The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

The girl is Marie. Clara is the name of her doll.

Everything the ballet is built on begins here, and almost none of it survives the journey. E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote this in 1816, for the children of a friend, and it is a stranger and sharper thing than the Christmas pageant it became.

A wooden nutcracker is given to a seven-year-old girl on Christmas Eve. That night the drawing room fills with mice, the toys arm themselves from the cupboard, and a war is fought across the floor by tin hussars, gingerbread men and sugar mice, against a Mouse King with seven heads and a taste for extortion. Marie is wounded by a pane of glass, and no one believes a word she says.

At the centre of the book stands the Story of the Hard Nut, which the ballet leaves out altogether. A queen's appetite for sausage begins a feud. A princess is turned hideous out of spite. An astronomer and a clockmaker search fifteen years for the one nut that can undo it, and the clockmaker's nephew is made wooden in the cracking of it. Godpapa Drosselmeier tells it over three evenings, and stops each time at the worst possible moment.

What Tchaikovsky kept was the journey to the Kingdom of Sweets - the Candy Mead, the Marchpane Castle, Comfit Grove and the Christmas Wood. What he left behind is the reason the tale still unsettles: nothing here is explained away as a dream, and the child who is right about everything is the one nobody listens to.

Printed complete in Major Alexander Ewing's translation, made for The Serapion Brethren, where Hoffmann had set the tale inside a frame narrative. The frame has been removed so the story stands on its own; the text is otherwise Ewing's. With four wood engravings from the 1853 D. Appleton edition.

Presented by Solocosmo Press with Original Cover Art by Jessica von Braun