner edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addendum.
Isaac Asimov notes in The Annotated Gulliver that Lindalino is composed of double lins; hence, Dublin.
Major themes
Gulliver's Travels has been the recipient of several designations: from Menippean satire to a children's story, from proto-Science Fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel.
Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.
Possibly one of the reasons for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many different people. Broadly, the book has three themes:
* a satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religions.
* an inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted.
* a restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books.
In terms of storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:
* The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on - he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
* Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses — he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behaviour of people.
* Each part is the reverse of the preceding part — Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant, the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's.
* Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part — Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.
* No form of government is ideal — the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and are equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.
* Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad — Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the novel's end.
Of equal interest is the character of Gulliver himself — he progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion and we may well have to filter our understanding of the work if we are to believe the final misanthrope wrote the whole work. In this sense Gulliver's Travels is a very modern and complex novel. There are subtle shifts throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in Houyhnhnm-land, as Yahoos.
Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often classified as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section (frequently bowdlerised) as a book for children. It is still possible to buy books entitled Gulliver's Travels which contain only parts of the Lilliput voyage.
Cultural influences
From 1738 to 1746, Edward Cave published in occasional issues of The Gentleman's Magazine semi-fictionalized accounts of contemporary debates in the two Houses of Parliament under the title of Debates in the Senate of Lilliput. The names of the speakers in the debates, other individuals mentioned, politicians and monarchs present and past, and most other countries and cities of Europe ("Degulia") and America ("Columbia") were thinly disguised under a variety of Swiftian pseudonyms. The disguised names, and the pretence that the accounts were really translations of speeches by Lilliputian politicians, were a reaction to a Parliamentary act forbidding the publication of accounts of its debates. Cave employed several writers on this series: William Guthrie (June 1738-Nov. 1740), Samuel Johnson (Nov. 1740-Feb. 1743), and John Hawkesworth (Feb. 1743-Dec. 1746).
The popularity of Gulliver is such that the term "Lilliputian" has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and delicate". There is even a brand of cigar called Lilliput which is (not surprisingly) small. In addition to this there are a series of collectible model-houses known as "Lilliput Lane". The smallest light bulb fitting (5mm diameter) in the Edison screw series is called the "Lilliput Edison screw". In Dutch, the word "Lilliputter" is used for adults shorter than 1.30 meters. Conversely, "Brobdingnagian" appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for "very large" or "gigantic".
In like vein, the term "yahoo" is often encountered as a synonym for "ruffian" or "thug".
In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms big-endian and little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes in memory; see Endianness. One of the satirical conflicts in the book is between two religious sects of Lilliputians, some of whom who prefer cracking open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, while others prefer the big end.
The Solitaire Mystery was published in 1990 and written by Jostein Gaarder, Norwegian author of the best-selling Sophie's World. Its main target audience is young adults, but the themes of the book transcend any age group.
Like Sophie's World, The Solitaire Mystery has a philosophical content, but unlike Sophie's World, it does not explicitly mention philosophers and theories, thus, the reader of the book may be unaware that he or she is actually engaging in philosophy.
Plot
The book follows two seemingly separate stories:
Hans Thomas
A twelve year old boy, Hans Thomas, and his father are driving through Europe on a journey to locate and bring home the boy's estranged mother. Whilst on their journey, a strange little bearded man gives Hans Thomas a magnifying glass, saying mystically: "You'll need it!"
Not long afterwards, Hans Thomas and his father stop in a roadside cafe where Hans Thomas gets a giant sticky bun from a kind baker to eat on his journey. To Hans Thomas's great surprise, hidden inside the sticky bun is a tiny book, with writing so small it cannot be read with the naked eye.
Hans Thomas begins to read the tiny book using his new magnifying glass, and the story then alternates between Hans Thomas's journey, and the story in the sticky bun book.
The Sticky Bun Book
The sticky bun book tells the story of an old baker whose grandfather gave him a drink of a wonderful liquid he called Rainbow Fizz (Rainbow Soda in the American edition). It came from an island which the grandfather had been shipwrecked on as a young man. On the island lived an old sailor called Frode, and fifty-three other people; the fifty three other people did not have names though, they referred to themselves as the numbers on playing cards (52 cards plus a Joker)
The red suits were all women, except for the Kings and Jacks, whilst the black suits were all men, except for the Queens and Aces. The Ace of Hearts was particularly enchanting, and Frode had quite a crush on her, even though she was forever 'losing herself'. The cards (as he called them) were scatterbrained and childish, and talked in card-related riddles about "when the game ends" and "turning a person face up" etc.
Frode told the young sailor the miraculous story about how the other people had come to be on the island with him:
Frode himself was shipwrecked on the island many years earlier, and had lost virtually all of his possessions, except for a pack of playing cards. As he had no way off the island, he played solitaire a lot to pass the time. After a few months, he started talking to the cards, and even creating personalities for each of them in his head.
Time passed, and through overuse, the pictures on the cards faded and disappeared, but Frode continued to talk to them in his mind. Then suddenly one day, the Three of Diamonds walked by -- a flesh and blood person -- and said hello to Frode as if they were old friends! Frode thought he must be going mad, and as the remaining fifty-two cards surfaced, he became convinced he had gone senile. But since there was no way off the island, he decided he may as well sink himself into his delusion and enjoy the company.
When the new sailor was shipwrecked on the island, it came as a huge shock to Frode that he could see and interact with the card people as well! It wasn't a delusion! But then it seemed that Frode had simply 'dreamt' them into existence - how could this be so?
The crossing over of worlds
As the plot progresses, the reader sees that the 'two' separate stories of Hans Thomas's journey, and the events in the sticky bun book are beginning to overlap:
The cards in the sticky bun book take part in a game, where each says a sentence, and Frode tries to interpret its bizarre meaning. But sentences such as "the inner box unpacks the outer at the same time as the outer box unpacks the inner" and "destiny is a snake so hungry it devours itself" seem devoid of meaning for Frode.
However, the cards' predictions as told in the tiny book begin to reveal details about Hans Thomas's own plight to find his mother. It occurs to Hans Thomas that his mother bears a striking resemblance in her personality to the Ace of Hearts in that she 'loses herself' (disappears) for long periods.
Also, throughout Hans Thomas's journey, he has seen the same odd little bearded man following him about (the man who gave him the magnifying glass which proved so useful to read the sticky bun book). But whenever Hans Thomas approaches the little man, he seems to dash away and vanish.
The baffling thing for Hans Thomas is that he stopped for the cake merely by chance, and chose to eat a sticky bun by chance - how is it possible that a tiny book from a random bun is telling him things about his own life?
In the end, it turns out that the man who gave Hans Thomas the sticky bun book was his estranged grandfather, the baker and writer of the sticky bun book, and grandson to the shipwrecked sailor who had met Frode and his cards on the magic island. The grandfather works this out at the same time Hans Thomas deduces it too (the inner box unpacks the outer at the same time as the outer box unpacks the inner), yet this understanding is never realised, as the grandfather passes away before Hans Thomas returns to the small alpine village, having reunited with his mother in Athens.
Back in the sticky bun book, we discover that just as the cards had played their prophetic game where they predicted exactly what would happen between Hans Thomas and his family, the magic island begins to close in on itself, fifty-two years to the day after it had sprung into existence. It seems as if it were meant to happen that way (destiny is a snake so hungry it devours itself).
The poor card-people get eaten up inside the island, and as the island folds in on itself and disappears into nothingness, the young sailor (Baker Hans) escapes on a rowing boat which he had brought. Only one of the 'cards' managed to escape the island: the Joker.
Hans Thomas realises that it is the Joker who gave him the magnifying glass, and who has been following him about all this time. Just as Hans Thomas reads the last sentence of the sticky bun book, closes it and looks up, he sees the Joker slip away into the crowd, and vanish...
Philosophical themes
The book encompasses several philosophical themes; the obvious ones which are covered in the overall plot, but also little snippets here and there. Hans Thomas's father is a smoker but doesn't like to smoke inside his car, and so on their long journey across Europe, they are forever stopping for cigarette breaks, and the father is talking philosophically with his son. These bite-size chunks of philosophy are far easier to swallow than the weighty lectures in Sophie's World, but are nonetheless potent.
The nature of existence
The nature of existence is a theme which runs throughout, especially the miraculous nature of life itself. The book explores the question of whether it is possible to imagine something into existence. This theme is also found in Australian aboriginal myth, where elders claim that the world was dreamt into existence.
It seems unimaginable that we can make something happen just by wanting it to happen, yet the placebo effect has been well-documented in psychology, and many psychic healers and suchlike will claim that you need to have faith in order for something to work.
Religious Themes
The Christian concept of the creator living within his creation is explored. The seemingly perfect creation is soon destroyed by the Joker, during the "Joker Game" sequence, which is arguably an intended parallel with the Garden of Eden.
Destiny
The fact that the cards in the sticky bun book predicted the goings on between Hans Thomas's family decades later gives the book a strong theme of destiny: the idea that some things are going to happen no matter what - it is fate.
Fate as a concept also has many supporters; those who believe that some things (or the more stronger claim, that all things) have been pre-planned from long ago -- perhaps from the dawn of time. This is a main theme running through theology as well as more pseudo-scientific disciplines such as tarot reading and palm reading.
It certainly seems possible (though highly improbable) that the cards could have predicted the goings-on in Hans Thomas's young life, but the unlikelihood of it all only adds to the mystery and wonder of the story.
Like Sophie's World, The Solitaire Mystery has a philosophical content, but unlike Sophie's World, it does not explicitly mention philosophers and theories, thus, the reader of the book may be unaware that he or she is actually engaging in philosophy.
Plot
The book follows two seemingly separate stories:
Hans Thomas
A twelve year old boy, Hans Thomas, and his father are driving through Europe on a journey to locate and bring home the boy's estranged mother. Whilst on their journey, a strange little bearded man gives Hans Thomas a magnifying glass, saying mystically: "You'll need it!"
Not long afterwards, Hans Thomas and his father stop in a roadside cafe where Hans Thomas gets a giant sticky bun from a kind baker to eat on his journey. To Hans Thomas's great surprise, hidden inside the sticky bun is a tiny book, with writing so small it cannot be read with the naked eye.
Hans Thomas begins to read the tiny book using his new magnifying glass, and the story then alternates between Hans Thomas's journey, and the story in the sticky bun book.
The Sticky Bun Book
The sticky bun book tells the story of an old baker whose grandfather gave him a drink of a wonderful liquid he called Rainbow Fizz (Rainbow Soda in the American edition). It came from an island which the grandfather had been shipwrecked on as a young man. On the island lived an old sailor called Frode, and fifty-three other people; the fifty three other people did not have names though, they referred to themselves as the numbers on playing cards (52 cards plus a Joker)
The red suits were all women, except for the Kings and Jacks, whilst the black suits were all men, except for the Queens and Aces. The Ace of Hearts was particularly enchanting, and Frode had quite a crush on her, even though she was forever 'losing herself'. The cards (as he called them) were scatterbrained and childish, and talked in card-related riddles about "when the game ends" and "turning a person face up" etc.
