Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Southey’s Intruder Was Old

Who tells the story inside The Doctor?

The Doctor, &c. is a long, digressive book about a country doctor, Daniel Dove, published in seven volumes, and its title page names no author. Chapter CXXIX, which begins on page 312, interrupts a discussion of the Doctor’s philosophy to offer one chapter “for the nursery,” so that the book will have something for every room of the house. The narrator then credits the story to a character.

For their sakes I will relate one of William Dove’s stories, with which he used to delight young Daniel, and with which the Doctor in his turn used to delight his young favourites

written by Robert Southey · The Doctor, &c., vol. 4, London, 1837, ch. CXXIX, p. 316

William Dove is the Doctor’s uncle, and earlier in the same chapter the narrator says he “could not read.” The book therefore frames the tale as an oral story, passed from an illiterate uncle to a boy and then from the grown boy to other children, a chain that belongs to the fiction. The Telling card above lists the telling as unrecorded, since no real teller, place or evening is recorded in the sources checked here.

The anonymity is also part of the book’s humour. A footnote on page 317 credits a borrowed line, “My good little women and men,” to “Southey,” and the next chapter’s heading offers aphorisms ascribed to “the Laureate, Dr. Southey,” as if he were someone else. Later printings name him outright: Cundall’s preface credits “the great poet Southey,” and Lang’s Green Fairy Book signs the story “Southey.”

The 1837 text is a fixed printing, what this site calls a one-evening text: one dated witness, not the tale itself. Like the Arabian Nights, another story told inside a frame, it tells the reader who is supposed to be speaking, and that speaker is not the author.

How does the 1837 page print three voices?

The narrator also tells the reader how the story should be performed, in a sentence that runs across pages 316 and 317.

which never fails of effect with that fit audience for which it is designed, if it be told with dramatic spirit, in the manner that our way of printing it may sufficiently indicate, without the aid of musical notation.

written by Robert Southey · The Doctor, &c., vol. 4, London, 1837, ch. CXXIX, pp. 316–317

The typography does the remaining work. On pages 322 to 325, every line the Great, Huge Bear speaks is set in large black-letter, a heavy, pointed Gothic style of type. The Middle Bear’s lines are in large roman type, and the Little, Small, Wee Bear’s lines are in small italic, so a reader sees three voice sizes before anyone speaks aloud.

The next chapter, CXXX, even assigns the parts: “Papa and Uncle, will do the Great, Huge Bear, best,” while Sister, Aunt and Mamma “will excel them” in the little bear’s voice. Cundall’s 1850 printing keeps three sizes, though not the same faces: large roman for the great bear, a medium roman for the middle one and small italic for the little one.

The narrator who gives these directions also knows a great deal. He judges the old woman before she touches anything (“She could not have been a good, honest old Woman,” p. 319), and he explains that the bears’ spoons were wooden, since silver ones would have gone into her pocket (p. 322). At the third chair he turns to the listener: “And you know what the little old Woman had done to the third chair” (p. 324). Only at the end does he claim not to know something.

What happens three times, and what changes the third time?

The story has three rounds: porridge, chairs and beds. In each round the old woman tries the great bear’s thing, then the middle bear’s, then the little bear’s, and the little one is “just right.” When the bears come home, they repeat the pattern in speech: each bear speaks once per round, great to little, which makes nine lines, and every one of them begins “Somebody has been.”

The intruder’s complaints follow a pattern of their own: the porridge is “too hot” and then “too cold,” and the chairs are “too hard” and then “too soft,” so each pair names two opposite extremes before the third object settles between them.

The beds break that symmetry slightly: the great bed is “too high at the head,” the middle bed “too high at the foot,” and the little bed is right at both ends. Every round therefore ends on the smallest object, which is also the object the intruder damages or occupies.

Counting the words shows where the news sits: in the 1837 text the first two lines of each round are short and almost identical. The third is always the longest, at 12, 15 and 11 words, because only the little bear adds what has happened: the porridge is eaten, the chair is broken, and “here she is.”

The nine lines, with page and type style, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: The Doctor, &c., vol. 4, London, 1837, pp. 322–325, retrieved 2026-11-03

Read this way, the repetition does practical work for the teller. The first two lines set up a rhythm that a listener can predict, and the third line breaks it with new information. It also moves the plot, because the little bear’s bed line is the one that wakes her: the great bear’s voice was “no more to her than the roaring of wind,” but the little bear’s was “so sharp, and so shrill, that it awakened her at once.”

What the count does not show

The count describes how one printed text is built. It does not show why tellers favour threes, whether repetition helped anyone remember the tale, or where the pattern came from. Those are questions about origins, and four printings from 1837 to 1918 cannot answer them.

Motif grid: what four tellings keep

Each motif below was defined before any cell was filled: what counts as present, and which specific changes count as transformed. Absent means only that the checked text does not have it. Undetermined marks the cells where only a transcription was read, because a transcription’s capitals or italics may not follow the printed page.

