Fairy Tales (Everyman's Library Children's Classics) by Hans Christian Anderson

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The Princess and the Pea, The Little Mermaid, and other great Andersen fairy tales have enchanted children since the first ones appeared in Danish in the 1830s and '40s. Spink's translation into English is widely recognized as the finest, and the new Everyman's Library edition is further graced by the magical pictures made in 1899 by three of Britain's most celebrated illustrators.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker, who nonetheless was a great reader, made a toy-theatre for his son and taught him to notice every natural wonder as they walked in the woods together on Sundays. His father died when he was eleven, and it wasn't until six years later that, with the help of a patron, he finally went to a state secondary school attended by much younger children. There he suffered at the hands of a cruel headmaster, but he acquired an education and was determined to be a writer. He published his first novel and his first fairy tales in 1835; thereafter he wrote over 150 more of these stories which have become classics in many languages.

A lonely man who never married, he was also an anxious man; he loved travelling, but would carry a coil of rope with him in case of fire in his hotel. Although he originally addressed his fairy tales to children (and some would maintain he had a streak of childhood in his nature) he insisted they were "for all ages," and the gentleness and humor that are their characteristics are recognized by everyone.

William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was the youngest of the three artist sons of a wood engraver. Born in Hornsey Rise, north London, he studied at Islington School of Art and briefly at the Royal Academy Schools. His grandfather, Thomas Robinson, had been a bookbinder working in Newcastle for the famous wood engraver, Thomas Bewick, and subsequently took up engraving and illustrating himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that all three brothers – Thomas, Charles and William – became book and magazine illustrators. William was still in his twenties when he was commissioned, with other young artists – Helen Stratton, A.D. McCormick, A. L. Davis and A. E. Norbury – to illustrate a collection of stories from The Arabian Nights, published in 1899. William's contribution was by far the largest and the best, demonstrating the beauty of line and composition that characterized his illustrations for other literary classics. But now he is chiefly remembered for his humorous drawings and the weird contraptions that gave his name to the English language for any mechanical device 'absurdly complicated in design and having a simple function'. At the Memorial Exhibition after his death, one of his few peers in comic drawing, Nicolas Bentley, compared him to Leonardo da Vinci, claiming that Heath Robinson 'had the advantage of Leonardo, in that some of his inventions did at least look as if they might have worked'.

Reginald Spink

Target age: 8 to 11

Everyman's Library

Pub Date: November 3, 1992

1.16" H x 8.38" L x 6.44" W

432 pages

Hardcover (clothbound)

Back to Everyman’s Library Children’s Classics Series