Frode told the young sailor the miraculous story about how the other people had come to be on the island with him:
Frode himself was shipwrecked on the island many years earlier, and had lost virtually all of his possessions, except for a pack of playing cards. As he had no way off the island, he played solitaire a lot to pass the time. After a few months, he started talking to the cards, and even creating personalities for each of them in his head.
Time passed, and through overuse, the pictures on the cards faded and disappeared, but Frode continued to talk to them in his mind. Then suddenly one day, the Three of Diamonds walked by -- a flesh and blood person -- and said hello to Frode as if they were old friends! Frode thought he must be going mad, and as the remaining fifty-two cards surfaced, he became convinced he had gone senile. But since there was no way off the island, he decided he may as well sink himself into his delusion and enjoy the company.
When the new sailor was shipwrecked on the island, it came as a huge shock to Frode that he could see and interact with the card people as well! It wasn't a delusion! But then it seemed that Frode had simply 'dreamt' them into existence - how could this be so?
The crossing over of worlds
As the plot progresses, the reader sees that the 'two' separate stories of Hans Thomas's journey, and the events in the sticky bun book are beginning to overlap:
The cards in the sticky bun book take part in a game, where each says a sentence, and Frode tries to interpret its bizarre meaning. But sentences such as "the inner box unpacks the outer at the same time as the outer box unpacks the inner" and "destiny is a snake so hungry it devours itself" seem devoid of meaning for Frode.
However, the cards' predictions as told in the tiny book begin to reveal details about Hans Thomas's own plight to find his mother. It occurs to Hans Thomas that his mother bears a striking resemblance in her personality to the Ace of Hearts in that she 'loses herself' (disappears) for long periods.
Also, throughout Hans Thomas's journey, he has seen the same odd little bearded man following him about (the man who gave him the magnifying glass which proved so useful to read the sticky bun book). But whenever Hans Thomas approaches the little man, he seems to dash away and vanish.
The baffling thing for Hans Thomas is that he stopped for the cake merely by chance, and chose to eat a sticky bun by chance - how is it possible that a tiny book from a random bun is telling him things about his own life?
In the end, it turns out that the man who gave Hans Thomas the sticky bun book was his estranged grandfather, the baker and writer of the sticky bun book, and grandson to the shipwrecked sailor who had met Frode and his cards on the magic island. The grandfather works this out at the same time Hans Thomas deduces it too (the inner box unpacks the outer at the same time as the outer box unpacks the inner), yet this understanding is never realised, as the grandfather passes away before Hans Thomas returns to the small alpine village, having reunited with his mother in Athens.
Back in the sticky bun book, we discover that just as the cards had played their prophetic game where they predicted exactly what would happen between Hans Thomas and his family, the magic island begins to close in on itself, fifty-two years to the day after it had sprung into existence. It seems as if it were meant to happen that way (destiny is a snake so hungry it devours itself).
The poor card-people get eaten up inside the island, and as the island folds in on itself and disappears into nothingness, the young sailor (Baker Hans) escapes on a rowing boat which he had brought. Only one of the 'cards' managed to escape the island: the Joker.
Hans Thomas realises that it is the Joker who gave him the magnifying glass, and who has been following him about all this time. Just as Hans Thomas reads the last sentence of the sticky bun book, closes it and looks up, he sees the Joker slip away into the crowd, and vanish...
Philosophical themes
The book encompasses several philosophical themes; the obvious ones which are covered in the overall plot, but also little snippets here and there. Hans Thomas's father is a smoker but doesn't like to smoke inside his car, and so on their long journey across Europe, they are forever stopping for cigarette breaks, and the father is talking philosophically with his son. These bite-size chunks of philosophy are far easier to swallow than the weighty lectures in Sophie's World, but are nonetheless potent.
The nature of existence
The nature of existence is a theme which runs throughout, especially the miraculous nature of life itself. The book explores the question of whether it is possible to imagine something into existence. This theme is also found in Australian aboriginal myth, where elders claim that the world was dreamt into existence.
It seems unimaginable that we can make something happen just by wanting it to happen, yet the placebo effect has been well-documented in psychology, and many psychic healers and suchlike will claim that you need to have faith in order for something to work.
Religious Themes
The Christian concept of the creator living within his creation is explored. The seemingly perfect creation is soon destroyed by the Joker, during the "Joker Game" sequence, which is arguably an intended parallel with the Garden of Eden.
Destiny
The fact that the cards in the sticky bun book predicted the goings on between Hans Thomas's family decades later gives the book a strong theme of destiny: the idea that some things are going to happen no matter what - it is fate.
Fate as a concept also has many supporters; those who believe that some things (or the more stronger claim, that all things) have been pre-planned from long ago -- perhaps from the dawn of time. This is a main theme running through theology as well as more pseudo-scientific disciplines such as tarot reading and palm reading.
It certainly seems possible (though highly improbable) that the cards could have predicted the goings-on in Hans Thomas's young life, but the unlikelihood of it all only adds to the mystery and wonder of the story.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre, and its narrative course and structure have been enormously influential, especially in the fantasy genre.
History
Facsimile page from Alice's Adventures Under Ground
Alice was published in 1865, three years after the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat, on 4 July 1862, up the River Thames with three young girls:
* Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13, born 1849) ("Prima" in the book's prefatory verse)
* Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10, born 1852) ("Secunda" in the prefatory verse)
* Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8, born 1853) ("Tertia" in the prefatory verse).
The three girls were the daughters of Henry George Liddell, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church as well as headmaster of Westminster School.
The journey had started at Folly Bridge near Oxford and ended five miles away in the village of Godstow. To while away time the Reverend Dodgson told the girls a story that, not so coincidentally, featured a bored little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure.
The girls loved it, and Alice Liddell asked Dodgson to write it down for her. After a lengthy delay—over two years —he eventually did so and on 26 November 1864 gave Alice the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, with illustrations by Dodgson himself. Some, including Martin Gardner, speculate there was an earlier version that was destroyed later by Dodgson himself when he printed a more elaborate copy by hand, but there is no known prima facie evidence to support this.
But before Alice received her copy, Dodgson was already preparing it for publication and expanding the 15,500-word original to 27,500 words, most notably adding the episodes about the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party. In 1865, Dodgson's tale was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by "Lewis Carroll" with illustrations by John Tenniel. The first print run of 2,000 was held back because Tenniel objected to the print quality. A new edition, released in December of the same year, but carrying an 1866 date, was quickly printed. As it turned out, the original edition was sold with Dodgson's permission to the New York publishing house of Appleton. The binding for the Appleton Alice was virtually identical to the 1866 Macmillan Alice, except for the publisher's name at the foot of the spine. The title page of the Appleton Alice was an insert cancelling the original Macmillan title page of 1865, and bearing the New York publisher's imprint and the date 1866.
The entire print run sold out quickly. Alice was a publishing sensation, beloved by children and adults alike. Among its first avid readers were Queen Victoria and the young Oscar Wilde. The book has never been out of print. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into 125 languages[citation needed]. There have now been over a hundred editions of the book, as well as countless adaptations in other media, especially theatre and film.
The book is commonly referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland, an alternative title popularized by the numerous stage, film and television adaptations of the story produced over the years. Some printings of this title contain both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and, What Alice Found There.
Publishing highlights
cover of the 1898 edition
* 1865: First UK edition (the suppressed edition).
* 1865: First US edition.
* 1869: Alice's Abenteuer im Wunderland is published in German translation by Antonie Zimmermann.
* 1869: Aventures d'Alice au pays des merveilles is published in French translation by Henri Bué.
* 1870: Alice's Äfventyr i Sagolandet is published in Swedish translation by Emily Nonnen.
* 1871: Dodgson meets another Alice during his time in London, Alice Raikes, and talks with her about her reflection in a mirror, leading to another book Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, which sells even better.
* 1886: Carroll publishes a facsimile of the earlier Alice's Adventures Under Ground manuscript.
* 1890: Carroll publishes The Nursery "Alice", a special edition "to be read by Children aged from Nought to Five".
* 1905: Mrs J. C. Gorham publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable in a series of such books published by A. L. Burt Company, aimed at young readers.
* 1908: Alice has its first translation into Japanese.
* 1910: La Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando is published in Esperanto translation by Elfric Leofwine Kearney.
* 1916: Publication of the first edition of the Windermere Series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Illustrated by Milo Winter.
* 1928: The manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground that Carroll wrote and illustrated and that he had given to Alice Liddell was sold at Sotheby's on April 3. It sold to Philip Rosenbach for ₤15,400, a world record for the sale of a manuscript at the time.
* 1960: American writer Martin Gardner publishes a special edition, The Annotated Alice, incorporating the text of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It has extensive annotations explaining the hidden allusions in the books, and includes full texts of the Victorian era poems parodied in them. Later editions expand on these annotations.
* 1961: The Folio Society publication with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel.
* 1964: Alicia in Terra Mirabili is published in Latin translation by Clive Harcourt Carruthers.
* 1998: Lewis Carroll's own copy of Alice, one of only six surviving copies of the 1865 first edition, is sold at an auction for US$1.54 million to an anonymous American buyer, becoming the most expensive children's book (or 19th-century work of literature) ever traded. (The former record was later eclipsed in 2007 when a limited-edition Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, was sold at auction for £1.95 million ($3.9 million).
* 2003: Eachtraí Eilíse i dTír na nIontas is published in Irish translation by Nicholas Williams.
* 2008: Folio Alice's Adventures Under Ground facsimile edition (limited to 3,750 copies, boxed with The Original Alice pamphlet).
* 2009: Alys in Pow an Anethow is published in Cornish translation by Nicholas Williams.
* 2009: Children’s book collector and former American football player Pat McInally reportedly sold Alice Liddell’s own copy at auction for $115,000.
Synopsis
The White Rabbit in a hurry
Chapter 1-Down the Rabbit Hole: Alice is bored sitting on the riverbank with her sister, when she sees a talking, clothed White Rabbit with a watch run past. She follows it down a rabbit hole when suddenly she falls a long way to a curious hall with many locked doors of all sizes. She finds a small key to a door too small for her to fit, but through which she sees an attractive garden. She then discovers a bottle labelled "DRINK ME", the contents of which cause her to shrink too small to reach the key. A cake with "EAT ME" on it causes her to grow to such a tremendous size her head hits the ceiling.
Chapter 2-The Pool of Tears: Alice is unhappy and cries and her tears flood the hallway. After shrinking down again due to a fan she had picked up, Alice swims through her own tears and meets a Mouse, who is swimming as well. She tries to make small talk with him but all she can think of talking about is her cat, which offends the mouse.
Chapter 3-The Caucus Race and a Long Tale: The sea of tears becomes crowded with other animals and birds that have been swept away. Alice and the other animals convene on the bank and the question among them is how to get dry again. The mouse gives them a very dry lecture on William the Conqueror. A Dodo decides that the best thing to dry them off would be a Caucus-Race, which consists of everyone running in a circle with no clear winner. Alice eventually frightens all the animals away, unwittingly, by talking about her cat.
