[In the following essay, Little and Myerson offer an overview of Cranch's literary career, focusing on his stories for children.]

Christopher Pearse Cranch's reputation has not fared well over the years. Henry James, who knew him, called Cranch a “painter, poet, musician, mild and melancholy humourist, [who] produced pictures the American traveller sometimes acquired and left verses that the American compiler sometimes includes.”¹ And Perry Miller, in his anthology of The Transcendentalists, described Cranch as “one of the most futile and wasted talents” among the group.² If both James and Miller slight Cranch's work as a writer and artist, they both also ignore his contribution to children's literature. We hope that the republication of The Last of the Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo: A Sequel to The Last of the Huggermuggers, along with the first publication of “The Legend of Doctor Theophilus,” will help to bring Cranch and his writings for the young back into public view.

Cranch was unique among the Transcendentalists in that he was born a southerner, in Alexandria, then in the District of Columbia, on 8 March 1813.³ His father was a judge who had married a niece of his lifelong friend John Quincy Adams, and Cranch counted Noah Webster among his uncles. With this background, it was natural for Cranch to look toward New England for his future after he was graduated from Columbian College (now George Washington University) in 1832.

Cranch attended the Harvard Divinity School, where he became friends with Theodore Parker, and, planning to become a minister, he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to preach after his graduation in 1835. He passed the winter in Andover, Maine, where he wrote his first extended literary work, “Childe Christopher,” a poetic parody of “The Ancient Mariner” with himself as the title character.⁴ The following summer he traveled to Illinois, and then on to Cincinnati, where his brother Edward had settled.

At Cincinnati, Cranch was given an opportunity to use and hone his literary talents when he was invited to join the staff of the Western Messenger, a journal devoted to spreading the word of Transcendentalism in the West. Cranch's work was appreciated, and when the Messenger's editor, James Freeman Clarke, left Louisville for New England in the winter of 1837, Cranch moved to Louisville and edited the magazine. He substituted for Clarke again the following winter, and when Clarke returned in January 1839, he told Cranch the latest news from Boston, including the activities of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings Cranch had read and praised in the pages of the Messenger.

Cranch's activities on behalf of the Western Messenger had whetted his literary appetite, and he became more and more attracted to Transcendentalism in general and Emerson in particular. Because Cranch had not been in any hurry to be ordained, it is fair to say that the ministry as a career held less interest for him as his literary activities and talents became more valued. In 1839 both of Cranch's talents came to the forefront. Cranch the artist began the “New Philosophy Scrapbook,” containing caricatures of contemporaries, most notably those based on passages from Emerson's writings, the best known of which is the long-legged, barefoot, dinner-coat-clad transparent eyeball.⁵ In that same year Cranch the writer composed one of his best poems, “Correspondences,” which was deeply indebted to Emerson's ideas for its philosophical content.⁶

Cranch returned to New England in the fall of 1839. He visited his old Divinity School classmate Theodore Parker at West Roxbury, and Parker found him “full of spontaneous fellowship,” though he recognized Cranch's dilettantish attitude would not make him “a man who the world will use well.”⁷ In December Cranch moved to Boston, where he attended a meeting of an informal group, the Transcendental Club, on the fifth. The meeting was held at the house of George Ripley, who would later organize the Brook Farm community, and among those present were the educator Bronson Alcott, the historian George Bancroft, the famous Unitarian divine William Ellery Channing, Emerson, the feminist Margaret Fuller, and Parker.⁸ Of all this heady company, it was Emerson whose presence was most important to Cranch.

Cranch had followed Emerson's career with interest. He had read Nature soon after its publication in 1836, and had told his brother that it had sent him “athinking.”⁹ He had reviewed Emerson's address on “The American Scholar” in the Messenger, calling it “beautiful and masterly,” and had privately described the Divinity School Address as “the utterance of a seer and a prophet, a word of profound truth.”¹⁰ Moreover, his cousin William Henry Furness was a childhood friend of Emerson's, and his brother John had met Emerson when both were in Rome in 1833.¹¹ And after arriving in Boston, Cranch attended Emerson's lecture series on “The Present Age,” which he called “a treat whose worth I can find no words to express.”¹²

On 2 March 1840, Cranch sent two of his poems to Emerson, “To the Aurora Borealis” and “Enosis,” the latter having been written in Cranch's Boston hotel room while he was attending Emerson's lectures.¹³ He asked Emerson to be the poems' “godfather” by placing them in the Dial, a new journal started by the Transcendentalists and edited by Margaret Fuller. And he expressed his “deep gratitude” for Emerson's ideas and his pleasure in Emerson's writings, concluding: “I utter no hollow compliments or vain imaginings when I say that I have owed to you more quickening influences & more elevating views in shaping my faith, than I can ever possibly express to you.”¹⁴ Emerson praised both poems to Fuller, and they appeared in the Dial for July 1840.¹⁵

