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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Yellow-Cap and Other Fairy-Stories For Children,' Julian Hawthorne crafts a whimsical collection that draws upon traditional fairy-tale motifs while imbuing them with a rich psychological depth. Written in a lyrical prose style, the stories evoke a sense of wonder and enchantment, appealing not just to the young, but also to the youthful spirit in every adult. Set against a backdrop of vibrant imagination, the narratives weave moral lessons and poignant themes, expertly balancing light-hearted adventure with deeper reflections on human nature and societal norms, indicative of the late 19th-century literary tradition stepping away from purely didactic tales. As the son of the renowned author Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne grew up in a literary milieu that profoundly shaped his sensibilities. Influenced by his father's exploration of moral complexities and the supernatural, Julian's own writing captures a similar ethos, but with a distinct focus on the fantastical and childlike. His diverse experiences, including travel and journalism, enriched his narrative style and thematic exploration in this collection, allowing him to connect with a youthful audience while preserving literary sophistication. 'Yellow-Cap and Other Fairy-Stories For Children' is a delightful addition to the canon of children's literature, offering readers a magical escape into realms of imagination. It invites not only children but also parents and educators to explore the joys of storytelling and the invaluable lessons that accompany them. This collection is a testament to the enduring power of fairy tales and a rejuvenating escape into the fantastical. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Yellow-Cap and Other Fairy-Stories For Children
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents Julian Hawthorne’s single-author collection of fairy-stories for children, gathering four complete, chaptered narratives—Yellow-Cap, Rumpty-Dudget, Calladon, and Theeda—into a coherent whole. The scope is deliberately focused: not a miscellany of fragments, but a curated suite of full-length tales designed for continuous reading or installment reading aloud. By presenting these works side by side, the collection highlights their shared architecture of adventure and wonder while preserving the integrity of each story’s progression. Its purpose is twofold: to offer young readers an inviting portal into Hawthorne’s imaginative fiction, and to give families, educators, and interested readers a reliable, unified text for enjoyment, study, and comparison.
All items herein are prose works of imaginative fiction expressly fashioned as fairy-stories for children. They are not poems, plays, essays, or letters; each narrative unfolds in titled chapters that guide the reader through a sequence of encounters and discoveries. Yellow-Cap moves through royal courts, pledges, talismans, and a culminating transformation. Rumpty-Dudget traverses a palace, a tower, and airy kingdoms, with dwarfs and gnomes shaping the action. Calladon explores magic governed by a lamp and mirror, opening into mysterious rooms and renewal. Theeda turns seaward, threading books, shells, and the secret language of waves. Together, these tales exemplify literary fairy tale in accessible prose.
Read collectively, the stories reveal unifying themes of promise, trial, and metamorphosis. Monarchs and masks, pledges and passwords, lamps and eyes—such objects and offices mark thresholds the young protagonists must cross. Chapter titles signal recurring motifs: talismans confer responsibility; enchanted fires test resolve; mirrored images reflect identity and choice. The presence of dwarfs, gnomes, and other tutelary figures anchors the narratives in familiar folklore while guiding children through ethical wayfinding. Above all, these tales celebrate courage tempered by kindness and curiosity disciplined by conscience, showing how imaginative ordeals translate into growth. The wonders are bright, yet they are never without moral light.
Stylistically, Hawthorne favors lucid narration, brisk episodes, and a genial, companionable voice that suits being read aloud. The chaptered design keeps momentum while offering natural pauses, and the playful nomenclature—names like Rumpty-Dudget—signals a tone that is whimsical without losing clarity. Stagecraft imagery, from scenes on a stage to a climactic transformation, underscores a dramaturgical sense of setting: curtains part, spaces shift, and characters learn by stepping into roles. Magical mechanics are articulated with story-internal logic—the law of a lamp, the rules of a talisman—so that wonder depends on coherence. The prose invites delight while quietly organizing enchantment into intelligible patterns.
