Understandably, Lang--like many other collectors and writers--attempted to create his own fairy tales. The ones that I read--"Princess Nobody" and "The Chronicles of Pantouflia"--were published in 1884 and 1889. George McDonald's seminal fantasy works came out ten to twenty years earlier; E. Nesbit's about five to ten years later; Frances Hodgson Burnett's about the same time.
It was the age of fantasy!
In addition, Alice in Wonderland came out in 1865--Lang's tales bear a resemblance to the dreamlike, surreal nonsense of Carroll's works.
Lang's fantasy tales are still in print and "Princess Nobody," usually presented as the text for Richard Doyle's In Fairyland, is memorable for Doyle's images. (Doyle's fairies fall into the cute and small category.)
Lang's stories are quite readable, full of all the expected tropes: irritated fairies, cursed princesses and princes; quests. They flow well--Andrew Lang and his wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne, were master editors, after all--and engage the reader's interest.
They are also, unfortunately, full of the coy wink-winks that shows up in many works of the time period--the kind of writing where the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the reader. Prince Prigio, for instance, is cursed to be too clever. Consequently, he doesn't believe in magic and dragons and anything else "disproved" by science. The narrator will address the "dear reader" in a tut-tutting tone."Oh, dear, the prince should have known better."
Nesbit employed this technique as did Frances Hodgson Burnett, to a much lesser extent. And for these authors, the narrators' coyness pulls the reader into the joke; the commentary is part of the story. In addition, Nesbit's writing has a deep pathos, as when Oswald Bastable's narrations dive into the painful, noticeable precisely because of what the talkative and bemused Oswald doesn't say.
Lang doesn't appear that in-touch with children's behaviors and emotions. His failure to capture the painful side of childhood is not due to his own lack of children or a lack of interest in children's reading habits.
Rather, great children's writers (whether or not they have children of their own or work with children) seem--to an extent--to hold onto certain memories, to never entirely leave childhood, not because they are immature but because the events remain real to them. C.S. Lewis was singularly capable to reproducing a child's comprehension of loss, an experience he underwent himself when his mother died: Lewis was nine.
Lang appears to lack this degree of understanding. I'm not entirely sure Lang would collect stories for children now. If anything, his work reveals the trends of the time period: a fascination with "antiquity"; the desire to discover the character of a nation through its stories; and a growing interest in childhood as a unique developmental period.
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