Fairy tales are a danger to children!

'Partial as we confess ourselves to be, to most of the books of the old school, we cannot approve of those which are only fit to fill the heads of children with confused notions of wonderful and supernatural events. 'Mother Bunch's Tales are of this description.'
 Mrs Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education, Vol. 2. 1803,p.185)

Sarah Trimmer (Wikipedia)

The late 18th and early 19th century is remarkable for the large number of Evangelical writers who turned to producing stories for children.  This was largely a result of the growth of the Sunday School Movement; people like Mrs. Trimmer, Hannah More and Mrs. Sherwood quickly found that there were no suitably improving stories for the children in their new Sunday schools for the poor to read.  There was also a steady demand from the better off, particularly parents in the same Evangelical; circles as the writers mentioned above.  They came from a section of society which had traditionally taken a close interest in their children's upbringing.  Their works were popular in both Britain and America. The influential American writer Mrs. Lydia Child recommended in The Mother's Book, an instruction manual for young mothers, the work of the Taylors, the Edgeworths, Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer, whom she describes as 'among the very best writers of juvenile books; her influence is pure and holy'.  She had reservations about Mrs. Sherwood because of the extremely Calvinistic tone of her theology, and regretted that the Edgeworths, for ideological reasons, as follower of the French philosopher Rousseau, omitted any religious teaching from their books for children.  (Mrs. Lydia Child, The Mother's Book, 1831.p95-103 of 4th ed 1832)  Lydia Child was an influential campaigner for women's rights, the abolition of slavery and Native American rights)

Naturally parents and writers in these social circles carefully scrutinized the books they gave their children and from 1802 to 1805 Mrs. Trimmer edited and largely wrote the very first reviewing journal for children's literature, The Guardian of Education.

One of the most remarkable effects of the virtual monopoly which this group of authors and educationalists established over the production of children's books at this time was the virtual abolition of traditional fairy tales for almost the first twenty-five years of the 19th century.  The Puritans had strongly disapproved of folklore and fairy tales, which they associated with Catholicism and witchcraft, and considered superstitious nonsense.  Mrs. Trimmer's own mildly fanciful moral story, The History of the Robins, 1786, was prefaced by a disclaimer reminding children that robins cannot really talk as they do in the story.  Children should be 'taught to consider them, not as containing the real conversations of birds (for that it is impossible we should ever understand), but as a series of Fables, intended to convey moral instruction...'
(The Guardian of Education, Vol. 2,)

Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories.
with The History of the Robins
(British Library)

The 19th century attack on fairy tales was, however, launched largely on grounds of morality.  In 1802 a correspondent in The Guardian of Education roundly condemned Cinderella, saying it 'is perhaps one of the most exceptional books that was ever written for children...It paints some of the worst passions that can enter into the human breast, and of which little children should, if possible, be totally ignorant; such as envy, jealousy, a dislike to  mothers-in-law (sic, meaning step-mothers) and half-sisters, vanity, a love of dress, etc. etc.' (Guardian of Education, Vol. 2, p.15 and 448 )  Mrs. Trimmer was forced to re-examine her old favourites such as Mother Bunch and Mother Goose, and shortly afterwards produced a damning review of Benjamin Tabart's very charming Juvenile Library, which included the first printed text of Jack and the Beanstalk, 1802.  Even works such as the very respectable Sarah Fielding's The Governess, which both Mrs. Trimmer and Mrs. Sherwood loved as children became suspect.  Mrs. Sherwood replaced the fairy tales it contains with something more improving.

John Newbery's publications became virtually unobtainable.  Charles Lamb,author of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, complained to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writer of The Ancient Mariner: 'Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print.  Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery...Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men.  Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?  Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history! ' ( Harvey Darton Children's Books in England,p. 131 quoting Lamb's letter to Coleridge)  This complaint is a fore-runner of Charles Dicken's satirical attack on the Rationalists, epitomized by Mr. Gradgrind, in Hard Times, 1854, by which time fantasy and fairy tales were once more accepted: 'Now, what I want is, Facts, Teach these boys and girl nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.'

