A Look at Historical Versions of Cinderella

My library was recently given a great collection of rare books which included a little book:

Cendrillon; ou, La petite pantoufle de verre. 12 gravures. Leipzig: Librairie de Baumgaertner, ca. 1835. [1] l., [12] p., 12 col. pls., 10 x 14 cm. The plates are hand colored. Text in French; footnotes on meaning of words and phrases in German. Blank peach boards.

I mentioned on Facebook that this version of Cinderella was very interesting in that it had full sisters, not stepsisters, no mention of a stepmother, and the prince had a worried mother. Various people asked me for a translation of the text. I provide here a transcription of the original text and below that my translation.

Un gentilhomme avait trois filles; deux d’entre elles étaient hautaines, petites-maîtresses, d’une caractère dur, laides, et gâtées par leur mère: elles se nommaient Javotte et Marton. L’autre, nuit et jour en butte à leur mauvais traitement, n’ètait aimée de personne, quoique jolie et d’un bon coeur; elle était chargée des occupations les plus viles, et devait obéir aux moindres ordres de ses aînées, qui l’avaient surnommée par mépris Cendrillon.

Il advint qu’un soir le fils du roi donna un bal; nos deux grandes dames y furent engagées. Ce fut avec un profond soupir, et les yeux pleins de larmes, que Cendrillon les vit partir: un tel bonheur ne m’arrivera-t-il donc pas! disait-elle.

Sa marraine entendit ses plaintes: “Sèche tes pleurs, lui dit-elle, je suis fée, et tu vas voir ce que peut ma baguette magique: fais seulement ce que je vais te dire, et tu iras au bal. Va d’abord me chercher une belle citrouille.” Cendrillon alla cueillir la plus belle qu’elle put trouver. “Leve maintenant la souricière. Oh! il y a six souris, nous aurons six beaux chevaux pour atteler à la citrouille, dont nous allons faire un carrosse des plus élégans et des plus beaux.” Et d’un coup de baguette ce qui fut dit fut aussitôt fait.

“Apporte-moi maintenant la ratière,” dit la Fée. Elle trouva dedans trois gros rats, elle prit celui qui était le plus gros, le plus beau, et dont la barbe était la plus épaisse; puis, l’ayant touché, le changea en un gros cocher bien grave, qui avait de superbes moustaches. S’étant fait apporter ensuite six lézards, elle les transforma en laquais à livrée chamarrée, qui montèrent aussitôt derrière le carrosse.

Lorsque le brillant équipage se trouva complet, et devant la porte prêt à partir, le bonne fée agita de nouveau sa baguette, puis toucha sa filleule, aussitôt les vilains habits de Cendrillon furent changés en habits de la plus belle couleur, brodés d’or et de pierreries, plus beaux encore que ceux d’une princesse.

Elle lui fit présent ensuite d’une paire de pantoufles de verre. Ainsi parée, Cendrillon monta dans son carosse; mais, avant de prendre congé d’elle, sa marraine lui dit: “Sur toutes choses, sois de retour avant minuit, car cette heure une fois passée, tes beaux habits, ton équipage, tes domestiques disparaîtront, et tes chevaux redeviendront souris.”

Quelques instans après Cendrillon arrivait au bal, où une foule brillante l’entoura bientôt; chacun admirait au jolie figure, sa tournure élégante et ses habits étincelans. Le jeune prince surtout, qui aurait désiré avoir une fiancée aussi charmante, vint la prier d’asseoir près de lui, et quelques instans après lui demanda la faveur de danser avec elle.

Mais, au milieu de ces plaisirs si nouveaux pour elle, Cendrillon oubliait l’heure… Déjà onze coups avaient sonné à l’horloge du château… Elle écoutait avec inquiétude… Un douzième se fit entendre!… Elle s’enfuit alors avec une telle vitesse, que personne ne put l’atteindre ni la retrouver; car les gardes dirent qu’ils n’avaient vu sortir qu’une jeune fille fort mal vêtue; on trouva seulement une pantoufle de verre la plus jolie du monde, que le prince ramassa bien soigneusement.

