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Bluebeard, the notorious serial wife murderer who the Victorians knew from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, loomed very large on the Victorian landscape. He can be found on the stage in just about every form (pantomime, burlesque, two and three act musical drama, parlor play and even charades), and from the mid-century he appears repeatedly in the works of both major writers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, among numerous others authors.

But the household first-name familiarity which Victorians had with him appears to have its 'entry level' in the chapbook. It is evident that fairy tales had a solid niche in the hundreds of thousands of chapbook titles sold during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and Bluebeard was a memorable title among the fairy tale offerings. It was in this form, rather than in the more expensive children’s book reprints of Mother Goose tales, (the common English title for Perrault’s Contes de ma mere l’Oye) that children (and their parents) appear to have had most direct contact with Charles Perrault’s tale.

This paper aims to report on my original sabbatical research (working on a comprehensive Bluebeard book-in-progress). I will focus on the chapbook phenomenon (publication, distribution, readership) using the prevalent example of Bluebeard chapbooks which reached a wide readership in both Britain and America in 8vo and 12mo form. I will provide examples of these chapbooks, and discuss the many references to Bluebeard chapbooks in the catalogues of the time and in contemporary memoirs. It is fascinating to see, against the detailed backdrop of the chapbook phenomenon, what permutations the tale takes from the original, through its first major English translation by Robert Samber in 1729. For example, the strain of orientalism, by which the Victorians came to know Bluebeard as a Turk, his wife as Fatima, and which on the Victorian stage both comic and serious created a host of named 'extras' in her brothers (Osman and Alee), a forsaken lover (Selim), a servant under Bluebeard’s thumb (Shacabac) and his love interest (Beda), permeates these chapbook renditions of the tale. I will also briefly compare the data with the French parallel tradition of cheap chapbooks (livres de colportage, or bibliotheque bleue).

Stream: Books, Writing and Reading

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Casie Hermansson is a tenured Associate Professor of English Literature at Pittsburg State University. She is currently working on a book about Bluebeard in the English language tradition, collecting and analyzing examples of the fairy tale and its numerous recastings over the past three hundred years. It is under contract with the University Press of Mississippi. Her prize-winning dissertation, Reading Feminist Intertextuality Through Bluebeard Stories, was published in 2001 by Edwin Mellen.