Category Archives: Classics

Cinderella Lives Happily Ever After in Advertising Ephemera

Posted on by

East of the sun or west of the moon, Cinderella is probably the best known fairy tale in the world and her story has been co-opted by shrewd businessmen eager to sell products.  Three creative examples of advertising ephemera from the collection which exploit the cinder wench are highlighted here.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (1888-1960)  is not a household name in America, but she is one of the Southern hemisphere’s most beloved children’s book illustrators.  Famous for having created distinctly Australian fairies and elves, Outhwaite was not above drawing pictures for advertising brochures. “Cinderella’s Dream and What it Taught Her” (ca 1931; Cotsen 86877) is one of her rarest works.  A Fairy Queen visits Cinderella’s dreary room late one night, saying sweetly,  ‘I am here to cheer you dear, / For you work like a drudge all day: / But listen to me, and you soon will see / How your work will become mere play,” as soon as she purchases all the versatile germ-killing products manufactured locally in Melbourne by J. Kitchen & Sons.  (Several will be essential in cementing her power as princess.) No longer will her ugly, fault-finding sisters complain of shrunken woolens once they are washed in Kitchen’s Merino.   Her glass slippers, filthy from running home from the palace through the streets, can be disinfected like the drains and sinks with Kitchen’s strong Phenyle, a deadly poison sold in  glass bottles marked with molded Xes.  Her dressing table in the palace will have bottles of Kitchen’s Velvet Salts, talc for the bath, and medicated soap to keeping the fair complexion fresh.  The flame of the prince’s love will burn true as long as she discreetly stocks Kitchen’s Velvet Shaving Stick–or so it is promised.What must it have taken for mild-mannered Will Keith Kellogg to break away from his brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Battle Creek Sanatorium fame, and start his own cereal company in 1906? After improving the recipe for their flavorless corn flakes by sweetening them with malt syrup, Will had to figure out how to distinguish his breakfast cereal from his brother’s.  He  set out to vanquish his competitors through the stream of premiums designed to create customer loyalty.  Between 1910 and 1940, Kellogg Co. produced lines of blotters, paper dolls, radio shows, souvenir postcards, and pamphlets mostly aimed at children.

A 4-volume set of Story Game Books featuring characters famous in children’s literature copyrighted in 1931 are now collectibles.  The “Sunshine Fairy” offered general instructions for play and noted that each one in the volume would have individual directions that would need to be learned. The first story in the first volume was Cinderella’s rise from dirty rags to silken gowns (Cotsen 22579).  The prosaic retelling was accompanied by a board game designed by Bess Devine Jewell, a commercial artist who also illustrated Pansy Eyes: A Maid of Japan (c.1922).  This twelve-square adaptation of the classic game of the goose sets players on a quest to find the maiden whose foot will slide into the glass slipper, which cannot be stretched to fit.  The back cover was covered with information from Kellogg’s Home Economics Department on meal planning for growing children.  Mothers were advised that if their little ones did not like milk,  “Cereals are especially helpful in getting milk into the diet.”  A box top from any of Kellogg’s five nutritious cereals and 10 cents glued to the inside of the letter mailed to the company would send a copy of Cinderella and friends to anywhere in the US except for Wisconsin, Washington, Nevada, and Kansas.Mrs. Cinderella  (Cotsen 21954) has a very complicated origin, compared to the previous two pamphlets.  For its pavilion in the 1939 World’s Fair, General Electric commissioned William Duncan and Edward Mabley, co-principals of the famous puppet troupe Tatterman Marionettes, to write and perform a piece promoting the wonders of electricity. After the exposition, the show was taken on the road and performed hundreds of times across the country.  Programs for the original production have survived, but this colorful pamphlet illustrated by North Carolina artist Corydon Bell seems to have been printed  for distribution in retail outlets: the name of Herr’s Garage in Landisville, Pennsylvania is stamped on the rear cover.

It’s unclear how faithful the story in verse here is to the original script for the puppet show that played at the World’s Fair, but the outlines were probably very similar.  The prince carries his bride over the threshold of their starter palace and leaves her the next morning to explore the premises.  After a morning of dusting and mopping, Cinderella discovers that the goblins in residence whose delight is undoing her work.  With a stiff upper lip and sore back, she tries to bake in the ancient kitchen and do the laundry in a wash tub while they wreak more havoc.   Surely her fairy godmother can help her with the gnome problem… She recommends calling General Electric at G-E 1939.  No sooner had she hung up the receiver when a host of elves in tip-top physical condition and dashing uniforms.  Armed with guns, they shoot at the goblins and force a retreat.The elves have just begun to work.  The inadequate kitchen and laundry room are completely modernized, from the plumbing to the cabinetry.  Within hours they install the entire range of GE labor-saving appliances–refrigerator, dishwasher, garbage disposal, toaster, coffee maker, washing machine, water heater.  The powerful new vacuum cleaner makes the disgraceful living room carpet look like new in sixty minutes.  And they thoughtfully prepared a hearty, heartwarming meal for her charming prince when he comes home.The moral is too obvious to bear repeating, but here it is anyway:

The General Electric Co. is able / To sell you, thru a plan that’s all its own, / ADDED HOURS OF FREEDOM,/ And for happiness you need them,/ Cause there’s nothing so important as your home.