Le prince, quelques jours après, tomba malade sans que les médécins, avec tout leur savoir, pussent lui donner aucun soulagement; c’était au coeur qu’il souffrait. Souvent, lorsqu’il était seul, il portait en soupirant la jolie pantoufle à ses lèvres… Pressé par la reine sa mère, qui le chérissait, il lui avoua enfin tout l’amour qu’il ressentait pour la personne qu’il avait vue à son bal.

Peu de jours après un héraut fut chargé d’aller par toute la ville annoncer à son de trompe que l’héritier du trône épouserait la femme dont le pied irait bien juste à la pantoufle, et que toutes celles qui voudraient l’essayer eussent à se rendre le jour suivant dans une salle du château qu’il indiqua.

Le lendemain, jeunes et vieilles, jolies et laides, arrrivèrent en foule au palais: on commença l’essai, mais aucune ne put entrer son pied dans la pantoufle; Javotte et Marton se présentèrent aussi, mais sans être plus heureuses. Cendrillon, qui les regardait, dit en riant: “Que je voie si elle ne m’irait pas.” Ses soeurs se mirent à se moquer d’elle; mais quelle fut leur surprise lorsqu’elles virent qu’elle la chaussait très-juste, leur étonnement fut plus grand encore quand Cendrillon tira de sa poche l’autre pantoufle et qu’elle la mit à son pied.

La marraine, qui savait si bien changer une petite souris en un beau cheval, voulut bien faire encore quelque chose pour sa protégée: elle arriva, et, ayant donné un coup de baguette sur les habits de Cendrillon, chacun reconnut aussitôt la belle étrangère, parée avec encore plus de magnificence que les autres fois. Ses soeurs se jetèrent aussitôt à ses pieds.

Le prince la trouva plus belle que jamais, et, peu de jours après, il l’épousa. Cendrillon, dont la coeur était aussi bon que sa figure était jolie, pardonna à ses soeurs leurs mauvais traitemens, les fit loger au château, et les maria à deux seigneurs de la cour; aussi lui dirent-elles qu’elles voyaient bien que la beauté, jointe au bon coeur, sied bien aux femmes, et que par cela même elle était plus digne que toute autre d’être reine.


My translation:

A gentleman had three daughters; two of them were haughty, pretentiously overdressed, of a hard character, ugly, and spoiled by their mother: they were called Javotte and Marton. The other, night and day subject to their abuse, was not loved by anyone, although pretty and with a good heart; she was burdened with the worst tasks, and had to obey the least orders of her elders, who had disdainfully named her Cendrillon.

It happened that one evening the king’s son gave a ball; our two great ladies were invited to it. It was with a deep sigh, and eyes full of tears, that Cendrillon saw them depart: such happiness will never happen to me! she said to herself.

Her godmother heard her complaints: “Dry your tears, she said, I am a fairy, and you are going to see what my magic wand can do: only do what I am going to tell you, and you will go to the ball. First find me a beautiful pumpkin.” Cendrillon went out to pick the most beautiful one she could find. “Now lift the mousetrap. Ah! There are six mice, we will have six handsome horses to harness to the pumpkin, which we are going to make one of the most elegant and beautiful carriages ever.” And with a wave of the wand, that which had been said was promptly done.

“Now bring me the rat trap,” said the Fairy. She found within it three large rats, she took that which was the largest, handsomest, and whose whiskers were the thickest; then having touched it, changed it into a big, dignified coachman, who had a superb mustache. Having had six lizards brought to her, she changed them into lackeys in much-bedecked livery, who promptly mounted behind the carriage.

When the brilliant carriage and its retinue were complete, and before the door, ready to depart, the good fairy shook her wand anew, then touched her goddaughter, immediately Cendrillon’s ugly clothes were changed into clothes of the most beautiful color, embroidered with gold and jewels, even more beautiful than those of a princess.

She then gave her a pair of glass slippers. Thus bedecked, Cendrillon climbed into her carriage; but, before taking leave of her, her godmother said to her: “Above all things, return before midnight, because once that hour is past, your clothes, your carriage, your servants will disappear, and your horses will become mice again.”

A few instants later, Cendrillon arrived at the ball, where a brilliant crowd quickly surrounded her; each admired her pretty face, her elegant shape, and her sparkling clothes. The young prince especially, who had desired to have such a charming fiancée, came to beg her to sit next to him, and a few moments later asked for the favor of dancing with her.