Chapter 4-The Rabbit Sends a Little Bill: The White Rabbit appears again in search of the Duchess's gloves and fan. He orders Alice to go into the house and retrieve them, but once she gets inside she starts growing. The horrified Rabbit orders his gardener, Bill the Lizard, to climb on the roof and go down the chimney. Outside, Alice hears the voices of animals that have gathered to gawk at her giant arm. The crowd hurls pebbles at her, which turn into little cakes, which, when Alice eats them, reduce her again in size.
Chapter 5-Advice from a Caterpillar: Alice comes upon a mushroom and sitting on it is a blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah. The Caterpillar questions Alice and she admits to her current identity crisis, compounded by her inability to remember a poem. Before crawling away, the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make her shorter. She breaks off two pieces from the mushroom. One side makes her shrink smaller than ever, while another causes her neck to grow high into the trees, where a pigeon mistakes her for a serpent. With some effort, Alice brings herself back to her usual height. She stumbles upon a small estate and uses the mushroom to reach a more appropriate height.
Chapter 6-Pig and Pepper: A Fish-Footman has an invitation for the Duchess of the house, which he delivers to a Frog-Footman. Alice observes this transaction and, after a perplexing conversation with the frog, lets herself into the house. The Duchess's Cook is throwing dishes and making a soup that has too much pepper, which causes Alice, the Duchess and her baby (but not the cook or her grinning Cheshire Cat) to sneeze violently. Alice is given the baby by the Duchess and to her surprise, the baby turns into a pig.
Chapter 7-A Mad Tea Party: The Cheshire Cat appears in a tree, directing her to the March Hare's house. He disappears but his grin remains behind to float on its own in the air prompting Alice to remark that she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat. Alice becomes a guest at a "mad" tea party along with the Hatter (now more commonly known as the Mad Hatter), the March Hare, and a sleeping Dormouse who remains asleep for most of the chapter. The other characters give Alice many riddles and stories. The Mad Hatter reveals that they have tea all day because time has punished him by eternally standing still at 6 pm (tea time). Alice becomes insulted and tired of being bombarded with riddles and she leaves claiming that it was the stupidest tea party that she had ever been to.
Alice trying to play croquet with a flamingo
The grinning Cheshire Cat
Chapter 8-The Queen's Croquet Ground: Alice leaves the tea party and enters the garden where she comes upon three living playing cards painting the white roses on a rose tree red because the Queen of Hearts hates white roses. A procession of more cards, kings and queens and even the White Rabbit enters the garden. Alice then meets the King and Queen. The Queen, a figure difficult to please, introduces her trademark phrase "Off with his head!" which she utters at the slightest dissatisfaction with a subject.
Alice is invited (or some might say ordered) to play a game of croquet with the Queen and the rest of her subjects but the game quickly descends into chaos. Live flamingos are used as mallets and hedgehogs as balls and Alice once again meets the Cheshire Cat. The Queen of Hearts then orders the Cat to be beheaded, only to have her executioner complain that this is impossible since the head is all that can be seen of him. Because the cat belongs to the Duchess, the Queen is prompted to release the Duchess from prison to resolve the matter.
Chapter 9-The Mock Turtle's Story: The Duchess is brought to the croquet ground at Alice's request. She ruminates on finding morals in everything around her. The Queen of Hearts dismisses her on the threat of execution and she introduces Alice to the Gryphon, who takes her to the Mock Turtle. The Mock Turtle is very sad, even though he has no sorrow. He tries to tell his story about how he used to be a real turtle in school, which The Gryphon interrupts so they can play a game.
Chapter 10-Lobster Quadrille: The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon dance to the Lobster Quadrille, while Alice recites (rather incorrectly) "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster". The Mock Turtle sings them "Beautiful Soup" during which the Gryphon drags Alice away for an impending trial.
Chapter 11-Who Stole the Tarts?: Alice attends a trial whereby the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen's tarts. The jury is composed of various animals, including Bill the Lizard, the White Rabbit is the court's trumpeter, and the judge is the King of Hearts. During the proceedings, Alice finds that she is steadily growing larger. The dormouse scolds Alice and tells her she has no right to grow at such a rapid pace and take up all the air. Alice scoffs and calls the dormouse's accusation ridiculous because everyone grows and she can't help it. Meanwhile witnesses at the trial include the Mad Hatter, who displeases and frustrates the King through his indirect answers to the questioning, and the Duchess's cook.
Chapter 12-Alice's Evidence: Alice is then called up as a witness. She accidentally knocks over the jury box with the animals inside them and the King orders the animals be placed back into their seats before the trial continues. The King and Queen order Alice to be gone, citing Rule 42 ("All persons more than a mile high to leave the court"), but Alice disputes their judgement and refuses to leave. She argues with the King and Queen of Hearts over the ridiculous proceedings, eventually refusing to hold her tongue. The Queen shouts her familiar "Off with her head!" but Alice is unafraid, calling them out as just a pack of cards. Alice's sister wakes her up for tea, brushing what turns out to be some leaves and not a shower of playing cards from Alice's face. Alice leaves her sister on the bank to imagine all the curious happenings for herself.
Characters
Peter Newell's illustration of Alice surrounded by the characters of Wonderland. (1890)
* Alice
* The White Rabbit
* The Mouse
* The Dodo
* The Lory
* The Eaglet
* The Duck
* Pat
* Bill the Lizard
* The Caterpillar
* The Duchess
* The Cheshire Cat
* The Hatter
* The March Hare
* The Dormouse
* The Queen of Hearts
* The Knave of Hearts
* The King of Hearts
* The Gryphon
* The Mock Turtle
Misconceptions about characters
Although the Jabberwock is often thought to be a character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, it actually only appears in the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. It is, however, often included in film versions, which are usually simply called "Alice in Wonderland", causing the confusion. The Queen of Hearts is commonly mistaken for the Red Queen who appears in the story's sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, but shares none of her characteristics other than being a queen. The Queen of Hearts is part of the deck of card imagery present in the first book, while the Red Queen is representative of a red chess piece, as chess is the theme present in the sequel. Many adaptations have mixed the characters, causing much confusion.
Character allusions
The members of the boating party that first heard Carroll's tale all show up in Chapter 3 ("A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale") in one form or another. There is, of course, Alice Liddell herself, while Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, is caricatured as the Dodo. Carroll is known as the Dodo because Dodgson stuttered when he spoke, thus if he spoke his last name it would be Do-Do-Dodgson.[citation needed] The Duck refers to Canon Duckworth, the Lory to Lorina Liddell, and the Eaglet to Edith Liddell (Alice Liddell's sisters).
Bill the Lizard may be a play on the name of Benjamin Disraeli. One of Tenniel's illustrations in Through the Looking-Glass depicts the character referred to as the "Man in White Paper" (whom Alice meets as a fellow passenger riding on the train with her), as a caricature of Disraeli, wearing a paper hat. The illustrations of the Lion and the Unicorn also bear a striking resemblance to Tenniel's Punch illustrations of Gladstone and Disraeli.
The Hatter is most likely a reference to Theophilus Carter, a furniture dealer known in Oxford for his unorthodox inventions. Tenniel apparently drew the Hatter to resemble Carter, on a suggestion of Carroll's. The Dormouse tells a story about three little sisters named Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie. These are the Liddell sisters: Elsie is L.C. (Lorina Charlotte), Tillie is Edith (her family nickname is Matilda), and Lacie is an anagram of Alice.
The Mock Turtle speaks of a Drawling-master, "an old conger eel", that used to come once a week to teach "Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils". This is a reference to the art critic John Ruskin, who came once a week to the Liddell house to teach the children drawing, sketching, and painting in oils. (The children did, in fact, learn well; Alice Liddell, for one, produced a number of skilled watercolours.)
The Mock Turtle also sings "Beautiful Soup". This is a parody of a song called "Star of the Evening, Beautiful Star", which was performed as a trio by Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell for Lewis Carroll in the Liddell home during the same summer in which he first told the story of Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
Contents
Poems and songs
* "All in the golden afternoon..." — the prefatory verse, an original poem by Carroll that recalls the rowing expedition on which he first told the story of Alice's adventures underground
* "How Doth the Little Crocodile" — a parody of Isaac Watts' nursery rhyme, "Against Idleness And Mischief"
* "The Mouse's Tale" — an example of concrete poetry
* "You Are Old, Father William" — a parody of Robert Southey's "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them"
* The Duchess's lullaby, "Speak roughly to your little boy..." — a parody of David Bates' "Speak Gently"
* "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" — a parody of "Twinkle twinkle little star"
* The Lobster Quadrille — a parody of Mary Botham Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly"
* "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" — a parody of "The Sluggard"
* "Beautiful Soup" — a parody of James M. Sayles's "Star of the Evening, Beautiful Star"
* "The Queen of Hearts" — an actual nursery rhyme
* "They told me you had been to her..." — the White Rabbit's evidence
Tenniel's illustrations
John Tenniel's illustrations of Alice do not portray the real Alice Liddell, who had dark hair and a short fringe. There is a persistent legend that Carroll sent Tenniel a photograph of Mary Hilton Babcock, another child-friend, but no evidence for this has yet come to light, and whether Tenniel actually used Babcock as his model is open to dispute.
Famous lines and expressions
The term "Wonderland", from the title, has entered the language and refers to a marvelous imaginary place, or else a real-world place that one perceives to have dream-like qualities. It, like much of the Alice work, is widely referred to in popular culture.
Illustration of Alice with the White Rabbit by Arthur Rackham
"Down the Rabbit-Hole", the Chapter 1 title, has become a popular term for going on an adventure into the unknown. In drug culture, "going down the rabbit hole" is a metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs, as Carroll's novel appears similar in form to a drug trip.
In Chapter 6, the Cheshire Cat's disappearance prompts Alice to say one of her most memorable lines: "...a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"
In Chapter 7, the Hatter gives his famous riddle without an answer: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" When asked by Alice what the answer was, he responds with, "I haven't the slightest idea." Although Carroll intended the riddle to have no solution, in a new preface to the 1896 edition of Alice, he proposes several answers: "Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!" (Note the spelling of "never" as "nevar"—turning it into "raven" when inverted. This reverse spelling, however, was "corrected" in later editions to "never" and Carroll's pun was lost.) Puzzle expert Sam Loyd offered the following solutions:
* Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes
* Poe wrote on both
* They both have inky quills
* Bills and tales ("tails") are among their characteristics
* Because they both stand on their legs, conceal their steels ("steals"), and ought to be made to shut up.
* Occult: Marquis Andras, the raven from The Lesser Key of Solomon, riding a wolf with a sword.
Cyril Pearson proposed:
* Because they both slope with a flap.
Many other answers are listed in The Annotated Alice. In Frank Beddor's novel Seeing Redd, the main antagonist, Queen Redd (a megalomaniac parody of the Queen of Hearts) meets Lewis Carroll and declares that the answer to the riddle is "Because I say so". Carroll is too terrified to contradict her.
Other answers include “because there is a B in both and an N in neither,” (an answer which was meant to highlight the absurdity of the original question), "Neither one is made of cheese", and "it isn't."
