The Haunted Wood, page 18
Everyone knows Pinocchio tells the story of its protagonist’s journey to become “a real boy.” But here’s the thing: Pinocchio is a real boy all the way through. He may be made of wood, so his feet burn if he falls asleep with them propped on the stove, but his passions and vices are human ones from the get-go. What he’s really learning is how to be good. Becoming human – in the final scene, he admires himself in the mirror and sees “the bright face of a tall boy […] with wide-awake blue eyes, dark brown hair and happy, smiling lips” – is a reward for obedience and filial love, qualities it takes him many adventures and setbacks properly to acquire.
The qualities valued in the book are the qualities adults value in children; the qualities, indeed, that Pinocchio knows are expected of him:
‘I promise you,’ answered the Marionette, sobbing, ‘that from now on I’ll be good–’ ‘Boys always promise that when they want something,’ said Geppetto. ‘I promise to go to school every day, to study, and to succeed–’ ‘Boys always sing that song when they want their own will.’ ‘But I am not like other boys! I am better than all of them and I always tell the truth. I promise you, Father, that I’ll learn a trade, and I’ll be the comfort and staff of your old age.’
So he says, but he lies lightly, and without self-knowledge, and in the moment believes the lies he is telling. His sense of self is still unstable. Pinocchio is never going to get anywhere until he’s cured of idleness, theft, disobedience, and keeping bad company. He doesn’t get to be a real boy until, paradoxically, he abandons those qualities that make him most boy-like. He’s least a marionette when he’s actually a marionette – making his own headstrong, blundering way in the world with no strings attached.
What gives the book a more than merely didactic cast, though, is the imaginative energy of its narrative and the emotional warmth that underpins it. Geppetto and the blue-haired fairy are infinitely forgiving, as parents are supposed to be. Pinocchio’s desire to be good is more important than his failure. As the fairy says: “The depth of your sorrow made me see that you have a kind heart. There is always hope for boys with hearts such as yours, though they may often be very mischievous.”
In a way, it’s a book whose argument is that we all have strings attached: you don’t grow up until you live amid the web of reciprocal kindnesses, obligations, and responsibilities that make up society itself. To be a human being, Pinocchio says, is about sacrifice, selflessness, and hard work.
* I don’t think that this children’s story can be read as a straightforward allegory of antisemitic paranoia, but the overtones – a people driven out by institutional persecution, and subsequently demonized as ugly, cunning creatures hatching subterranean plots – are certainly there if you care to look for them.
* Compare, perhaps, the climactic encounter of Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom, where a composite creature issues an unworldly combination of animal cries.
Animal Magic
BEATRIX POTTER · ANNA SEWELL
The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle; The Tale of Peter Rabbit;
The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies; The Tailor of Gloucester;
The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan; The Tale of
Timmy Tiptoes; The Tale of Samuel Whiskers;
The Tale of Mr Tod; The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck;
The Tale of Ginger and Pickles; The Tale of Little Pig
Robinson; The Tale of Tom Kitten; The Story of a Fierce
Bad Rabbit; The Story of Miss Moppet; Black Beauty
THE LATER VICTORIAN YEARS ALSO SAW THE FLOURISHING of what was to become another vast subgenre of children’s writing: the animal story. It’s now so established a part of the imaginative furniture of childhood that it takes a moment and a step back to see how weird it is. Where did all those talking animals come from? Children’s writing has given us countless loyal dogs, perky pigs, and fluffy baa-lambs. It’s fair to suppose that a number of them are echoes of the Aesopic tradition. But they’re distorted echoes.
The animals in the stories of the nineteenth century both were and were not descendants of the animals that feature so prominently in the history of folktale – with their cast of bears and wolves and frogs and scorpions. Talking animals in folktales are, usually, avatars of the magical order of things. They are threats and helpers from a radically non-human world. The animal heroes of most modern children’s stories came to be something a little different. They are something more like humans in animal drag. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, “animals are good to think with.”
