Grimm Tales Made Gay — Text and Context

Verse Form and Moral Tags

Each poem in the collection follows a regular meter and rhyme scheme, often using couplets or alternating rhymes. Carryl appends a moral couplet to every tale, but these morals are deliberately anticlimactic or absurd. For instance, the Sleeping Beauty parody ends: “When affairs go ill / The sleeping partner foots the bill.” The moral puns on “sleeping partner” (a business term) while referring to the princess’s long nap. Similarly, the Bluebeard poem’s moral—not shown in the excerpts—likely twists the original lesson into something commercial or trivial. These tags undercut the instructive tradition of fairy tales, replacing earnest counsel with wordplay.

Anachronisms and Modern References

Carryl peppers his verses with contemporary allusions that clash with the medieval or folkloric settings. In “How Jack Found that Beans May go Back on a Chap,” the widow’s hypochondria is described with a catalog of patent medicines: “sarsaparilla, / Ammonia, digitalis, bronchial troches, soda mint.” The poem also mentions “homœopathist” and “hydropathist,” reflecting turn-of-the-century medical fads. The prince in the Sleeping Beauty parody compares the castle to “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” and later jokes about “the comic journal’s mania.” These anachronisms create a knowing, urban tone that distances the reader from the original tales’ simplicity.

Illustrations and Paratext

The title page announces “GAY PICTURES By Albert Levering,” and the frontispiece caption—“This shows the sword that Blue-Beard used full sore, / After he’d led his young wife to a door”—sets a comic, self-aware tone. Levering’s illustrations, though not reproduced in the excerpts, are clearly integral to the book’s humor. The table of contents lists twenty poems plus an “Envoi,” each title beginning with “How” (e.g., “How Little Red Riding Hood Came to be Eaten”). This formulaic structure mimics the cataloging of fairy tales while promising a punchline. The note acknowledges prior publication in magazines like Harper’s and Life, indicating the poems were originally standalone pieces.

Readers familiar with the Grimm originals will find Carryl’s versions deliberately irreverent, but the humor does not require deep knowledge of the source material. The poems reward attention to wordplay and anachronistic detail. Levering’s illustrations, mentioned in the front matter, likely amplify the satirical effect. This edition preserves the 1902 text and illustrations as originally published.

That rainy afternoon, Carryl’s grinning rewrites of the Grimms made me laugh at the very morals I once took so seriously, until their safe little endings felt like a cage. I closed the book, and my hand wandered to The Arabian Nights Entertainments — Edition Insights, where no moral arrives on time, and Scheherazade’s stories spin indefinitely — a wider, wilder world I hadn’t remembered loving so much.