But, in the middle of these pleasures so new to her, Cendrillon forgot the hour… Already eleven strikes had sounded from the castle’s clock… She listened with inquietude… A twelfth strike made itself heard!… She then fled with such speed, that no one could catch her or find her; for the guards said that they had only seen depart a very badly dressed girl; one only found the most beautiful glass slipper in the world, which the prince very carefully picked up.

A few days later, the prince fell ill, without the doctors, with all their knowledge, being able to give him any relief; it was in his heart that he suffered. Often, when he was alone, he brought the pretty slipper to his lips and sighed… Pressed by the queen his mother, who cherished him, he finally avowed all the love that he felt for the person he had seen at his ball.

A few days later a herald was ordered to go throughout the town announcing with trumpet blasts that the heir to the throne would marry the woman whose foot fit best in the slipper, and that all those who wanted to try it on had to come themselves on the following day to a room in the castle that he indicated.

The next day, young and old, pretty and ugly women, arrived in a crowd at the palace: the attempt began, but none could put their foot in the slipper; Javotte and Marton also presented themselves, but without being more successful. Cendrillon, who was watching them, said laughingly, “I will see if it doesn’t fit me.” Her sisters began to mock her; but whatever their surprise when they saw that the slipper fit her foot just right, their astonishment was even greater when Cendrillon took out of her pocket the other slipper and put it on her foot.

The godmother, who knew so well how to change a little mouse into a handsome horse, wanted to do something more for her protégée: she arrived, and having given a tap of her wand to Cendrillon’s clothes, everyone immediately recognized the beautiful stranger, clothed even more magnificently than the other times. Her sisters threw themselves at her feet.

The prince found her more beautiful than ever, and, a few days later, he married her. Cendrillon, whose heart was as good as her face was beautiful, pardoned her sisters their abuse, let them reside in the castle, and married them to two lords of the court; thus they said of her that they perceived that beauty joined to a good heart, suited women well, and for this alone she was more worthy than anyone else of being a queen.


I found myself very curious about this text so I emailed Andrea Immel, the curator of the fabulous Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton University, one of the two other American libraries that holds a copy of this text, hoping that she could answer some questions for me. My library's copy has no date so I wondered why the Cotsen's cataloguers gave the date 1835. I also had been checking on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Gallica digital library webpage and Google Books to see if other French versions had this variant of the story and the very beautiful, hand colored illustrations that showed a tiny fairy godmother floating on a cloud. None of the illustrations and texts I found seemed to match. Andrea informed me to my surprise that:

"Actually, Cotsen has two different editions of this: the one whose record you [gave me] and the other with the imprint 'Paris: Audot fils; Rue Paon, 8, Ecole de Medecine, 1836' BUT with the imprint of Librarie de Baumgaertner, Leipzig on the front wrapper. The text is the same in both (French with notes in German), although printed on different paper stocks. The Audot edition is rather badly foxed. The plates are the same as well."

 

"The book is a translation of the Cinderella, or the little glass slipper first published by John Harris in the Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction around 1827 (Moon, Harris 619) [Image from the Lilly Library website. A later edition of the text is available at Archives.org]. The Baumgaertner edition has reformatted the Harris original, which is a vertical format. The plates have been copied from the Harris set and reformatted also. A facsimile was published of it in the UK quite a while ago--I don't think the Opies included it in A Nursery Companion, but you might double check. The Harris Cinderella was in print for quite a while and the illustrations copied by other British publishers well into the 19th century. The tip-off is the little fairy godmother."

"The publication date of the Baumgaertner edition was most likely inferred from the publisher's trading dates. I assume our cataloger checked in German-language catalogues of institutional collections or issued by antiquarian booksellers such as Wegehaupt or Rumann. It couldn't be earlier than 1827 (the date of the first edition of the Harris original), but it certainly could be later."