Caring for pets is now acknowledged as one of the ways that children learn to take responsibility for other beings. We’ve seen, in Mrs Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, how early children’s writers sought to shape those interactions. Children learn kindness around animals – and cruelty; most serial killers are found to have taken their first steps into depravity by torturing animals in childhood. Yet the seemingly age-old connection between children and animals – in pets and, especially, in artificial pet-substitutes – isn’t as old as all that.
Nowadays, the average child’s bedroom is stuffed with cuddly toys in any number of animal shapes. Their very nappies are festooned with long-lashed crocodiles. But the “teddy bear” didn’t appear until the early years of the twentieth century, and its precursor Ithaca Kitty (a sew-your-own cat toy) only appeared in 1893. Stuffed animal toys didn’t exist until the culture paved the way for them. Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) laid the broadest of those paving stones. Indeed, when she lent her permission to a stuffed Peter Rabbit toy in 1903, she created the first licensed character; the Big Bang for children’s fiction merchandising.
Beatrix Potter was a woman who through a solitary childhood had found emotional and intellectual sustenance in her engagement with nature. She understood intuitively the attraction of animals to children because she felt it deeply herself as a child. Though the Potter industry is entirely centered on the Lake District, she was in her late forties before she moved there to live and most of her body of work for children had already been published.
Helen Beatrix Potter, as she was born, spent the first forty-seven years of her life in Kensington, and you could see that as the spur: she was a town-mouse who dreamed of being a country mouse. She was imaginatively nourished by holidays spent in her grandfather’s elegantly landscaped Hertfordshire pile, Camfield Place, a wild Perthshire estate, Dalguise, and – from 1882 onwards – visits to the Lake District.
The family was very wealthy – her father was a barrister and her grandfather an industrialist and an MP – but their strict Unitarian faith placed them a little to one side of conventional society. She was educated by a governess, rather than sent to school (“Thank goodness,” she wrote in later life, “my education was neglected.”) Beatrix had few friends of her own age, and her close relationship to her younger brother Bertram was eclipsed when he went away to school. She was a nervous, depressive child and adolescent, pouring her heart into a diary and her imagination into the fairytales and fantasies of her childhood reading.
As a child, she and Bertram amassed a sort of domestic zoo:
The third-floor nursery menagerie included, at various times, rabbits (Benjamin Bouncer and Peter), a green frog called Punch, several lizards, including Judy who was a special favourite, water newts, a tortoise, a frog, salamanders, many and different varieties of mice, a ring snake, several bats, a canary and a green budgerigar, a wild duck, a family of snails, several guinea pigs and later a hedgehog or two. Bertram’s tastes ran to the less domesticated: bats, a kestrel, and a mean-tempered Jay.*
These animals were not all what you’d now think of as cuddly pets. When they died, their bones would be boiled, labeled, sketched, and preserved – Potter had the double eye of an animal lover and a natural scientist. Like Charles Kingsley before her – as a child, she read The Water-Babies with fascination – the world of nature was to her one of scientific interest rather than sentimental rapture. She was a painter before she was a writer, and her paintings were painstakingly observed. She even went on to submit a scholarly paper on mycology to the Linnaean Society, arising from her drawings of fungus spores as seen through a microscope. Even as her fairytale fancy built on them, she was interested in animals as animals, nature as nature.
That doubleness of eye comes out in the stories that she was to write for children, their small format modeled on the little books of Mrs Barbauld, and the likewise pocket-sized Little Black Sambo. The original Potterverse – the name fits; the characters duck in and out of each other’s stories – is a strange and unstable place. The characters, creatures of the author’s uncertain fancy, flicker between two states: animals and not animals. You can see the process very clearly in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, in which a little girl in search of her mislaid hankies comes upon the titular creature, frantically washing and ironing the laundry for every animal in the vicinity. Lucie helps the washerwoman do her rounds and at last is left with her own handkerchiefs, washed and folded in a clean pinafore. She turns to thank Mrs Tiggy-Winkle:
But what a very odd thing! Mrs Tiggy-winkle had not waited either for thanks or for the washing bill!
She was running running running up the hill – and where was her white-frilled cap? and her shawl? and her gown – and her petticoat?
And how small she had grown – and how brown – and covered with PRICKLES!
Why! Mrs Tiggy-winkle was nothing but a HEDGEHOG.
