Don’t let the cancel mob come for Roald Dahl — kids need his darkness
● Reading stories where children are the heroes and adults are horrible twits who meet a violent end is a wonderful thing
Some of the best children’s stories are littered with violence.
The Brothers Grimm gave us Hansel and Gretel, in which “godless witches” are “miserably burnt to death” after trying to bake little children, and The Old Man and the Dog Dish, in which shivering grandparents are forced to eat out of troughs.
Being parked in front of Watership Down on a rainy afternoon was an experience I’ll never forget — reading the book alone, without the comfort of a sofa’s worth of cousins, was even more upsetting.
Part of the enjoyment of children’s stories is that they’re written for children.
As adults, we ensure that the fear caused by violence doesn’t creep from imagination to reality.
But some people aren’t so confident in our ability to act as grown-ups.
Thanks to lobbying from British politician Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne and two domestic-abuse charities in the UK, Sainsbury’s has removed a mug from sale.
The offending crockery carried the line “A brilliant idea HIT HER ”— a quote from Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
It was that capitalisation which caused upset: some accused it of portraying a message of violence rather than a clever girl’s light-bulb moment.
But even if this mug were using violent imagery, why would that be so terrible?
The whole attraction of Dahl’s work is that it often involves children enacting brutal and occasionally fatal revenge on misbehaving adults.
In fact, Matilda’s revenge is worse than violence — it’s psychological warfare, weaponising a dead father to floor Ms Trunchbull, her bullying headmistress.
The reason Dahl is beloved by children, decades after his books were first published, is that his stories relish in the endless possibilities of imagination.
We keep reading them to our kids because their darkness, unlike the sugary-sweet banalities of the likes of Peppa Pig, harbours sophisticated moral lessons.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance, provokes the childish horror of being sucked up a pipe or swelling up like overripe fruit — all the while being taunted by rhyming Oompa-Loompas — to teach us about selfishness and gluttony.
My mother thought Dahl was too vanilla.
We were raised on Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, where children who won’t stop sucking their thumbs have them snipped off by a tailor with giant scissors, and fussy eaters are left to starve to death.
Hoffmann illustrated his tales with terrible pictures of pumping blood and screaming children — we loved them.
And if you thought Dahl’s Matilda was violent, try reading your kids the poetic version by Hilaire Belloc.
Matilda, the “little liar”, cries wolf too many times, and when fire eventually breaks out for real, “Matilda, and the house, were burned”.
What seems to have been lost in the war on words — especially around children’s books and the influence they have — is the fact that imaginative immorality is catnip to kids.
Dahl knew that children find the constraints of adulthood unbearable.
Being told to eat your greens or go to bed feels like an insurmountable injustice for the under-10s, and so reading stories where children are the heroes and adults are horrible twits who meet a violent end is a wonderful thing.
This doesn’t mean they grow up feeling blasé about violence.
We should give children more credit.
There’s an awful lot of Mary-Whitehouse-esque hand-wringing these days about children being influenced by negative imagery, despite the fact that death and gore have been a central part of children’s entertainment for centuries. Indeed, they’re part of real life.
Everyone knows that Ring a Ring o ’ Rosie is (supposedly) about the Great Plague, and children enjoy the rhyme even more when you tell them that.
There’s a healthy fascination with scary things that should be nurtured, even if it can become quite dark.
Growing up in an Irish family, we were always sung Weile Weile Waila, a school song made popular by The Dubliners, featuring penknives being stuck in babies’ hearts and old women being hanged in the woods.
I wonder what Baroness Winterbourne would make of me.
In fact, if the Sainsbury’s mug fiasco tells us anything, it’s that it’s often adults who have a hard time telling fact from fiction, not kids.
The idea that a novelty teacup could offend is ridiculous — worse still is the claim that it could provoke something as serious as domestic violence.
In a letter to the CEO of Sainsbury’s, Baroness Winterbourne argued the mug “invites men to assault women”.
Putting aside the fact that it’s unlikely domestic abusers would be shopping in the gift section of their local supermarket, it’s bizarre to suggest that children’s stories could influence adults.
This refusal to engage with context is becoming increasingly popular, from the mundane (banning Peter Rabbit for its possible links to allergy attacks) to the serious (banning Huckleberry Finn because it uses the N-word).
We might scoff at claiming that a mug could provoke violence, or trigger trauma in people doing their weekly shop.
But there’s an ongoing push to strip our engagement with the world — and with literature — of context and subtlety, and it’s a worrying trend.
If we truly believe that life should be neutered and screened for signs of offence, we’ve given up belief in people’s ability to think and read and reason.
And if pearl-clutching baronesses start to remove violence and imagination from children’s books, we’ll need a new Dahl for the 21st century, to write stories in which those people get squashed in the giant-fruit aisle next time they’re in Sainsbury’s.