Fairy tales were considered harmful mainly on moral grounds but also because it was feared that children would learn to confuse truth and falsehood, which may have not been unjustified.  Caroline Hutton, daughter of the Birmingham historian William Hutton, recalled that, 'Nothing delighted me so much as did the tales of the fairies.  I no more doubted their truth than I did my own existence.'  She was most disappointed when her home-made wand failed to turn the parlour grate to gold. (Caroline Hutton Reminiscences of a gentlewoman of the last century.  Letters of Caroline Hutton ed. C.H. Beale, Cornish, Birmingham, 1891 p.2)  Mrs. Sherwood as a child peopled the woods near where she grew up with fairies: 'If I could discern fairy rings, which abounded in those woods, they gave me another set of images; and I had imaginary hermits in every hollow of the rocky sides of the dingle, and imaginary castles on every height, whilst the church and churchyard supplied me with more ghosts and apparitions than I dared to tell of.' (Life of Mrs. Sherwood, edited by her daughter Sophia Kelly, 1857 p.37)

Many children, of course, still had access to folk tales in spite of official disapproval.  Harriet Martineau, born 1802, whose father 'held that they developed the imagination in the wrong channels', was told them by her nurse, like many other children, and the traditional tales, along with more sensational literature, were still sold in the form of crudely printed little chapbooks carried round the country by pedlars and having a status similar to modern comics.  (Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 1877, Vol. 1, p.119)

It was serious folklore collectors, the Grimm brothers in Germany, Andrew Lang and Henry Cole on Britain, who restored fairy tales to the nursery by putting the weight of their considerable reputations behind well presented translations and editions of traditional tales which they collected.  Edgar Taylor argued for the encouragement of the imagination in the preface to the first English translation of Grimm's fairy tales, published in 1823:

'Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise, as our judgement or our memory; ad so long as such fictions only are presented to the young mind as do not interfere with the important department of moral education, a beneficial effect must be produced by the pleasurable employment of a faculty in which so much of our happiness in every period of life consists.'
(preface to German popular stories...collected by M.M. Grimm, 1823, translated by Edgar Taylor)

Curiously enough, fairy tales and fantasy in verse always remained generally acceptable.  It was at exactly this period that John Harris was achieving success with his picture book versions of Old Mother Hubbard, Cinderella  , The Butterfly's Ball, The Lion's Masquerade and numerous other titles.  Edmund Gosse, who was later allowed to read Scott's verse but not his Waverley Novels, supposed the distinction was made on the grounds that the artificiality of verse made it less realistic and so less credible than prose.
(Edmund Goss, Father and Son, 1907 Penguin Modern Classics ed. 1949 p.162)

(M. Roscoe,  The Butterfly's Ball, 1806
British Library)

Verse was, for whatever reason, enormously popular.  Isaac Watts had produced perhaps the most popular collection of children's poems ever published in 1715.  His Divine and Moral Songs for Children was written for a friend who wanted some hymns to accompany catechisms, and many of them are still in regular use.  His poem The Sluggard was parodied by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland:

'  'Tis the voice of the Lobster; I hear him declare
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair...'
(The Annotated Alice, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, 1960, Penguin ed. p. 139)

Watt's reasons for encouraging children to learn poetry by heart are given in his preface:
'There is something so amusing and entertaining in rhymes and metre, that will incline children to make this part of their business a diversion...What is learnt in Verse, is longer retained in memory, and sooner recollected...'
(Watts Divine Songs, 1st ed. 1715, preface)

Original poems for infant minds, 1834 ed.
1st ed. is 1804-5
(British Library)

Many collections of verse for children were produced around the turn of the century, including several well known collections by the Taylors, a family of Nonconformists.  'Twinkle, twinkle little star' has taken its place as a nursery rhyme, while My Mother was admired and imitated throughout the 19th century, appealing, as it did, even more to the Victorian cult of womanhood than to the Georgians:

'Who taught my infant lips to pray,

To love God's holy book and day,

And walk in wisdom's pleasant way?

  My mother.

Who ran to help me when I fell,

And would some pretty story tell,

Or kiss the place to make it well?

   My mother.'

(Jane and Ann Taylor, and others, 

Original poems for infant minds, 

1804-5.  Facsimile ed. 1976, p.76)