How interesting! Cinderella was first written down by Charles Perrault in his Histoires; ou Contes du temps passé (1697) and was reprinted and translated throughout Europe. Here was an English adaptation from 1827 being translated back into French in 1835 in Leipzig, Germany, for the benefit of children learning to read French, as shown by the footnotes that gave the meaning of difficult words and phrases in German. The publisher had even copied the illustrations from the English publication. Then the next year Baumgaertner had arranged with the Parisian publisher Audot to resell its book in Paris, so a Parisian publisher had thought it worth selling in France itself which was full of copies of other editions! I do wonder what the young French readers thought of the German footnotes, though... All the images of the 1827 Harris edition can be seen at an Italian blog, Le figure dei libri [Book illustrations]. However, my library's copy and the Cotsen copy have finer illustrations although the scenes are the same. The Harris illustrations were produced from wood-engraved blocks, and the Baumgaertner illustrations were probably etched on metal then printed and hand colored, accounting for their delicacy of line. My library's copy also lacks a scene by the fire and a illustration on the title-page.

I suspect that the need to abbreviate the text to fit the verse format may have led John Harris or whatever unknown author he employed to create this version of Cinderella to cut out much of the original text. When it was retranslated back into French, the translator seems to have kept the cuts of the Harris text along with direct quotes from the Perrault original text instead of translating the English verses. I tried to provide an exact word-for-word translation, so mine is not an elegant translation. My apologies, but I felt a literal translation would be of more interest to my readers. I would like to share one choice in translation: the phrase petites-maîtresses led me to a fascinating website on French fashions, where it was explained that this referred to female equivalents of dandies, who were overdressed and arrogant. I chose to translate this as pretentiously dressed because I couldn't come up with a comparable term in English. Translation is always a series of choices, whether to be literal or poetic, or to change to a familiar version of the tale.

The World-Wide Web is full of versions of Cinderella, and digitized copies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts with many different illustrations are easily discoverable. One little speculation here from my examination of these illustrations, is that the French editions show regal, full-size elegantly dressed fairy godmothers, save for the ones I have been exploring here. The French fairies were essentially self-representations of the French courtly ladies who originated the French fairy tale tradition. However, British folk lore had a long tradition of "little people" who were fairy folk, so that may have inspired the mini fairy godmother (dressed in a country-style, lower-class costume) of these illustrations. It would be interesting to see if later illustrated French fairy tale collections show any miniature fairies, that might trace back to these illustrations...

I hope my readers enjoy this post, and invite you to post comments and links to other resources on Cinderella!

Thinking about Ghosts

Some discussions on Child_Lit and Facebook got me thinking about the question of when friendly ghosts appeared in children's books. Ghosts have always been around in tales told to children. In the Greek myths which were told to both adults and children, people went to the gates of Hades and offered fresh blood to draw the shades (ghosts) out of Hades so they could talk to them and get advice. The ancient Celts believed that the dead walked on Samhain and could be dangerous to the living. Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, today's Halloween. Costumes and masks were often worn during the celebrations of these holy days in order to imitate or placate the spirits. Children wore costumes and participated in these festivals long before today's Halloween-mania. Ghost stories were certainly part of the early modern childhood experience. For evidence, see John Locke's warning in his 1693 book Some Thoughts Concerning Education that nursemaids were wont to frighten children with tales of "goblins, spectres, and apparitions," causing them to become superstitious (see p. 291 of the 1712 edition). He advised that children should be reared by their parents and tutors and kept away from the servants to train them to be logical and non-superstitious. Popular chapbooks from the 1600s onwards were full of ghostly apparitions bemoaning their dire fates and warning the reader not to follow their doomed paths. However none of these ghosts seem to have been friendly ghosts. Some eighteeenth-century authors stripped ghosts from their tales or used them to show the folly of superstition, as in Goody Two-Shoes (1766), where Goody shows the frightened populace that ghosts in the church were actually people making noises (see chapter VI, pp. 45-56). Later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stories told of fake ghosts and how they were disproved.

Among the most popular ghost tales of the nineteenth-century was Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). On GoogleBooks are various full view versions of Irving's tale. I like a collection of three of Irving's stories, Little Britain, Together with The Spectre Bridegroom & A Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1880). If you click on the last clickable page (90) of the table of contents and scroll down a few pages you come to the beginning of the Legend and can read it at your leisure. The illustrations are perfect for the story. The Headless Horseman when he comes along is very scary, although in the epilogue there is a subtle hint that he may have been a fake ghost. There was a long tradition of ghost stories being told around the fireside at Christmastime, and Charles Dickens did a series of small gift books to be sold at Christmas. The first was A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Story of Christmas (1843), which was an immediate bestseller, popular with both adults and children. The ghosts in this tale perform a by now traditional function of reforming both Scrooge and the reader. Robina F. Hardy's The Ghost of Greythorn Manor (1887) tells the tale of a nursemaid at an English country house who with her timid young charge bravely investigates mysterious ghostly noises and finds they are caused by natural things. These tales are fairly typical of the ghost stories nineteenth-century children encountered. But no friendly ghosts, or even the expectation of a friendly ghost. Ghosts were definitely scary.

