In 1837 Robert Southey (1774-1843), a British poet and a member of the so-called Lake District poets that included Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a fa

The Story of Robert Southey and the Three Bears

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2022-05-13 02:30:01

In 1837 Robert Southey (1774-1843), a British poet and a member of the so-called Lake District poets that included Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a fairy tale entitled The Story of the Three Bears, a precursor to one of the most popular of children’s stories, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.[1] Like so many fairy tales, it has a long oral pre-history. Southey is credited with being the first to write it down. In his version, the protagonist is not a pretty little girl with golden locks, but an old woman, and not a very nice one, at that. Here is a taste (pun intended) from Southey’s The Story of the Three Bears:[2]

So first she tasted the porridge of the Great, Huge Bear, and that was too hot for her; and she said a bad word about that. And then she tasted the porridge of the Middle Bear, and that was too cold for her; and she said a bad word about that, too. And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; and that was neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right; and she liked it so well, that she ate it all up; but the naughty old Woman said a bad word about the little porridge-pot, because it did not hold enough for her.

Over the course of the years the tale was modified in ways designed to make it more palatable (pun still intended). In 1850 Joseph Cundall, in his collection A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children, transformed (with Southey’s approval) the old Woman into a pretty little girl called Silver-hair. The trio of bears remained bachelors. According to Tatar (2002) the three bears became a family around 1852 and Silver-hair became Goldilocks in Flora Annie Steele’s English Fairy Tales (1918). But for quite a long time beneath all those golden locks, Goldilocks retained the character of a nasty old woman.