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=** OVERVIEW:**=
 * TITLE:** “Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Lamp”


 * DATE:** 1839 is written on the inside cover, the earliest record of a first edition I could find was in 1846.


 * ILLUSTRATIONS:** Copper engravings hand-colored with watercolor and gouache pigment. Engravings were etched by a team including Brightly, Gilbert, Gihon, and Downes, with original designs by the popular American illustrator, Felix O. C. Darley.


 * EDITOR**: Lawrence Lovechild


 * PUBLISHING INFO:** Philadelphia, Lindsay & Blakiston


 * APPEARANCE**: Cardboard cover with red cloth stretched over it, embossed gold title and illustration, no headbands. Printed on wove paper, most likely using a mechanized press. Thicker paper is used for the illustrations.

= CULTURAL HISTORY: = = WHERE DOES THE STORY OF THIS BOOK BEGIN? = Well, to answer that question fully, one has to consider the long lineage of other books in this book’s family tree. The story begins over 1,000 years ago. The earliest fragment of a text called “Alf Lailah,” or “The Arabian Nights,” discovered dates back to 879 AD.
 * PROVENANCE:** Originally owned by Lora Swartz, a Goucher graduate in the 1920’s. Her son, Mano Swartz, donated the book to Special Collections.13 libraries worldwide have a copy of this edition.



It is doubtful that even this is the “original” text—the history of the collection of stories now known as //One Thousand and One Nights//, or //The Arabian Nights//, is exceedingly complicated, twisted, and tangled in that almost no two versions of the early texts are exactly the same. The frame narrative probably began in India or Persia, but lacked the promised 1001 stories. As it got passed around and expanded, it grew into the incredibly layered, complex text we have today. To call the //Arabian Nights// primarily Arabian at all is somewhat of a misnomer—there is no one national identity to all of the stories, as they represent a history of Mesopatamian, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Arabic folklore combined.



Fast forward to the year 1704. It is here we meet the French Orientalist and translator, Antoine Galland.

Though he’s been working on a translation of a late Arabic version of //Nights// into his native French, Galland has an encounter that will fundamentally change the way //The 1001 Nights// is seen in popular culture for the next three hundred years.

In his diary, Galland claims to have met a man named “Youhenna Diab,” a Christian storyteller and scholar by trade who hailed from Aleppo, Syria.

Afterwards,// The 1001 Nights // contained seven new stories with no original source text. These seven stories, known to scholars as “the orphan tales,” are undoubtedly the most recognizable in modern consciousness. They include the tales of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, and, yes, Aladdin and his wonderful lamp.

Though it’s possible that these stories were around much earlier as oral Arabic folklore, the facts remain that the earliest written version was penned in the winter of 1710, in French, by a Frenchman. It was included in volumes IX and X of //Les Mille et Une Nuit//, published a year after Galland’s death.



Galland’s French version of the //1001 Nights// sweeps through Europe over the next century—it is translated, published, new editions are printed under his name, and this fundamentally Eastern collection of stories finally explodes across the West. Galland is often considered to be the “true” author of the //1001 Nights// as we think of it today—or at the very least, of Aladdin.



An anonymous English translation of Galland’s French text that appeared in 1710 called //The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment//, is stated in the preface to be the source material for this version of //Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Lamp//, later edited for “morality” by a man named Lawrence Lovechild.

=**ABOUT THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER:**=



Lawrence Lovechild was, as far as I can tell, a successful children’s author in the mid 1800’s. The last name “Lovechild” may be a pen name, as, a year later, he used it to launch his somewhat popular series “Grandfather Lovechild’s Nursery Stories,” in 1847. Because of his assumed name, it was difficult to track down any real information on him. He published a relatively small amount of books out of various presses in Philadelphia, including children’s educational primers and collections of Mother Goose tales.



Lovechild took on the role of “moralizing” and editing the story. He was probably a good choice of editor, as he may have built up a household name with his “Grandfather Lovechild” series and would seem to be a perfectly age-appropriate, trusted Christian voice for any potential buyers. Even though this was the peak of the Romantic era and thus an age of American and European fascination with the exotic, a story like Aladdin may have seemed too risqué to present to children without certain assurances about its moral character. Lovechild writes that, while many of the //1001 Nights// tales contain coarse material:

“Aladdin, however, had very few faults of the kind, and revised, modified, and corrected, as it has been in the present edition, has become a highly-wrought moral story, calculated to produce a pleasing permanent effect.”

The printing press itself was important, as Philadelphia’s Lindsay & Blakiston was a smaller press that mostly focused on medical treatises and religious pamphlets. This press could have gotten away with selling an exotic, non-western story like Aladdin as a book for children, because it was previously associated with religious and logical publications, and had the moral high-ground.

The story itself, of course, is clearly written by a Westerner trying their hardest to depict the most exotic, Eastern-flavored story possible (which is, personally, why I favor the theory that Galland made the story up himself). Though the source text is supposed to be Arabic, the book explicitly states that its characters are Chinese, and that the main setting is China. However, most characters are said to be Muslim or Jewish, and there are no mentions of traditional Chinese religions like Buddhism or Confucianism. Everyone has an Arabic name, and the system of government depicted is more Arabic than the ancient Chinese that it should be. The risqué oriental story that the publisher and editor tried so hard to “make safe” for children isn’t really Eastern at all, but rather a Western, folkloric version of the “Utter East.”

**ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR:** Another interesting facet of this book is that it is illustrated by F.O.C. Darley, one of the most prominent book illustrators in the history of American publishing. Darley is most well-known for illustrating Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and his style becomes identified with this iconic American identity in book art. Because he was a prominent children’s illustrator, Darley’s illustrations were often some of the first art experienced by Americans of that generation. In his heyday, he got to be so big that he became the name that a book was promoted by, not the actual author.



These illustrations in //Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Lamp// are an interesting moment in Darley’s career, as they are from his early period in Philadelphia before he moved to New York and really struck gold, so to speak. He was nevertheless successful enough to do these illustrations by commission, and have them actually engraved by a team of other artists. Though almost every plate in the book has a signature of the engraver, Darley himself is always given credit for the art, especially the “truly stunning” plates.





You can see the brushstrokes from where the watercolors were done by hand, as well as the shift in pigment texture of the orange paint, which could indicate that it’s actually gouache.





In these images, we can see Darley capturing a somewhat cartoonish and, by modern standards, offensive view of Eastern culture....



.......while at the same time honestly trying to infuse the images with the movement, color, and magic that he believes exists there.

=IN CONCLUSION:=

What all of these elements combine to present is a book that is fundamentally about the struggle between wonder and the mundane. There is a tension between the conservative, “moralizing” Western aspects of the book and the desire to dazzle and wonder that plays into the West’s fascination with the “exotic” East. It’s a story that struggles with its lineage to one of the most important works of Persian and Middle Eastern literature, while at the same time being a Western, caricaturish imagining of the “Utter East.”