Over the next few years, Cranch served as an itinerant preacher (but still put off his ordination), drew more caricatures of his contemporaries,¹⁶ and contributed more poetry to the Dial. His closeness to Emerson and the Transcendentalists was simultaneously a boon to his poetry (he had a total of eighteen poems published in the Dial) and a curse to his ministry. John Quincy Adams heard Cranch preach in August 1840 and complained that he “gave out quite a stream of transcendentalism, quite unexpectedly.”¹⁷ The reformer Lydia Maria Child warned, after hearing Cranch preach a few months later, that he was “unconscious of the evil that lies under his very whiskers!”¹⁸ By November 1840, Cranch wrote a friend that he had not had a paying preaching engagement for two months, for which he blamed the “sapient owls” of the Unitarian Association, who had “expunged” his name from “the list of safe men”; he had, he concluded, “the misfortune to have associated with Emerson, Ripley & those corrupters of youth, and have written for the Dial, and these are unpardonable offences.”¹⁹

By 1842 Cranch had traveled to New York, where he met and fell in love with Elizabeth de Windt. He also became involved in the New York artistic scene, and particularly the Hudson River School of painters. He and Elizabeth were married in October 1843 and they settled in New York. Although his Poems (which was dedicated to Emerson) was published in May 1844, the book served almost as a postscript to his early poetic career. The move to New York and his new life as an artist both physically and aesthetically separated him from the Transcendentalists, and when he and Elizabeth embarked on a European tour in August 1846, Cranch put this part of his life behind him—the ministry for good, but the writing, as it turned out, only temporarily.²⁰

The Cranches spent three years abroad, living for extended periods in Rome, Sorrento, and Florence, where they met and became friends of Elizabeth and Robert Browning. George William Cranch was born in March 1847 and Leonora Cranch was born in June 1848. Cranch continued his painting, but apparently earned only ＄2,000 for his work during this period. On this trip, as was true until the 1870s, the Cranches depended at least in part for their support on gifts from their fathers.²¹

The Cranches returned to New York in August 1849, living in the city but summering in places where Cranch could paint, such as the Catskills, the Berkshires, Niagara, and the Hudson. In the summer of 1852, they moved into the house at Lenox that the Hawthornes had vacated the previous fall. Caroline Amelia Cranch was born in May 1853. That October, the Cranches returned to Europe. It was there that Cranch met and began his lifelong friendship with James Russell Lowell. The next ten years were quiet ones, spent in Paris, with Cranch painting. A fourth and final child, Quincy Adams Cranch, was born in August 1855.

Upon their return to America in July 1863, the Cranches stayed in the New York City area, living at various times in the city, up the Hudson at Fishkill, or out on Staten Island. Cranch continued painting, and while his work was exhibited and sold, it did not fully support his family. Following the settlement of his father-in-law's estate after his death in 1870, Cranch achieved financial stability. No longer needing to maintain the pretense that his painting supported the family, he gradually began to leave that behind him as he returned to a literary career.

Cranch had never given up writing completely, publishing poetry and prose throughout the time he had concentrated on his painting. In 1872 he published his translation of the Aeneid, and the following year the family moved to Cambridge. There Cranch joined in the literary and social clubs of Boston and Cambridge, and saw other surviving friends from the Transcendentalist period. He published Satan: A Libretto in 1874 and The Bird and the Bell, with Other Poems the following year.

In 1880 the Cranches made their final trip to Europe, traveling there for two years. After returning to America, Cranch continued writing poetry, publishing his last book, Ariel and Caliban, in 1887. He died peacefully on 20 January 1892.

Cranch is today best known for his spirited caricatures of Emerson and other Transcendentalists. Like many people who have spread their abilities over a number of fields, Cranch failed to make a significant name for himself in any one of them. He himself was aware of this problem, and in the 1870s he expressed it in this fashion: “It is my misfortune (as regards worldly & pecuniary success) to have too many sides—to have been born (and educated) with a diversity of talents. … I have wooed too many mistresses; and the world punishes me for not shutting my eyes to all charmers but one.”²²

The publication of The Last of the Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo came about as the result of a number of circumstances. After a downturn in his literary activities in the late 1840s, Cranch began to write more and more during the early 1850s. For two years he served as a correspondent for the New York Evening Post, but most of his work was poetry. As an expatriate writer—and a relatively unknown one at that—Cranch would have had little opportunity to publish his writings in America had he not had an agent or friend working for him abroad. That friend was George William Curtis, who had sailed to Europe with the Cranches in 1846. The friendship among the three was firm and lasting, and the Cranches named their firstborn after him. After his own return to America, Curtis had established himself as a best-selling popular author with such travel books as Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), Lotus-Eating, A Summer Book (1852), and Potiphar Papers (1853). He also helped found Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1853 and contributed the “Editor's Easy Chair” column to each issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine from 1854 to 1892. It was Curtis who used his connections with publishers on Cranch's behalf; as early as 1851 he had written his friend with this advice: “Keep on, and have a store of ammunition ready to let fly, and especially to send me everything you want to sell, and if I can not buy it, I can perhaps persuade others.”²³

