Cinderella
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Cinderella. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the heroine of an old fairy tale, dearly loved of little folks. The story is doubtless of eastern origin, but is found in Germany as early as the sixteenth century, and in the French of Perrault soon after, whence it probably came into the English. As commonly told this story posseses many features delightful to the mind of a child, while lacking in those distressing elements found so frequently in old time tales. Cinderella-little cinder girl-is a poor little drudge. She has a hard-hearted stepmother and two proud, selfish sisters. But she has also a fairy godmother, with a wonderful wand! Her ragged gown is changed to a party dress. A fascinating pumpkin shell coach appears, with mice for steeds, lizards for footmen, and a long-whiskered rat on the coachman's box. Cinderella's beauty and happiness at the ball are most gratifying. But the clock strikes twelve, and the gay gown changes to rags as she runs for her coach. Then comes the search for a foot that can wear the glass slipper, lost in her haste. None but Cinderella's is small enough. She weds her prince. The sisters repent and are forgiven, and all "live happy till they die." We are told that the slipper should have been of fur; that the first Englishman who translated the tale mistook the French word vair for verre, similar in form and sound. But to the English or American child, the slipper of glass only adds another charm to the tale of her who "lay among the ashes and wedded the king's son."
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the heroine of a popular fairy tale. She is the drudge of the house, dirty with housework, while her elder sisters go to fine balls. At length a fairy enables her to go to the prince's ball; the prince falls in love with her, and she is discovered by means of a glass slipper which she drops, and which will fit no foot but her a strange own. The glass slipper is mistranslation of pantoufle en vair (a fur slipper), not en verre.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries pass on as fact something folklorists now reject: that the glass slipper was a translator's blunder for a fur one. Perrault's 1697 French text plainly reads "pantoufle de verre," and there is no English mistranslation to blame; the vair theory was a nineteenth-century guess, popularised by Balzac and the lexicographer Littré, and most scholars today take the glass as Perrault's deliberate marvel. What has grown since 1910 is the tale's documented spread: it is catalogued as tale type 510A with hundreds of recorded variants worldwide, and the ninth-century Chinese story of Ye Xian is usually cited as the oldest written version, giving some substance to Aiton's hunch of an "eastern origin." Since 1921 the version most children meet is no longer a printed one at all but Disney's 1950 animated film, which fixed the pumpkin coach, the mice and the midnight chime in a single global image.
Written for this edition, 2026.