H., who had heard it from her mother forty years previously. However, Jacobs changed his opinion not long afterwards, when he received a story titled "Scrapefoot." This was collected by John Batten from a Mrs. In 1890, the folklorist Joseph Jacobs stated that the story was "the only example I know of where a tale that can be definitely traced to a specific author has become a folk-tale." 25, where the name is not capitalized).Īt this point, most people believed that the tale was created by Southey. However, Goldilocks was used for the Three Bears' antagonist as early as 1875 ( Little Folks' Letters: Young Hearts and Old Heads, pg. Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes (1904) is sometimes credited with the first use of the name Goldilocks for this story. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this was a nickname for blonds as early as 1550. The variant "Goldilocks" soon gained popularity. "Golden Hair" appeared around 1868, in Aunt Friendly's Nursery Book. I think it should be noted that a synonym for hobgoblin is "bug-bear."īack to the evolving story of The Three Bears! The heroine’s name varied from Silver Hair, to Silver-locks, to Golden Hair, to Golden Locks - or, occasionally, she was nameless. It was, as Bella gaily said, like the supper provided for the three nursery hobgoblins at their house in the forest, without their thunderous low growlings of the alarming discovery, ‘Somebody’s been drinking my milk!’Īs pointed out by Katharine Briggs, this could indicate another version of the story floating around. In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens titles a chapter "The Feast of the Three Hobgoblins." The characters eat bread and milk, and Dickens includes this line: A Moral Tale, in Verse, the bears are identified as "a father, a mother, and child."ġ865: An interesting aside here. In 1852, illustrations were showing them as a nuclear family. Both the name and the child character caught on very quickly, another possible indicator that he didn't make it up. However, Cundall might not have been the first person to do this he implies that the tale is already "better known" as Silver-Hair. This I did because I found that the tale is better known with Silver-Hair, and because there are so many other stories of old women. The "Story of the Three Bears" is a very old Nursery Tale, but it was never so well told as by the great poet Southey, whose version I have (with permission) given you, only I have made the intruder a little girl instead of an old woman. Namely, instead of an elderly crone, he made the antagonist a little girl named Silver-Hair. Also, in letters from 1813, Southey mentioned telling the story to his relative's young children.ġ849: Joseph Cundall made a significant change when he retold the tale in Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children. In a stroke of genius, Southey had the Great, Huge Bear, the Middle Bear, and the Little, Small, Wee Bear speak in appropriately sized type. The story ends with the old woman jumping out the window, never to be seen again. Southey described the story as one he had heard as a child from his uncle. Among those was "The Story of the Three Bears." This is, in some ways, more like modern Goldilocks. Mure's homemade manuscript remained unknown for years, until 1951, when it was finally rediscovered in the Toronto Public Library.īefore that, the oldest known version had been Robert Southey's.ġ837: Robert Southey anonymously published The Doctor, a collection of his essays. They find her, have difficulty burning or drowning her, and finally throw her on top of St. The bears return and discover the damage one by one. Hearing the bears coming home, she hides in a closet. Rather than porridge, she drinks their milk, but she breaks chairs and sleeps in beds just like the modern Goldilocks. A snooping old woman, with no name, breaks into their house while they're out. Rather, the story begins with three bears (all apparently male, referred to as the first, second and little bears) who move into a house in town.
The story is different from the version familiar today. She called it "the celebrated nursery tale," indicating that it was already famous, and she was just rendering it in verse. until an older version surfaced in a library collection.ġ831: Eleanor Mure wrote down "The Story of the Three Bears", (available here from the Toronto Public Library) in rhyme, with watercolor illustrations, as a birthday gift for her young nephew. Elms wrote that Goldilocks "does not resemble any of the standard tale-types, and includes no indexed folktale motifs." For years, Goldilocks was believed to be a literary creation by a single author. Goldilocks and the Three Bears is one of the most famous fairytales today.
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