This vintage picture book of fairy tales retold and illustrated by Rene Cloke was first published by Award in 1976. My edition, the tenth impression, was published in 1986 as part of the Award Fairyland Favourite series. For a list of the other books in the series (and links to my reviews) see Award Fairyland Favourites Series.
Cover, front and back matter
My edition is a smaller size than the earlier edition. At the centre of the front cover image is Cinderella in rags, the prince at her feet with her glass slipper on her foot. Goldilocks and the three bears gather around her in celebration. The ugly duckling looks on, alongside a lizard, and a pumpkin sits in the corner. The cottage of the three bears is in the background. The characters are from within the illustrations, although with some subtle differences to their features.
On the back cover we have an image of Ricky Rabbit with his umbrella (a character from "The Red Umbrella" in Cloke's Nursery Stories), the Award Publications logo, ISBN, and barcode. Ricky Rabbit has been used as the back cover image on several Award books, but this is the first time I've seen his umbrella painted green rather than red.
The title page features a tree by a lake or river. Baby Bear sits in one of the branches, two swans glide on the lake, the ugly duckling stands on the shore, and Goldilocks stands alongside him. A butterfly perches on her finger and another flutters over her shoulder. A robin perches on a tree branch and two brown rabbits sit at the base of the tree.
The title page notes Rene Cloke as the illustrator and doesn't attribute an author, but we know from a note on the copyright page of Rene Cloke's Bedtime Book of Fairy Tales and Rhymes that Rene Cloke both wrote and illustrated "The Ugly Duckling" and it is likely that she retold the other two fairy tales, too.
The collection
The collection contains three retold fairy tales:
- The Three Bears
- The Ugly Duckling
- Cinderella
There is no contents page, but each fairy tale retelling begins with its title.
The Three Bears
This fairy tale is retold over 5 pages (unpaginated).
"Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is tale type 339.¹ It's an English fairy tale that was popularised in its current well-known form by Flora Annie Steel, in her English Fairy Tales, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1918). The story comes from the oral tradition and was known in previous published versions by Robert Southey (whose story had all the hallmarks of the current tale but Goldilocks was an old woman and there were three bachelor bears), Joseph Cundall (who changed Southey's old woman into a young girl), and Joseph Jacobs, whose English Fairy Tales (1890) was a key source for Steel.
In this retelling by Rene Cloke, Goldilocks is "a very inquisitive girl" who goes into the bears' cottage when she spies it while "walking through the woods one early morning". When no-one answers her knock she goes in and begins tasting the "very tempting" porridge bowls, finding the big one too salty, the middle-size one too sweet (even though she loves sweet porridge), and the third bowl "just right".
After eating it all up she sees three chairs and wonders which is most comfortable. The big one is "so big that she felt quite lost in it", the middle-size chair is too hard and stiff, and the little one is nice but she is too heavy for it and breaks one of its legs.
"I must see what it is like upstairs," she decided next, "just a quick peep."
Finding a bedroom with three beds of different sizes, she tries the big one but it is filled with feathers that nearly smother her. The middle size one is too hard, but the littlest one is so bouncy and snug that she falls asleep.
The three bears had gone for a walk while the porridge was cooling, even though Baby Bear was "quite hungry already". Coming home, each wonders who has been tasting their porridge, sitting in their chairs, and lying on their beds.
Baby Bear squeals so loudly when we spies Goldilocks that she wakes up "with a start", is frightened, and leaps from the window. The bears jump after her but they all three tumble over each other and by the time they pick themselves up, Goldilocks is safely home.
I really enjoyed this fresh retelling by Cloke. She imbues Goldilocks with a personality of endless curiosity, and the three bears are grumbly but ultimately goofy, so not to be feared. The nature of the three different options was also slightly unusual. Sometimes the story is written so that the porridge is too hot, too cold, and just right, which never makes sense to me if they're all poured at the same time and the bears have gone for a walk to let them cool! Too salty and too sweet worked well. Then usually it is the biggest chair and bed that is too hard and the mother-sized chair and bed that is too soft, but that is turned on its head in this retelling.