Arguably the most famous quote is used when the Queen of Hearts screams "Off with her head!" at Alice (and everyone else she feels slightly annoyed with). Possibly Carroll here was echoing a scene in Shakespeare's Richard III (III, iv, 76) where Richard demands the execution of Lord Hastings, crying "Off with his head!"
When Alice is growing taller after eating the cake labeled "Eat me" she says, "curiouser and curiouser", a famous line that is still used today to describe an event with extraordinary wonder. The Cheshire Cat confirms to Alice "We're all mad here", a line that has been repeated for years as a result.
Symbolism in the text
Oxford Locations
Most of the book's adventures may have been based on and influenced by people, situations and buildings in Oxford and at Christ Church, e.g., the "Rabbit Hole," which symbolized the actual stairs in the back of the main hall in Christ Church. A carving of a griffon and rabbit, as seen in Ripon Cathedral, where Carroll's father was a canon, may have provided inspiration for the tale.
Mathematics
Since Carroll was a mathematician at Christ Church, it has been suggested that there are many references and mathematical concepts in both this story and also in Through the Looking-Glass; examples include:
* In chapter 1, "Down the Rabbit-Hole", in the midst of shrinking, Alice waxes philosophic concerning what final size she will end up as, perhaps "going out altogether, like a candle."; this pondering reflects the concept of a limit.
* In chapter 2, "The Pool of Tears", Alice tries to perform multiplication but produces some odd results: "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!" This explores the representation of numbers using different bases and positional numeral systems: 4 x 5 = 12 in base 18 notation, 4 x 6 = 13 in base 21 notation, and 4 x 7 could be 14 in base 24 notation. Continuing this sequence, going up three bases each time, the result will continue to be less than 20 in the corresponding base notation. (After 19 the product would be 1A, then 1B, 1C, 1D, and so on.)
* In chapter 5, "Advice from a Caterpillar", the Pigeon asserts that little girls are some kind of serpent, for both little girls and serpents eat eggs. This general concept of abstraction occurs widely in many fields of science; an example in mathematics of employing this reasoning would be in the substitution of variables.
* In chapter 7, "A Mad Tea-Party", the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse give several examples in which the semantic value of a sentence A is not the same value of the converse of A (for example, "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"); in logic and mathematics, this is discussing an inverse relationship.
* Also in chapter 7, Alice ponders what it means when the changing of seats around the circular table places them back at the beginning. This is an observation of addition on a ring of the integers modulo N.
* The Cheshire cat fades until it disappears entirely, leaving only its wide grin, suspended in the air, leading Alice to marvel and note that she has seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. Deep abstraction of concepts (non-Euclidean geometry, abstract algebra, the beginnings of mathematical logic...) was taking over mathematics at the time Dodgson was writing. Dodgson's delineation of the relationship between cat and grin can be taken to represent the very concept of mathematics and number itself. For example, instead of considering two or three apples, one may easily consider the concept of 'apple', upon which the concepts of 'two' and 'three' may seem to depend. However, a far more sophisticated jump is to consider the concepts of 'two' and 'three' by themselves, just like a grin, originally seemingly dependent on the cat, separated conceptually from its physical object.
Mathematician Keith Devlin asserted in the journal of The Mathematical Association of America that Dodgson wrote Alice in Wonderland in its final form as a scathing satire on new modern mathematics that were emerging in the mid-1800s.
The French language
It has been suggested by several people, including Martin Gardner and Selwyn Goodacre, that Dodgson had an interest in the French language, choosing to make references and puns about it in the story. It is most likely that these are references to French lessons—a common feature of a Victorian middle-class girl's upbringing. For example, in the second chapter, Alice posits that the mouse may be French and chooses to speak the first sentence of her French lesson-book to it: "Où est ma chatte?" ("Where is my cat?"). In Henri Bué's French translation, Alice posits that the mouse may be Italian and speaks Italian to it.
Pat's "Digging for apples" could be a cross-language pun, as pomme de terre means potato and pomme means apple, which little English girls studying French would easily guess.
Classical languages
In the second chapter, Alice initially addresses the mouse as "O Mouse", based on her vague memory of the noun declensions in her brother's textbook: "A mouse (nominative)— of a mouse (genitive)— to a mouse (dative)— a mouse (accusative)— O mouse! (vocative)." This corresponds to the traditional order that was established by Byzantine grammarians (and is still in standard use, except in the United Kingdom and some countries in Western Europe) for the five cases of Classical Greek; because of the absence of the ablative case, which Greek does not have but is found in Latin, the reference is apparently not to the latter as some have supposed.
At the Mad Tea Party, Alice is astonished not to have jam served because the rule is: "Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today." This is a reference to the rule in Latin that the word iam or jam meaning now in the sense of already or at that time cannot be used to describe now in the present, which is nunc in Latin. Jam is therefore never available today.
History
Facsimile page from Alice's Adventures Under Ground
Alice was published in 1865, three years after the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat, on 4 July 1862, up the River Thames with three young girls:
* Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13, born 1849) ("Prima" in the book's prefatory verse)
* Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10, born 1852) ("Secunda" in the prefatory verse)
* Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8, born 1853) ("Tertia" in the prefatory verse).
The three girls were the daughters of Henry George Liddell, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church as well as headmaster of Westminster School.
The journey had started at Folly Bridge near Oxford and ended five miles away in the village of Godstow. To while away time the Reverend Dodgson told the girls a story that, not so coincidentally, featured a bored little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure.
The girls loved it, and Alice Liddell asked Dodgson to write it down for her. After a lengthy delay—over two years —he eventually did so and on 26 November 1864 gave Alice the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, with illustrations by Dodgson himself. Some, including Martin Gardner, speculate there was an earlier version that was destroyed later by Dodgson himself when he printed a more elaborate copy by hand, but there is no known prima facie evidence to support this.
But before Alice received her copy, Dodgson was already preparing it for publication and expanding the 15,500-word original to 27,500 words, most notably adding the episodes about the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party. In 1865, Dodgson's tale was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by "Lewis Carroll" with illustrations by John Tenniel. The first print run of 2,000 was held back because Tenniel objected to the print quality. A new edition, released in December of the same year, but carrying an 1866 date, was quickly printed. As it turned out, the original edition was sold with Dodgson's permission to the New York publishing house of Appleton. The binding for the Appleton Alice was virtually identical to the 1866 Macmillan Alice, except for the publisher's name at the foot of the spine. The title page of the Appleton Alice was an insert cancelling the original Macmillan title page of 1865, and bearing the New York publisher's imprint and the date 1866.
The entire print run sold out quickly. Alice was a publishing sensation, beloved by children and adults alike. Among its first avid readers were Queen Victoria and the young Oscar Wilde. The book has never been out of print. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into 125 languages[citation needed]. There have now been over a hundred editions of the book, as well as countless adaptations in other media, especially theatre and film.
The book is commonly referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland, an alternative title popularized by the numerous stage, film and television adaptations of the story produced over the years. Some printings of this title contain both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and, What Alice Found There.
Publishing highlights
cover of the 1898 edition
* 1865: First UK edition (the suppressed edition).
* 1865: First US edition.
* 1869: Alice's Abenteuer im Wunderland is published in German translation by Antonie Zimmermann.
* 1869: Aventures d'Alice au pays des merveilles is published in French translation by Henri Bué.
* 1870: Alice's Äfventyr i Sagolandet is published in Swedish translation by Emily Nonnen.
* 1871: Dodgson meets another Alice during his time in London, Alice Raikes, and talks with her about her reflection in a mirror, leading to another book Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, which sells even better.
* 1886: Carroll publishes a facsimile of the earlier Alice's Adventures Under Ground manuscript.
* 1890: Carroll publishes The Nursery "Alice", a special edition "to be read by Children aged from Nought to Five".
* 1905: Mrs J. C. Gorham publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable in a series of such books published by A. L. Burt Company, aimed at young readers.
* 1908: Alice has its first translation into Japanese.
* 1910: La Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando is published in Esperanto translation by Elfric Leofwine Kearney.
* 1916: Publication of the first edition of the Windermere Series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Illustrated by Milo Winter.
* 1928: The manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground that Carroll wrote and illustrated and that he had given to Alice Liddell was sold at Sotheby's on April 3. It sold to Philip Rosenbach for ₤15,400, a world record for the sale of a manuscript at the time.
* 1960: American writer Martin Gardner publishes a special edition, The Annotated Alice, incorporating the text of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It has extensive annotations explaining the hidden allusions in the books, and includes full texts of the Victorian era poems parodied in them. Later editions expand on these annotations.
* 1961: The Folio Society publication with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel.
* 1964: Alicia in Terra Mirabili is published in Latin translation by Clive Harcourt Carruthers.
* 1998: Lewis Carroll's own copy of Alice, one of only six surviving copies of the 1865 first edition, is sold at an auction for US$1.54 million to an anonymous American buyer, becoming the most expensive children's book (or 19th-century work of literature) ever traded. (The former record was later eclipsed in 2007 when a limited-edition Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, was sold at auction for £1.95 million ($3.9 million).
* 2003: Eachtraí Eilíse i dTír na nIontas is published in Irish translation by Nicholas Williams.
* 2008: Folio Alice's Adventures Under Ground facsimile edition (limited to 3,750 copies, boxed with The Original Alice pamphlet).
* 2009: Alys in Pow an Anethow is published in Cornish translation by Nicholas Williams.
* 2009: Children’s book collector and former American football player Pat McInally reportedly sold Alice Liddell’s own copy at auction for $115,000.
Synopsis
The White Rabbit in a hurry
Chapter 1-Down the Rabbit Hole: Alice is bored sitting on the riverbank with her sister, when she sees a talking, clothed White Rabbit with a watch run past. She follows it down a rabbit hole when suddenly she falls a long way to a curious hall with many locked doors of all sizes. She finds a small key to a door too small for her to fit, but through which she sees an attractive garden. She then discovers a bottle labelled "DRINK ME", the contents of which cause her to shrink too small to reach the key. A cake with "EAT ME" on it causes her to grow to such a tremendous size her head hits the ceiling.
Chapter 2-The Pool of Tears: Alice is unhappy and cries and her tears flood the hallway. After shrinking down again due to a fan she had picked up, Alice swims through her own tears and meets a Mouse, who is swimming as well. She tries to make small talk with him but all she can think of talking about is her cat, which offends the mouse.
Chapter 3-The Caucus Race and a Long Tale: The sea of tears becomes crowded with other animals and birds that have been swept away. Alice and the other animals convene on the bank and the question among them is how to get dry again. The mouse gives them a very dry lecture on William the Conqueror. A Dodo decides that the best thing to dry them off would be a Caucus-Race, which consists of everyone running in a circle with no clear winner. Alice eventually frightens all the animals away, unwittingly, by talking about her cat.
Chapter 4-The Rabbit Sends a Little Bill: The White Rabbit appears again in search of the Duchess's gloves and fan. He orders Alice to go into the house and retrieve them, but once she gets inside she starts growing. The horrified Rabbit orders his gardener, Bill the Lizard, to climb on the roof and go down the chimney. Outside, Alice hears the voices of animals that have gathered to gawk at her giant arm. The crowd hurls pebbles at her, which turn into little cakes, which, when Alice eats them, reduce her again in size.
