Fables and Folk Stories is one of the myriad textbooks produced by Horace E. Scudder in a lengthy and varied literary career. The books is a conventional collection of well-known fairy tales, in keeping with Scudder’s stated pedagogical claim that “As soon as a child has learned to make out simple sentences, the wise teacher looks about for something which it is worth while to read… [Fairy tales] are parts of [a child’s] primer which they never leave behind and never forget… They perceive, even thus early, what is literature and what is not literature.”
Scudder is best known for his educational children’s books, including the Bodley Books (1875–87), but he was also an essayist, journalist, biographer, and editor. He edited the Riverside Magazine for Young People from 1867 to 1870, and published several of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales for the first time.Scudder also served as editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1890 to 1898, despite the opinion of his predecessor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who joked that Horace Scudder was greater than Moses because “Moses dried up the Red Sea once only; Scudder dries up The Atlantic monthly.”
There is a deeper connection between Scudder and Byrdcliffe: Only a few months into his role as editor, Scudder received a submission from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of the most famous writers to ever stay at Byrdcliffe. He rejected “The Yellow Wallpaper” telling Gilman, “I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!” I confess, I’m on Scudder’s side. I’ve never liked the story, particularly when it is presented to me as a “great ghost story.” As ghost stories go, it’s far from great. In fact, I would argue it’s not a ghost story at all, simply a blood-curdling portrait of a post-partum breakdown that made me as miserable as Scudder professed himself to be. But taken on its own terms, the story did exactly what the brilliant journalist Gilman meant it to do, and she ranks with John Dewey and Hervey White among the significant social reformers Byrdcliffe nourished.
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