Cranch availed himself of Curtis's assistance, and allowed him to place a number of his poems in New York and Boston periodicals. In the winter of 1854-1855, he wrote a children's book, which he described as “amusing, with some pathos at the end,” drew illustrations on wood that could be used by an engraver, and sent everything to Curtis “to get a publisher for it.”²⁴ Cranch had confidence in the book, since he had already tried it out on his children, eight-year-old Georgie and seven-year-old Leonora, with success. He told a friend that “the germ of it was conceived in inventing something to amuse” the children. Cranch read Georgie “the chapters as I wrote them, which amused and excited him, but always made him cry at the end over the sorrows of the poor giant.”²⁵

Curtis also liked the story, calling it “unique and droll,” and he sent it to Appleton's. But their report, as he quoted it to Cranch in June, was a negative one: “‘We do not think that the story, although well written, would do to sell by itself. Fairy tales do not possess very great attractions to parents in search of books for their children, or if they do wish them, they more frequently look for a volume containing a variety, than for a single story.’” Curtis promised to continue seeking a publisher, vowing to send it to Ticknor and Fields, then if necessary to the Harpers.²⁶

Other publishers must have agreed with Appleton's, for it was not until November that Curtis was able to report having success. The book had been accepted by the Boston firm of Phillips, Sampson, who were, coincidentally, the publishers of Emerson's Representative Men and English Traits. Curtis wrote that it was “to be done in the best and most costly manner.” The publishers considered the sale “doubtful, (publishers always do),” but Curtis jocularly added “I don't believe you will make more than a million by it.” He also enclosed a newspaper clipping with an advertisement for the book, described as intended “for large as well as small children,” with illustrations “uncommonly spirited and beautiful.”²⁷

Unfortunately, the book was accepted and put into production too late to fully capitalize on the large volume of a sales associated with the Christmas season, appearing as it did on 22 December.²⁸ His friend William Wetmore Story wrote to Cranch that “at 5 oclock of the day The Last of the Huggermuggers was published, 300 copies were sold, & that Phillips & Sampson said that if the holiday had been a little farther off, they could easily have sold 10,000.”²⁹ Cranch was delighted with this news, and he wrote James Russell Lowell of his anticipation at receiving a bound copy: “Huggermugger is coming—is coming to cheer our eyes—we shall see ourselves in print—clear large beautiful print, with our own illustrations engraved:—and across the great waters we hear the approving clapping of little hands and know that we are known among the juvenile gentry.”³⁰

Story, rather than Curtis,³¹ was apparently the one who encouraged Cranch to write a sequel to The Last of the Huggermuggers, for in April 1856 he wrote Cranch that he had “promised on your behalf to Phillips, Sampson & Co. that you will write them another story with illustrations of about the length of Huggermugger, and send it to them in July. So bestir your stumps.” Still, as had often happened in Cranch's career, there were reservations about his work. Story reported that “your friends did not think it [Huggermuggers] up to your mark. We all know that you can do much better if you choose to put your energies to work; and now you must do so. You must invent a new story, and tell it in a livelier and sharper way.”³²

Cranch wrote Kobboltozo: A Sequel to The Last of the Huggermuggers, and that fall he reported to his brother Edward that it was “much better in subject, style, and in the designs.” In fact, he went on, “Phillips & Sampson are much delighted with it, and say no expense will be spared to make it the most splendid book ever published in Boston,” which news he found “pleasant and encouraging.”³³ But to Lowell, Cranch complained, somewhat humorously, about the way in which books had to be fancified to ensure a good sale: “In what typographic dandyism and display will my bantling appear! P. & S. standing as godfather over it, decking it at the baptismal font with lace and gold and baubles—as if it were a Prince Imperial … But I dare say infantine America loves such things—the way gingerbread nowadays must be gilt—and every dog eared story book must blaze with illuminated letters—why dont they bind it in diamond-dusted and ruby spangled covers at once! The children of this generation go for luxe (looks) more than they did in our young days.”³⁴