Chapter 5-Advice from a Caterpillar: Alice comes upon a mushroom and sitting on it is a blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah. The Caterpillar questions Alice and she admits to her current identity crisis, compounded by her inability to remember a poem. Before crawling away, the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make her shorter. She breaks off two pieces from the mushroom. One side makes her shrink smaller than ever, while another causes her neck to grow high into the trees, where a pigeon mistakes her for a serpent. With some effort, Alice brings herself back to her usual height. She stumbles upon a small estate and uses the mushroom to reach a more appropriate height.
Chapter 6-Pig and Pepper: A Fish-Footman has an invitation for the Duchess of the house, which he delivers to a Frog-Footman. Alice observes this transaction and, after a perplexing conversation with the frog, lets herself into the house. The Duchess's Cook is throwing dishes and making a soup that has too much pepper, which causes Alice, the Duchess and her baby (but not the cook or her grinning Cheshire Cat) to sneeze violently. Alice is given the baby by the Duchess and to her surprise, the baby turns into a pig.
Chapter 7-A Mad Tea Party: The Cheshire Cat appears in a tree, directing her to the March Hare's house. He disappears but his grin remains behind to float on its own in the air prompting Alice to remark that she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat. Alice becomes a guest at a "mad" tea party along with the Hatter (now more commonly known as the Mad Hatter), the March Hare, and a sleeping Dormouse who remains asleep for most of the chapter. The other characters give Alice many riddles and stories. The Mad Hatter reveals that they have tea all day because time has punished him by eternally standing still at 6 pm (tea time). Alice becomes insulted and tired of being bombarded with riddles and she leaves claiming that it was the stupidest tea party that she had ever been to.
Alice trying to play croquet with a flamingo
The grinning Cheshire Cat
Chapter 8-The Queen's Croquet Ground: Alice leaves the tea party and enters the garden where she comes upon three living playing cards painting the white roses on a rose tree red because the Queen of Hearts hates white roses. A procession of more cards, kings and queens and even the White Rabbit enters the garden. Alice then meets the King and Queen. The Queen, a figure difficult to please, introduces her trademark phrase "Off with his head!" which she utters at the slightest dissatisfaction with a subject.
Alice is invited (or some might say ordered) to play a game of croquet with the Queen and the rest of her subjects but the game quickly descends into chaos. Live flamingos are used as mallets and hedgehogs as balls and Alice once again meets the Cheshire Cat. The Queen of Hearts then orders the Cat to be beheaded, only to have her executioner complain that this is impossible since the head is all that can be seen of him. Because the cat belongs to the Duchess, the Queen is prompted to release the Duchess from prison to resolve the matter.
Chapter 9-The Mock Turtle's Story: The Duchess is brought to the croquet ground at Alice's request. She ruminates on finding morals in everything around her. The Queen of Hearts dismisses her on the threat of execution and she introduces Alice to the Gryphon, who takes her to the Mock Turtle. The Mock Turtle is very sad, even though he has no sorrow. He tries to tell his story about how he used to be a real turtle in school, which The Gryphon interrupts so they can play a game.
Chapter 10-Lobster Quadrille: The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon dance to the Lobster Quadrille, while Alice recites (rather incorrectly) "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster". The Mock Turtle sings them "Beautiful Soup" during which the Gryphon drags Alice away for an impending trial.
Chapter 11-Who Stole the Tarts?: Alice attends a trial whereby the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen's tarts. The jury is composed of various animals, including Bill the Lizard, the White Rabbit is the court's trumpeter, and the judge is the King of Hearts. During the proceedings, Alice finds that she is steadily growing larger. The dormouse scolds Alice and tells her she has no right to grow at such a rapid pace and take up all the air. Alice scoffs and calls the dormouse's accusation ridiculous because everyone grows and she can't help it. Meanwhile witnesses at the trial include the Mad Hatter, who displeases and frustrates the King through his indirect answers to the questioning, and the Duchess's cook.
Chapter 12-Alice's Evidence: Alice is then called up as a witness. She accidentally knocks over the jury box with the animals inside them and the King orders the animals be placed back into their seats before the trial continues. The King and Queen order Alice to be gone, citing Rule 42 ("All persons more than a mile high to leave the court"), but Alice disputes their judgement and refuses to leave. She argues with the King and Queen of Hearts over the ridiculous proceedings, eventually refusing to hold her tongue. The Queen shouts her familiar "Off with her head!" but Alice is unafraid, calling them out as just a pack of cards. Alice's sister wakes her up for tea, brushing what turns out to be some leaves and not a shower of playing cards from Alice's face. Alice leaves her sister on the bank to imagine all the curious happenings for herself.
Characters
Peter Newell's illustration of Alice surrounded by the characters of Wonderland. (1890)
* Alice
* The White Rabbit
* The Mouse
* The Dodo
* The Lory
* The Eaglet
* The Duck
* Pat
* Bill the Lizard
* The Caterpillar
* The Duchess
* The Cheshire Cat
* The Hatter
* The March Hare
* The Dormouse
* The Queen of Hearts
* The Knave of Hearts
* The King of Hearts
* The Gryphon
* The Mock Turtle
Misconceptions about characters
Although the Jabberwock is often thought to be a character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, it actually only appears in the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. It is, however, often included in film versions, which are usually simply called "Alice in Wonderland", causing the confusion. The Queen of Hearts is commonly mistaken for the Red Queen who appears in the story's sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, but shares none of her characteristics other than being a queen. The Queen of Hearts is part of the deck of card imagery present in the first book, while the Red Queen is representative of a red chess piece, as chess is the theme present in the sequel. Many adaptations have mixed the characters, causing much confusion.
Character allusions
The members of the boating party that first heard Carroll's tale all show up in Chapter 3 ("A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale") in one form or another. There is, of course, Alice Liddell herself, while Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, is caricatured as the Dodo. Carroll is known as the Dodo because Dodgson stuttered when he spoke, thus if he spoke his last name it would be Do-Do-Dodgson.[citation needed] The Duck refers to Canon Duckworth, the Lory to Lorina Liddell, and the Eaglet to Edith Liddell (Alice Liddell's sisters).
Bill the Lizard may be a play on the name of Benjamin Disraeli. One of Tenniel's illustrations in Through the Looking-Glass depicts the character referred to as the "Man in White Paper" (whom Alice meets as a fellow passenger riding on the train with her), as a caricature of Disraeli, wearing a paper hat. The illustrations of the Lion and the Unicorn also bear a striking resemblance to Tenniel's Punch illustrations of Gladstone and Disraeli.
The Hatter is most likely a reference to Theophilus Carter, a furniture dealer known in Oxford for his unorthodox inventions. Tenniel apparently drew the Hatter to resemble Carter, on a suggestion of Carroll's. The Dormouse tells a story about three little sisters named Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie. These are the Liddell sisters: Elsie is L.C. (Lorina Charlotte), Tillie is Edith (her family nickname is Matilda), and Lacie is an anagram of Alice.
The Mock Turtle speaks of a Drawling-master, "an old conger eel", that used to come once a week to teach "Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils". This is a reference to the art critic John Ruskin, who came once a week to the Liddell house to teach the children drawing, sketching, and painting in oils. (The children did, in fact, learn well; Alice Liddell, for one, produced a number of skilled watercolours.)
The Mock Turtle also sings "Beautiful Soup". This is a parody of a song called "Star of the Evening, Beautiful Star", which was performed as a trio by Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell for Lewis Carroll in the Liddell home during the same summer in which he first told the story of Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
Contents
Poems and songs
* "All in the golden afternoon..." — the prefatory verse, an original poem by Carroll that recalls the rowing expedition on which he first told the story of Alice's adventures underground
* "How Doth the Little Crocodile" — a parody of Isaac Watts' nursery rhyme, "Against Idleness And Mischief"
* "The Mouse's Tale" — an example of concrete poetry
* "You Are Old, Father William" — a parody of Robert Southey's "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them"
* The Duchess's lullaby, "Speak roughly to your little boy..." — a parody of David Bates' "Speak Gently"
* "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" — a parody of "Twinkle twinkle little star"
* The Lobster Quadrille — a parody of Mary Botham Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly"
* "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" — a parody of "The Sluggard"
* "Beautiful Soup" — a parody of James M. Sayles's "Star of the Evening, Beautiful Star"
* "The Queen of Hearts" — an actual nursery rhyme
* "They told me you had been to her..." — the White Rabbit's evidence
Tenniel's illustrations
John Tenniel's illustrations of Alice do not portray the real Alice Liddell, who had dark hair and a short fringe. There is a persistent legend that Carroll sent Tenniel a photograph of Mary Hilton Babcock, another child-friend, but no evidence for this has yet come to light, and whether Tenniel actually used Babcock as his model is open to dispute.
Famous lines and expressions
The term "Wonderland", from the title, has entered the language and refers to a marvelous imaginary place, or else a real-world place that one perceives to have dream-like qualities. It, like much of the Alice work, is widely referred to in popular culture.
Illustration of Alice with the White Rabbit by Arthur Rackham
"Down the Rabbit-Hole", the Chapter 1 title, has become a popular term for going on an adventure into the unknown. In drug culture, "going down the rabbit hole" is a metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs, as Carroll's novel appears similar in form to a drug trip.
In Chapter 6, the Cheshire Cat's disappearance prompts Alice to say one of her most memorable lines: "...a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"
In Chapter 7, the Hatter gives his famous riddle without an answer: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" When asked by Alice what the answer was, he responds with, "I haven't the slightest idea." Although Carroll intended the riddle to have no solution, in a new preface to the 1896 edition of Alice, he proposes several answers: "Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!" (Note the spelling of "never" as "nevar"—turning it into "raven" when inverted. This reverse spelling, however, was "corrected" in later editions to "never" and Carroll's pun was lost.) Puzzle expert Sam Loyd offered the following solutions:
* Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes
* Poe wrote on both
* They both have inky quills
* Bills and tales ("tails") are among their characteristics
* Because they both stand on their legs, conceal their steels ("steals"), and ought to be made to shut up.
* Occult: Marquis Andras, the raven from The Lesser Key of Solomon, riding a wolf with a sword.
Cyril Pearson proposed:
* Because they both slope with a flap.
Many other answers are listed in The Annotated Alice. In Frank Beddor's novel Seeing Redd, the main antagonist, Queen Redd (a megalomaniac parody of the Queen of Hearts) meets Lewis Carroll and declares that the answer to the riddle is "Because I say so". Carroll is too terrified to contradict her.
Other answers include “because there is a B in both and an N in neither,” (an answer which was meant to highlight the absurdity of the original question), "Neither one is made of cheese", and "it isn't."
Arguably the most famous quote is used when the Queen of Hearts screams "Off with her head!" at Alice (and everyone else she feels slightly annoyed with). Possibly Carroll here was echoing a scene in Shakespeare's Richard III (III, iv, 76) where Richard demands the execution of Lord Hastings, crying "Off with his head!"
When Alice is growing taller after eating the cake labeled "Eat me" she says, "curiouser and curiouser", a famous line that is still used today to describe an event with extraordinary wonder. The Cheshire Cat confirms to Alice "We're all mad here", a line that has been repeated for years as a result.
