The story was first published in 1816 in German in Berlin by In der Realschulbuchhandlung in a volume entitled Kinder-Mährchen, Children’s Stories, which also included tales by Carl Wilhelm Contessa and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. The story was republished in the first volume of Hoffmann’s short story collection, Die Serapionsbrüder, The Serapion Brethren, (1819-20). The Serapion Brethren was the name of a literary club that Hoffmann formed in 1818.
The short story was published in 1853 in the U.S. in a translation by Mrs. St. Simon in New York by D. Appleton and Company with illustrations by Albert H. Jocelyn.
A new English version was published in 1886 in a translation of the first volume of Die Serapionsbrüder by Alexander Ewing. The preface to this translation states that the already well-known story was only familiar to English readers at the time indirectly, through a secondary translation of an earlier French edition.[1]
In 1930, a new edition of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King" was published by Albert Whitman and Company in Chicago in a translation by Louise F. Encking with illustrations by Emma L. Brock.
Ewing's translation was included in the 1967 collection The Best Tales of Hoffman released by Dover Publications. In 1996, Dover published a new version of the translation, abridged by Bob Blaisdell with illustrations by Thea Kliros, as The Story of the Nutcracker.