Someone–a woman–who owned of this copy left a tart note inside. complaining about a woman of her acquaintance who swallowed the message whole before learning that “all men are rats.”

Mother Goose Goes to India: Culturally Diverse Nursery Rhymes

Posted on by

Nursery rhymes are popularly considered as a type of universal children’s literature. Like folk and fairy tales, they belong to a genre that can be compared across countries and cultures because of their distinctive structures of combined motifs and themes. They are presumed to be timeless because they are anonymous, their origins misty, and meanings  mysterious. Any child, regardless of origin, race, and gender, is welcome in Mother Goose’s realm.

The English-speaking world has inherited one of the most robust corpuses of children’s lore in Western Europe, a merry, ragtag mass of ditties, characters rhymes, lullabies, tongue-twisters, counting out rhymes,  singing games, riddles, mixed up with tags from songs, ballads, plays for adults.  Many are not as ancient as popularly supposed and rarely is there hard evidence that they allude to horrific events like the plague.  Since the publication in 1842 of James Orchard Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England, traditional oral children’s lore has become an English genre of poetry in its own right because of all the illustrated anthologies and picture books of rhymes that have been published.

Because collections of English nursery rhymes have dominated the market for so long, and there has been a movement to acquaint children with oral lore from different cultures and languages. A picture book of culturally diverse nursery rhymes caught my eye in Barnes & Noble last week.  Mother Goose Goes to India was compiled by Kabir and Surishtha Sehgal. Surishtha’s parents read them to her growing up in India and in turn she introduced her children. The mother-son team  have given their beloved rhymes an Indian twist by substituting key English words with Hindi ones, glossed below.  Details from Indian folk are incorporated into Wazza Pink’s vividly colorful illustrations to be discovered.

All the warm good humor radiating from the pages can’t quite compensate for the shortcomings of the concept.  No changes were made to “Humpty Dumpty” beyond substituting “raja’s” for “king’s” in the third line, so it was left up to the illustrator to give the rhyme more Indian flavor.   The rajas in the lower left  are so light-skinned that they could be Europeans, when surely they are not.  The other characters are clothed in Indian garments, but no notes explain who is wearing what.  Humpty wears a belt  around his waist as if he were a hard-boiled egg decorated for a holiday meal, as he takes the tumble to the ground.  To his left, Mother Goose in a sleeveless jacket and skirt claps her wings  and to his right a man who might be a dancer in an unusual hat strikes a pose.

One of the most successful transformations in the collection is “Jack Be Nimble:”

Jai be nimble, / Jai be free, / Jai jump over / The mombatee

“Jai,” a boy’s name in Hindi that alliterates with “Jack,” nicely preserves the original’s punchy rhythm.  He vaults over the lit candle in a lavender kurta with a stand-up collar and loose trousers.  The second line has been rewritten so that it rhymes with the Hindi word for candle, “mombattee.”  Chanting the rhyme out loud would probably delight a small child too young for an explanation that probably came from  candle leaping, which was a game and a form of fortunetelling in England for centuries, although the text did not appear in print until 1825.

“This Little Pig Went to Market” is still the best known of all  the toe or finger rhymes, but it seems an odd  choice for this collection.  Here is the Indian version:

This little sooar went to bazaar, ‘ This little sooar stayed home. / This little sooar had roast gosht,/ This little sooar had none. /  And this little sooar cried, “Wee-wee-wee,” / All the way home!

Thinking  about the English piggy gobbling down roast beef may make a reader feel squeamish, but it is even more gross here, given the pig’s status as an unclean animal to Hindus and Muslims.  Presumably people born into those faiths who are no longer unobservant may not feel bound by the taboo, but as an outsider, it feels wrong or even insensitive.

Can the Sehgals’ experiment with Mother Goose be described as culturally diverse?  Are the resulting  illustrated rhymes to be considered subversions of English nursery rhymes, as the Kirkus Review suggested?  The edited versions respect the originals too much to support a such claim, in my opinion. The Sehgals did not set out to turn this imaginary world upside down while trying to create an enjoyable introduction to Indian culture through rhymes very young children can be presumed to be familiar.  Still, “Garam Cross Buns” are neither authentically Indian or English…  Or is that a pedantic quibble, when any child will recognize it as a delectable sweet pastry?

Mother Goose Goes to India could easily be used in a story hour, with a related activity of teaching Hindi words to a multi-generational audience. But unless the facilitator is South Asian or has some real knowledge about modern Indian culture, it is hard to go beyond that.  Without glosses at the back of the book providing some context for the adult reader, the mass of details impress chiefly through the colors and patterning, which says “exotic” (minus the sexual overtones), a way into a culture we are now consider suspect.  If I were reading the book with a child, I would be hard pressed to anticipate questions or pick out things to explain what’s “Indian” about them.  Cobbling short answers of dubious accuracy about the lotus or paisley or the griddle for baking naan obviously does not to justice to the culture which the  Seghals and Pink are offering a portal.  This has always been the dilemma of writing and illustrating introductions to non-Western countries and people simple enough for a little child to grasp. With a nearly impossible task, the best intentions in the world go so only far.  Figuring out ways to do better are elusive indeed…