China’s censors are right to fear the subversive power of Peppa
Peppa Pig has been scrubbed from the record in China. Thousands of clips of the plump pink character – adored by children the world over – have been expunged from Douyin, one of Asia’s most used video-sharing platforms, and the deployment of her name as a hashtag has been banned. Peppa has been condemned for subversion. She is too popular, says the state, with “unruly slackers”.
Peppa should be proud. Children’s books and TV shows have horrified authority almost from the start. The nature of the early tales aimed at children is perhaps best demonstrated by the title of Puritan minister James Janeway’s then-bestselling volume published in 1671: A Token for Children – Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children.
Not many laughs, but religious tracts were all that children were given. Entertainment was the subversive notion then.
But without a communist dictatorship, it inevitably crept in. Drama, fun and adventure gradually took more of a starring role until, one day in 1865, an Oxford mathematician writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll published a book now considered to be the beginning of modern children’s literature: Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland,a story shocking in both form and content.
For the first time, it spoke to the child reader, instead of with a dual address that implicitly included an adult sensibility. The central character, Alice, was confident, opinionated – and a girl! (Reading the book today, it is still striking how modern she acts and sounds). And there was no moral message at all, no matter how deeply you delved. It was Nonsense, before that could be a term of praise. Sheer, marvellous nonsense.
But child readers love a rebel. Alice has endured, as has Jo – the tomboy in Little Women who struggles with her temper, makes a living out of the deeply unfeminine activity of writing and never does learn to do her hair neatly or stop striding about quite so energetically.
Sulky, imperious, suspicious Mary in The Secret Garden unbends but never becomes what you’d call a committed peoplepleaser, and such progress as she does make is ascribed to the magical power of nature rather than God. Mary’s creator, Frances Hodgson Burnett, had at that point turned away from traditional doctrines as she sought any possible comfort in her grief after her adored son Lionel died.
In more modern times, subversive authors and characters have continued to make their mark. The maverick Roald Dahl is still widely adored for his willingness to show, in broad, snozzboggling brush strokes, the fantastical extremes of human nature. Parents, meanwhile, look on aghast and worry about the pandering to their offspring’s basest instincts. The former children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson has faced opposition to her stories about fractured families and foster children by those who hanker after a return to a literary prelapsarian state.
They should take heart. It is subversion that best snags infant interest, and pulls them out of the current of fleeting pleasures and onto the solid banks of reading. A little insurrection beats the ipad and brings them back into the fold.
‘Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading’ by Lucy Mangan is published by Square Peg