English Fairy Tales (Everyman's Library Children's Classics) by Joseph Jacobs

One of the great nineteenth-century folklorists, Joseph Jacobs collected stories from oral sources and made scholarly notes on their origin, but he deliberately recorded them in a plain and direct style which he thought suitable for children and which makes them 'supremely tellable'. First published in 1890, his famous collection includes all the well-known tales, such as JACK AND THE BEANSTALK and DICK WHITTINGTON, as well as British variants of stories common to many cultures. The illustrations by John Batten are taken from the first edition.

Born in Australia in 1854, Joseph Jacobs spent most of his adult life in England where he became, with Andrew Lang, a prominent member of the English Folk Lore Society founded in 1878. He spent ten years collecting from storytellers or printed sources the fairy tales that were first published in two volumes in 1890 and 1894 and now appear here in one Everyman's Library volume. Jacobs was a cheerful man, with a down-to-earth attitude towards fairy tales, which he regarded as "essentially colloquial" rather than romantic. Though his approach to collecting and recording material was scholarly, his telling of the tales was deliberately directed at young listeners, and he tried them out on his own three children. He died in 1916.

Target age: 8 to 11

Everyman's Library

Pub Date: November 3, 1992

1.05" H x 8.38" L x 6.32" W

428 pages

Hardcover (clothbound)