Bluebeard in Victorian Arts and Letters
Bluebeard in Victorian Arts and Letters
In the nineteenth century, Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” became popular in chapbooks and drama at a time when folk and fairy tales had a questionable status in England. The widespread presence of the Mother Goose tales is an indication of their popularity, but not their respectability. The release of the massive multivolume English translations of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Grimms’ Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen triggered antiquarian research into English folklore and made “Bluebeard” a staple of Victorian art and literature. Some examples are Charlotte Brontë’s “Bluebeard novel” Jane Eyre and the works of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. Images of Bluebeard also appeared in the popular art of Thackeray (inspired by George Cruikshank), Alfred Henry Forrester, and Walter Crane.
Keywords: fairy tale, Charles Perrault, Bluebeard, Mother Goose, English translations, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Victorian art, Victorian literature, Charles Dickens
University Press of Mississippi requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
