Abstract
This chapter considers the figure of the child in Granny’s Wonderful Chair (1856), a collection of fairy tales by Frances Browne (1816–79), the once-popular Irish poet known as the “Blind Poetess of Ulster.” Browne’s poetry has been the subject of critical reassessment in recent years, and there is a vibrant local interest in her life and work in her native Stranorlar, County Donegal. However, despite Jack Zipes’s brief acknowledgement of Browne’s “significant contribution to the fairy-tale genre,” in his broader discussion of “the general trend [in the period 1840 to 1880] … to use the fairy-tale form in innovative ways to raise social consciousness about the disparities among the different social classes” (xix), Granny’s Wonderful Chair has received limited critical attention. As Colin Manlove, who considers Browne’s “neglected nursery classic” the “first truly Christian Victorian fantasy,” notes: “Accounts of children’s literature tend to pass by Granny’s Wonderful Chair with benign nods, essays on it are not to be found. Yet it is arguably one of the great works of Victorian fantasy, which the magnificence of The Rose and the Ring, The Water-Babies and the Alice books has concealed” (19). This chapter seeks to redress this critical neglect by exploring more fully how Browne’s work engages with literary cultures of childhood and the history of the fairy tale in ways that have been highly influential, if not always fully acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
“Browne” is sometimes spelled “Brown.”
- 2.
For analysis of Browne’s poetry, see Easley; McLean. The inaugural Frances Browne Festival took place in Stranorlar in 2021. My thanks to Patrick Bonar, author of The Life and Work of Frances Browne (2007), and Raymond Blair, editor of The Best of Frances Browne (2012), for their assistance in locating sources for this essay.
- 3.
Perhaps a strategic commercial decision given that several tales, especially “The Christmas Cuckoo,” involve Christmas.
- 4.
Notably, Ruth Bottigheimer argues that this second kind of frame tale is not necessarily about mimicking oral storytelling; rather, “sixteenth and seventeenth-century readers would have understood the frame tale as a literary and cultural trope” (7).
- 5.
Due to the scope of this chapter, it is not possible to discuss the individual tales in detail, but they certainly warrant further analysis in their own right.
- 6.
References to the text are to the 1906 edition, prefaced by Dollie Radford.
- 7.
Similarities between the ways the enchanted chairs transport their young charges in Browne’s text and Enid Blyton’s Adventures of a Wishing-Chair (1937) suggest that Blyton, like Burnett before her, may well have been an avid reader of Granny’s Wonderful Chair. Rather than moving on wheels, however, Blyton’s “wishing-chair” sprouts wings and flies when the children wish to go somewhere.
- 8.
This has also been the case for the frames surrounding tales by many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French fairy-tale writers; for example, Bottigheimer notes that “[n]o English translation has ever included Madame d’Aulnoy’s frame tale peritexts” (170).
- 9.
For example, Alison Lurie notes that “Fairyfoot” “exposes the arbitrary nature of standards of Victorian beauty” (xix).
- 10.
Perhaps more egregiously, some editions exist in highly abridged forms that include the tales but dispense with most of the frame narrative.
- 11.
See Blair for further examples of Browne’s wider writing.
- 12.
See Easley for discussion of Browne’s financial difficulties in the years after Granny’s Wonderful Chair, including several appeals to the Royal Literary Fund.
- 13.
Notably, the town in “The Story of Fairyfoot” is given a name—Stumpinghame, a play on the townspeople’s obsession with feet but also a possible nod to the local Donegal legend of Stumpy’s Brae.
- 14.
Although some accounts state that the book was completely forgotten for thirty years until Burnett’s retelling, Griffith, Farran, Okeden, and Welsh’s publishers’ note offers a different picture: “Granny’s Wonderful Chair was first published in 1856, in the small quarto shape which was then so familiar, and was illustrated by Kenny Meadows. Although a small book it was published at ‘3s. 6d. plain, and 4s. 6d coloured,’ and it very speedily became popular, and went out of print. It was not reprinted until 1880, when it was issued in more modern dress as an eighteenpenny volume; it then took a fresh lease of life: New Editions appeared in 1881—1882—1883—1884—1887, and in 1889, when, owing to the effect of competition, it had to take its place in a shilling series” (8).
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Rodgers, B. (2024). “Bring[ing] back the fairy times”: Framing the Child in Frances Browne’s Granny’s Wonderful Chair. In: Moruzi, K., Smith, M.J. (eds) Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38351-9_8
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