Cranch, not wishing to lose sales again, sent in Kobboltozo early enough for it to appear in time for the Christmas season, and it was published on 10 December.³⁵ The book also appeared in time to be reviewed, although as a Christmas book aimed at a juvenile audience, it received short and general notices. Typical of the comments on Kobboltozo was the praise of it as “a very attractive and amusing book” in a two-sentence review in the Boston Daily Advertiser.³⁶ Reviewers had remembered The Last of the Huggermuggers, and the one in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller noted that everyone who read the first book will “rush to devour this one”; both were “capital stories, admirably illustrated.”³⁷ And the reviewer in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript called Cranch's books “two sterling additions to the literature of childhood.”³⁸

Cranch's two children's books proved to be a financial windfall for him. The Last of the Huggermuggers sold “perhaps 12 to 1400 copies,” even though it was published so late in the season,³⁹ and Cranch received a ＄500 payment through Lowell in late 1856.⁴⁰ At about the same time, Curtis sent Cranch another “＄200 from Phillips, Sampson ‘on account of Hugg. and Kobbo.’”⁴¹ Ironically, Cranch earned at least as much from these two children's books as he had earned annually from his painting during his trip abroad in the 1840s.

The success of Kobboltozo, which had been placed on sale early in the 1856 Christmas season, gave Cranch reason to hope for further success with his children's books. Curtis advised him to write more stories for the Christmas market: “Your name thus becomes associated with the holidays. Children will think of Santa Claus and Cranch as brothers.”⁴² Cranch apparently took Curtis's advice, for in March 1857 he wrote to his longtime friend Mrs. Mary Preston Stearns of his plans for the next holiday season: “I have written a tale with an amusing shell and spiritual kernel with the motto ‘For the young a story, for the old an allegory’, which I am a good deal pleased with. I am preparing it and a fairy story for next Christmas.”⁴³ The story he mentions must be “Doctor Theophilus,” which ends with “For the young, a magic-story. For the old, an allegory.” “Burley-bones” is almost certainly the fairy story.

In July, Curtis conveyed the bad news that Phillips, Sampson would not be publishing a new Cranch story for Christmas. Cranch later explained to his brother that his work was “declined by the publisher on account of squally times beginning—and not for any fault of the stories.”⁴⁴ Even without seeing them, Curtis offered to print the stories himself, “in my own ‘Schoolfellow’—a magazine we publish for children, and a very popular affair for the young people.”⁴⁵ However, the magazine ceased publication in 1857 without printing Cranch's stories. Curtis wrote in September that he had the manuscripts and blocks, which he would try to sell.⁴⁶

The publishing market continued to struggle, and neither book was printed. Phillips, Sampson itself went bankrupt in 1859.⁴⁷ Consequently, Cranch's career as a storyteller gave way to his painting for the rest of his stay in Europe.

In 1863, when the Cranches returned to the United States, Cranch devoted more of his time to writing, especially poetry—some explicitly for children. His poems for children appeared in the leading children's periodicals of the time: Riverside Magazine for Young People and St. Nicholas. Many of these poems had been destined for a volume of children's poems to be called Father Gander's Rhymes, but no such collection ever appeared.

Cranch also began trying to publish his storybooks again. In 1866 he showed “Burley-bones” and the accompanying illustrations to Lowell, who wrote to Charles Eliot Norton that he hoped to get James T. Fields to publish the story.⁴⁸ Cranch wrote to Lowell in January 1867, asking him to inquire of Ticknor and Fields about the “Burley-bones” manuscript: “I fully understood that it was accepted, and would be published, sometime or another, in ‘Our Young Folks’—But I am inclined to think that Fields intends to do nothing about it.”⁴⁹ Cranch went on to mention that Henry Oscar Houghton (of the firm Hurd and Houghton) was thought to be looking for illustrated stories, and asked Lowell to show him “Burley-bones” and the illustrations for “Doctor Theophilus.”

In 1869 the two earlier books were reissued by Lee and Shepard, and Cranch suggested that Lowell approach them about the two manuscripts.⁵⁰ In May, he complained: “My unfortunate stories with the unfortunate blocks are I suppose still in limbo, in Boston. Mr. Woodman who undertook so enthusiastically to recommend them to Lee and Shepard has written no answer to a letter I sent him long ago. It's of no use I suppose writing again to him. They are doomed to be stillborn. … I can learn nothing about the other story and the illustrations—“Dr. Theophilus.””⁵¹

The Theophilus manuscript continued to elude him. On 31 January 1870 he wrote Lowell:

And will you just rummage once more in your drawers, for my missing Ms. “Dr. Theophilus”—I can't help thinking it has slid into some chink, or been covered up out of sight, somewhere about your study.

Mr. Fields, I am told, states that he knows nothing about the Ms.