Symbolism in the text
Oxford Locations
Most of the book's adventures may have been based on and influenced by people, situations and buildings in Oxford and at Christ Church, e.g., the "Rabbit Hole," which symbolized the actual stairs in the back of the main hall in Christ Church. A carving of a griffon and rabbit, as seen in Ripon Cathedral, where Carroll's father was a canon, may have provided inspiration for the tale.
Mathematics
Since Carroll was a mathematician at Christ Church, it has been suggested that there are many references and mathematical concepts in both this story and also in Through the Looking-Glass; examples include:
* In chapter 1, "Down the Rabbit-Hole", in the midst of shrinking, Alice waxes philosophic concerning what final size she will end up as, perhaps "going out altogether, like a candle."; this pondering reflects the concept of a limit.
* In chapter 2, "The Pool of Tears", Alice tries to perform multiplication but produces some odd results: "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!" This explores the representation of numbers using different bases and positional numeral systems: 4 x 5 = 12 in base 18 notation, 4 x 6 = 13 in base 21 notation, and 4 x 7 could be 14 in base 24 notation. Continuing this sequence, going up three bases each time, the result will continue to be less than 20 in the corresponding base notation. (After 19 the product would be 1A, then 1B, 1C, 1D, and so on.)
* In chapter 5, "Advice from a Caterpillar", the Pigeon asserts that little girls are some kind of serpent, for both little girls and serpents eat eggs. This general concept of abstraction occurs widely in many fields of science; an example in mathematics of employing this reasoning would be in the substitution of variables.
* In chapter 7, "A Mad Tea-Party", the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse give several examples in which the semantic value of a sentence A is not the same value of the converse of A (for example, "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"); in logic and mathematics, this is discussing an inverse relationship.
* Also in chapter 7, Alice ponders what it means when the changing of seats around the circular table places them back at the beginning. This is an observation of addition on a ring of the integers modulo N.
* The Cheshire cat fades until it disappears entirely, leaving only its wide grin, suspended in the air, leading Alice to marvel and note that she has seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. Deep abstraction of concepts (non-Euclidean geometry, abstract algebra, the beginnings of mathematical logic...) was taking over mathematics at the time Dodgson was writing. Dodgson's delineation of the relationship between cat and grin can be taken to represent the very concept of mathematics and number itself. For example, instead of considering two or three apples, one may easily consider the concept of 'apple', upon which the concepts of 'two' and 'three' may seem to depend. However, a far more sophisticated jump is to consider the concepts of 'two' and 'three' by themselves, just like a grin, originally seemingly dependent on the cat, separated conceptually from its physical object.
Mathematician Keith Devlin asserted in the journal of The Mathematical Association of America that Dodgson wrote Alice in Wonderland in its final form as a scathing satire on new modern mathematics that were emerging in the mid-1800s.
The French language
It has been suggested by several people, including Martin Gardner and Selwyn Goodacre, that Dodgson had an interest in the French language, choosing to make references and puns about it in the story. It is most likely that these are references to French lessons—a common feature of a Victorian middle-class girl's upbringing. For example, in the second chapter, Alice posits that the mouse may be French and chooses to speak the first sentence of her French lesson-book to it: "Où est ma chatte?" ("Where is my cat?"). In Henri Bué's French translation, Alice posits that the mouse may be Italian and speaks Italian to it.
Pat's "Digging for apples" could be a cross-language pun, as pomme de terre means potato and pomme means apple, which little English girls studying French would easily guess.
Classical languages
In the second chapter, Alice initially addresses the mouse as "O Mouse", based on her vague memory of the noun declensions in her brother's textbook: "A mouse (nominative)— of a mouse (genitive)— to a mouse (dative)— a mouse (accusative)— O mouse! (vocative)." This corresponds to the traditional order that was established by Byzantine grammarians (and is still in standard use, except in the United Kingdom and some countries in Western Europe) for the five cases of Classical Greek; because of the absence of the ablative case, which Greek does not have but is found in Latin, the reference is apparently not to the latter as some have supposed.
At the Mad Tea Party, Alice is astonished not to have jam served because the rule is: "Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today." This is a reference to the rule in Latin that the word iam or jam meaning now in the sense of already or at that time cannot be used to describe now in the present, which is nunc in Latin. Jam is therefore never available today.
Little Men, or Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1871. The novel reprises characters from Little Women and is considered by some the second book of an unofficial Little Women trilogy, which is completed with Alcott's 1886 novel Jo's Boys, and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to "Little Men". Little Men tells the story of Jo Bhaer and the children at Plumfield Estate School. The book was inspired by the death of Alcott's brother-in-law, which reveals itself in one of the last chapters, when a beloved character from Little Women passes away. The novel has been adapted to a film and television series.
Plot Details
Little Men follows the life of Jo Bhaer and the students who live and learn at the Plumfield Estate School that she runs with her husband, Professor Bhaer. The mischievous children, whom she loves and cares for as her own, learn valuable lessons as they become proper gentlemen and ladies. We also get cameo appearances of almost all the characters found in the previous books, almost all of them happy and well. Meg's older two children, Demi and Daisy, also attend the school and so do Mr. Bhaer's German nephews Franz and Emil.
The story begins with the arrival of Nathaniel "Nat" Blake, a shy young orphan with a talent for playing the violin and a penchant for telling fibs. Through his eyes we are introduced to the majority of the characters, from the Bhaers' children to other classmates. We follow Nat's life from April through Thanksgiving, meeting new students and playing games and having adventures throughout. Each student has his or her own struggles: Nat lies; Demi, although adored by his mother and sister, is so naïve that he finds it hard to live in the real world, but swears that he will be like 'parpar' after John Brooke (Meg's husband) dies; Emil has a bad temper; Dan is rebellious and rude; Tommy is careless (and once sets the house afire); Annie alias Nan is too tomboyish; Daisy is too prim and even weak-willed etc. They all learn to cope with their faults as they grow into young men and women.
Plot Details
Little Men follows the life of Jo Bhaer and the students who live and learn at the Plumfield Estate School that she runs with her husband, Professor Bhaer. The mischievous children, whom she loves and cares for as her own, learn valuable lessons as they become proper gentlemen and ladies. We also get cameo appearances of almost all the characters found in the previous books, almost all of them happy and well. Meg's older two children, Demi and Daisy, also attend the school and so do Mr. Bhaer's German nephews Franz and Emil.
The story begins with the arrival of Nathaniel "Nat" Blake, a shy young orphan with a talent for playing the violin and a penchant for telling fibs. Through his eyes we are introduced to the majority of the characters, from the Bhaers' children to other classmates. We follow Nat's life from April through Thanksgiving, meeting new students and playing games and having adventures throughout. Each student has his or her own struggles: Nat lies; Demi, although adored by his mother and sister, is so naïve that he finds it hard to live in the real world, but swears that he will be like 'parpar' after John Brooke (Meg's husband) dies; Emil has a bad temper; Dan is rebellious and rude; Tommy is careless (and once sets the house afire); Annie alias Nan is too tomboyish; Daisy is too prim and even weak-willed etc. They all learn to cope with their faults as they grow into young men and women.
An Old-Fashioned Girl is a novel by Louisa May Alcott.
It was first serialised in the Merry's Museum magazine between July and August in 1869 and consisted of only six chapters. For the finished product, however, Alcott continued the story from the chapter "Six Years Afterwards" and so it ended up with nineteen chapters in all. The book turns around Polly Milton, the old-fashioned girl who titles the story. Polly visits her wealthy friend Fanny Shaw in the city and is overwhelmed by the fashionable and urban life they live––but also left out because of her "countrified" manners and outdated clothes.
The novel was the basis of a 1949 musical film starring Gloria Jean as Polly.
Plot summary
Polly Milton, a 14-year-old country girl, visits her friend Fanny Shaw and her wealthy family in the city for the first time. Poor Polly is overwhelmed by the splendor at the Shaws' and their urbanized, fashionable lifestyles, expensive clothes and other habits she has never been exposed to, and, for the most part, dislikes. Fanny's friends reject her because of her different behavior and simple clothing, and Fan herself can't help considering her unusual sometimes. However, Polly's warmth, support and kindness eventually win the hearts of all the family members, and her old-fashioned ways teach them a lesson.
Success (Roberts Bros., 1870)
Six years later, Polly comes back to the city to become a music teacher and struggles with profession issues and internal emotions. Later in the book, Polly finds out that the prosperous Shaws are on the brink of bankruptcy, and she guides them to the realization that a wholesome family life is the only thing they will ever need, not money or decoration.
With the comfort of the ever helpful Polly, the family gets to change for the better and to find a happier life for all of them. After being rejected by his fiancée, Trix, Tom procures a job out West, with Polly's brother Ned, and heads off to help his family and compensate for all the money he has wasted in frivolous expenditures. At that point of the book, we see that Polly and Tom seem to have developed strong feelings for one another.
At the end of the book, Tom returns from the West and finally gets engaged to his true love, Polly.
It was first serialised in the Merry's Museum magazine between July and August in 1869 and consisted of only six chapters. For the finished product, however, Alcott continued the story from the chapter "Six Years Afterwards" and so it ended up with nineteen chapters in all. The book turns around Polly Milton, the old-fashioned girl who titles the story. Polly visits her wealthy friend Fanny Shaw in the city and is overwhelmed by the fashionable and urban life they live––but also left out because of her "countrified" manners and outdated clothes.
The novel was the basis of a 1949 musical film starring Gloria Jean as Polly.
Plot summary
Polly Milton, a 14-year-old country girl, visits her friend Fanny Shaw and her wealthy family in the city for the first time. Poor Polly is overwhelmed by the splendor at the Shaws' and their urbanized, fashionable lifestyles, expensive clothes and other habits she has never been exposed to, and, for the most part, dislikes. Fanny's friends reject her because of her different behavior and simple clothing, and Fan herself can't help considering her unusual sometimes. However, Polly's warmth, support and kindness eventually win the hearts of all the family members, and her old-fashioned ways teach them a lesson.
Success (Roberts Bros., 1870)
Six years later, Polly comes back to the city to become a music teacher and struggles with profession issues and internal emotions. Later in the book, Polly finds out that the prosperous Shaws are on the brink of bankruptcy, and she guides them to the realization that a wholesome family life is the only thing they will ever need, not money or decoration.
With the comfort of the ever helpful Polly, the family gets to change for the better and to find a happier life for all of them. After being rejected by his fiancée, Trix, Tom procures a job out West, with Polly's brother Ned, and heads off to help his family and compensate for all the money he has wasted in frivolous expenditures. At that point of the book, we see that Polly and Tom seem to have developed strong feelings for one another.
At the end of the book, Tom returns from the West and finally gets engaged to his true love, Polly.
HOW IT WAS LOST
Among green New England hills stood an ancient house, many-gabled, mossy-roofed, and quaintly built, but picturesque and pleasant to the eye; for a brook ran babbling through the orchard that encompassed it about, a garden-plat stretched upward to the whispering birches on the slope, and patriarchal elms stood sentinel upon the lawn, as they had stood almost a century ago, when the Revoiution rolled that way and found them young.