Cloke captures Goldilocks's curious personality beautifully in this illustration:
Other images show her perfect surprise as the chair breaks, and fear as she leaps out of the window. She has golden locks, as you would expect, and wears a blue dress with ruffles, a black corset with ties, white stockings and buckled shoes.
The three bears wear country finery, Father Bear dressed as an English gentleman, and Baby Bear very cute in a green buttoned shirt with black bow tie and red dungarees.
The Ugly Duckling
This fairy tale is retold over 6 pages (unpaginated).
"The Ugly Duckling" is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, first published in 1843.²
Cloke's retelling begins:
A mother duck sat on her eggs in a nest by the river and hoped that they would soon hatch for she had been there a long time and was getting tired. Crack! Crack! one day the shells broke and eight yellow ducklings appeared.
A visiting friend suggests the large egg that hasn't hatched might be a turkey egg but the mother duck decides to "sit on it a little longer" as "it may be a particularly fine bird". The ugly duckling that appears runs away after everyone at the farm is "very unkind".
He spends the night with wild ducks but runs away when "a shooting party" arrives the next day. Then he stays at a cottage with a woman and her cat and hen but they are also unkind to him so he leaves.
He sees beautiful swans flying overhead and admires them. In winter he is frozen in the ice but "a kind peasant" rescues him and takes him to his house for his children to play with. The ugly duckling is frightened and runs away. He survives a "very, very miserable" winter and in spring he sees three lovely swans on a large pond. This bit shocked me:
"I will ask them to kill me," he said, "much better to be killed by those handsome birds than to be hated and despised by everyone."
But when he approaches the swans he discovers he is a swan as well, and he is called by a group of children "the most beautiful of them all".
Cloke's retelling is much shorter than the Hans Christian Andersen original² and has its own freshness and sweetness of style. Some key differences are:
- It begins directly with the mother duck on her nest (Andersen's version begins with some beautiful descriptions of the countryside).
- The Mother Duck sits on the egg longer because she thinks "it might be a particularly fine bird" (in Andersen's version she does so since she's already put in enough effort that she "may as well just keep on for a bit")
- We learn that others are unkind to the ugly duckling but we don't hear/see how.
- We don't learn of the mother duck herself (or the apparent duckling siblings) being unkind to the ugly duckling (in Andersen's version, the mother duck at first defends the ugly duckling, and even finds things to praise about him, but eventually even she wishes he were a long way away)
- We don't see any wild birds killed in the marsh and there is no encounter with a hunting dog (in Andersen's version the wild ducks let him be but two wild geese befriend him, only to fall down dead in the hunt, and the ugly duckling thinks he is so ugly that even the hunting dog won't bother to bite him).
- We learn only that the cottage woman with cat and hen were unkind to him (in Andersen's version we see that they want him to be someone he is not, trying to remake him into a cat or hen)
- The man who rescues the ugly duckling from the ice is described as a "kind peasant" (in Andersen's version he a "farmer", and not described as kind)
- When the children try to play with him, we're told "the duckling was so used to being teased by everyone that he was frightened" (in Andersen's version we're just told "the duckling thought they wanted to harm it")
- The ugly duckling's decision to ask the swans to kill him comes as quite a surprise in Cloke's version (in Andersen's version, he thinks they will peck him to death for daring to approach them in his ugliness, and that he'd rather be hurt by them than all the other animals that would hurt him – his words "Just kill me!" follow this context). I wonder if most modern retellings keep this suicidal element of the story? It feels very intense for a children's picture book!
Cloke's mother duck is illustrated as a white duck with yellow ducklings. I love this image of their birth amongst a cluster of forget-me-nots, the large swan egg remaining in the nest:
The same page shows mother duck's visiting friend to be a Muscovy duck, standing alongside a cattail.
A double-page spread of the farmyard shows the ugly duckling walking away, tears dropping from his eyes, while the other animals (hens, rooster, turkey, geese) bully him.
The next double-page spread shows the white swans flying through the blue sky; a very poor peasant in ragged clothes breaking the ice with one of his shoes in his hand, his stick with its tied bundle laid down on the ice; and four peasant children chasing the ugly duckling through mayhem in the house.
The final page shows well-dressed children in late 19th century dress, admiring four swans on the water.
