A Tangle of Tales

Storytime for rabbits?

by Anne White

In her early book Parents and Children, Charlotte Mason takes a side path from talk about nature study and object lessons, to point out the existence of “a storehouse of thought wherein we may find all the great ideas that have moved the world,” and says that to access that storehouse, “We read [a child] his Tanglewood Tales, and when he is a little older his Plutarch, not trying to break up or water down, but leaving the child's mind to deal with the matter as it can” (pp. 231-232).

From that brief statement, we can draw a couple of important points. First, I think we can take it that Mason was not singling out Tanglewood Tales from its predecessor, A Wonder Book. We might wonder if perhaps Mason preferred the second book, without its framing stories about the children of Tanglewood; but as she didn’t seem to object to such devices in other books, it seems more likely that she was just reaching for a familiar title. That confusion is eliminated, though, when we discover that the book Mason was probably thinking of was the Blackwood edition (described below), which combines stories from both books under the title Tanglewood Tales.

So, we might assume that, with that much weight given to Hawthorne’s book, that it would have played an important and long-lasting part in the later PNEU curriculum. Strangely enough, it didn’t. In the Programme for Term 43, Form IB ( in the era when Mason wrote School Education), we do have this under the subject heading of Tales: “Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Blackwood, 1/-), pages 1-40.” (Two stories, “The Gorgon’s Head” and “The Golden Touch.”) As a point of interest, this particular British edition contains three stories from the first book and three from the second, with a publisher’s note explaining that the framing stories have been omitted because they were “full of allusions to American scenery and American customs.”

But by the time of the more readily available PNEU Programmes, around 1921, Hawthorne had been supplanted by Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece or (as a second option) Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses. As Lamb’s book was published decades before Hawthorne’s, this is clearly not just a case of wanting to use a newer book. Troy and Greece might have been chosen because it covers a wider variety of material than Hawthorne’s stories, so it would have been easier to keep on plugging it in from term to term. However, there may be one extra reason that Mason recommends Tanglewood Tales so ardently early on, but then does not keep it in the curriculum, and that is simply that she may not have cared that much about which good storyteller was read, be it Hawthorne, Kingsley, Lamb, or Lang. The real point was to open the storehouse, to offer a child’s mind that vital matter, not broken into “little bits of everything” (p. 231), but leaving him/her “receptive and respectful,” wanting to engage with the story, as humans have done through the centuries. She speaks of concrete things a child observes in the outside world which offer “real seed to [his] mind,” and compares them to the world of ideas, given through books, which (to change similes) must be offered in as large and meaty a portion as possible, not pre-cut or pureed.

And how does that line up with Hawthorne’s choice, for example, to cast Pandora and Epimetheus as children rather than adults? Are we contradicting ourselves by offering a “chicken-nuggets” version of an adult tale? Eustace Bright, the fictional narrator of the stories, is criticized for this by the older scholar Mr. Pringle, so perhaps we should let Eustace defend himself:

"I described the giant as he appeared to me," replied the student, rather piqued. "And, sir, if you would only bring your mind into such a relation with these fables as is necessary in order to remodel them, you would see at once that an old Greek had no more exclusive right to them than a modern Yankee has. They are the common property of the world, and of all time."

And this is exactly Mason’s point about the “keys to the storehouse.” These stories, even “remodeled” to allow young children access, are accepted by them as the real goods, the OG of tales, if you like. They contain themes that we begin to recognize in childhood (getting your wish can go terribly wrong; curiosity blew up the box; a simple life of love and hospitality brings its own rewards); and others that can make us tearful long afterwards.

All their eyes were dancing in their heads, except those of Primrose. In her eyes there were positively tears; for she was conscious of something in the legend which the rest of them were not yet old enough to feel. Child’s story as it was, the student had contrived to breathe through it the ardor, the generous hope, and the imaginative enterprise of youth. (Epilogue to "The Chimera")