One summer morning, when the air was full of country sounds, of mowers in the meadow, black- birds by the brook, and the low of kine upon the hill-side, the old house wore its cheeriest aspect, and a certain humble history began.
Among green New England hills stood an ancient house, many-gabled, mossy-roofed, and quaintly built, but picturesque and pleasant to the eye; for a brook ran babbling through the orchard that encompassed it about, a garden-plat stretched upward to the whispering birches on the slope, and patriarchal elms stood sentinel upon the lawn, as they had stood almost a century ago, when the Revoiution rolled that way and found them young.
One summer morning, when the air was full of country sounds, of mowers in the meadow, black- birds by the brook, and the low of kine upon the hill-side, the old house wore its cheeriest aspect, and a certain humble history began.
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (also sometimes called The Happy Prince and Other Stories) is an 1888 collection of stories for children by Oscar Wilde. It is most famous for The Happy Prince, the short tale of a metal statue who befriends a migratory bird. Together, they bring happiness to others, in life as well as in death.
The stories included in this collection are:
* The Happy Prince
* The Nightingale and the Rose
* The Selfish Giant
* The Devoted Friend
* The Remarkable Rocket
The stories convey an appreciation for the exotic, the sensual and for masculine beauty.
The stories included in this collection are:
* The Happy Prince
* The Nightingale and the Rose
* The Selfish Giant
* The Devoted Friend
* The Remarkable Rocket
The stories convey an appreciation for the exotic, the sensual and for masculine beauty.
本版是林桦1995年译的，但当我翻看其中字句时，却发现至少《打火匣》及《野天鹅》与与叶氏译本全无二致，到底为何如此，却非我能了解。不过如果全部如此，至少可以保证此版本的质量不差。另外其中有重复的地方，如51与92。我会在有暇时仔细查对，然后补上缺少的部分。因为，安徒生是我至爱的一个作家。（宇慧编后记）
001
打火匣
002
皇帝的新装
003
飞箱
004
丑小鸭
005
没有画的画册
006
跳高者
007
红鞋
008
衬衫领子
009
一个豆英里的五粒豆
010
一个贵族和他的女儿们
011
守塔人奥列
012
蝴蝶
013
贝脱、比脱和比尔
014
烂布片
015
织补针
016
拇指姑娘
017
跳蚤和教授
018
区别
019
一本不说话的书
020
夏日痴
021
笔和墨水壶
022
风车
023
瓦尔都窗前的一瞥
024
甲虫
025
幸福的家庭
026
完全是真的
027
蓟的遭遇
028
新世纪的女神
029
各得其所
030
一星期的日子
031
钱猪
032
在辽远的海极
033
荷马墓上的一朵玫瑰
034
野天鹅
035
母亲的故事
036
犹太女子
037
牙痛姑妈
038
金黄的宝贝
039
民歌的鸟儿
040
接骨木树妈妈
041
沙丘的故 事
042
小克劳斯和大克劳斯
043
迁居的日子
044
鬼火进城了
045
幸运的套鞋
046
鹳鸟
047
枞树
048
香肠栓熬的汤
049
牧羊女和扫烟囱的人
050
天上落下来的一片叶子
051
恶毒的王子
052
演木偶戏的人
053
舞吧，舞吧，我的玩偶
054
安妮·莉斯贝
055
素琪①
056
藏着并不等于遗忘
057
谁是最幸运的
058
钟声
059
顽皮的孩子
060
识字课本
061
老约翰妮讲的故事
062
老墓碑
063
姑妈
064
墓里的孩子
065
老路灯
066
老头子做事总不会错
067
老房子
068
天鹅的窠
069
创造
070
冰姑娘
071
小鬼和小商人
072
阳光的故事
073
依卜和小克丽斯玎
074
梦神
075
老上帝还没有灭亡
076
园丁和他的贵族主人
077
书法家
078
茶壶
079
小小的绿东西
080
一点成绩
081
天国花园
082
最难使人相信的事情
083
一枚银毫
084
肉肠签子汤
085
光棍汉的睡帽
086
做出点样子来
087
老橡树的最后一梦
088
字母读本
089
沼泽王的女儿
090
跑得飞快的东西
091
钟渊
092
狠毒的王子
093
多伊和他的女儿们
094
踩面包的姑娘
095
守塔人奥勒
096
安妮·莉丝贝特
097
孩子话
098
一串珍珠
099
墨水笔和墨水瓶
100
墓中的孩子
101
家养公鸡和风信公鸡
102
沙冈那边的一段故事
103
演木偶戏的人
104
两兄弟
105
教堂古钟
106
搭邮车来的十二位
107
屎壳郎
108
老爹做的事总是对的
109
雪人
110
在鸭场里
111
新世纪的缪斯
112
冰姑娘
113
蝴蝶
114
普赛克
115
蜗牛和玫瑰树
116
害人鬼进城了
117
风磨
118
银毫子
119
伯尔厄隆的主教和他的亲眷
120
在幼儿室里
121
金宝贝
122
狂风吹跑了招牌
123
茶壶
124
民歌的鸟
125
绿色的小东西
126
小精灵和太太
127
贝得、彼得和皮尔
128
隐存着并不就是被忘却
129
看门人的儿子
130
搬迁日
131
谎报夏
132
姨妈
133
癞蛤蟆
134
教父的画册
135
碎布块
136
汶岛和格棱岛
137
谁最幸福
138
树精
139
看鸡人格瑞得的一家
140
蓟的经历
141
你能琢磨出什么
142
好运气在一根签子里
143
彗星
144
一个星期的每一天
145
阳光的故 事
146
曾祖父
147
烛
148
最难令人相信的事
149
一家人都怎样说
150
跳吧，舞吧，我的小宝宝
151
大海蟒
152
园丁和主人
153
跳蚤和教授
154
老约翰妮讲了些什么
155
大门钥匙
156
跛脚的孩子
157
牙痛姨妈
158
最后的一天
159
亚麻
160
“真可爱”
161
海的女儿
162
邻居们
163
夜莺
164
小意达的花儿
165
她是一个废物
译后记
001
打火匣
002
皇帝的新装
003
飞箱
004
丑小鸭
005
没有画的画册
006
跳高者
007
红鞋
008
衬衫领子
009
一个豆英里的五粒豆
010
一个贵族和他的女儿们
011
守塔人奥列
012
蝴蝶
013
贝脱、比脱和比尔
014
烂布片
015
织补针
016
拇指姑娘
017
跳蚤和教授
018
区别
019
一本不说话的书
020
夏日痴
021
笔和墨水壶
022
风车
023
瓦尔都窗前的一瞥
024
甲虫
025
幸福的家庭
026
完全是真的
027
蓟的遭遇
028
新世纪的女神
029
各得其所
030
一星期的日子
031
钱猪
032
在辽远的海极
033
荷马墓上的一朵玫瑰
034
野天鹅
035
母亲的故事
036
犹太女子
037
牙痛姑妈
038
金黄的宝贝
039
民歌的鸟儿
040
接骨木树妈妈
041
沙丘的故 事
042
小克劳斯和大克劳斯
043
迁居的日子
044
鬼火进城了
045
幸运的套鞋
046
鹳鸟
047
枞树
048
香肠栓熬的汤
049
牧羊女和扫烟囱的人
050
天上落下来的一片叶子
051
恶毒的王子
052
演木偶戏的人
053
舞吧，舞吧，我的玩偶
054
安妮·莉斯贝
055
素琪①
056
藏着并不等于遗忘
057
谁是最幸运的
058
钟声
059
顽皮的孩子
060
识字课本
061
老约翰妮讲的故事
062
老墓碑
063
姑妈
064
墓里的孩子
065
老路灯
066
老头子做事总不会错
067
老房子
068
天鹅的窠
069
创造
070
冰姑娘
071
小鬼和小商人
072
阳光的故事
073
依卜和小克丽斯玎
074
梦神
075
老上帝还没有灭亡
076
园丁和他的贵族主人
077
书法家
078
茶壶
079
小小的绿东西
080
一点成绩
081
天国花园
082
最难使人相信的事情
083
一枚银毫
084
肉肠签子汤
085
光棍汉的睡帽
086
做出点样子来
087
老橡树的最后一梦
088
字母读本
089
沼泽王的女儿
090
跑得飞快的东西
091
钟渊
092
狠毒的王子
093
多伊和他的女儿们
094
踩面包的姑娘
095
守塔人奥勒
096
安妮·莉丝贝特
097
孩子话
098
一串珍珠
099
墨水笔和墨水瓶
100
墓中的孩子
101
家养公鸡和风信公鸡
102
沙冈那边的一段故事
103
演木偶戏的人
104
两兄弟
105
教堂古钟
106
搭邮车来的十二位
107
屎壳郎
108
老爹做的事总是对的
109
雪人
110
在鸭场里
111
新世纪的缪斯
112
冰姑娘
113
蝴蝶
114
普赛克
115
蜗牛和玫瑰树
116
害人鬼进城了
117
风磨
118
银毫子
119
伯尔厄隆的主教和他的亲眷
120
在幼儿室里
121
金宝贝
122
狂风吹跑了招牌
123
茶壶
124
民歌的鸟
125
绿色的小东西
126
小精灵和太太
127
贝得、彼得和皮尔
128
隐存着并不就是被忘却
129
看门人的儿子
130
搬迁日
131
谎报夏
132
姨妈
133
癞蛤蟆
134
教父的画册
135
碎布块
136
汶岛和格棱岛
137
谁最幸福
138
树精
139
看鸡人格瑞得的一家
140
蓟的经历
141
你能琢磨出什么
142
好运气在一根签子里
143
彗星
144
一个星期的每一天
145
阳光的故 事
146
曾祖父
147
烛
148
最难令人相信的事
149
一家人都怎样说
150
跳吧，舞吧，我的小宝宝
151
大海蟒
152
园丁和主人
153
跳蚤和教授
154
老约翰妮讲了些什么
155
大门钥匙
156
跛脚的孩子
157
牙痛姨妈
158
最后的一天
159
亚麻
160
“真可爱”
161
海的女儿
162
邻居们
163
夜莺
164
小意达的花儿
165
她是一个废物
译后记
Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening-- the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet. When she left home she had slippers on, it is true; but what was the good of that? They were very large slippers, which her mother had hitherto worn; so large were they; and the poor little thing lost them as she scuffled away across the street, because of two carriages that rolled by dreadfully fast.
One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself. So the little maiden walked on with her tiny naked feet, that were quite red and blue from cold. She carried a quantity of matches in an old apron, and she held a bundle of them in her hand. Nobody had bought anything of her the whole livelong day; no one had given her a single farthing.
She crept along trembling with cold and hunger--a very picture of sorrow, the poor little thing!
The flakes of snow covered her long fair hair, which fell in beautiful curls around her neck; but of that, of course, she never once now thought. From all the windows the candles were gleaming, and it smelt so deliciously of roast goose, for you know it was New Year's Eve; yes, of that she thought.
