ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the absorption into children’s culture of a variety of traditional tales, myths, legends, commedia dell’arte characters, chivalric narratives and fairy stories, all important manifestations of popular culture in pre-industrial Britain. They reappeared in theatrical pantomimes, first staged in the eighteenth century, and still performed in twenty-first century Britain. And they reappeared in new kinds of children’s literature which sprang up in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the ‘harlequinade’ and the children’s chapbook. Some critics might call this ‘remediation’: the successive reconfiguration of particular texts in new formats and new media.2 Others might see it as ‘materialisation’: the way in which orally transmitted narratives were given physical form as either performances or books. Or perhaps the process under discussion here is really ‘commodification’: the harnessing of tales freely circulating in popular culture to make money, either for theatrical impresarios or for the publishers of books and pamphlets. What is certain is that relatively little work has been undertaken either on the pantomime or on the children’s books that developed alongside it.3 But what lies at the heart of this chapter is the connection between popular culture and children’s culture, and the ways in which a popular theatre, aimed at children, acted as a bridge between them.
