In Fairyland

From the Kid Blog at Miss Missy’s School where Marica talks with kids (and their grownups) about reading and writing…I’d like introduce Andrew Lang (1844-1912), author of In Fairyland. More than anyone, Lang was responsible for making fairy-tales popular with children, and grownups as well, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He’s most famous for a series of 12 Fairy Books which were titled using color names. The first of these was The Blue Fairy Book (1889)…

Fairy-tales

The Water-babies: A Fairy Tale for Land-babies by Reverend Charles Kingsley, first published in 1868. It’s the story of a little boy named Tom who lived in middle of the 1800s. Tom is a chimney sweep–he crawls into the chimneys of rich peoples’ houses to clean out the soot. It’s a dirty job, and he is always tired and hungry. One day

Animal Stories

Now, as you know, most dogs don’t usually wear reading glasses and Homburg hats unless their people dress them up (as Beatrix Potter did her pets). Most animals don’t write in shorthand like Missy, or read British detective stories as Rocky likes to do. And most animals don’t talk in real life! To give human characteristics to nonhuman creatures and things is to anthropomorphize them.