The Brothers Grimm published the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen — "Children's and Household Tales", in 1812. The book contained 86 stories. They then revised and expanded it, repeatedly, through six further editions, the last of which appeared in 1857 with 211 stories. What most modern readers encounter, when they pick up "the Grimms," is a version drawn largely from the 1857 edition.
What has been almost entirely forgotten is that the 1857 edition is dramatically different from the 1812 edition. The Grimms did not just add new stories. They rewrote, in substantial ways, many of the original ones. The rewrites were systematic. They followed a consistent editorial logic. That logic tells us something important about what the German middle class of the early and mid-19th century wanted their children's stories to not contain.
What I want to do in this short piece is describe three kinds of edit the Grimms made, with examples, and suggest what the pattern reveals. This is, if you care about the history of what a culture is willing to hear about itself, one of the more interesting small archives we have.
The mothers who became stepmothers
In the 1812 edition of "Snow White," the evil queen who orders the child's death is Snow White's biological mother. In the 1857 edition, she has been rewritten as the stepmother. The same change occurs in "Hansel and Gretel," where the mother who, in 1812, proposes to abandon the children in the forest is softened, across later editions, into a stepmother figure.
The reason for this edit is, by 1857, obvious to both the Grimms and their audience: a biological mother who murders or abandons her children is culturally intolerable in a way that a stepmother is not. The stepmother is, for the growing middle-class audience of the tales, a useful narrative container. She can embody the fear of maternal violence without requiring the reader to confront the idea that biological mothers, too, sometimes do terrible things. The 1812 versions had preserved the older folk-tale structure, in which the mother figure could genuinely be monstrous. The 1857 versions replaced her with someone it was safer to hate.
The sexual content that was removed
A good deal of the original material collected by the Grimms contained sexual content that would, today, be considered mildly lewd at most, but which was, by the standards of 1850s Germany, intolerably frank for a book aimed at children. Much of this was stripped out.
The most famous example is "Rapunzel." In the 1812 version, Rapunzel's pregnancy, which reveals to the witch that the prince has been visiting her, is explicit. Rapunzel asks the witch, innocently, why her clothes are getting tighter. In the 1857 version, the pregnancy is replaced with a more coded giveaway: Rapunzel accidentally mentions the prince. The sexual implication is preserved only as subtext. A modern child reading the 1857 Rapunzel would have no reason to know that the witch's fury was at an unmarried pregnancy, rather than at simple disobedience. The 1812 child would have understood immediately.
The 1812 child would have understood immediately what the 1857 child had to have the frame explained.
The violence that stayed, and the violence that went
The Grimms, interestingly, did not tone down the physical violence in most of the stories across editions. The wolf still gets stones sewn into his belly. The stepsisters still cut off parts of their feet to fit into the glass slipper. The evil queen in Snow White is still made to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. The physical cruelty of the tales survives basically unedited from 1812 to 1857.
What was edited out was the violence directed at certain categories of person. Specifically: the early editions contained stories in which sympathetic protagonists killed Jewish characters, who were presented as stereotypes. These stories were dropped from later editions, not for ethical reasons in the way we would now consider ethical, but because they were thought unseemly for the developing middle-class sensibility. A useful reminder that editorial change is not always progress, sometimes it is just the replacement of one kind of ugliness with a different kind of silence.
What the pattern reveals
Take the three categories together, mothers becoming stepmothers, sexual content being coded, certain violence being erased, and a picture emerges of what the 19th-century German middle class wanted children's stories to do. The stories were supposed to entertain, instruct morally, and confirm a particular vision of family and society as safe, orderly, and bounded. The earlier, rougher versions had been willing to show: mothers who were not safe, sexuality that was not married, and violence against people the audience might, in different versions of themselves, have been.
The 1857 edition is the one that got into most English translations. It is the one that influenced Disney, which is to say, the one that shaped the modern international conception of what a "fairy tale" is. What we think of as the fairy tale tradition is, in other words, already a heavily edited version of itself. The original material was stranger, darker, and more honest about the shape of what people feared. Most of it is still readable, if you know where to look. But you have to look. The 1812 edition exists in scholarly translations; it does not exist on most bookstore shelves.
I think about this, occasionally, when I hear an argument about what should and shouldn't be in a contemporary children's book. The argument is always conducted as if there is an original, uncorrupted version of the tradition being defended against modern distortions. There is not. The tradition is, and has always been, the product of a series of editorial choices that reflect the anxieties of the age that made them. The Grimms did their own editing. Every generation does. The question is not whether to edit but what the edits, taken together, say about the editor.