Cinderella
This fairy tale is retold over 4 pages (unpaginated).
"Cinderella" is tale type¹ 510A ("The persecuted heroine") and has many sources, the most influential being Charles Perrault's "Cendrillon" of 1697, which features a fairy godmother (the Grimms' 19th-century "Aschenputtel" having a helpful hazel tree instead).
Cloke's retelling is obviously influenced by the Perrault version, but follows a tradition I haven't yet been able to identify, in which Cinderella only lives with her stepsisters, here named Matilda and Agatha. For another Cinderella story along these lines, see my review of Fairy Stories (Birn Brothers, undated).
In Cloke's retelling, Cinderella lives with her two stepsisters, and no back story is given to explain this situation. The story begins with Cinderella listening to her stepsisters' plans to attend the ball. They laugh at her request to go to the ball. She helps them to dress for the ball and "their costumes were as ugly as they were but they both felt very pleased with themselves".
After they've gone "a strange fairylike old lady" changes a pumpkin into a coach, rat into a coachman, mice into horses, and two lizards into footmen.
"Why, this is magic!" cried Cinderella.
"Of course it is," replied the old lady, "for I am your fairy godmother"
She changes Cinderella's "ragged dress" into a "beautiful ball gown" and gives her glass slippers for her "dainty feet". Cinderella is warned that "all the magic will vanish at midnight".
At the ball, she looks so beautiful that the prince won't dance with anyone else. When it reaches midnight and she flees, the prince finds her glass slipper and sees a ragged girl running away.
The next day he walks around the town with his page boy, getting women to try on the glass slipper. Cinderella asks to try and it fits her. At that moment, the fairy godmother appears and transforms her dress again.
Cinderella married the Prince and her two step-sisters were the only people in the kingdom who were not happy.
This is a short, somewhat pedestrian retelling of Cinderella; it gains its magic from the illustrations.
Cinderella is depicted as a beautiful golden-haired girl in a brown dress with a ragged hem and patches. She wears a green neck-kerchief and a white apron with blue flowers. I liked how the white ballgown she later wears retains this blue flower theme. She wears a white wig with feathers in her hair and long white gloves with the ball gown, and her prince is correspondingly white-wigged, and dressed in 18th century court clothing, including a double-layered jabot.
The fairy godmother, on the other hand, appears of an earlier era, wearing medieval escoffion and bliaut dress with very long sleeves. She also sports small feathered wings and a traditional magic wand (with a star on the end).
Summary, availability, and reprints
This is a lovely vintage collection of three very different fairy tales retold and illustrated by Rene Cloke. There appear to be plenty of copies of this collection available online. It appears with two different covers (including different titles) as part of the Fairyland Favourites series.
"The Ugly Duckling" (as it appears here) is reprinted in Rene Cloke's Bedtime Book of Fairytales and Rhymes.
Note that Rene Cloke illustrated other quite different versions of "The Three Bears", "The Ugly Duckling", and "Cinderella".
- Other versions of "The Three Bears" illustrated by Rene Cloke (each different) appear in the Storyland Classics collection retold by Howard Hall (Award), and Jack and the Beanstalk and Other Fairy Tales (Ward Lock/Gallery 1990).
- Another version of "The Ugly Duckling" illustrated by Rene Cloke appears in the Fairyland Classics collection retold by Jane Carruth (Award)
- Other versions of "Cinderella" illustrated by Rene Cloke (each different) appear in the Fairyland Classics collection retold by Jane Carruth (Award) and Cinderella and Other Fairy Tales (Ward Lock/Gallery 1990).
Footnotes
¹ Tale types are a way of classifying fairy tales and folk tales that have the same characteristics. For more information, see Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (Wikipedia).
² You can read the original fairy tale in English on Hcanderson.dk, the website curated by experts from the Hans Christian Andersen Center at The University of Southern Denmark in Andersen's home town, Odense. The texts are drawn from the 18 volume printed edition of Andersen’s complete works published between 2003 and 2007 under the title ANDERSEN. H.C. Andersens samlede værker. The head editor Klaus P. Mortensen published the edition on behalf of The Danish Society of Language and Literature (Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab). See Hcandersen.dk.