Category Archives: English Language Children’s Books

Thoroughly Modern Ogres

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Gustave Dore’s rendering of the ogre’s discovery of little Thumb and his brothers.

The Oxford English Dictionary succinctly defines an ogre as “a man-eating monster, usually represented as a hideous giant” in folklore and mythology.  It comes from the French via Perrault’s fairy tales (its mate is an “ogress” and their offspring an “ogrichon” according to Mme d’ Aulnoy).   No ogre is welcome when scouring the countryside for its next meal, whether it happens to be a good supply of baby belly buttons, which by oni, the ogres of Japan, relish, or a brace of fat boys rolled in bread crumbs and fried in butter, the favorite dish of the giant Snap-‘em up in Uncle David’s nonsensical story from Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839).  The ogres I’ve found in picture books from the last ten years seem to belong to an altogether different subspecies.The title of Michael Morpurgo’s The Ogre Who Wasn’t (2023) gives fair warning.  A somewhat forced reinvention of Grimms’ The Frog Prince is odd place to invoke the presence of a monster.  Motherless Princess Clara discovers a teeny tiny ogre in the garden and stows him under the bed in a hot pink character shoe.  Because her father is away most of the time, the disagreeable servants try to constrain her but she defies them by keeping  an extensive  menagerie in her room and running wild barefoot in the garden in dirty shorts with uncombed hair. One evening she confides her pain to her best friend the loyal little ogre, who reveals that he is really the Toad King and has magical powers, which can be put at her service.  He grants her wishes to scrap the help and give her a stay-at-home dad with a nice new wife.  There is nothing more for the new racially blended family to do in this sweetly vapid story but live happily ever after.The creature in Peter McCarty’s 2009 picture book Jeremy Draws a Monster is quite satisfying–big, blue, and bulky with multiple horny protrusions, pinpoint eyes, big nostrils and bare earholes (funny preparatory drawings turn up on the endpapers).  But things go awry almost immediately.  It wants a sandwich, when it ought to threaten Jeremy, a much more substantial mouthful.  It wants consumer goods to help pass the time, including a television so it can watch the game.  Wearing a dandy red hat, it goes out on the town and hogs the single bed when it gets back very late. That is the last straw.  Jeremy draws a suitcase and one-way bus ticket and escorts the big blue pest to the station in the morning.  Then he joins the neighborhood kids in games for the first time.  Obviously the ogre is a projection of Jeremy’s imagination, which probably explains why his creation won’t eat him and goes without putting up a fight.  If it isn’t real and only looks dangerous, then the story deflates without any conflict between the two unequal characters. Even if the point were that monsters are all in your head, of which I’m unconvinced, the imagination demands the possibility of them being real.Leave it to David Sedaris to think up Pretty Ugly (2024), a typically weird story, the last to be illustrated by the late Ian Falconer.  Dedicated to Tiffany, Sedaris’s sister who committed suicide, he also pays tribute to the ability of sister Amy to make ghastly faces. Whenever the adorable little ogrichon Anna is awful, she is so good that her parents and grandmother coo that she really is “something.”  Her bad habit of making dreadful faces–adoring gran starts at the fuzzy bunny gran–prompts her mother to warns her quite correctly that if she doesn’t stop it, she’s going to be sorry.  Anna dismisses her concern, until the features of her most horrible face of all (shown to the left) cannot be reversed.  Even a medical intervention fails to restore her face to its original loveliness. While her loving family can live with their little monstrosity in a new guise, her peer group has no problem reminding how her how hideous she is now.  After secluding herself in the wood shed for a miserable three days, Anna remembers her grandmother’s consoling words about true inner beauty and sticks her hand down her throat to turn herself inside out, which solves the problem (below).  There is nothing traditional about this ogre story, but if they ever start creating picture books about family life, they could do worse than take Sedaris as their literary model. I’m not sure why authors and illustrators who have been busy reinventing Western folklore’s traditional baddies have smoothed off most of their rough edges. As monsters go, an ogre is terrifying, but otherwise uncomplicated. It stomps around, uses brute force to capture people, and devours them, sometimes with guests. Maybe it tosses the bones into a large, grisly, untidy heap outside its dwelling place. Still, a  brave and quick-thinking child like Little Thumb  has a shot at defeating one.  But perhaps the classic stand-off between big and small compares unfavorably with old and modern stories about Japanese yokai and requires big injections of horror and violence to hold its own in today’s media environment.  Time to clap if you believe in ogres?

A Woman’s Work at Her Needle Is Never Done

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“Work” with respect to girls and women used to be synonymous with “needlework.”  Not just the stitching of samplers, but “plain sewing,” the making of shifts and shirts, aprons and babies’ caps for members of the family.   Those tasks were not relegated to the servants: princesses and queens were supposed to cheerfully perform  this necessary work as well.  Virtuous female characters from the Bible and classical literature were cited as examples.  It was said the daughters of Queen Charlotte were expert at tapestry work and fine embroidery of all kinds.

But times were changing according to the anonymous author of The Little Needle Woman: Or the Pleasures of Work.  Published with the Approbation of The Princess Royal of Lilliput, for the Entertainment of the Ladies of Great-Britain and Ireland  (Gainsborough: H. Mozley, 1792).  He or she exclaimed:

Needle—work, the cares of domestic affairs, a serious and retired life, is the proper function of women; and for this they were designed by Providence.  The depravity of the age has indeed affixed to these customs which are  very near as old as the creation, an idea of meanness and contempt; but then what has it substituted in the room of them?  A soft indolence, a stupid idleness, frivolous conversation, vain amusements, a strong passion for public shews, and a frantic love of gambling.

If dexterity with the needle was as important as claimed above, then surely this little pamphlet has illustrations of obedient little girls hard at work.  Just one–the frontispiece shows a girl sewing while she watches the baby in the cradle.  But there is also a picture of a girl practicing the piano while her mama watches, which directly contradicts the rant in the introduction.…To be honest, there are more illustrations in 18th-century children’s books of boys mistreating animals in than of girls sewing.  Only one I’ve found in the collection so far is The Brother’s Gift, which was first published by Francis Newbery in 1770.  The story is straightforward enough.  Kitty Bland returns home from boarding school “perfectly spoiled,” having picked up affected manners.  Like most boarding school misses, she can’t spell correctly, write neatly, read aloud nicely, or, most important of all, sew carefully.  In spite of all this her older brother Billy loves her too much to let this continue  and explains kindly why it is to her advantage to learn all these things—and stop spending so much time staring at herself in the mirror.  Here she is hard at work.And here is her thimble.

If Kitty applies herself, she might one day produce a map sampler like this one in the Victoria and Albert Museum.Or aspire to needle paintings  in worsted like Mary Linwood, who exhibited her full-size copies of old masters in a  gallery on Leicester Square in London for decades.  Here is one after the famous animal painter, George Stubbs.