In a corner formed by two houses, of which one advanced more than the other, she seated herself down and cowered together. Her little feet she had drawn close up to her, but she grew colder and colder, and to go home she did not venture, for she had not sold any matches and could not bring a farthing of money: from her father she would certainly get blows, and at home it was cold too, for above her she had only the roof, through which the wind whistled, even though the largest cracks were stopped up with straw and rags.
Her little hands were almost numbed with cold. Oh! a match might afford her a world of comfort, if she only dared take a single one out of the bundle, draw it against the wall, and warm her fingers by it. She drew one out. "Rischt!" how it blazed, how it burnt! It was a warm, bright flame, like a candle, as she held her hands over it: it was a wonderful light. It seemed really to the little maiden as though she were sitting before a large iron stove, with burnished brass feet and a brass ornament at top. The fire burned with such blessed influence; it warmed so delightfully. The little girl had already stretched out her feet to warm them too; but--the small flame went out, the stove vanished: she had only the remains of the burnt-out match in her hand.
She rubbed another against the wall: it burned brightly, and where the light fell on the wall, there the wall became transparent like a veil, so that she could see into the room. On the table was spread a snow-white tablecloth; upon it was a splendid porcelain service, and the roast goose was steaming famously with its stuffing of apple and dried plums. And what was still more capital to behold was, the goose hopped down from the dish, reeled about on the floor with knife and fork in its breast, till it came up to the poor little girl; when--the match went out and nothing but the thick, cold, damp wall was left behind. She lighted another match. Now there she was sitting under the most magnificent Christmas tree: it was still larger, and more decorated than the one which she had seen through the glass door in the rich merchant's house.
Thousands of lights were burning on the green branches, and gaily-colored pictures, such as she had seen in the shop-windows, looked down upon her. The little maiden stretched out her hands towards them when--the match went out. The lights of the Christmas tree rose higher and higher, she saw them now as stars in heaven; one fell down and formed a long trail of fire.
"Someone is just dead!" said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God.
She drew another match against the wall: it was again light, and in the lustre there stood the old grandmother, so bright and radiant, so mild, and with such an expression of love.
"Grandmother!" cried the little one. "Oh, take me with you! You go away when the match burns out; you vanish like the warm stove, like the delicious roast goose, and like the magnificent Christmas tree!" And she rubbed the whole bundle of matches quickly against the wall, for she wanted to be quite sure of keeping her grandmother near her. And the matches gave such a brilliant light that it was brighter than at noon-day: never formerly had the grandmother been so beautiful and so tall. She took the little maiden, on her arm, and both flew in brightness and in joy so high, so very high, and then above was neither cold, nor hunger, nor anxiety--they were with God.
But in the corner, at the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall--frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. "She wanted to warm herself," people said. No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendor in which, with her grandmother she had entered on the joys of a new year.
Another version:
The Little Match Girl
by Hans Christian Anderson
Once upon a time . . . a little girl tried to make a living by selling matches in the street.
It was New Year's Eve and the snow-clad streets were deserted. From brightly lit windows came the tinkle of laughter and the sound of singing. People were getting ready to bring in the New Year. But the poor little match seller sat sadly beside the fountain. Her ragged dress and worn shawl did not keep out the cold and she tried to keep her bare feet from touching the frozen ground. She hadn't sold one box of matches all day and she was frightened to go home, for her father would certainly be angry. It wouldn't be much warmer anyway, in the draughty attic that was her home. The little girl's fingers were stiff with cold. If only she could light a match! But what would her father say at such a waste! Falteringly she took out a match and lit it. What a nice warm flame! The little match seller cupped her hand over it, and as she did so, she magically saw in its light a big brightly burning stove.
She held out her hands to the heat, but just then the match went out and the vision faded. The night seemed blacker than before and it was getting colder. A shiver ran through the little girl's thin body.
After hesitating for a long time, she struck another match on the wall, and this time, the glimmer turned the wall into a great sheet of crystal. Beyond that stood a fine table laden with food and lit by a candlestick. Holding out her arms towards the plates, the little match-seller seemed to pass through the glass, but then the match went out and the magic faded. Poor thing: in just a few seconds she had caught a glimpse of everything that life had denied her: warmth and good things to eat. Her eyes filled with tears and she lifted her gaze to the lit windows, praying that she too might know a little of such happiness.
She lit the third match and an even more wonderful thing happened. There stood a Christmas tree hung with hundreds of candles, glittering with tinsel and coloured balls. "Oh, how lovely!" exclaimed the little match seller, holding up the match. Then, the match burned her finger and flickered out. The light from the Christmas candles rose higher and higher, then one of the lights fell, leaving a trail behind it. "Someone is dying," murmured the little girl, as she remembered her beloved Granny who used to say: "When a star falls, a heart stops beating!"
Scarcely aware of what she was doing, the little match seller lit another match. This time, she saw her grandmother.
"Granny, stay with me!" she pleaded, as she lit one match after the other, so that her grandmother could not disappear like all the other visions. However, Granny did not vanish, but gazed smilingly at her. Then she opened her arms and the little girl hugged her crying: "Granny, take me away with you!"
A cold day dawned and a pale sun shone on the fountain and the icy road. Close by lay the lifeless body of a little girl surrounded by spent matches. "Poor little thing!" exclaimed the passers-by. "She was trying to keep warm!"
But by that time, the little match seller was far away where there is neither cold, hunger nor pain.
One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself. So the little maiden walked on with her tiny naked feet, that were quite red and blue from cold. She carried a quantity of matches in an old apron, and she held a bundle of them in her hand. Nobody had bought anything of her the whole livelong day; no one had given her a single farthing.
She crept along trembling with cold and hunger--a very picture of sorrow, the poor little thing!
The flakes of snow covered her long fair hair, which fell in beautiful curls around her neck; but of that, of course, she never once now thought. From all the windows the candles were gleaming, and it smelt so deliciously of roast goose, for you know it was New Year's Eve; yes, of that she thought.
In a corner formed by two houses, of which one advanced more than the other, she seated herself down and cowered together. Her little feet she had drawn close up to her, but she grew colder and colder, and to go home she did not venture, for she had not sold any matches and could not bring a farthing of money: from her father she would certainly get blows, and at home it was cold too, for above her she had only the roof, through which the wind whistled, even though the largest cracks were stopped up with straw and rags.
Her little hands were almost numbed with cold. Oh! a match might afford her a world of comfort, if she only dared take a single one out of the bundle, draw it against the wall, and warm her fingers by it. She drew one out. "Rischt!" how it blazed, how it burnt! It was a warm, bright flame, like a candle, as she held her hands over it: it was a wonderful light. It seemed really to the little maiden as though she were sitting before a large iron stove, with burnished brass feet and a brass ornament at top. The fire burned with such blessed influence; it warmed so delightfully. The little girl had already stretched out her feet to warm them too; but--the small flame went out, the stove vanished: she had only the remains of the burnt-out match in her hand.
She rubbed another against the wall: it burned brightly, and where the light fell on the wall, there the wall became transparent like a veil, so that she could see into the room. On the table was spread a snow-white tablecloth; upon it was a splendid porcelain service, and the roast goose was steaming famously with its stuffing of apple and dried plums. And what was still more capital to behold was, the goose hopped down from the dish, reeled about on the floor with knife and fork in its breast, till it came up to the poor little girl; when--the match went out and nothing but the thick, cold, damp wall was left behind. She lighted another match. Now there she was sitting under the most magnificent Christmas tree: it was still larger, and more decorated than the one which she had seen through the glass door in the rich merchant's house.
Thousands of lights were burning on the green branches, and gaily-colored pictures, such as she had seen in the shop-windows, looked down upon her. The little maiden stretched out her hands towards them when--the match went out. The lights of the Christmas tree rose higher and higher, she saw them now as stars in heaven; one fell down and formed a long trail of fire.
"Someone is just dead!" said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God.
She drew another match against the wall: it was again light, and in the lustre there stood the old grandmother, so bright and radiant, so mild, and with such an expression of love.
"Grandmother!" cried the little one. "Oh, take me with you! You go away when the match burns out; you vanish like the warm stove, like the delicious roast goose, and like the magnificent Christmas tree!" And she rubbed the whole bundle of matches quickly against the wall, for she wanted to be quite sure of keeping her grandmother near her. And the matches gave such a brilliant light that it was brighter than at noon-day: never formerly had the grandmother been so beautiful and so tall. She took the little maiden, on her arm, and both flew in brightness and in joy so high, so very high, and then above was neither cold, nor hunger, nor anxiety--they were with God.
But in the corner, at the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall--frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. "She wanted to warm herself," people said. No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendor in which, with her grandmother she had entered on the joys of a new year.
Another version:
The Little Match Girl
by Hans Christian Anderson
Once upon a time . . . a little girl tried to make a living by selling matches in the street.
It was New Year's Eve and the snow-clad streets were deserted. From brightly lit windows came the tinkle of laughter and the sound of singing. People were getting ready to bring in the New Year. But the poor little match seller sat sadly beside the fountain. Her ragged dress and worn shawl did not keep out the cold and she tried to keep her bare feet from touching the frozen ground. She hadn't sold one box of matches all day and she was frightened to go home, for her father would certainly be angry. It wouldn't be much warmer anyway, in the draughty attic that was her home. The little girl's fingers were stiff with cold. If only she could light a match! But what would her father say at such a waste! Falteringly she took out a match and lit it. What a nice warm flame! The little match seller cupped her hand over it, and as she did so, she magically saw in its light a big brightly burning stove.
She held out her hands to the heat, but just then the match went out and the vision faded. The night seemed blacker than before and it was getting colder. A shiver ran through the little girl's thin body.
After hesitating for a long time, she struck another match on the wall, and this time, the glimmer turned the wall into a great sheet of crystal. Beyond that stood a fine table laden with food and lit by a candlestick. Holding out her arms towards the plates, the little match-seller seemed to pass through the glass, but then the match went out and the magic faded. Poor thing: in just a few seconds she had caught a glimpse of everything that life had denied her: warmth and good things to eat. Her eyes filled with tears and she lifted her gaze to the lit windows, praying that she too might know a little of such happiness.
She lit the third match and an even more wonderful thing happened. There stood a Christmas tree hung with hundreds of candles, glittering with tinsel and coloured balls. "Oh, how lovely!" exclaimed the little match seller, holding up the match. Then, the match burned her finger and flickered out. The light from the Christmas candles rose higher and higher, then one of the lights fell, leaving a trail behind it. "Someone is dying," murmured the little girl, as she remembered her beloved Granny who used to say: "When a star falls, a heart stops beating!"
Scarcely aware of what she was doing, the little match seller lit another match. This time, she saw her grandmother.
"Granny, stay with me!" she pleaded, as she lit one match after the other, so that her grandmother could not disappear like all the other visions. However, Granny did not vanish, but gazed smilingly at her. Then she opened her arms and the little girl hugged her crying: "Granny, take me away with you!"
A cold day dawned and a pale sun shone on the fountain and the icy road. Close by lay the lifeless body of a little girl surrounded by spent matches. "Poor little thing!" exclaimed the passers-by. "She was trying to keep warm!"
But by that time, the little match seller was far away where there is neither cold, hunger nor pain.