Illustrated by Louis Rhead, with an introduction by William Dean Howells
Reading this 1914 edition of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Wonder Stories is like brushing cobwebs off an heirloom only to find a scalpel beneath the lace. For all its gilded edges and whimsical illustrations, this book is not simply a collection of fairy tales—it’s a study in duality: beauty veined with pain, innocence dogged by existential dread. It is a curated cathedral of longing, sacrifice, and loss, dressed up in Edwardian finery. And Louis Rhead’s illustrations? They do not soften the blow—they simply gild it. Andersen’s tales have always been misunderstood, but in this edition, their original raw nerve is mostly left exposed, and the result is disarming, affecting, and occasionally brutal.
The Story Behind the Stories: History and Development
By 1914, Hans Christian Andersen’s reputation had evolved from that of a folkloric scribbler to that of a literary patriarch of the modern fairy tale. He died in 1875, but in death, his work underwent the sort of editorial embalming typical of the Victorian and Edwardian eras: an emphasis on sentiment, suppression of sex and suffering, and a focus on “child-friendliness” that belied the stories’ accurate contours. This edition, however, stands apart. Published at the cusp of the First World War, it marks a final flourish of the high Edwardian gift book—a lush, illustrated tome meant to comfort, inspire, and edify children and adults alike.
Louis Rhead, a British-American artist trained in the decorative tradition of Art Nouveau, was enlisted to illustrate the volume. His pen was a blend of ornament and edge. His stylized borders and immersive tableaux do not pacify the content but underline its strangeness. The artwork leans hard into atmosphere—moody forests, shadowy rooms, strange creatures caught mid-transformation—rendering the psychological undercurrents of Andersen’s tales in swirling ink and color. Rhead understood something key: these stories were not meant to be entirely safe.
A Mirror, Darkly: Social Meaning and Misconceptions
Andersen’s fairy tales were never just bedtime stories. They are allegories of class anxiety, bodily sacrifice, emotional starvation, and spiritual yearning. In this edition, that truth glows faintly beneath the gold-leaf borders. Consider The Little Mermaid: far from Disney’s sass-and-songfest, Andersen’s original tale is an unsettling parable of unrequited love, physical mutilation, and spiritual self-erasure. She trades her voice for legs that cause agonizing pain with every step, not for love, but for the possibility of a soul. And when the prince marries another, she does not fight, but dissolves into sea foam. The moral? Silence is not always golden—sometimes it’s damnation.
The Red Shoes is another bruiser. Ostensibly a cautionary tale about vanity, it spirals into a grotesque meditation on compulsion and punishment, ending with the heroine begging an executioner to chop off her enchanted feet. In these pages, Andersen never pretends that virtue guarantees salvation. Often, it is precisely the innocent who suffer most. There is no triumph, only transformation—and sometimes, not even that.
And yet, these stories endure not despite their discomfort, but because of it. Andersen was a writer obsessed with the soul’s struggle against worldly constraints—he simply dressed that struggle in the imagery of nightingales and tin soldiers. This volume offers a window into that conflict, free of the saccharine haze that later adaptations poured over it.
Art, Ink, and Industrial Nostalgia
Published during the golden age of illustrated children’s books, this edition is as much an object as it is a text. The cover, if intact, likely features embossed titles, gilt flourishes, and Rhead’s hallmark swirling designs. Inside, it is lavishly peppered with over a hundred illustrations—some in color, most in Rhead’s rich black linework. It’s a book that demands both handling and reverence: not meant to be read in a hurry or on a screen, but to be poured over, page by page.
William Dean Howells’ introduction is a masterstroke of American literary diplomacy. A staunch realist, Howells somehow manages to praise Andersen’s romanticism as emotionally truthful and psychologically acute. He frames the Danish author not as a spinner of idle fables, but as a serious craftsman of human feeling—one whose use of fantasy illuminates moral and spiritual realities better than most realist novels. Howells’ preface doesn’t coddle; it frames. He tells you these stories matter not because they entertain children but because they confront the abyss with something like grace.
The Long Shadow of Andersen
At the time of its release, this edition was likely seen as a deluxe keepsake, more shelf ornament than soul surgery. Yet it achieved what all truly great children’s literature does: it found a second life in adult hands. Readers who returned to it decades later—likely after decades of Disneyfication—were jolted awake by what they found. This was not the sanitized, all’s-well-that-ends-well fairy tale canon of mid-century America. It was closer to Kafka in nursery rhyme clothing.
Over the years, Andersen’s darker visions have been quietly restored to cultural memory. Writers like Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter owe him a debt. So too do readers now hungry for something more than fairy dust. And this edition—beautiful, heavy, slightly macabre—remains one of the most powerful gateways back to the source.
Rhead’s illustrations and Howells’ literary gravitas combined to rescue Andersen from the playroom and return him to the salon—and, perhaps more fittingly, the confessional.
Final Thoughts
This is not a book you finish with a sigh of satisfaction. You finish it slightly haunted. You realize the “fairy tales” you thought you knew are ghost stories in disguise, and the world of princes and mermaids, of toy soldiers and red shoes, is a mirror turned inward. If that doesn’t merit four stars, I don’t know what does.
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