Ting-a-ling
Stockton’s first book gathers four loosely connected tales around a fairy an inch and a half tall who turns up wherever somebody needs rescuing. It opens with the sheltered Princess Aufalia answering a travel-worn prince outside a confectioner’s shop; he drives off her two escorts, the king has him locked in the Tower of Tears under sentence of death, and Ting-a-ling talks a famously good-natured giant into helping. Elsewhere the fairy queen sends her whole tribe hunting a stolen princess, a dead king leaves his throne to anyone who can sing his fiendish composition at sight, and Ting-a-ling takes a week’s holiday at the giant Tur-il-i-ra’s castle. Written for the Riverside Magazine for Young People from 1867 on, these skip the moralizing usual in Victorian children’s books. The humor is dry, the logic deadpan, nobody gets improved.
About the Author
Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902) was an American writer and humorist who worked as a wood engraver in Philadelphia before turning to fiction and children’s writing in his thirties. He is best remembered for “The Lady, or the Tiger?” (1882), a story whose withheld ending became…
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