The 36 cells, with page or paragraph and short quotations, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Southey 1837, Cundall 1850, Lang (Green Fairy Book), Steel 1918, retrieved 2026-11-03

n = 4 texts checked: Southey, The Doctor, vol. 4 (1837), pp. 318–326; Cundall, A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (1850); Lang, The Green Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg text); Steel, English Fairy Tales (1918). Of the 36 cells, 26 are present, 6 absent in the checked text, 2 transformed and 2 undetermined. The definitions are a separate download: the nine motif definitions as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Once Upon a Version, 2026-11-03.

Four motifs are present in all four texts, and all four belong to the counting frame: three sizes, the order ending in “just right,” the broken chair and the nine lines. Every motif in the grid that changes concerns the intruder.

The four texts agree almost completely about furniture, arithmetic and dialogue, and disagree about a single character: her age, name, language and punishment. A reteller who wanted a different moral could leave the counting machinery untouched and change only the person who walks through it. Steel’s two transformed cells follow the definitions exactly: her girl does not swear but is “very cross,” and the list of possible fates survives with one fate replaced.

When did the old woman become a girl?

The first change on record in these texts is Cundall’s, and he explained it himself. Put the two openings side by side and the sentence barely moves.

His preface, signed “J. C.” and dated Kentish Town, November 1849, says he gave Southey’s version “with permission,” only making the intruder a little girl, and goes on to give two reasons for the alteration.

This I did because I found that the tale is better known with Silver-Hair, and because there are so many other stories of old women.

written by Joseph Cundall · A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children, London, 1850, preface, first page

The first reason points to tellings with a girl that were already in circulation, but the preface names none, and this page has not checked any. In this site’s studio terms, Cundall’s book is a new pressing with the lead part sung by someone else. Other parts go quiet with the change: the swearing, the spoon joke and the old woman’s “ugly, dirty head,” which becomes “little Silver-hair’s pretty head.” The ending shrinks to a single line, “away she ran into the wood.”

The change did not sweep every later printing. Lang’s Green Fairy Book prints the old woman, her bad words and all three possible fates, and it closes with the signature “Southey.” The Project Gutenberg text gives no year, but the German union catalogue lists a second edition of 1893, so Lang’s first appeared no later than that. Bolte and Polívka’s notes to the Grimms’ tales (vol. 1, 1913, p. 455) point readers from Southey’s story to Lang’s book.

A Dutch broadsheet printed in Leiden between 1850 and 1881, whose last panel opens this page, goes further in its verses. Its intruder is “een meisje,” and its bears have become a family: “Papa, de groote beer,” “Mama, zijn vrouw” and “de kleine beer, hun kind.” In this site’s rendering, that is a girl, and Papa, the big bear; Mama, his wife; and the little bear, their child. That print is a free retelling in rhyme and is not counted in the grid.

The four tellings, with years and endings, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: Southey 1837, Cundall 1850, Lang (Green Fairy Book), Steel 1918; hbz union catalogue; retrieved 2026-11-03

Steel and Rackham, 1918: where does Goldilocks come in?

Of the four texts checked, Steel’s English Fairy Tales, published by Macmillan in 1918 with drawings by Arthur Rackham, is the one that names her Goldilocks. Steel also gives her a home, a mother and an errand.

And while they were away a little girl called Goldilocks, who lived at the other side of the wood and had been sent on an errand by her mother, passed by the house

retold by Flora Annie Steel · English Fairy Tales, London: Macmillan, 1918, The Story of the Three Bears

Steel turns the rudeness into a lesson in a child’s conduct. Her bears are “polite, well-brought-up Bears,” her girl is “not at all a well-brought-up little girl,” and she sits down because she was tired from catching butterflies instead of running her errand. The bears eat from bowls rather than pots, and on the pillow lies “Goldilocks’s yellow head.” Rackham’s drawing for the book follows Steel rather than Southey: a young girl with long hair sits up in the little bed while the smallest bear points at her.

The ending has the same shape as Southey’s, three fates and an open verdict, but the constable and the House of Correction are gone; in their place, she “got whipped for being a bad girl and playing truant, no one can say.” The vagrant adult of 1837 has become a truant child who might get a whipping.

That does not make 1918 the first use of the name with this tale: this page checked four texts, not the whole printed record. Even the Blue Fairy Book, the first of Lang’s colour books by the Green Fairy Book’s own preface, has a “Pretty Goldilocks,” but she is a princess in a different story.

Southey’s narrator refuses to settle the old woman’s fate. Whether she broke her neck, got lost in the wood or was sent to the House of Correction “for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell.” Having claimed to know everything else, he leaves this one point open, and in the next chapter he hands the voices to the family reading aloud: the great bear to Papa and Uncle, the little one to Sister, Aunt and Mamma.