As a whole, the collection showcases range within a single imaginative mode. Yellow-Cap frames courtly adventure and favor within questions of merit. Rumpty-Dudget blends domestic thresholds with elemental travel, from towers to the ways of the wind. Calladon turns inward as much as outward, using mirrors and rooms to stage regeneration. Theeda opens onto littoral mysteries, where books converse with shells and the sea guards its meanings. Read in sequence, the tales move from crowns and pledges through airy and fiery ordeals to watery wisdom, mapping a full compass of elements. The result is a varied yet harmonious gallery of wonder.
Situated within the tradition of English-language literary fairy tales, these stories draw upon recognizable personae—dwarfs, gnomes, kings—while shaping them through a distinctly narrative, chapter-driven design. The settings often invoke theaters, palaces, towers, and shorelines, spaces where law and magic intersect and characters must choose. The collection’s significance lies in its balance: it preserves the charm of folklore while offering an authored architecture readers can revisit, study, and compare. By arranging the four tales together, the volume invites attention to recurring symbols—gold, eyes, lamps, ivy—and to the way consistent motifs create continuity across distinct adventures without sacrificing each story’s individuality.
For contemporary readers, the value of this collection is practical as well as aesthetic. Its language is clear, its episodes are self-contained yet cumulative, and its motifs are ripe for conversation at home or in the classroom. The unified presentation enables thematic pairing across stories—promises beside talismans, mirrors beside waves—fostering close reading without requiring prior knowledge. Children may savor the movement from peril to play; adults will notice the ethical scaffolding that steadies the enchantment. Whether approached serially or dipped into selectively, these fairy-stories offer invitations to imagine responsibly: pleasures of make-believe aligned with steady lights of judgment and care.
Historical Context
Julian Hawthorne (June 22, 1846–July 21, 1934) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. His childhood bridged New England’s literary milieu in Concord and Salem and extended stays abroad after President Franklin Pierce appointed Nathaniel United States consul at Liverpool (1853–1857). The family then lived in England and Italy (1857–1859), exposing Julian to British periodicals, Christmas pantomimes, and continental folklore. That transatlantic formation, together with Nathaniel’s child-friendly mythographies—A Wonder-Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853)—provided Julian a template for mingling moral fable, classical and Germanic motifs, and theatrical enchantment that informs Yellow-Cap and companion tales such as Rumpty-Dudget, Calladon, and Theeda.
Hawthorne’s children’s fantasies emerged amid the post–Civil War expansion of juvenile publishing in the United States. Compulsory schooling (Massachusetts, 1852; gradually nationwide) and rising middle-class literacy created new markets exploited by houses in Boston and New York and, across the Atlantic, by London firms. The launch of St. Nicholas Magazine in 1873 (edited by Mary Mapes Dodge) and Harper’s Young People in 1879 set a tone of imaginative yet morally guided entertainment. Illustrated gift books, chromolithographic covers, and subscription libraries put fairy narratives within reach of families. Hawthorne wrote into this ecosystem, crafting stories that could be read aloud at home while competing with magazine serials and holiday “annuals.”
Nineteenth-century folklore revivals shaped the idiom Hawthorne chose. The Brothers Grimm entered Anglophone nurseries via Edgar Taylor’s translations (1823–1826), Hans Christian Andersen’s tales circulated in English from the 1840s, and George MacDonald’s fantasies (The Princess and the Goblin, 1872) and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) modeled spiritualized moral allegory for children. John Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air (1869), a study of Greek cloud and storm myths, legitimized myth-reading as character education. Later, Andrew Lang’s “Color” Fairy Books (beginning 1889) codified the anthology form Hawthorne anticipated. Dwarfs, gnomes, talismans, enchanted fires, and metamorphoses in his stories reflect this pan-European, didactic-romantic blend.
