Chapter LVI: Tattercoats

_Source._--Told to Mrs. Balfour by a little girl named Sally Brown, when she lived in the Cars in Lincolnshire. Sally had got it from her mother, who worked for Mrs. Balfour. It was originally told in dialect, which Mrs. Balfour has omitted.

_Parallels._--Miss Cox has included "Tattercoats" in her exhaustive collection of parallels of _Cinderella_ (Folk-Lore Society Publications, 1892), No. 274 from the MS. which I had lent her. Miss Cox rightly classes it as "Indeterminate," and it has only the _Menial Heroine_ and _Happy Marriage_ episodes in common with stories of the Cinderella type.

_Remarks._--_Tattercoats_ is of interest chiefly as being without any "fairy" or supernatural elements, unless the magic pipe can be so considered; it certainly gives the tale a fairy-like element. It is practically a prose variant of _King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid_, and is thus an instance of the folk-novel pure and simple, without any admixture of those unnatural incidents which transform the folk-novel into the serious folk-tale as we are accustomed to have it. Which is the prior, folk-novel or tale, it would be hard to say.