For basic information on L. Frank Baum's life, go to my Wizard of Oz page.   

The Twinkle Tales

    The Twinkle Tales consists of six short fairy tales, each of which was initially published separately and later combined into the collection Twinkle and Chubbins, and a longer story, Policeman Bluejay, which is a sequel to "Bandit Jim Crow," one of the six short tales.  Michael Patrick Hearn judges the six short stories to be “odd” and “inconsistent” (viii).  Only three of the stories are actually in “Nature-Fairyland” (emphasis added), and Chubbins actually only appears in two of the first six, as well as in Policeman Bluejay. 

    Following publication of the first two Oz books, Baum was an authorial workhouse for the publishing firm of Reilly and Britton; in 1906, he wrote 11 books under various pseudonyms, addressing different audiences (Hearn i).  During this year, for instance, he wrote the first of the Aunt Jane’s Nieces books, a popular series for girls, using the pseudonym “Edith Van Dyne”; he also wrote the six stories by “Laura Bancroft” that constitute the bulk of Twinkle Tales.  The next year he published the longer story, Policeman Bluejay, which appears here as the concluding story of the book.  Hearn notes that these were the only fairy tales Baum published under a pseudonym, and that they were written for a younger audience than his other fantasies; they appeared under the pseudonym because “it was deemed not wise to issue two Baum books in one season” (Hearn ii).

    The illustrator of the Twinkle Tales, Maginel Wright Enright, was the younger sister of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (Hearn xiii). Her husband illustrated another of Baum’s books, and her daughter won the Newbery Award for her book Thimble Summer in 1938 (Hearn xiv).

    The Twinkle Tales collectively sold 40,000 copies in 1906, and were reprinted as separate volumes in 1916 and 1918; they were also released in one volume in 1911.  Baum included references to his Oz books in two of the stories, so was apparently not trying to make the authorship of the tales too mysterious (Hearn iii).  Nevertheless, and despite Baum’s feeling that these were among his best work, they did not appear in print under his name until 1987.

    The Edgeley setting reflects Baum’s familiarity with the Dakotas from his time in Aberdeen, and from the experience of his sister-in-law and her family, the Carpenters, who homesteaded near Edgeley beginning in 1882.  They were not good farmers and struggled to establish a home there, but ultimately failed and moved into the town in 1899, where Frank Carpenter ran a blacksmith shop (Hearn vi).  Hearn argues that the Dakotas were the model for Kansas in the Oz books, noting that the Carpenters, like Dorothy’s aunt and uncle, had to haul lumber by wagon to build a home and were quite isolated, 20 miles from their nearest neighbors (vi). The Baums and Carpenters continued to be close even after Baum moved to Chicago, although the Baums never came back to South Dakota – the Carpenters visited them in Illinois and Michigan instead.  Hearn suggests that the Carpenters’ daughter, Magdalena, may have been a model for Twinkle (vii).

    Agricultural details presented in the stories reflect Baum's awareness of the economy of the region from his time as an entrepreneur and newspaper publisher in Aberdeen:

      During the period that Baum lived in Aberdeen, the surrounding prairie was being plowed under and planted with wheat, corn, and other cash crops.  Because the land had never been cultivated, it was quite fertile.  For a number of years, the region produced good crops of high quality grain, and the farmers prospered.  However, the wildlife that had inhabited the prairie before the advent of agriculture still lived in the area and, in many cases, saw the farmers’ crops as new food sources.  This reponse resulted in conflict between the farmers and the native wildlife.

(West 141)

General Issues in The Twinkle Tales

• Liminality of the Fantastic World: In much of traditional folklore, the hero must pass over a threshold between the ordinary world of experience and the magic world in which the adventure takes place.  This is accomplished in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is carried from Kansas to Oz by the cyclone; we see it happening in stories like "Little Red Riding Hood" when the heroine enters the woods.  There are a number of indications of this liminality (a fancy word for focusing on boundaries) in The Twinkle Tales - for instance, the first story is set "on the edge of civilization" where the settlers can go out the front door and be in the town or the back door and be in the country.  Similarly, in "Twinkle's Enchantment," the big gulch (i.e., the "magic world" for this story) is just behind her house, and she is told by the beetle that she should be wary about crossing "the line of enchantment" beyond which adventures happen.  And in "Sugar Loaf Mountain," Twinkle and Chubbins cross the boundary between the real and the magical when they go through the door in the side of the mountain.  As Michael O. Riley says:

    In these stories, almost more clearly than in Baum’s other fantasies, it is possible to form an idea of the inspirations for his imaginary worlds.  He had lived on that great westward advancing edge of civilization, and his imagination had allowed him to wander in the great unknown on the other side of it.  He alone of the people pushing the edge farther and farther west had the vision to see the fair palaces sitting on the broad prairie or the knowledge to know where the fairy cities were hidden.