Victorian stagecraft provided a second reservoir of imagery and technique. London’s Drury Lane Christmas pantomimes, scripted by E. L. Blanchard and painted by scenic masters like William Beverley, climaxed in the “grand transformation scene,” a spectacular cascade of tableaux made with gauzes, traps, limelight, and later electricity. John Henry Pepper’s famous “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion (popularized in 1862) and New York’s spectacle The Black Crook (1866) showcased the period’s appetite for visual magic. Such technologies saturated popular culture through magic-lantern lectures, fairgrounds, and theatres in Liverpool, London, Boston, and New York, encouraging writers like Hawthorne to stage moral metamorphosis as literal scene changes and optical marvels.
Late nineteenth-century fascination with science and the unseen—electric lighting (Edison’s incandescent lamp, 1879), the telephone (Bell, 1876), microscopy, and popular physics—coexisted with Spiritualism (the Fox sisters, 1848 forward) and the Theosophical Society (founded in New York, 1875 by Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry S. Olcott). Juvenile fiction freely blended empirical wonders with occult vocabulary: lamps with laws, mirrors revealing inner states, talismans governed by quasi-scientific rules. World’s fairs, notably the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, diffused a faith in progress and display. Hawthorne’s fantasies register this milieu, treating enchantment as an orderly system, at once moral and mechanical, legible to a curious, modern child.
Hawthorne’s career unfolded within a transatlantic book trade that rewarded simultaneity and spectacle. Before the U.S. International Copyright Act of 1891 (the Chace Act), American and British houses jostled over unauthorized reprints, encouraging authors to cultivate both markets. Subscription libraries like Mudie’s in London shaped tastes; magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly offered serial venues. Hawthorne divided his efforts between fiction, journalism, and literary biography—Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884)—leveraging his surname while experimenting with romance, detection, and children’s tales. The juvenile stories thus belong to a pragmatic strategy: produce portable fantasies suited to gift-book formats and to publishers on either side of the Atlantic.
The social uses of children’s literature in the Gilded Age and early Progressive era also matter. Postbellum America—scarred by the Civil War (ended 1865), urbanizing, and receiving large immigrant waves—prized narratives that promised inner discipline, sympathy, and civic imagination. Fairy stories functioned as polite training in ethics, often staging promises, pledges, and tests of obedience through fantastical proxies like dwarfs, queens, and gnomes. Domestic ideology and emerging debates about gender, play, and coeducation inflected plots about courage, curiosity, and responsibility. Hawthorne’s tales deploy transformation and ordeal to rehearse virtues prized in households from Boston to New York to London, without relinquishing their playful, theatrical surfaces.
Hawthorne’s later life complicates the reception of his earlier fairy tales. He turned increasingly to journalism and transatlantic commentary in the 1890s, and in 1913 was convicted in New York federal court of mail fraud tied to mining-stock promotions, serving time in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He answered with a reformist memoir, The Subterranean Brotherhood (1914). He died in San Francisco in 1934. Yet the children’s fantasies—issued in the late 1870s and 1880s, when he moved between New York and London—remain a distinctive bridge between American Romantic inheritance and modern fantasy’s theatrical-technological idiom, preserving a record of the stages, schools, and salons that formed him.
Synopsis (Selection)
Yellow-Cap
A child marked by a yellow cap and a golden pledge is swept from ordinary life into royal intrigue, stagecraft, and sorcery under the guidance of a golden dwarf and a talisman. Dark passages, a magic eye, and a climactic transformation frame a quest that tests the claim of an 'appanage of royalty.'
Rumpty-Dudget
When the dwarf Rumpty-Dudget disturbs a quiet household, children are drawn from palace to tower and into elemental realms. Helped and hindered by the Queen of the Air and the King of the Gnomes, they face enchanted fire and golden ivy in an effort to undo a binding spell.
Calladon
Bound by the exacting 'law of the lamp' after invoking abracadabra, Calladon navigates mirrors and a sequence of outer rooms that mirror inner trials. His path converges with Callia’s as the tale moves from incantation toward regeneration.
Theeda
A seaside boy named Oscar meets the sea-spirit Theeda and receives gifts—including a pearl-shell—that turn his perspective 'inside out.' Guided by a crab and a mysterious stranger, he follows clues toward the secret written in the waves.
