Stockton, Frank (1834–1902), American author, particularly noted for his humorous stories for adults and his fairy tales for children. Although, at his father's insistence, Stockton was trained as a wood‐engraver, he soon began writing short stories in his spare time; by his mid 30s, he was supporting himself as a freelance writer and journalist. His first book of fairy tales, Ting‐a‐ling (later Ting‐a‐ling Tales), was published in 1870; rather crude and violent in comparison to his later work, the adventures of the diminutive fairy Ting‐a‐ling also suggest the humour and imagination that were to become his special strengths. In 1873 he was invited to become the assistant editor to Mary Mapes Dodge of the new children's magazine St. Nicholas. He held this position for five years, until ill health forced him to take an easier job with Scribner's Monthly, and continued to write for St. Nicholas well into the 1890s—so prolifically, in such a variety of genres, that he was obliged to adopt two additional pseudonyms. During the 1880s and 1890s Stockton was also one of America's most popular authors for adults, best known for such humorous novels as Rudder Grange (1879) and The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine (1886) and for wild and ingenious short stories, sometimes bordering on science fiction. His single most famous short story was the classic teaser ‘The Lady or the Tiger?’
In addition to Ting‐a‐ling, Stockton produced four volumes of literary fairy tales, most of which were originally published in the St. Nicholas: The Floating Prince and Other Fairy Tales (1881), The Bee‐Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales (1887), The Queen's Museum (1887), and The Clocks of Rondaine and Other Stories (1892). His role was pivotal in the development of the American fairy tale. Before 1880 little fantasy had been written in America, even for children; Stockton became the first American author to develop a species of fairy tale with a distinctively American character. Although he drew liberally from the stock plots and characters of European and Near Eastern folk tales, he had, he says, ideas of his own about the ‘fanciful creatures’ of tradition, which he consciously incorporated into his stories: ‘I did not dispense with monsters and enchanters, or talking beasts and birds, but I obliged these creatures to infuse into their extraordinary actions a certain leaven of common sense.’ The incongruity of common sense in a monster became not only a source of wry humour, but also a reflection of American scepticism towards the irrational. Stockton's fairyland is essentially democratic, too, despite its kings and queens; there is little of the jockeying over status or social class characteristic of Lewis Carroll's imaginary worlds. And while the ‘fanciful creatures’ may play a traditional animal‐helper role in assisting the protagonist on a quest, they are in no way subject to him; often, they are pursuing quests of their own. In this, as in other respects, Stockton's fairy tales may well have influenced those of L. Frank Baum.
Most of Stockton's tales are based on familiar folk‐tale patterns. Some, the simplest, are about children who encounter a ‘fanciful creature’ and earn some reward from it, like the heroines of ‘Toads and Diamonds’ or ‘Snow White and Rose Red’. A larger and more interesting group of stories is based on such tales of quests and journeys as ‘The Water of Life’ and ‘The Seven Ravens’. In these, the protagonists are royal; their quests often take them to distant lands, where they may encounter a wide variety of creatures—from the dryads of Greek myth, to the giants, fairies, and hobgoblins of European folklore, to the sphinxes and genies of the East. The third group is farthest from folktale origins and contains some of Stockton's most original and philosophical tales. Their protagonists are of lowly social status, their problems are universal—old age in ‘Old Pipes and the Dryad’, destiny in ‘The Bee‐Man of Orn’, the failure of goodness to redeem human nature in ‘The Griffin and the Minor Canon’—and their outcomes are not conventional happy endings.
There is an underlying melancholy in many of Stockton's best fairy tales, and the quest‐journey, his favourite plot device, is generally given an ironic twist. Quests tend to go awry, and many end inconclusively or in failure. The Bee‐Man's long search for his ‘original form’ results in his discovery that his original form was that of a bee‐man. The king who begins his travels under the direction of a sphinx in ‘The Banished King’, intending to learn how to rule more wisely, never returns to his kingdom, leaving it in the competent hands of his queen. The prince of ‘Prince Hassak's March’ becomes hopelessly lost in his attempt to march from one kingdom to another in ‘a mathematically straight line’. The three conceited princes in ‘The Sisters Three and the Kilmaree’ are unable to reach the three beautiful sisters on their island until they have learned humility and built a fairy ‘kilmaree’, a boat shaped like a ram's horn that cannot possibly sail straight. Those characters who do succeed in Stockton's metaphor for life do not march arrogantly toward their goal; like Prince Nassime, ‘The Floating Prince’, they must be willing to ‘float’—to be flexible and take what comes to them in their journey, and to learn from all the strange creatures they meet along the way.
Bibliography
- Golemba, Henry L., Frank Stockton (1981).
- Griffin, Martin I. J., Frank Stockton: A Critical Biography (1939).
- Rahn, Suzanne, ‘Life at the Squirrel Inn: Frank Stockton's Fairy Tales’, in Rediscoveries in Children's Literature (1995).
- Zipes, Jack, ‘Afterword’, in The Fairy Tales of Frank Stockton (1990).
— Suzanne Rahn
