SOURCE: "The Tribulations of Pinocchio: How Social Change Can Wreck a Good Story," in Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 197-219.

In the following excerpt, Wunderlich chronicles the publication history of Pinocchio, the many editorial changes it underwent, and its adaptations.

Written serially for an Italian children's weekly from 1881 to 1882, Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio was assembled and first released as a full-length novel in 1883. Pinocchio's tribulations, alas, did not end with the story's final chapter; a long series of quite different mishaps awaited him in North America. The first of these entailed the actual process of getting into print in the United States.

English audiences first met the puppet at Christmas time, 1891, when Fisher Unwin (London) published Mary Alice Murray's translation. The little book was decorated with Enrico Mazzanti's sketches, borrowed from the 1883 Italian edition. Murray's direct, rather literal translation of the novel was fortunate: the play it granted...