The image that accompanies the closing words is a perfectly realist watercolor of a hedgehog, the shape of a little brown aubergine. The hint in a postscript here is that, Alice-style, Lucie has dreamed the encounter. But if so, all Potter’s books are half in a dream.
At one moment these creatures are furred and feathered avatars of bourgeois propriety – Mrs Tabitha Twitchit washing and brushing her kittens, dressing them in “elegant uncomfortable clothes,” and asking them to walk on their hind legs to impress her guests at a tea party. And at the next moment, they are creatures observed with the sharp eye of the amateur naturalist. Just look at the deftness with which Potter captures the movement of Mr Drake Puddle-Duck in that same book, when he picks up Tom Kitten’s torn clothes: “advanced in a slow sideways manner and picked up the various articles.” When he puts the clothes on himself, he looks just as absurd as you might expect a duck wearing a kitten’s trousers and jacket to look. Fancying himself the elegant gent – “It’s a very fine morning!” he proclaims – he waddles off with the other ducks (“pit-pat, paddle-pat! pit-pat, waddle-pat!”) to the pond where the clothes tumble off and sink. The final panel – shades of a Just So story here – explains that the ducks have been “looking for [the sunken clothes] ever since.” The picture shows a perfectly naturalistic scene with one duck tranquil on the water and two with their tails up and heads down.
The fineness of Potter’s observation is visible in little flares of style. The delinquent cat Simpkin, in Potter’s home-made fairytale The Tailor of Gloucester, “sniffed and mewed” at the closed shop door behind which the mice are busy. Potter goes to town on soundeffects – these are books that are begging to be read aloud. A pony goes “trit-trot, trit-trot”; a bumblebee says, “Zizz, Bizz, Bizzz!” and “Zizz, Wizz, Wizz!” The magpie doctor in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan says, “Gammon? ha! HA!” Spinach? ha! HA!” In Timmy Tiptoes, the twittering of songbirds comes out as “Who’s bin digging up my nuts? Who’s-bin digging-up-my-nuts?” and “Little bit-a-bread and-no-cheese! Little bit-a-bread an’-no-cheese!”*
Her creatures’ relationship to food is no less peculiar and inconsistent than their relationship with clothes. Sometimes they eat what their species would be expected to eat. The badger Tommy Brock in The Tale of Mr Tod eats “wasp nests and frogs and worms” (though we’re told, oddly, that he’ll eat rabbit pie when other food is scarce), and the Flopsy Bunnies – to say nothing of their notorious Uncle Peter – are bastards for lettuce. But Pig Robinson has bread-and-jam sandwiches for his packed lunch, the Two Bad Mice fall on the plaster food in a doll’s house and try to carve the tiny ham with a knife, while the horrible old rat Samuel Whiskers, in Potter’s most terrifying tale, hungers for a home-cooked roly-poly pudding, and his wife has a recipe.*
The ordinary laws of predation are, for the most part, in place: the fox very much wants to eat the winningly idiotic Jemima Puddle-Duck, but he makes her fetch herbs and onion so that he can eat her in the manner a human would eat her. Jemima puts on a shawl and a bonnet before setting out to find somewhere to lay her eggs where they won’t be taken from her (which is what gets her in trouble with the fox in the first place). She’s saved by a foxhound from being eaten herself; but the hound’s puppies eat her eggs, leaving her in tears.
Is there danger in these stories? There is. Any of the generations of children haunted by the rats in the crawlspace in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers will have felt as much. Potter’s child-animals are vulnerable when they let go of Nurse. The Flopsy Bunnies are perpetually in peril of being eaten or turned into the fur lining for a cloak. The guileless Pig Robinson is abducted by boat just like the hero of Kidnapped, and comes within a whisker (he’s saved by a kind-hearted cat) of being roasted.† Nobody (except Jemima Puddle-Duck’s unborn children and the Fierce Bad Rabbit) comes to real harm in her stories – but the threat of it lingers.
