The True Bill Press

ENCHANTED IDEOLOGIES: A COLLECTION OF REDISCOVERED NINETEENTH-CENTURY

ENGLISH MORAL FAIRY TALES.

Edited and with annotations and an introductory essay by Marilyn Pemberton

Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press. 307p.

ISBN-10: 0-9791116-5-X

ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-5-5

Published 2010 in hard cover at a price of $45.00

"Marilyn Pemberton has further enriched our understanding of the British fairy tale in the nineteenth century by publishing a valuable anthology of rediscovered moral fairy tales for young women and children...Pemberton's anthology is a solid reminder that fantasy and fairy tales, while often countercultural, can produce--as is the case in today's consumer culture--widespread banality that reflects the dominant ideology of the times."

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, 2011.

"This collection does...assemble an interesting and reasonably catholic sampling of the genre's moral trajectory. The selections work well together, gathering intertextual impact as they proceed. Individuals and libraries with a stake in this portion of the golden age of children's literature will want to acquire it."

ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, & Reviews, September/October 2010.

"[P]ortions of her critical apparatus, such as her discussion of nineteenth-century girls' periodicals, contain useful information for both general and scholarly readers. In all, Pemberton has gathered a fascinating collection of tales, valuable for their revelation of nineteenth-century social and literary practices."

Routledge ABES (Annotated Bibliography of English Studies), 2010.

"Pemberton nicely summarizes the tales' themes, and the progression she portrays is clear...Enchanted Ideologies will be most useful to scholars interested in the authors included here, and looking for previously unavailable texts...Access to fairy tales by these authors will open doors to further scholarship."

NBOL-19: An Online Review of New Books on English and American Literature of the 19th Century, March 2010.

"What makes Pemberton's selection of literary fairy tales from the Victorian period different from previous collections is that they are chosen to show how the fairy tale could be used to promote educational content to children. One of the ways in which the literary fairy tale became acceptable to middle-class parents was its reconfiguration of the lessons of the moral tale. Pemberton points out that in order for the genre to become respectable, publishers were willing to create fairy tales that provided social lessons...The reprinting of these literary fairy tales is an important corrective to the overstated assumption that after the success of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the shift in children's literature, and literary fairy tales in particular, quickly become geared more toward entertainment than instruction...Sometimes critics have tried too hard to find the subversiveness in many nineteenth-century children's texts. In these literary fairy tales, fairies are just governesses with wings; Pemberton shows that many of these stories promoted middle-class values such as 'thrift, self-control, restraint, personal ambition, and deffered gratification' (31). While these may not be the best-written or most memorable of the literary fairy tales of the Victorian period, they do show that the genre could be conservative and overtly educational as well as subversive and entertaining. In considering these fairy tales as literary texts, it is not surprising that they are not well known. But viewed as examples of representative children's texts from the late nineteenth century, they provide a more nuanced literary context to appreciate the rise of popularity of the fairy tale as an acceptable form of children's reading."

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Fall 2011.

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