(Riley 125)

Riley notes that Baum had elsewhere distinguished the fantasy world from the real one only by the presence of civilization; thus the location “on the edge of civilization” is significant (124).

• Social Snobbery: Although these stories were written for a younger audience even than that of The Wizard of Oz, Baum uses the stories to satirize the social climbing and conformity of small-town life.  This is particularly noticeable in the pretensions of the mayor and Mrs. Puff-Pudgy in "Prairie Dog Town," as well as in the banishment of Mrs. Puff-Pudgy's husband for refusing to conform to social norms.  The Rolling Stone in "Twinkle's Enchantment" similarly asserts his social superiority, as do the Birds of a Feather who flock together because no one else is as special as they are, in their own estimation.  The entire society of the sugar world in "Sugar Loaf Mountain" suffers severe anxiety over their social position; like the characters in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes," the courtiers are afraid they will found out to be frauds, hollow or of inferior-grade sugar.  The paradise of the birds in Policeman Bluejay is one of several examples in Baum's work where an idyllic world exists only by excluding others; the birds of paradise will not allow other bird species to enter.

• Natural History: Many of the animals that Twinkle and Chubbins meet are weirdly anthropomorphic - the prairie dogs keep servants and eat off of dishes, etc.  However, in many cases Baum's presentation of natural history is nonetheless accurate.  While the prairie dogs eat off dishes and create soup, the food that they eat is typical of a real prairie-dog diet; their homes are not unlike those of humans in the prairie towns, but the arrangement of the tunnels is accurate.  So, too, much of the behavior of the birds in Policeman Bluejay is consistent with that of acutal birds, both as to the food they eat and their behavior. Crows will raid other birds' nests, bluejays will attack crows, etc.

Riley argues that Baum’s professed desire to present the birds “in strict accordance with natural history teachings was not wholly successful, though he notes that the part outside of paradise is “more naturalistic than any of his other fantasies, with the exception of some in Animal Fairy Tales” (126). 

“Prairie-Dog Town”

    West argues (correctly) that only two of the Twinkle Tales make extensive use of the setting in the Dakotas – “Prairie-Dog Town” and “Mr. Woodchuck.”  “In the others, the Dakota setting serves as a starting point for tales that take place primarily in pretend worlds.” (136).  Baum also wrote two animal fairy tales set in the Dakotas – “The Discontented Gopher,” published in The Delineator in 1905 (and republished in 2006 as a picture book by the SD State Historical Society), and “The Enchanted Buffalo, also published in The Delineator in 1905.

    The most significant use of the Dakota prairie comes in “Prairie-Dog Town” (West 147)  It was not the first published story in the series, but it is published first in the book because it introduces the Edgeley setting.  West connects it to Alice in Wonderland, noting several corresponding events (150).  “Mr. Woodchuck” is similar to “The Discontented Gopher” in that it is more serious social satire (West 153).  In this story, “the prairie landscape is only peripheral” but Twinkle’s father “see[s] the prairie as a sort of adversary” (West 153)

    Life in the prairie-dog town is remarkably like that in a human prairie town – everyone knows everyone (22), the evening entertainment is similar to that chronicled in the Sunday Pioneer (25).

    This story may be partly inspired by real-life events and Baum's distaste for hunting.  His son Robert recalled hunting prairie dogs with his cousin when they visited in Edgeley:

  Prairie dogs were such a nuisance in eating the grain and other crops that there was a bounty of one cent on them...we shot them when we had bullets and, when we ran out of bullets, we would get a piece of cord, make a slipknot in the end, place it over the hole and go back eight or ten feet to wait for Mr. Prairie Dog to appear.  They were inquisitive animals and were always popping in and out of their holes, so when they popped their heads out, we would jerk the end of the string, the noose would tighten around their necks, and we had them.  The next part of the story isn’t so pleasant, for we would then swing them around on the string, smash them down on the ground, then take them by the tail and give a quick jerk and the tail would come off in our hands.  The tail was all we were concerned with for we had to turn them in in order to collect our one-cent bounty.