I am sorry to put you to this trouble. And if you shouldn't find it, the loss will not be irreparable—as I have a rough copy of the same—only the missing one is an improved edition.⁵²

We cannot know whether Cranch ever found his manuscript; there is no evidence it was ever published. In any event, by the next year, Cranch had turned his attention to translating Virgil's Aeneid. Although his poems for young people continued to appear occasionally—the last in St. Nicholas for August 1891—he did not return to writing children's fiction. The Last of the Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo were reprinted several times in the nineteenth century, but after that 1870 letter, no further references concerning “Doctor Theophilus” or any other children's fiction have been found.

Although Cranch's fiction for children is better known, he also wrote a number of poems for young people as well. They appeared on the pages of St. Nicholas, Hearth and Home, and Riverside Magazine for Young People from 1869 until his death in 1892.

Many of these poems reveal the storytelling skill and sense of humor that characterized his two children's books. “The Painter's Scarecrow” tells of an independent young woman whose painting is repeatedly interrupted by rude, disruptive boys. Without a male protector and unable to find a policeman to help her, she creates a scarecrow to insure her privacy.⁵³ “A Chinese Story” tells of two near-sighted men who challenge one another to read the inscription on a distant marble tablet. Both men cheat, and their misdeeds are exposed when the tablet is replaced by a blank slab. The priest to whom they appeal for a judgment says:

“I think, dear sirs, there must be few
Blessed with such wondrous eyes as those you wear.
There is no tablet with inscription there!
There was one, it is true; 't was moved away,
And you plain tablet placed there yesterday.”(54)

Cranch often wove lessons into the fabric of his poems and his fiction as well. “Burley Bones,” the tale of a “big young fairy who had idle habits, and who got into difficulty” because he did not know the value of work, is the fairy story which Cranch originally prepared for Phillips, Sampson in 1857 and later believed to be accepted for publication in Our Young Folks.⁵⁵ An abridged version of the story appeared in Hearth and Home in 1871.⁵⁶ Burley Bones drinks punch and becomes drunk, embarrassing himself before Whirligig, the fairy maiden he wishes to woo. He is taken in by the kindly Deacon Hollyhock and his wife, Mrs. Pansy, but the ungrateful fairy repays their kindness by destroying their garden. Hollyhock takes him to the fairy court, and Burley Bones is sentenced to hard work in the garden for a year. He finally recognizes the error of his ways and becomes “quite a respectable and useful fairy.” He is rewarded by a second encounter with Whirligig, who sees the remarkable change in him. They marry and live happily in the garden. Cranch uses his story-telling skills to teach a moral lesson: “And I conclude with the hope that all who read this may be as good and useful in their day and generation.”

The fantasy which is characteristic of his fiction can also be found in his poetry. In “The Coal-Imp,” when Cranch lights his fire, a spirit trapped in the coal appears. The artist captures his likeness on paper and asks how he got there. The spirit complains of his imprisonment and is released:

Then, taking the poker, I punched
          A hole in the half-burnt mass—
When the fire leaped up, and the Imp flew off
          In a laugh of flaming gas.(57)

In “How Willie Coasted by Moonlight,” Willie is lured outside in the cold for an eerie ride with his “uncle” from Lapland. They go faster and faster down a hill with no end until they seem to be flying through the air and around the stars. A meteor flashes by knocking him off his seat and he wakes to find it was all a dream.⁵⁸

Cranch's enjoyment of language play also shows up in his children's poetry. In “Four Charades” he composed four word puzzles for young readers. Each stanza suggests one syllable of the two-syllable words, and the third is a clue for the whole word.⁵⁹ The answers—carpet, bargain, pic-nic, and nightmare—were given in a later issue. “Phaeton” shows Cranch's penchant for wordplay as well as the interest in classical literature displayed in his poetry for adults. It is the story of the sun's charioteer, Phoebus Apollo, and his son, Phaeton.

                    So, one day, Phaeton
Said to his sire, “I'd like to drive your Sun—
That is myself—dear sir, excuse the pun,—
Twelve hours through space. You know you
          promised once
Whatever I might ask.” “I was a dunce,”
Apollo said. “My foolish love for you,
I fear, my son, that I shall sadly rue.”

Pressing his case, Phaeton goes on,

“Father, you swore it by the River Styx,—
You know you did,—and you are in a fix.”

