Charles Perrault - Cinderella and Other Stories

William Collins

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2015

Life & Times section © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Silvia Crompton asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

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Cover image: Glass slipper © R-O-M-A / Shutterstock

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Source ISBN: 9780008147457

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008147464

Version: 2015-07-21

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page CINDERELLA AND OTHER STORIES Charles Perrault Translated by A. E. Johnson

Copyright

History of Collins

Life & Times

The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

Puss in Boots

Little Tom Thumb

The Fairies

Ricky of the Tuft

Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper

Little Red Riding Hood

Blue Beard

The Ridiculous Wishes

Donkey-Skin

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon . Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner ; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress , making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

The fairy tales we all grew up with are so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine someone, somewhere, having sat down and actually written them. Perhaps thanks to their modern-day Hollywood adaptations, we barely think of them as books at all. But although tales similar to Cinderella , Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots have existed in European oral storytelling traditions for centuries, it took one man, very late in his life, to update them for the modern age and record them for posterity. That man was Charles Perrault.

There is relatively little to be said about Charles Perrault’s early years, perhaps because he had a considerably more fortunate childhood than most famous writers. Perrault was born in Paris in 1628, the fifth son of wealthy parents. He was sent to a prestigious school and did well there, becoming, in his own words, ‘one of the best students in my class’. ‘I took so much pleasure in class debates,’ he later recalled in his memoirs, ‘that I enjoyed the days we went to school as much as the holidays.’ Around the age of fifteen, he left school to study independently for a few years — among other subjects, poetry — during which he also found the time to put together a burlesque translation of a portion of Virgil’s Aeneid .

But writing was not the career he — or, more to the point, his father — had in mind. Aged twenty-three, and after a fleeting attendance at the University of Orléans (‘They were not … strict … in granting degrees’), Perrault became a lawyer. It was a short-lived endeavour and he never settled into it, abandoning the profession in 1654 to become a government clerk under his brother Pierre. Finding his new job ‘not very demanding’, Perrault took to visiting libraries and reading poetry, and was inspired to write a poem, ‘Le Portrait d’Iris’, which was published to positive reviews in 1659.