THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s delightful collection of Greek myths opens with a group of children gathered to hear stories from a local college student, Eustace Bright. The six tales told by Hawthorne’s young narrator include ‘The Gorgon’s Head’, ‘The Golden Touch’ of King Midas and ‘The Paradise of Children’ which tells the story of Pandora and her box.

Hawthorne was the first author to write versions of these stories especially for a younger audience, yet he never talks down to his readers: the Gorgon and the Chimaera are hideous and menacing; heroes like Perseus and Hercules face genuine peril; Pandora and King Midas are shown as both heroic and flawed. Hawthorne’s sense of adventure and his grasp of character, so evident in The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, make these stories a triumph, appealing both to young and old.

In A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys, Hawthorne showed that stories for younger readers could be entertaining as well as instructive, and helped lay the foundation for a golden age of children’s literature. In the spirit of that era, this edition contains 60 beautiful colour plates by Walter Crane, one of the leading illustrators of the Arts and Crafts movement.