Thinking about it, the only nineteenth-century story with a relatively friendly ghost is Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost of 1887. This ghost story was published in a collection of tales for adults, not children, but children did read it. Wikipedia points out that it was a satire of the popular gothic ghost tales of the day. It has a ghost trying to terrify the very practical American Otis family, but only a young girl, Virginia, pays any attention to the ghost who she ends up befriending. Here is an unstereotypical ghost with human cares and worries. In the end Virginia helps him resolve his situation and depart for heaven. The 1944 film of this story changes the ghost's background story and makes him a bumbler but the movie is very funny and the relationship between the ghost and young Jessica (Margaret O'Brian) is sweet.

Various juvenile series of the early twentieth century had young detectives investigating ghosts, always to find that they were fake.



It doesn't seem to have been until 1936 when William Pène du Bois came out with his first book, Elisabeth the Cow Ghost, that there appeared a children's book with a funny ghost. Elisabeth was a sweet, gentle cow who came back as a ghost and tried to be a scary ghost, even wearing a sheet to inspire terror. Pène du Bois rewrote and reillustrated the book in 1964 and that edition is generally available through libraries. The text of the 1936 edition is to be found in Philippa Pearce's compilation, Dread and Delight: A Century of Ghost Stories (1995). Pearce commented that when she searched for ghost stories written specifically for children for this anthology, she did not find any before 1900. The stories from 1900 to 1936 are quite scary, save for one by Eleanor Farjeon, "Elsie Piddock Skips In Her Sleep" (1928), that I personally do not see as a ghost story. Thus my conclusion is that friendly ghost stories are an American invention that spread first to England and then to Europe. American authors such as Thorne Smith, with Topper (1926) and Elswyth Thane, with Tryst (1939) had introduced the concept of funny and romantic ghosts to adult fiction and to the movies. The influence of movies such as The Canterville Ghost and the Casper cartoons seem to have spurred the development of children's stories with friendly ghosts. This was a remarkable development because in 500 years of English hauntings and investigations of hauntings there appears to have been no concept of friendly ghosts with their own afterlives, only of murdered ghosts who needed to be avenged, or were themselves ghosts of murderers and suicides, or of spirits summoned by mediums to assuage their loved ones' grief, according to the very interesting and scholarly book by Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (2007).



The author Robert Bright did a thirteen-book series about a friendly ghost named Georgie, starting with the first book, Georgie, in 1944. Georgie was a shy, gentle ghost who haunted the Whittakers' house. He did appropriate creaky noises around the house, and frightened away robbers, but the humans never knew he was there.


I remembered the Casper the Friendly Ghost comics from my childhood, and Wikipedia stated that Casper started as a concept for a children's picture book in 1939, conceived by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo. Oriolo sold the concept to an animation studio and Casper first appeared in a 1945 film. Here was a ghost who made friends with humans and interacted with them. Casper became the hero of a comic book series in 1952 which was published until the 1990s. He still appears in TV series and feature films.




The name Seymour Reit caught my eye because one of my favorite childhood books was The Worried Ghost (1976) by Reit! This tale of a ghostly clerk who needed a human to listen to him and get a long-overdue letter delivered is wonderful, and Quentin Blake's illustrations perfectly fit the book. What fun to find that Reit was at the beginning of this tradition of friendly ghosts back in the 1930s.








In 1948 appeared The Witch of Scrapfaggot Green, by Patricia Gordon, which was illustrated by William Pène du Bois. This story was set during WWII in England. American soldiers stationed near Scrapfaggot Green widened the road for their trucks, and unleashed a witch's ghost. Two young locals befriended the ghost, who turned out to be a mischievous prankster as well as their ancestress. I was fascinated to discover it was based on newspaper articles about a 1944 hoax in England, but in the book the witch was a real ghost. The author, Patricia Gordon, also wrote as Joan Howard, who wrote two of my favorite childhood books, and both names were pseudonyms for a husband-and-wife team, Rene and Patricia Prud'Hommeaux. This Witch book seems to have been the first to have an ancestral friendly ghost.


