| The Tales of the Genii | |
| Author: | "Sir Charles Morell" (James Ridley) |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
| Release Date: | 1764 |
| Media Type: | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages: | 2 vols. |
The Tales of the Genii: or, the Delightful Lessons of Horam, The Son of Asmar is a collection by the English author James Ridley, consisting of Oriental pastiche fantasy tales modeled on those of the Arabian Nights. The work was originally passed off as an authentic work by a Persian imam named Horam translated into English by "Sir Charles Morell, formerly ambassador from the British Settlements in India to the Great Mogul" and published by an anonymous "editor." It is the work for which Ridley is chiefly remembered.[1]
The work was first issued in shilling parts, with the full work published in two volumes in London in 1764. Further editions appeared in 1780, 1794, 1800, 1805, 1814, 1849, and 1861, the last two selected, revised, "purified and remodelled" by Archbishop Whately "with a view of developing a religious moral." Whately's reworking has been judged "far inferior." The book was translated into German in 1765-66, and French in 1766.[1]
The book consists of a dedicatory statement and an introductory note, both by an anonymous editor, a fictitious biography of its supposed author by the supposed translator, and the nine tales of the work itself, most of them subdivided into several parts. The editor, author and translator are all fictitious personae of the actual author.
In own time and after, Ridley's book was popular, and was compared to Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. Thomas Seccombe calls "the stories ... good in themselves; they are interspersed with some satire upon the professions of so-called Christians; and, for the rest, are skilfully modelled upon the 'Arabian Nights'."[1]
John Beer, in the introduction to the 1975 Everyman edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Poems (p. vi), notes the influence of several of Ridley's tales on Kubla Khan.
John Martin's painting Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1812) is based on the eighth tale.[2]
Seccombe notes of Ridley's tales that "[t]heir popularity among children outlasted the eighteenth century," as attested by Misnar, a juvenile play written by Charles Dickens based on the sixth tale about 1822.[1]
As late as 1970 editor Lin Carter included the first tale in his pioneering anthology of classic fantasy Golden Cities, Far, twenty-second volume in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.