Jupiter must save the earth from destruction by sending a thunderbolt to stop Phaeton's wild driving. Cranch interjects:

(but wait—
Here in parenthesis I'd like to state
This may have been a telegram; for then
Lightning dispatches were not known to men,
But only used by heathen gods)(60)

Although Cranch had planned a volume of poetry for children, the project—like “Burley Bones” and “Doctor Theophilus”—never reached fruition. The book, the aborted Father Gander's Rhymes, included a number of fantasy poems featuring animal characters. Selections from the proposed book were eventually published in Riverside Magazine for Young People with illustrations prepared by Cranch.⁶¹

Cranch is best remembered today for The Last of the Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo. His fantasy adventures for children hold a special place in the history of American children's books. For the practical-minded audience of nineteenth-century America, fantasy did not yet hold a major place. Hawthorne had introduced the notion of fairy tales in his A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, but the fantastic adventure story was only beginning to emerge. Early publications for children were dominated by a concern for secular education in the works of Samuel Goodrich (“Peter Parley”) and Jacob Abbott or religious education in the works published by the Sunday School Union and the American Tract Society. All these individuals and groups were opposed to fantasy stories or fairy tales that appealed to children's imaginations. Hawthorne and Cranch, however, had close ties to the Romantic movement in the United States and welcomed the added respect being granted to the imagination.

Cranch particularly was able to combine the genre of the fantasy tale represented by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm with the adventure story, especially the Robinsonades patterned after Defoe and Swift. In telling of a meeting between ordinary folk and make-believe giants and dwarfs, Cranch recalled the tradition of Gulliver's Travels, but added a new dimension to it. The stories are aggressively American, with only a subtle message about moral character woven into the plot.

The realistic and thoroughly practical Americans enter the island world of fantasy—giants, dwarfs, witches, magic shellfish—and emerge unaffected. They retain control of themselves and of their lives. Readers are impressed by their ingenuity, not their piety or even by the power of supernatural forces. Although similar to the Robinsonade genre, Huggermuggers focuses more on the opportunistic ingenuity of Jacky Cable and Zebbedee Nabbum than on Cable's instinct for survival. Their plan to capture the giants and make them the main attraction of a P. T. Barnum show is born of self-interest, not self-revelation. Thus Cranch helped pave the way for pleasurable, non-instructive reading among young people.

The two stories also display his talent and affection for humorous wordplay. Cranch had fun using puns to name his characters: Mark Scrawler, the historian; Kobboltozo, the cobbler; Hammawhaxo, the carpenter; Stitchkin, the tailor. Nevertheless, his friends complained that the story was “too lachrymose” and urged him to write “in a livelier and sharper way.”⁶² Cranch himself thought the sequel “was much better in subject, style, and in the designs.”⁶³

Indeed, the plot of Kobboltozo is more cohesive and the theme more explicit. The focus has shifted from the adventurers to the dwarfs and their efforts to become giants themselves. The dwarfs are unable to grasp the message given them by the king of the sea:

He that is a dwarf in spirit
Never shall the isle inherit.
Hearts that grow 'mid daily cares
Grow to greatness unawares;
Noble souls alone may know
How the giants live and grow.

The dwarfs' refusal to work together tears their community apart and the Americans must teach the dwarfs how to live in harmony. In this story, Cranch is more direct in his use of physical size to represent moral character. He also reveals more clearly the mark of his Transcendentalist ties in the antimaterialistic message.

Although the advice of his friend arrived too late to have much impact on Kobboltozo, Cranch seems to have taken it to heart in writing “The Legend of Doctor Theophilus; or, The Enchanted Clothes.” Story had urged him: “Don't begin till you have settled all your plot in your mind; and if you can, let it hold a double story, an internal one and an external one, as Andersen's do, so that the wiseacres shall like it as well as the children. Read ‘The Little Tin Soldier’ of Andersen's, ‘The Ugly Duckling,’ ‘The Emperor's New Clothes.’ You can do this and you must.”⁶⁴ The influence of Story's advice can be seen in the subtitle and further in the closing lines: “For the young, a magic-story. For the old, an allegory.” The attention to clothes also reveals Cranch's interest in Thomas Carlyle and Sartor Resartus.

The opening chapter of “Doctor Theophilus” is reminiscent of Dickens's Bleak House, where the fog in Chancery Court represents the stagnation of the British legal system. However, Cranch's target is the medical profession in particular and reverence for the past in general. He uses puns to speak of Fogland's inhabitants as “Foggies or old (as we often spell the word) Fogies.” Theophilus's foes are Dr. Sangsue (a leech), Dr. Musophof (hater of light), and Dr. Status-quo. His failure to heed the lesson of the encounter with his patient Godfrey shows the danger of the doctor's inaction. He is so wrapped up in his books and his work that he cannot see his peril. At last Theophilus discovers the enchanted clothes and does battle with the magician who made them, conquering him with one blow from the Bible.

Children will enjoy the doctor's cleverness in outsmarting his enemies as he destroys the Grand Panjandrum, and they will recognize the danger inherent in the good doctor's desire for fancy clothes. Children will immediately know that the energized clothes are magic, especially when the suit has tantrums. The news that his suit resembles the robes of the Grand Panjandrum will alert young readers that the magic clothes are dangerous. But the exact nature of that danger will be a surprise. Unlike the emperor's clothes, the doctor's clothes have too much substance. Instead of revealing the wearer's vanity, these clothes set out to ruin the good doctor and his reputation.

