Book excerpt: In his day, Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) was a well-known figure in American arts and letters, with close ties to the New England Transcendentalists. Though Cranch made his mark in fields ranging from poetry and journalism to caricature and oil painting, his most enduring achievements are his novels for children. Collected here for the first time in one volume, these three works - The Last of the Huggermuggers, Kobboltozo: A Sequel to the Last of the Huggermuggers, and The Legend of Dr. Theophilus; or, The Enchanted Clothes - establish Cranch as a pioneer in American fantasy fiction. Until now, these texts have been largely inaccessible. Huggermuggers (1866) and Kobboltozo (1867) went through several printings during the last half of the nineteenth century but have not been reissued since 1901. The manuscript of Cranch's third and last novel, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus, disappeared around 1870 and did not resurface until the 1980s. It has never before been published. As the editors explain in their introduction, Cranch was the first American author to write novel-length works solely for children, and to fuse elements of fantasy and adventure. In an era when most juvenile books emphasized moral rectitude and acquiescence to adult authority, Cranch put a higher premium on humor and the imaginative aspects of storytelling. Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo relate the still-entertaining escapades of a shipwrecked American boy, Jacky Cable, and the gentle giants and evil dwarfs who inhabit the unknown island on which he is marooned. In Dr. Theophilus Cranch takes children to a faraway place where the sun cannot penetrate the fog and where a suit of enchanted clothes can cause mayhem and grief. True to the novel's closing lines - "For the young, a magic story. For the old, an allegory" - Cranch also satirizes the medical profession and his society's stunting reverence for the past. The editors note superficial parallels between Cranch's novels and Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and the English "Jack Tales," but they believe that Cranch's stories actually belong more to the tradition of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, earlier masters at combining elements of fantasy and adventure. They also detect in Cranch's heroes a thoroughly American self-reliance and resourcefulness. Written during an important transition in the history of American children's literature, these three novels are of special interest to scholars of American Romanticism. Perhaps most important of all they have not lost their attraction for young readers. The presence in this volume of eleven of Cranch's original illustrations for Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo only enhances the stories' imaginative appeal.