The stories can’t quite decide whether in their universe it’s normal for animals to wear waistcoats and eat like humans, or whether it’s absurd – and they don’t need to. They have fun with the shuttling back and forth. A mother rabbit scolds her son for losing his nice coat in pursuit of a lettuce, then gives him a spoonful of chamomile tea to settle his stomach. In the matchlessly peculiar Tale of Ginger and Pickles, a tomcat and a fox terrier run a shop selling sugar, snuff, galoshes, and red spotted handkerchiefs. The mice are frightened of Ginger and the rabbits are frighted of Pickles – but they still, cautiously, frequent the shop, because where else is a mouse going to be able to buy snuff on tick? As it happens, Ginger and Pickles lack business brains and insist on extending credit to their customers until they run out of money altogether: the story has become a touchstone in our own day for conservative-minded newspaper columnists.
Potter’s books are, to use a literary-critical term, completely bananas. But they have extreme charm, and they are excellently and consciously geared to reading to children. They are full of funny noises, exclamations, buttonholings of the reader, and typographical quirks for emphasis and change of pace. The rhythms of the printed text – long before picture books for children were quite the developed art they are in our own age – work in concert with the paintings on the opposite page: “This is a Pussy called Miss Moppet, she thinks she has heard a mouse!” And there, on the facing page, is Miss Moppet comically tensed, eyes wide with attention. The illustrations aren’t secondary: the whole thing is a gestalt. And these illustrations capture the doubleness of the creatures: they do not distort or caricature their animal subjects even when they’re dressed in frock-coats or bonnets.
The stories are told from an animals’-eye perspective; Mr MacGregor is seldom more than a pair of gumboots and a terrifying appetite for rabbit pie. Yet in Pig Robinson humans and humanlike animals seem to coexist – pigs are customers at (human) Mr Mumby’s general store. And the reader encounters “Miss Potter” herself, unusually, near the end of The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, where we learn that John Joiner (the carpentry dog; do keep up) has recently built her a wheelbarrow and has been commissioned to follow it with a brace of hen coops. Samuel and Mrs Whiskers, at this point, are legging it. The author (now speaking in the first person) is on her way to the post office when she sees them fleeing up the street “with big bundles on a little wheelbarrow, which looked very like mine.” She adds, peevishly: “I am sure I never gave her leave to borrow my wheelbarrow!” Doctoral theses, I suspect, could be written on the question of how big Beatrix Potter’s wheelbarrow is supposed to be. Is Beatrix Potter, in this story, the size of a rat? Or are the rats the size of Beatrix Potter? Curiouser, as another size-shifter has it, and curiouser.
The animal community in Beatrix Potter’s works is a world that exists alongside our own one. Its web of enmities and alliances, neighborliness, and predation, exist all around us, sometimes but not always just out of sight – they are of our world and at the same time separate. Their existence doesn’t follow the orderly logic of our own, but a more dreamlike one. Is that maybe an analog to the world of the child?
* * *
Meanwhile Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) – in whose hoofprints came National Velvet, My Friend Flicka, and War Horse – kicked off a strand of realist animal stories that is strong in children’s literature to this day. It remains one of the best-selling books of all time. It’s also, I think I’m right in saying, the first story in the Western canon to be narrated by a horse, beating Leo Tolstoy’s celebrated short story “Strider” to the punch by nearly a decade.
Black Beauty was Anna Sewell’s only book – and she barely lived to see it published. Born in 1820, she was an outgoing woman of high intelligence and considerable hopes for the future. Her family were Quakers – though her formal commitment to the faith (if not to Christianity itself) wavered, she used the archaic forms of address “thee” and “thou” her whole life. Her mother Mary was a successful children’s writer: her first book Walks With Mama (1824) was originally composed for her own children because the family’s precarious finances (her father was a hopeless businessman) didn’t run to books.
The defining moment of Anna’s life was what seemed at the time like a trivial accident: aged fourteen, she slipped on wet leaves in the rain while returning home from school one afternoon and hurt her ankle. Her mother later said, “I can scarcely bear, even now, to recall the beginnings of this life of constant frustration.” The injury, reckoned then to be no more than a “bad sprain,” never healed. (Sewell’s biographer Celia Brayfield reckons that the best candidate for the injury was a fracture to the talus bone, but, since the invention of x-rays lay in the future, we have no way of knowing.)*