It is our hope that this book will introduce children, both young and old, to American fantasy in one of its early manifestations. Jacky Cable, Zebedee Nabbum, and the gentle giants have a place in American children's literature. Although overlooked, they helped define the genre in the new world, bringing brash American ways into the fantasy world of Huggermugger Island. Furthermore, this volume introduces the long-lost story of Dr. Theophilus and his nemesis, the enchanted clothes. The story-telling talents of Christopher Pearse Cranch have brought these characters to life with gentle humor and a now seldom-heard message of cooperation and harmony.

Notes

1. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 1:110.

2. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 179.

3. Biographical information is drawn from Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917); F. DeWolfe Miller, “Christopher Pearse Cranch: New England Transcendentalist,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1942; F. DeWolfe Miller, Christopher Pearse Cranch and His Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951); Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), pp. 133-39; and Robert D. Habich, Transcendentalism and the Western Messenger: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors, 1835-1841 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985). For a survey of the scholarship on Cranch, see David Robinson, “Christopher Pearse Cranch,” in The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Modern Language Association, 1984), pp. 123-30.

   We are grateful to the Andover-Harvard Theological School, the Cornell University Library Department of Rare Books, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for permission to quote from materials in their possession.

4. The manuscript of this poem, at the University of Wyoming, shows it to be a decidedly juvenile effort. This was clearly Cranch's apprenticeship period: F. DeWolfe Miller describes the verses of this time as marked by “jejune religiosity,” and even his friend John Sullivan Dwight called his poetry “always beautiful, but feeble” (Cranch, p. 10; Dwight to Cranch, 12 August 1837, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society).

5. Reproduced in Scott, Cranch, opposite p. 40, and Miller, Cranch, figure 3.

6. See Hazen C. Carpenter, “Emerson and Christopher Pearse Cranch,” New England Quarterly 37 (March 1964): 18-42. “Correspondences” was published in the Dial 1 (January 1841): 381.

7. 12 October 1839, Parker, “Journal,” 1:250, Andover-Harvard Theological School.

8. See Joel Myerson, “A Calendar of Transcendental Club Meetings,” American Literature 44 (May 1972): 205.

9. Cranch to Edward Cranch, 22 December 1836, in Miller, “Cranch,” p. 53.

10. “Emerson's Oration,” Western Messenger 4 (October 1837): 184-89; entry of ca. 15 July 1838, “Manuscript Autobiography,” in Miller, “Cranch,” p. 81.

11. 5 April 1833, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 4:156.

12. Cranch to Julia Myers, 4 February 1840, in Scott, Cranch, p. 47.

13. “Enosis,” which was influenced by Cranch's reading of Nature, appeared in the July 1840 Dial as “Stanzas.” Its later title of “Gnosis” resulted from editors' misreadings of the German-style typography of its title in Cranch's Poems (see Miller, Cranch, p. 9; Miller, “Cranch,” p. 105; Sidney E. Lind, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's ‘Gnosis’: An Error in Title,” Modern Language Notes 62 [November 1947]: 486-88).

14. Cranch to Emerson, 2 March 1840, Collection of Joel Myerson.

15. See Emerson to Fuller, 3 March 1840, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 8 vols. to date (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; 1990-), 2:258; Emerson to Cranch, 4 March 1840, Letters, 7:374.

16. One of the best that has survived shows a man lying on a couch, sipping wine while his wife glowers at him as she polishes his boots. A copy of the Dial is under the couch and the caption is a line from Caroline Sturgis's poem “Life”: “Why for work art thou striving, / Why seeks't thou for aught? / To the soul that is living / All things shall be brought.” See Dial 1 (October 1840): 195, for Sturgis's poem. The drawing is reproduced in both Scott, Cranch, opposite p. 60, and Miller, Cranch, figure 17.

17. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874-1877), 10:345.

18. Child to Augusta King, 21 October 1840, Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library.

19. Cranch to John Sullivan Dwight, 17 November 1840, in Myerson, “Transcendentalism and Unitarianism in 1840: A New Letter by C. P. Cranch,” CLA Journal 16 (March 1973): 366-67.

20. A month before he left New York, Edgar Allan Poe portrayed Cranch in his “Literati of New York City” as “one of the least absurd contributors” to the Dial, who had since then “reformed his habits of thought and speech” (Godey's Lady's Book 33 [September 1846]: 18-19).

21. Elizabeth's father died in 1870, leaving them a sizable estate valued in 1890 at ＄54,000, with an annual interest of ＄3,600 (see Miller, Cranch, p. 17).

22. “The Book of Thoughts,” commonplace book, 1872-1879, quoted in Francis B. Dedmond, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's ‘Journal. 1839,’” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1983, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), p. 149n.

