Status
Available
Genres
Collection
Publication
Hodder & Stoughton (1895), Edition: 1st, 392 pages
Description
Publisher: Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs
Language
Local notes
"A Summer Campaign in Brownieland Against King Cobweaver's Pixies."
In Old Farm Fairies, the clergyman-naturalist Henry Christopher McCook (1837-1911) set out to write "a book for youth wherein my observations [about spiders] should be personified in the imaginary creatures of fairy lore, and thus float into the young mind some of my natural history findings in such pleasant form that they would be received quite unconsciously, and at least an impression thereof retained with sufficient accuracy to open the way to more serious lessons in the future." McCook first thought of such a story, in which spiders are pixies or goblins, "the ill-natured fairies of Scotland and Northern England," while the Brownies, "friendly folk" or "household fairies," are the insects upon which spiders wage war, only a few years into the two-decade-long professional observation of arachnids.
In Old Farm Fairies, the clergyman-naturalist Henry Christopher McCook (1837-1911) set out to write "a book for youth wherein my observations [about spiders] should be personified in the imaginary creatures of fairy lore, and thus float into the young mind some of my natural history findings in such pleasant form that they would be received quite unconsciously, and at least an impression thereof retained with sufficient accuracy to open the way to more serious lessons in the future." McCook first thought of such a story, in which spiders are pixies or goblins, "the ill-natured fairies of Scotland and Northern England," while the Brownies, "friendly folk" or "household fairies," are the insects upon which spiders wage war, only a few years into the two-decade-long professional observation of arachnids.