A seventeenth-century writer named Charles Perrault was sometimes called Mother Goose, an imaginary author of fairy tales. His early material was inspired and derived from earlier folk tales that he greatly embellished and improved. The Mother Goose creation was actually based on European popular tradition. She was never identified as an actual person but instead was merely a way of calling attention to popular and rural storytelling. The tales most often ended with a moral, such as: “Good manners are not easy/ They need a little care,/ But when we least expect it/ Bring rewards both rich and rare.”
One of the most popular versions of the long-ago tales was “Cinderella,” and Perrault made several modifications to the original, these including the pumpkin carriage, fairy godmother, and the initial mention of the “glass slippers.”
This collection includes that story, along with other such known favorites as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Blue Beard,” and “Puss in Boots,” along with such lesser known fairy tales as “The Ridiculous Wishes,” “Little Thumb,” “Ricky of the Tuft,” “Griselda,” and “Donkey Skin.”
Some of the stories were told similar to the style in which they had been written well more than three hundred years ago, with revisions in the telling over the years.
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