The History of the Celebrated Nanny Goose and The History of the Prince Renardo and the Lady Goosiana

Published in 1973 by the Toronto Public Library, this little book reproduces two early-nineteenth-century English children's books, held in that institution's Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books. The first is The History of the Celebrated Nanny Goose, a tale first published in 1813, in which the three daughters of the eponymous Nanny Goose - Nanny, Betsy and Jane - are warned by their mother on her deathbed to beware of the fox. Each one builds a house: Jane of straw and sticks, Betsy of bricks and thatch, and Nanny of bricks and tile. The first two houses are quickly destroyed by the fox - Jane's through brute force and Betsy's through the burning of her thatch roof - and their residents eaten. Nanny's house stands up to her show more vulpine enemy, who quickly changes tack, and attempts to use cunning to lure her out, telling her of the local fair and inviting her to attend with him. Wise in her ways, she evades his trap, visiting the fair on her own. When the fox eventually does force his way into her home, Nanny's quick thinking, in pretending that a fox hunt is near, saves the day, and her actions in trapping her adversary in a butter churn and pouring scalding water over him, free her of this danger forever.

The second selection here, The History of the Prince Renardo and the Lady Goosiana, was first published in 1833, and is essentially a rewrite of the first, with a few changes to story, and the addition of a framing device. In this tale, the story of the three geese is related to three human children by their Aunt Bessy, and there are interruptions to that narrative, as the children and their older relative discuss matters. Here the three geese are raised by their father, a widowed gander, and are warned by him on his deathbed to beware of Prince Renardo (i.e.: the fox). Their names here are Prudence, Amelia and Vain, and the houses they construct correspond to the ones in the earlier tale, as do their fates. In this version, Prudence, AKA "Lady Goosiana," is aided in her efforts to attend the fair and evade Renardo by the assistance of her canine friend, Julio, and his fellow hounds in the local hunting pack. She eventually marries her suitor, Mr. Gander, and the latter part of the story is taken up with their honeymoon in Paris.

As Judith St. John notes in her brief afterword, both of these stories are clearly fore-runners of the now famous tale of "The Three Little Pigs," which first saw print in 1853, in James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps' The Nursery Rhymes of England, and which concerns three pigs who are pursued by a wolf. It also closely mirrors the ballad of "The Fox and the Geese," which Joseph Cundall included in his 1850 A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children, and which also appears in Katharine Briggs' 1970 Dictionary of British Folk-Tales. There are connections also to the Italian folktale, "The Story of the Three Goslings," which appeared in Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni's 1870s collection, translated into English in 1885 as Italian Popular Tales. A variant is included in Virginia Haviland's 1965 Favorite Fairy Tales Told in Italy, and there are possible connections to Beatrix Potter's 1908 Tale of Jemima Puddleduck as well. All of which is to say, that this little volume offers a fascinating glimpse into an early printed variant of a story that has been very influential in the world of children's literature. I myself picked up a copy while searching for retellings of the Reynard story, for my masters dissertation, and although this didn't turn out to be a useful title, in that respect, the name of the villain, in the 1833 selection, certainly bears witness to the influence of the 'real' Reynard on fox fictions that would follow it. Recommended primarily to those readers interested in early nineteenth-century English children's books, or in the history of this tale type. show less