Publisher's Synopsis
The author wrote: "IN 1877, when I was living in Twickenham, near London, my sister Una happened to be describing a queer character she had met that day: she had a gift for making swift and vivid portraits in words. "He was a little Rumpty-Dudget of a man," she said, concluding her description. She may have meant to say, "Rumpelstiltskin," the name of a dwarf immortalised in the Grimm fairy-tales, with which we had been familiar in our childhood. But her variation struck me soundly, and I said to myself, I'll write a story about him! But, in truth, the story, upon that inspiration, wrote itself. I had a fine time with it, and my own children, to whom it was read in manuscript, heartily approved it. Then Alexander Strahan, the publisher, and the first editor of the famous Contemporary Review, saw it and proclaimed, with many a Scottish burr, that it was "a varra fine piece of worrk, my boy, and does ye credit," and he carried it off and published it in his new magazine for children. Afterward, the eminent firm of Longmans, Green and Longmans, of Paternoster Row, hard by Saint Paul's, in London, considered it and said, "If you can collect half a dozen others of the same sort, we would be glad to issue them in a volume."
