SOURCE: "The Importance of Being Earnest: The Fairy Tale in 19th-century England," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 11-14.

In the following essay, Miller asserts that what differentiates Victorian fairy tales from European ones are the morality and earnestness of characters, particularly those of Dickens and Rus kin.

De Vries Explains the Word "märchen":

[First] we must agree on the meaning of the word "Märchen, " which (like the Dutch sprookje) means simply "tale," thus corresponding to the French conte populaire. In Scandinavian it is called "adventure" (e.g., Danish eventyr) or, very colorlessly, "myth" (as in Swedish). These fuzzy designations (compare also the Russian skazka and the Finnish tarino) are in agreement with the contents of the famous book with which the Brothers Grimm stimulated fairy-tale research, the Kinder- und Haus-märchen ("Children's and Household Tales"), containing fables and pranks, even some legends...