In his influential 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim claimed that children need the horror in fairy tales to help them process their Freudian fears of abandonment, pain, and extinction. Regardless of the average tot’s death instinct, children’s stories from Jack and Jill’s violent tumble down the hill toR.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series have happily obliged. The latest round of big-screen fairy tales, including three upcoming Snow Whites and Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight-esqueRed Riding Hood, market themselves as unusually dark, but good luck matching the grisly source material in which wolves eat children and queens dance themselves to death in red-hot iron shoes.
Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. She lives in New Hampshire.
The other strain running through the history of children’s literature is didacticism. A 1563 English text, to take one example, exhorted young readers to “remember this well, all you that be young/ Exercise vertue, and rule well your toung." If the traditional purpose of children’s stories is to turn them into proper adults, writers have very often treated that mission with grown-up earnestness.
Even modern-day fairy tales read as cautionary tales, and their original versions usually draw even sharper lessons. French author Charles Perrault wrote the first published version of Little Red Riding Hood in 1697 as a thinly veiled warning to young courtesans during the indulgent reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. (“To see the wolf” was French slang for losing one’s virginity.) At the end of Perrault’s version, the wolf devours Little Red. The moral of that story:
Never trust a stranger-friend; no one knows how it will end.
Image from Charles Perrault’s CREDIT: Little Red Riding Hood, illustrated by Gustave Doré, Dover Publications.
The Daisy, 1807
Elizabeth Turner’s The Daisy (1807) was one of several pious cautionary tales published in the early 19th century in imitation of poet sisters Ann and Jane Taylor’s popular collection Original Poems for Infant Minds (1805). In this story, The Giddy Girl, little Helen disobeys her mother by peering into a deep well but slips while “intending to take but a peep.” You can guess what happens next:
Unhappy misfortune! the water was deep And giddy Miss Helen was drown’d.
Image from CREDIT: The Daisy, or, Cautionary Stories, in Verse by Elizabeth Turner, illustrations by Samuel Williams.
Struwwelpeter, 1845
A German psychiatrist named Heinrich Hoffmann published Struwwelpeter for his 3-year-old son in 1845, and it remains the icon of the form. Hoffmann picks up the rhyming couplets and tidy morals of earlier cautionary tales, but takes them into darker, absurdist territory. Pictured here are the consequences for poor Conrad, aka “Little Suck-a-Thumb”:
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go; And Conrad cries out—Oh! Oh! Oh!
Characters in Struwwelpeter are burned to ashes as punishment for playing with matches, bitten by dogs for teasing one, and starved to death after refusing soup, all in rhymed couplets. Within a month of its publication, Struwwelpeter had sold 1,500 copies. Mark Twain translated the book into English in 1848 under the title Slovenly Peter.
Image from CREDIT: Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann, Dover Publications.
Struwwelhitler, 1941
Struwwelpeter became one of the most widely imitated children’s books in history, with influences on everything from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the Lemony Snicket series. In recent years it has inspired a museum, academic conferences and journals, and a successful operetta, Shockheaded Peter. Struwwelpeter has also spawned many more literal imitations, including Swollen-Headed William (1914), with Kaiser Wilhelm II as Peter; the Nixon spoof Tricky Dick and His Pals (1975); and, yes, Struwwelhitler, seen here. The 1941 parody was produced as a fundraiser for British soldiers, and featured caricatures of Mussolini, Stalin, and “Cruel Adolf” in the roles of Hoffmann’s naughty children. Even though it was never meant for children, Struwwelhitler reads as beyond grotesque:
“When patient Fritz in abject mood, complained that he was short of food, ‘Be off!’ cried Adolf, ‘Greedy scamp! To Dachau Concentration Camp.’ ”
Image from CREDIT: Struwwelhitler: A Nazi Storybook by “Doktor Schrecklichkeit,” Haycock Press.
