The Three Little Pigs
7 min read ages 4 and up
British tales
11 tales
Robin Hood
14 min read ages 7 and up
Jack and the Beanstalk
12 min read ages 5 and up
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
7 min read ages 3 and up
Alice in Wonderland
16 min read ages 6 and up
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
6 min read ages 3 and up
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
15 min read ages 6 and up
The Velveteen Rabbit
13 min read ages 4 and up
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
7 min read ages 3 and up
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
8 min read ages 4 and up
The Tale of Tom Kitten
4 min read ages 3 and up
Where these English stories come from
Joseph Jacobs gathered his English Fairy Tales into a book published in London in 1890. Two of the best known stories in the language are in it, Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Little Pigs, and our retellings of both follow his text.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears has a curious past. Robert Southey printed the first known version in 1837, and in it the bears’ house is entered by an old woman, not a little girl. Our text follows the retelling Flora Annie Steel published in 1918.
Lewis Carroll first told Alice in Wonderland to the Liddell children on a river trip near Oxford in 1862, and the book came out in 1865. Beatrix Potter began The Tale of Peter Rabbit as a letter from Dunkeld in Scotland in 1893, and it became a book in 1902.
Robin Hood is a legend rather than a fairy tale. It grew out of old ballads about an outlaw in Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and our text follows a later retelling. None of these stories costs anything, and each is retold from a text now in the public domain.