“No Fairy Tales of their Own?”

This chapter begins by surveying the English folktale collectors and their work in chronological order of their chief publications. It discusses some of the issues flagged up in the course of that review. There are many hints of the existence of folktales in early modern England, which Tom Pettitt surveys in his piece on the subject, and which Charlotte Artese treats with respect to William Shakespeare. The English folktale can be said to have become an established literary category, somewhat later than in most other countries of Europe, but all the same the country was no longer a blank space in the cartography of Folktale Europe. The weaknesses of folktale textualization in Victorian England make it difficult to make any sound observations about oral folktale style. Writing about the English folk narrative tradition, Stith Thompson remarked: “Popular narrative has had a tendency to take the form of the ballad”.