SAN DIEGO, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- There was a time when children used to sit and read, and dream of fairies and princes and princesses. I don't think they do that anymore. Most children spend their free time watching television and playing video games. Harry Potter's success is the exception, not the rule.

Michael Patrick Hearn's "The Victorian Fairy Tale Book" is a collector's item for adults, not for children. The language is archaic; today's children would not understand a great deal of it, and the subject matter, I fear, would not interest them.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the tales myself. They brought back memories of my childhood, but that was in a pre-television era. Not that I was born in Queen Victoria's time, but we resisted having a television set in my family well into the 1970s.

In his introduction, Hearn traces the origin of the fairy tale, and its decline at the onset of Christianity, with a renaissance in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Shakespeare's plays, among others, delighted his audiences with Ariel and Puck and Titania and Oberon.

The Puritans did away with fairies and superstitions, declaring them ungodly. But Charles Perrault, in France, and the brothers Grimm, in Germany, helped bring the tales back into fashion. In England, the Victorian era saw the return of this genre of literature, with the patronage of such luminaries as Charles Dickens and John Ruskin.