"The History of the Nutcracker" by Alexandre Dumas with 234 illustrations - George Routledge, London -1860s early UK edition - 15cmx13cm - condition: good, original blue binding, with some wear and rubbing, name to ffep, complete with all ill. and frontispiece. "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" (German: Nussknacker und Mausekönig) is a fairy tale written in 1816 by Prussian author E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which a young girl's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive and, after defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls. The story was originally published in Berlin in German as part of the collection Kinder-Märchen (Children's Stories) by In der Realschulbuchhandlung. In 1892, the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov turned Alexandre Dumas's adaptation of the story into the ballet The Nutcracker.