By 1954 the British author L.M. Boston had written The Children of Green Knowe, the first of a classic 7-book series, where an old house's ghosts interacted with the children who lived there in the mid-twentieth century. This, with its deeper sense of history, not the Witch book, seemed to be the real beginning of another thread in the tradition of friendly ghosts, i.e the concept of bringing history to life through the communication of ghosts and the living. These children interacted with ancestral ghosts and learned about the history of the house and their country. The author based Green Knowe on her own home, the Manor at Hemmingford Grey, which was originally built in the 1130s. It's on my very long list of children's literature-related sites to visit someday.




By 1958 the American author, Elizabeth Marie Pope, had written The Sherwood Ring, where a young girl encountered ancestral ghosts at her family home in New York. It was actually what today would be called a YA novel and quite different from the English Green Knowe books. But that sense of ancestry and history and getting a modern young person interested in the past was similar. There's a substantial section of it readable over on GoogleBooks. Just skip past the dreadful 2001 cover and enjoy reading it! (The cover shown is a library binding from 1958).



By the 1960s there were more children's books with ghosts in them who brought history to life for their young readers. These humanized ghosts were also usually shown in illustrations and the authors' descriptions as looking like people, not ghost shapes wearing sheets. I note that ghosts wearing sheets still appear in picture books for young children, but not usually in middle-grade and YA books. I wonder if their amorphous shapelessness is perceived as less frightening and thus safer for the very young? I also wondered when ghosts began to be portrayed as wearing sheets. I found a 1592 poem by Thomas Churchyard, "Strange farlies," which talks of ghosts walking in sheets. My brother suggested that the image of ghosts in sheets might be inspired by the very old custom of burying people in shrouds, also known as winding sheets. Davies in The Haunted confirmed this idea and gave information on ghosts' appearances dating back to the Middle Ages.




May Nickerson Wallace's Ghost of Dibble Hollow (1965) had a young boy moving to an ancestral New England farm and becoming friends with his ghostly boy great-uncle Miles Dibble who needed him to solve a family mystery and a feud with another family. Through his efforts at resolving the mystery, Pug also made friends and settled down to a country life.









Librarian Judith Spearing's The Ghosts Who Went To School (1966) was another Scholastic paperback staple for many years. I still have my childhood paperback copies of this as well as the Reit and Wallace books. This was about a whole ghost family who had been pioneers in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. It's very funny and the pageant where they retell the true history of the founding of the town is hysterical. I just discovered that Spearing did a sequel, The Museum House Ghosts (1969). I hope to get my hands on it.






The British author Antonia Barber wrote The Ghosts (1969). Charlotte's Library has a very good review of it here, so I won't try to summarize it. I show here an image of the cover of my childhood copy from 1977. I do observe that a theme of many of these books from the 1960s and 1970s is how humans can help the ghosts so they can be released from their ghostly existence and move on to heaven whereas the earlier books from the 1950s are more about the ghosts helping humans. Another point about this book is that it is both a ghost story and a time-travel story. Time-travel stories from E. Nesbit's The House of Arden (1908) onwards may have paved the path for the development of ghost stories for children. Many stories incorporate elements of both themes and emphasize the importance of learning about history.



The British author Eva Ibbotson's first book was The Great Ghost Rescue (1975) which is still in print. A young boy became friends with some ghosts and discovered that ghosts all over England were being driven out of their homes. He set out to rescue them and find them a permanent home. Ibbotson's ghosts have all kinds of idiosyncracies and the book is delightfully funny. She wrote some other ghost books, and any of them, indeed, any at all of her books are worth reading. Interestingly Wikipedia claimed that she stated that she disliked the supernatural and wrote her books to lessen her readers' fears of such things. However I found a 2005 interview with her where she stated that "I think ghosts generally get a bad press. My ghosts are very nice and often to be pitied".