Max and Moritz, 1865
Next to Struwwelpeter, Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (1865) is probably the best-known German children’s story today. Over the course of seven stories, its wee protagonists pull off a series of increasingly serious pranks, stealing chickens, filling their teacher’s pipe with gunpowder, and releasing bags full of bugs into their uncle’s bed. They remain mostly unpunished until they fall into a vat of dough while trying to steal pretzels from a baker, who slides them into the oven. They gnaw their way to safety, but the pair meets their end when they hide in some grain sacks and are ground into duck feed. A few decades later, Max and Moritz became the inspiration for the long-running comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids.
Image from CREDIT: Max and Maurice (a common English translation of Moritz) by Wilhelm Busch; Little, Brown and Co.
Cautionary Tales for Children, 1907
In 1907, the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc published his satiric book of cautionary verses in the style of Struwwelpeter. Belloc’s spoiled subjects die of misdemeanors like fibbing and chewing string; one boy who runs away from his nurse at the zoo is promptly eaten by a lion. Belloc also taps into the priggish element in so many morality tales, with a chapter on a dull boy named Charles Augustus Fortescue, “Who Always Did What Was Right, and So Accumulated an Immense Fortune.” Belloc’s tales received a deserved revival in 2002 when they were republished accompanied by illustrations by macabre master Edward Gorey, who had completed the drawing before his 2000 death but never published them. The original illustration here is by Belloc’s frequent collaborator Basil Blackwood.
Image from CREDIT: Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc, Duckworth & Co.
Slovenly Betsy, 1911
Slovenly Betsy (1911) was an Americanized sequel to Struwwelpeter, also credited to Heinrich (or Henry) Hoffmann. Where Struwwelpeter is inconsistent at the edges—a few characters are adults, and some suffer relatively mild fates—in Slovenly Betsy the cautionary formula has been boiled down to a rat-a-tat of revenge. The protagonists in Slovenly Betsy are all female, and they are all punished heavily in both text and image: The reader can linger over burns, horribly broken limbs, and plenty of plain old heavy shame. Shown here is “the Cry-Baby” sobbing her eyes right out of their sockets. The tidy moral:
My children, from such an example take warning, And happily live while you may; And say to yourselves, when you rise in the morning, “I'll try to be cheerful today.”
Image from CREDIT: Slovenly Betsy by Henry Hoffmann, Applewood Books.
Sticky Ends, 2011
Though earnest didacticism in children’s literature has fallen out of favor, the cautionary tale format lives on in cheekier form, with variations by Maurice Sendak and Mo Willems, among many others. The latest entry is Sticky Ends, a new British book of 26 cautionary verses by best-selling authors Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross. Punishment in these pages falls on a tedious vegetarian dog and Icy Clare who refuses to get dressed. Here, an unlucky boy is dragged off to become part of a school lunch. Hey, there are worse fates.
Image from CREDIT: Sticky Ends by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, Andersen Press.
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The cautionary tale lies at the intersection of didacticism and gore. Gruesomeness without redemption is gratuitous (e.g., the Saw series), and didacticism alone (e.g., the simpering 19th-century child heroine Elsie Dinsmore) is dull. Together, they’re magical, and the stuff of a blood-soaked yet pious genre that flourished throughout the 19th century. The typical collection of cautionary tales, including the best-known, Struwwelpeter, includes multiple illustrated stories, usually told in verse, about various wicked youths who meet lurid fates that match their sins with poetic justice; at the end, a narrator arrives to sum up the lesson for readers in rhyme. The formula’s broad strokes echo through everything from after-school specials to fundamentalist “hell houses.”
As early as 1865, the conventions of these little books were so established that Lewis Carroll cheekily refers to them in Alice in Wonderland:
She had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if your hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds.
Flash forward a few homages, and you’ll stumble on the campy 1971 drug-scare novel Go Ask Alice, a worthy heir to the stories Carroll poked fun at.
Here, a look at the traditional children’s cautionary tale through history. Be good and read carefully, or you might meet the same fate as little Johnny Head-in-the-Air, who didn’t pay attention to where he was going and fell headfirst in the river. A lot can go wrong when little boys and girls disobey orders.