The audience for fairy tales

 Fairy tales are not just for children.  In fact, the first fairy tales were told to adults - not to children. But they are magical.  They have the ability to unite societies across many different kinds of barriers. They can, in effect, be a social binding agent.  Adults enjoy being children again; different generations and classes lose themselves in the make-believe in different ways and, in the process, are united by the pleasures of enchantment.  Hope is conjured; the lost cause is championed; the underdog comes out on top. During the nineteenth-century fairy tales began their migration from the communal hearth into the nursery.  Urbanization and industrialization began to have an impact on the tradition of oral storytelling and fairy tales began to appear more frequently as stories for children.

Gustave Dore's illustration for Tales of Perrault, 1862

This was not in my paper - but I also think that the advent of the printing press played a role in the spread of fairy tales also.   With easier printing, the cost of printing - and thus of books - went down.  More people learned to read. And they wanted to read things that were in their own language and spoke to their own interests.  What better than tales that reminded them of stories they had heard told to them when they were children?  No sources to back that up - just my own personal beliefs.  

Speaking of sources - time to cite a few more!

Opie, Iona and Peter.  The Classic Fairy Tales. New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1992 revised

And pretty much anything by Zipes.  The one I used was Zipes, J. (1988) The Brothers Grimm: from enchanted forests to the modern world. New York, NY:   Routledge.

Jack Zipes has written and lectured extensively on the subject of fairy tales.  At last count, he had written fifteen books and edited at least a dozen.  He has his own particular viewpoint on fairy tales but his contribution cannot be discounted.