During the 1960s and 1970s there was a vogue for collections of ghostly stories, some of which were truly creepy, or which purported to be stories of real ghosts. I avoided them as a child, but I did love the tales of Sorche Nic Leodhas, who collected Gaelic ghost stories, and presented them in books such as Ghosts Go Haunting (1965). These gentler ghost stories showed ghosts such as the mother who worried about her baby and needed reassurance that he would be taken care of. I do wonder if the creepier story collections may have sown the ground for the vogue for juvenile horror in the 1980s and 1990s such as the books by Christopher Pike and P.L. Stine.


There were a number of stories during the 1970s and 1980s that repeated the theme of teaching about history through these ghostly encounters. British authors such as Eileen Dunlop, Mollie Hunter, Penelope Lively, and William Mayne, drew on Britain's very deep history and their ghosts tended to be from earlier periods and less likely to be friendly. American authors drew from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War for inspiration, but you also find authors such as Mary Downing Hahn and Betty Ren Wright who had recent ghosts, often direct relatives, helping the children out of dangerous situations and helping them deal with the fact of their loved ones' deaths.


The 1980s also saw the appearance of some books that combined helpful and scary ghosts, such as E.W. Hildick's six-book Ghost Squad series, published from 1984 to 1988. The cover for The Ghost Squad Flies Concorde (1986) still frightens me when I see it among my books. The concept of the Ghost Squad was that of four teenage ghosts working with two human boys to solve crimes. One of the ghosts was Hispanic and a computer genius and found a way to communicate with his best friend, an African-American through a computer they had been working on before his death. The ghosts wanted to solve the mysteries of their deaths and found themselves solving other mysteries as well. They also encountered some truly scary and evil ghosts along the way.




1982 saw the publication of Virginia Hamilton's Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, which appears to be the first African-American ghost book and it remains distinct from other such books. I'm still investigating if there were earlier books with African-American ghosts. There aren't very many even today and they tend to have slave ghosts. This book has the ghost of the main characters' uncle who helps Tree and Dab understand their family history and why their mother is the way she is. I wonder if the current push to get African-Americans interested in their history and genealogy will inspire writers to produce relevant books with ghosts that are not associated with the Civil War.




There were also gentler books, such as Bruce Coville's The Ghost in the Third Row (1987) and its two sequels. I still wish he had written more books in that series. I loved the two friends Nine and Chris and their adventures. I do note that in the second book, The Ghost Wore Gray (1988), as well as a ghost of a Confederate soldier, at the end there is the ghost of a former slave who became a conductor on the Underground Railroad.





In the 1990s there were a number of books with ghosts and humans working together to solve historical mysteries.




Elaine Marie Alphin's Ghost Cadet (1991) portrayed the ghost of a real boy who was a Civil War soldier fighting on the Confederate side. Many Civil War ghost books focus on the Northern side or slavery so this is rather different. It was very moving in its final reunion scene. I was surprised to find that Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where this book was set, had a web page devoted to the young cadet William Hugh McDowell due to the many inquiries made by readers of this book.






I've found some books printed in the 2000s that have ethnic Chinese and Hispanic ghosts. In Meg Cabot's delightful Mediator series, Suze, a teenage psychic, can see ghosts and falls in love with Jesse, a Hispanic ghost. Much of the six-book series is taken up with trying to solve his nineteenth-century murder along with other ghostly encounters. Check Cabot's website for excerpts from the books and a free short story. Ethnic ghosts in children's books seem to be still uncommon, though that may be changing.




Today's books run the gamut with friendly and scary ghosts all over the place, from picture books to YA fiction. In the 2008 Newbery Medal winner, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book ghosts are key to the story. The hero is brought up in a graveyard by ghosts, and when he grows up, he must go out into the world of humans, never to see his ghost family again. This is unlike many earlier books, where ghosts are expected to go on to heaven after having their problems solved, leaving their human friends behind.

Over the last two hundred years children's books have shifted from showing ghosts as frightening images used to teach morals to ghosts as a common theme in all kinds of books for children, whether they be scary or friendly. The roots of this shift may well go back to 1887 but it really sprang to life in the 1930s and 1940s through picture books, comics and cartoons. I will hope to hear in the comments if my readers can identify earlier books with friendly ghosts and also that they will share their favorite children's books with ghosts in them.