William Alexander Clouston , folklorist: introduction and bibliography

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Gareth Whittaker

   But, if it be freely admitted that short and simple tales or jests
   have been independently conceived or invented ... it is not only far
   from probable, but almost impossible, that such could also be the
   case of tales of more complex construction, where the same
   incidents, and their very sequence, are found preserved among races
   far apart (Clouston 1891; see also Clouston 1890, 264 and 302 where
   similar ideas are expressed; also Lang 1893, 415).

Both Dorson in The British Folklorists and, more recently, Christine Goldberg in her introduction to her new edition of Popular Tales and Fictions (Dorson 1968a, 261-3; Goldberg 2002, XI-XVI) have described and discussed Clouston's folklore-related books. Goldberg, in offering plausible reasons why successors to Clouston's approach are scarce, has described how twentieth-century developments in folktale research became more co-operative and professional subsequent to the publication of Bolte and Polivka's Anmerkungen (1913-32), "Folklore Fellows Communications" (1910-), Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson's The Types of the Folktale (1961), Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955-8), and Kurt Ranke's Enzyklopadie des Marchens (1977-). She suggests that Clouston's Popular Tales and Fictions complements the modern works in folklore most similar to it--Thompson's The Folktale (1946) and Aarne and Thompson's The Types of the Folktale (1961). While the latter work has a northern-European and oral bias, Clouston deliberately favoured Asian written sources, although he often presented contemporary, orally collected material as additional analogues. She concludes:

   ... the priority of written versus oral tradition was a matter of
   dispute for a long time. Recently, however, researchers have shown
   themselves to be willing to try to consider all evidence--written,
   oral, dramatic and pictorial--of a tale type or of a motif.
   Furthermore, the recent interest in contemporary folklore has
   directed attention to the kind of informal jests that were
   Clouston's forte. For these reasons, Popular Tales and Fictions
   should have more appeal now than it had fifty years ago (Goldberg
   2002, XXII).

In addition to her "Introduction," Goldberg also provides a very useful list of notes on "Subsequent Scholarship on Clouston's Tales" (2002, XXVI-XXXI) where she identifies type and motif numbers of the tales and incidents dealt with and indicates starting points to further research. [6]

The section on Clouston in The British Folklorists and Goldberg's new edition of Popular Tales and Fictions are two important steps toward offering Clouston what Dorson said was his "proper due" (Dorson 1968a, 264). This bibliography is intended as a homage to a neglected writer and a small step in the same direction.

The Bibliography

W. A. Clouston produced seventeen books, the first of which was published in 1873 and the last, at the end of a twenty-one-year period, in 1894. Several of these he had had printed himself, financed by advance subscription from libraries and members of learned bodies such as the Royal Asiatic Society. (See letter from James Robertson [1840-1920] to Duncan Black Macdonald [1863-1943] describing "what Clouston did when he was getting out those books of his"; MS Gen 513/21, Special Collections, University of Glasgow). In the years when he was not busy working on a book, or a major annotation project such as that of the Canterbury Tales for the Chaucer Society, or the Supplemental Arabian Nights for Sir Richard Burton, he contributed the more than one hundred articles and notes by which he intended to put on record the variants and analogues of well-known tales, jokes, fables and nursery stories that he had found.