NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. XIX, No. 3, September, 1963

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CHARLES GODFREY LELAND—NEGLECTED FOLKLORIST
Moritz Jagendorf

THE saddest loss in the richness of life is to forget a great deed or an important man. For that reason, I want to bring back, in a few pages, Charles Godfrey Leland, and his works, an almost forgotten but towering literary figure of our land.

Leland was born August 15, 1824, in Philadelphia, and his whole life, in almost all respects, exemplifies, the successful, ideal American of the 19th Century. With pioneering determination, he succeeded in everything he undertook, and he had many prominent undertakings. He was a highly successful author of entertaining and popular literature; he made an ineradicable mark in the field of folklore; he was a good poet and a fine raconteur; and he had progressive ideas about education in industrial and the minor arts. Moreover, he also earned a suitable living from his literary work. For almost sixty years, Leland was known as one of the most popular literary creators in the United States as well as in Europe. Even though his popular literary work still furnishes timely and pleasant reading, and his scholarship and pioneering in folklore are still as authoritative and as full of value as when first published, he is almost forgotten but for the few who accidently come upon his works. For these reasons, it was a great pleasure to find that one of his important books, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, has just been republished by the University Book Press (New York, 1962). It is a magnificent, informative opus crammed with information for both the student of lore and the interested layman.

Yet as a folklorist, he was condescendingly tolerated by the academic fraternity, even in his own day. Said one of them, “Leland could do very well as a folklorist, but he had too many irons in the fire.” (Leland did, however, contribute to the Journal of American Folklore in the 1890s a dozen articles on names, rhymes and the folklore of straw, bones and footprints.) His crime was a passionate interest in all life around him, and his own life was full of many activities. His transgressions were that he was a successful popular writer—his books sold in large numbers—and that his interests lay in many fields of literary endeavor....

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