In July 1853 Cruikshank issued the first number of his projected Fairy Library, a re-telling of the story of 'Hop-O'-My-Thumb, and the Seven-League Boots' accompanied by some splendid illustrations.

'Hop-O'-My-Thumb' was the English name bestowed on the eponymous hero of Perrault's seventeenth-century fairy tale, 'Le petit Poucet'. In his version of the story Cruikshank rather blatantly introduced a number of explicit moral messages, especially with regard to alcohol. Hop's father, for example, 'kept on drinking and smoking; whilst the money that he spent in the drink that made him tipsy, and on the nasty tobacco which he smoked, would have brought bread enough for his family to live upon'. The children wash in cold water every morning 'because it is most refreshing and healthy to do so', the Ogre can be outwitted because he is tipsy, and at the end Hop's father reforms and is made Prime Minister by the King. He legislates to discourage gambling and 'to abolish the use of all intoxicating liquor'. As to the Ogres, they are set to work under guards on 'great national works and improvements—such as new roads, draining marshes, and making harbours'. Forster highly praised Cruikshank's illustrations in an enthusiastic Examiner review (23 July) and did not condemn the moralising interpolations which, he thought, could 'do no harm' because they were not 'obtruded ... in any dull way' and might even do some good. Reading Forster's review in his summer retreat in Boulogne, Dickens apprehended that Cruikshank, whose passionately single-minded teetotalism he had already attacked in public (see Vol. 2 of the Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism, p. 103), was letting loose a 'Whole Hog' (see Volume 3 of the Dent edition, p. 18) into a realm very dear to Dickens's heart, that of the 'fancy', so vital to the healthy development of the child. He determined to respond to Cruikshank in HW. 'Half playfully and half seriously', he wrote to Wills

I mean to protest most strongly against alteration—for any purpose—of the beautiful little stories which are so tenderly and humanly useful to us in these times when the world is too much with us early and late; and then to re-write Cinderella according to Total-Abstinence, Peace-Society, and Bloomer principles, and expressly for their propagation. [Pilgrim, Vol. VII, p. 121].

He asked Wills to send him a copy of Cruikshank's publication and also a copy of the simplest popular version of 'Cinderella'. When sending copy to Wills, he confessed that he was very pleased with it, calling it both 'merry and wise'.

Cruikshank was deeply upset by Dickens's attack and responded, writing in the character of Hop-O'-My-Thumb, in the second number (February 1854) of George Cruikshank's Magazine. In this rather heavy-handed piece, which was reprinted as a separate pamphlet, he responded both to 'Frauds' and to 'Whole Hogs', but Dickens's attacks had severely damaged his project. Only two more numbers of the Fairy Library were issued during 1854, the second of which, 'Cinderella', really does, as Harry Stone has commented, 'out-parody Dickens's parody'. At the end, for example, Cinderella's godmother (whom Cruikshank makes a dwarf rather than a fairy) preaches a temperance sermon to the King to dissuade him from causing the fountains to flow with wine to celebrate Cinderella's marriage with the Prince: '"The history of the use of strong drinks", the dwarf said, "is marked on every page by excess, which follows as a matter of course, from the very nature of their composition, and is always accompanied by ill-health, misery, and crime"'. No more stories appeared until 1864, when the last one, 'Puss in Boots', was published by Routledge with a renewed defence of his treatment of the tales against Dickens's criticisms appended by Cruikshank. For Dickens's later caricaturing of Cruikshank as 'Mr Monomaniacal Patriarch', see Vol. 3 of the Dent edition, p. 311.

The way in which Dickens's argument in 'Frauds' looks forward to his main theme in Hard Times (1854) has been commented on by K. J. Fielding. See also, for further discussions of the controversy between Dickens and Cruikshank, Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World (1979), pp. 9-16, and R. L. Patten, George Cruikshank's Life, Times and Art, Vol. 2 (1996), pp. 331-347.

Literary allusions

• 'seven Blue Beards in the field': adapted from Shakespeare's 'I think there be six Richmonds in the field', Richard III, Act 5, Sc. 8;
• 'Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe ...': Dickens shows his usual total recall of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719);
• 'consume their own smoke': Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book 2, Ch. 6;
• 'The Vicar of Wakefield was wisest ...': the title of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Chapter 15 includes the phrase 'The Folly of Being Over-wise';
• 'The world is too much with us...': Wordsworth, Miscellaneous Sonnets, Pt ii, No. 33.

Author: Michael Slater; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume III: 'Gone Astray' and Other Papers from Household Words, 1851-1859, 1998.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Click here for further information about texts cited.