23. George William Curtis to Cranch, 23 June 1851, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

24. Cranch to Mary Preston Stearns, 10 August 1855, in Scott, Cranch, p. 215.

25. Cranch to George Luther Stearns, 25 December 1855, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

26. George William Curtis to Cranch, 19 June 1855, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

27. George William Curtis to Cranch, 21 November 1855, copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

28. It was advertised as “nearly ready” in the 18 December Boston Daily Evening Transcript, and as published on that day in the 22 December Boston Daily Advertiser.

29. William Wetmore Story to Cranch, 24 December 1855, quoted in Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 27 January 1856, Houghton Library, Harvard University. In her transcript of Story's now-lost letter, Scott reports the sales as “nine hundred copies” (Cranch, p. 218).

30. Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 27 January 1856, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

31. Story wrote Cranch on 20 July 1856 that “I took upon myself to advise & direct as best I could for your advantage, although you had put the matter into George Curtis' hands, especially as he was at a distance and in love, 2 facts which interfere with business transactions” (typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society).

32. William Wetmore Story to Cranch, in Scott, Cranch, pp. 220-21.

33. Cranch to Edward Cranch, 14 September 1856, in Scott, Cranch, pp. 222-23. Story also found the book good, writing to Cranch that it was “a great step in advance of ‘Huggermugger’” (20 July 1856, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society).

34. Cranch to James Russell Lowell, [Fall? 1856?], Houghton Library, Harvard University.

35. Boston Daily Advertiser, 10 December 1856, p. 2.

36. Boston Daily Advertiser, 12 December 1856, p. 2.

37. Boston Daily Evening Traveller, 16 December 1856, p. 4.

38. “Knick,” “Juvenile Books and Periodicals,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, 20 December 1856, p. 1.

39. George William Curtis to Cranch, 28 December 1856, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

40. Lowell had written Cranch in August about sending him ＄500 from “my Boston publishers,” but he had not received it by November. But a letter from John Sullivan Dwight the next month reports that “Lowell tells me they have just sent you solid cash” (Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 24 November 1856, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Dwight to Cranch, 7 December 1856, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society).

41. George William Curtis to Cranch, 28 December 1856, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

42. George William Curtis to Cranch, 28 December 1856, in Scott, Cranch, p. 228.

43. Cranch to Mary Preston Stearns, 30 March 1857, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society. Mrs. Stearns, the wife of antislavery crusader Major George Luther Stearns, met Cranch through Frederic Henry Hedge when the latter was pastor of a Unitarian church in Bangor, Maine, in 1836-1837. They became lifelong friends.

44. Cranch to Edward Cranch, 12 November 1857, in Miller, “Cranch,” p. 290.

45. George William Curtis to Cranch, 18 July 1857, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

46. George William Curtis to Cranch, 14 September 1857, typescript copy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

47. The firm suspended business in September 1859, within a month after the deaths of both partners, Moses D. Phillips and Charles Sampson (see Emerson, Letters, 5:172n).

48. James Russell Lowell to Charles Eliot Norton, 30 May 1866, in Miller, “Cranch,” p. 309.

49. Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 28 January 1867, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

50. Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 16 December 1868, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

51. Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 10 May 1869, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

52. Cranch to James Russell Lowell, 31 January 1870, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

53. St. Nicholas 5 (September 1878): 714-15.

54. Originally published in Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 11 (April 1873): 398-99, this poem was plagiarized and appeared under the name of W. J. Bahmer in St. Nicholas 15 (September 1888): 839.

55. Cranch mentioned the fairy story in a letter to Mary Preston Stearns, 30 March 1857, and again in a letter to James Russell Lowell, 28 January 1867 (see above).

56. Scott cites a description of the old de Windt home, which she claims is the opening of the fairy story “Burley-bones” (see Cranch, p. 203). Nothing resembling this passage occurs anywhere in the text published in Hearth and Home.

57. St. Nicholas 2 (February 1875): 220-21.

58. St. Nicholas 3 (January 1876): 168-70.

59. St. Nicholas 5 (April 1878): 406.

60. St. Nicholas 11 (February 1884): 288-90.

61. Four installments of Father Gander's rhymes, including a preface and some ten poems, appeared in Riverside Magazine for Young People 4 (1870): 60, 117, 152, 360. That number is about half of the twenty poems Miller indicates were originally planned (“Cranch,” p. 320).

62. William Wetmore Story to Cranch, 18 April 1856, in Scott, Cranch, pp. 220-21.

63. Cranch to Edward Cranch, 14 September 1856, in Scott, Cranch, p. 223.

64. William Wetmore Story to Cranch, 18 April 1856, in Scott, Cranch, p. 221.