(qtd. in Hearn, ix-x)

“Twinkle’s Enchantment”

    The fantasy here is more like what we are familiar with from Oz.  There are not just the talking animals of "Prairie Dog Town" (and, for that matter, of "Mr. Woodchuck" and "Bandit Jim Crow"), there are other animated characters - specifically, the Rolling Stone, a fantastic invention on a par with Oz's scarecrows, tin men, and other non-"meat" characters.  The humor is generated her by lots of puns and other linguistic play such as making clichés literal: the walls in the bear's cave actually have ears, etc.

“Sugar-Loaf Mountain”

    This would be another charming example of Baum's creation of fantastic societies were it not for the unfortunate racial connotations of the sugar world's class system.  Hearn claims that “Baum was intolerant towards prejudice” (x), supporting this statement by noting the author's attitude toward the “stupidity of rank” in this story (Hearn x-xi).  While Baum may personally have sought a tolerant worldview (though the anti-Sioux editorials of 1890 and 1891 might call that into question), he nevertheless repeats an association with race and color that was common in his time.  As Rogers notes, “Regrettably, Baum distinguishes the upper classes of this make-believe world by describing them as made of pure white loaf sugar, while the lower classes are made of brown.  Readers should realize that this casual, unconscious racism, also reflected in the title ‘Bandit Jim Crow,’ was virtually universal in Baum’s day.” (xi) While the social climbing of the upper-class inhabitants of the mountain is skewered by Baum's narration, the association of class with color is presented without comment of any sort.

    (The most egregious racial echo in The Twinkle Tales comes in a story we are not reading, "Bandit Jim Crow."  The title character wickedly steals from other birds and eats their eggs; the name "Jim Crow" is a common reference to segregation of African Americans, apparently originating in a blackface character in a minstrel show.  Hearn defends Baum even here, saying: “…one should not take Bandit Jim Crow too seriously.  Beyond his name and color, there is nothing about the villain (not even his dialogue) even remotely Black.  Evidently Baum was either naïve or completely unaware of the name’s racist tradition, for Twinkle’s father calls him that merely because ‘all crows were called Jim, although he never could find out the reason.’”(Hearn xi)  While it is true that the crow is not as overtly modeled on negative racial stereotypes as, say, the crows in Walt Disney's Dumbo, it begs credulity that this name could have been a coincidence, 70-odd years after its first use.  What seems most likely is that Baum, while not consciously prejudiced, nevertheless uncritically absorbed and reflected the common racial classfications of his time.) 

Policeman Bluejay

If there is any one lesson running throughout the Laura Bancroft books, it is "Be Kind to animals."

 (Hearn ix)

One of the main themes of the stories is a plea for people to live in harmony and understanding with the wild creatures of this country.

(Riley 124)

    The anti-cruelty theme that runs through the animal stories of The Twinkle Tales is most strongly developed in Policeman Bluejay.  We get the oriole's story in chapter 6, in which birds are killed and stuffed to create decorations for human living rooms and cuckoo clocks, and the terrifying episode in chapter 9 when human hunters indiscriminately kill the other residents of the tree that Twinkle and Chubbins nest in, nearly killing the transformed children along with the owl, opossum, and squirrel.  Riley calls this act “the most savage and heartrending episode in all [Baum's] fantasies” (126), and it bears comparison with the frightening scene of the hunt in Disney's Bambi.  As in the Disney film, the hunters are not seeking a specific prey animal (though Baum would have been equally disturbed by such an intentional hunt), but rather seem to seek the thrill of the kill, regardless of what animal is killed.

    The terror of the "Destroyers" is contrasted to the peaceful environment of the birds' paradise, where humans are excluded - but then, so are most bird species; as Rogers comments, in the birds’ paradise, only one race is permitted to live (xiv) and females are subservient to males (xvii).  She contrasts this “undisturbed existence” to “the rich variety of Baum’s Land of Oz, where every human, animal, and machine is accepted for what he or she is; where females are equal; where conflicts arise because people express their differing opinions; where adventures are possible because evil exists, though good always wins.” (xv) For those (male) birds who dwell in the center of the forest, it is indeed a paradise - but it is a paradise that provides no hope or relief for the ordinary birds outside, and little for the female birds of paradise.

 SOURCES: Michael Patrick Hearn, “Introduction,” Twinkle and Chubbins: Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland, by L. Frank Baum,  Escanaba, MI: International Wizard of Oz Club, 1987, i-xvi; Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 1997; Katharine M. Rogers, “Introduction,” The Twinkle Tales, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005, ix-xviii;  Mark I. West, “The Dakota Fairy Tales of L. Frank Baum,” Baum’s Road to Oz: The Dakota Years, Ed. by Nancy Tystad Koupal, Pierre, SD: SD State Historical Society, 2000, 134-54.

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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