I’m tickled pink by the anarchic sophistication of the Mr Men
When Little Miss Neat spots a puddle outside Twopin Cottage, she gasps and seizes a duster. “She mopped up every drop of puddle, and then she rushed inside and washed the duster, and then she ironed the duster, and then she folded the duster, and then she placed the duster very neatly back in its drawer.” As she should. When I was five, my nanny gave me a copy of Roger Hargreaves’s Little Miss Neat. I saw the joke. Little Miss Neat was me! A strange, small person who liked tidying her toys even more than playing with them. My younger brother was, yes, you guessed it, Mr Messy.
Our favourite, though, was Mr Tickle, who tickles a teacher through a classroom window. “There was terrible pandemonium,” writes Hargreaves. Good word: pandemonium. “Hello, darling, how was the playground/park/ bouncy castle?” “It was pandemonium…” Little children love big words. A friend couldn’t keep a straight face when her threeyear-old protested against going to nursery with: “This is intolerable, Mummy.”
So I am tickled pink that statisticians – 13 letters
– and psychometricians – 16 letters – from education group Renaissance UK have rated Hargreaves’s series as having a “really high difficulty level”. Good! The Mr Men and Little Misses are surprisingly sophisticated: more challenging in sentence length, average word length and vocabulary than Roald Dahl and David Walliams.
The researchers singled out this gluttonous passage from Mr Greedy: “Over on the other side of the table stood the source of that delicious smell. A huge enormous gigantic colossal plate, and on the plate huge enormous gigantic colossal sausages the size of pillows, and huge enormous gigantic colossal potatoes the size of beach balls, and huge enormous gigantic colossal peas the size of cabbages.” Try getting your greedy tongue round that.
The genius of the Hargreaves books is their sense of anarchic, irreverent glee. A young reader may stumble over “enormous gigantic colossal sausages”, but they’ll want to read on to find out just how Mr Greedy by name, Greedy by nature, plans to tackle this delicious foody feast.
Hargreaves is never predictable. The moral of Mr Greedy isn’t “eat less”, it’s “beware of giants”. If you are weaned on Mr Men, you’ll grow up to love Saki, Evelyn Waugh and Edith Wharton. For who is Paul Pennyfeather if not Mr Muddle? And who is Undine Spragg if not Little Miss Trouble?
The books play on our soft spot for stereotypes. Mr Mean is the colleague who never stands his round. Mr Strong is the gym-bro bore. We find Little Miss Shy peering at the bookcase at parties, and Mr Quiet eating nibbles on his own in the kitchen.
Last year, there were grumbles that the Little Miss formula was sexist. The series was accused of diminishing women and presenting girls as passive. Little Miss Bossy would have something to say about that. What makes Hargreaves’s characters so enduringly popular – more than 100 million copies sold since Mr Tickle was published in 1971 – is that they unashamedly revel in their own bad habits. So what if you’re stubborn, vain, scary, dotty or a bit of a neat freak? That’s all right, chorus the Little Misses, you’re not the only one.
Laura Freeman’s ‘The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite’ (W&N) is out in paperback