Are you Mr Grumpy or Little Miss Sunshine?
Fifty years on, the Mr Men characters still make us smile, discovers Matthew Dennison
THE instruction to readers is a clear one: ‘If you’re ever thinking of being rude to anybody, “Please” keep a sharp lookout for goblins!’ It’s the final warning in a cautionary tale that, as a child, wholly beguiled me: my favourite ‘Mr Men’ story, Mr Uppity. Remarkably, Roger Hargreaves’s first six ‘Mr Men’ stories—the tales of Messrs Tickle, Greedy, Happy, Nosey, Sneeze and Bump—celebrate their 50th birthday this year. Their instant success spawned more than 40 further stories, including, in 1972, Mr Uppity, the ‘Little Miss’ series initiated by American publishers in 1981 and global sales of more than 100 million books. Hargreaves himself, despite his early death in 1988 at the age of 53, has been listed as Britain’s third bestselling author, after J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown, and the distinctive imagery of his buoyant, boldly drawn, brightly coloured inhabitants of Mister Land has imprinted everything from bed linen to plastic lunch boxes for generations of children globally.
As do the tales of Beatrix Potter, Hargreaves’s ‘Mr Men’ books owe their success to their happy synthesis of words and pictures, brevity (each can be read by a parent within minutes), storylines marked by humour, reassurance and an anarchic topsy-turviness, plus a dollop of the kind of didacticism that small children accept as the way of the world.
The Mr Men embody traits we all share. As psychotherapist Fern Dickson explains: ‘In the “Mr Men” universe, everyone’s quirks and foibles can be accommodated and each character learns to see the world from a different perspective—at least for a while.’
Shortcomings receive amusing correctives. Mr Uppity is punished for his crashing rudeness by being shrunk to the size of a goblin; he learns politeness through something presumably akin to terror, although Hargreaves plays it for laughs. So much in British life has changed since the early 1970s: in a world of rude adults, young children are still exhorted to have good manners and many remain unconstrained by the imaginative limits learned by their parents.
Hargreaves offers no cure for Mr Bump’s astonishing clumsiness. Instead, he provides him with gainful employment for which his clumsiness is a valuable qualification— he picks apples in Mr Barley’s orchards by bumping into trees and loosening the fruit. At the same time, the story offers a salve to childhood accidents: next time you ‘bump yourself’, children read, ‘go and eat an apple picked by Mr Bump, and then you won’t feel your bump at all’.
Artist Oliver Akers Douglas particularly remembers the story of Mr Forgetful. Chaos might have been the result of Mr Forgetful remembering a message about sheep loose in the lane as ‘there’s a goose asleep in the rain’, but, instead, both the farmer and Mr Forgetful see the funny side of his mistake and Mr Forgetful’s poor memory becomes a source of mirth.
Echoing much successful writing for children, the ‘Mr Men’ stories generate cosiness through certainties. Botanical painter Katharine Amies remembers the thrill of Mr Strong’s apparent omnipotence: ‘The all-action hero, whose strength derives from his exclusive diet of eggs, lives dangerously, hurling cannonballs
Everyone’s quirks are accommodated and each character learns a different perspective
into space for fun and saving the farmer’s burning crops by upending a barn and filling it with water to douse the flames.’
As did The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Wind in the Willows, the very first story—mr Tickle—emerged from the author’s relationship with a real child: the eldest of Hargreaves’s four children, Adam, who asked him what a tickle looked like. The orangebodied terror with extraordinarily long arms was the result. From an initial single sketch emerged a full-length story. Unusually, Mr Tickle’s bad behaviour—as with much childhood naughtiness a product of ebullient spirits—goes triumphantly unpunished, leaving him free to tickle again, much as we suspect that Peter Rabbit, although chastened, may not entirely have done with garden raids.
Both the stories and Hargreaves’s illustrations linger in readers’ memories. Many of those who read or listened to the stories as children retain lifelong nuggets of their fizzy wisdom or distinctive aesthetic. Daniel Slowik, an interior designer at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, draws on a wide range of inspiration that includes
Mr Topsy-turvy. ‘This was my first “Mr Men” book, given to me by my godmother,’ remembers Mr Slowik. ‘I remember enjoying the decoration in Mr Topsy-turvy’s bedroom, with his stylised wallpaper and bed-cover combination. It formed my introduction to flowers in decoration, although I was worried about a topsy-turvy house and particularly the upside-down curtains!’
Children’s writer Rupert Kingfisher, author of the ‘Madame Pamplemousse’ novels, loved the star-shaped Mr Sneeze, inhabitant of Shivertown, mostly for his extraordinary appearance. However, the image that lingers in his mind is that of the story he never owned, Mr Wrong, ‘which our local bookshop didn’t stock and which then haunted my imagination. Even today, on seeing his image, I can still remember that excitement’. This is the ultimate gift of these apparently simple stories: excitement and happy memories.