Sex and Snow White: how Grimm should children’s books be?

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived in a deep, dark forest. Their name was Grimm, and so was their life. Their father died, and their mother was poor. She slaughtered pigs, while their aunt castrated cocks with a knife. When the boys grew up Napoleon invaded, and one brother travelled to war. He saw villages burned, girls raped and piles of corpses so big the villagers could not bury them.

But this story has a happily ever after. Because when the boys grew up they wrote down stories. They penned “Snow White” and “Cinderella” and indeed the line “happily ever after”. There were hints of their life in their tales, though, as a new book by Ann Schmiesing, an academic, shows. For they also wrote a tale called “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering”. In it, one boy slits another’s throat; his brother drowns in the bath; his mother hangs herself with guilt; his father dies of grief. A forgotten children’s classic.

This is a story about children’s stories. It is about what stories should include—sugar, spice and all things nice, or frogs, snails and incest?—and how dark their telling should be. In the Grimms’ day, the answer was very. In these stories fathers abuse daughters, Rapunzel falls pregnant and Red Riding Hood is duped into bed (“My, how hairy you are, granny!”) and raped. In a Swiss telling of “Snow White”, the girl is a “slut”, the seven dwarves are murdered and their house is burned down. Disney did not go with that version.

This debate still matters now. Children’s books cause conniptions. In Britain Roald Dahl was edited to remove words such as “fat” that, to some modern eyes, seemed objectionable and (as Dahl might have put it) fizzwiggling. In 2023, 17 American states tried to censor more than 100 books. “There is a sort of tug-of-war through the history of children’s writing between instruction and delight,” says Sam Leith, author of “The Haunted Wood”, a book about children’s literature.

The debate is fraught partly because the stakes—and the sales—are high. The personal stakes are high, too. Reading is dangerously independent. It offers children their first escape from their parents. Go into Narnia or Neverland or Wonderland and you—like Lucy or Peter Pan or Alice—go alone. And what you see there will shape you: for ever after you will know what lies behind the wardrobe door (furs and firs), what eating Turkish delight leads to (trouble) and what to do with bottles saying “DRINK ME” (don’t).

When Martin Amis, a British novelist, said that he would write a children’s book only if he “had a serious brain injury”, he distilled centuries of disdain. Until the 18th century there was no distinct children’s literature. Though not everyone was so dismissive: John Locke argued that, since children’s minds were “as easily turned this or that way, as water”, books should be written specially for them to guide them. And, sounding slightly less like Britain’s foremost political philosopher and slightly more like someone’s six-year-old, they should have “as many pictures of animals…as can be found”.

Publishing eventually caught up. “The New England Primer”, first published in the 17th century, promised young readers illustrated alphabets, a “pleasant guide” to reading—and an arguably muted idea of what constitutes pleasure. From its syllabic spelling guides (three-syllable words offered “Ho-li-ness” and “God-li-ness”), to its illustrated alphabet (“Y” glumly informed readers that “No Youth we see / From death is free”), the tone was sober—though it did brighten for some three- and four-syllable words (“Drunk-en-ness” and “For-ni-ca-tion”).

By comparison, the arrival of the Grimms—with their slaughter, torture and violent animal deaths (a wolf drowns, a hare dies an agonising death)—was almost larky. Though, as Ms Schmiesing points out, their stories were not really intended for children. The Grimms were linguists, not novelists; their aim was preservation, not entertainment. Industrialisation had started to creep through the ancient forests of Germany, destroying habitats, species and stories as it went. Narrative naturalists, they wanted to pluck Germany’s native species of story from its fields and press them between the pages of their anthology before such tales went extinct.

The aim might have been scholarly, but the result was an unexpected children’s bestseller. Not everyone approved: early readers complained about the darkness. Even the very structure of these stories was gloomy: the famous “happily ever after” ending alternated with the glummer “And if they haven’t died, they’re still alive.” The Grimms responded briskly: take the nasty bits away from children’s books and you may as well “blindfold” youngsters so they cannot see at all.

A look at the bestseller chart shows that books that sell sweetness do well. One ever-popular title is “Guess How Much I Love You” (1994), in which Little Nutbrown Hare spends his days trying to tell Big Nutbrown Hare how much he loves him and does not, alas, experience an agonising death. The bestselling book in America in a recent ten-year period was not Shakespeare or even Dan Brown but Dr Seuss’s “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”. Silly, scatological tomes, such as “The Fart that Changed the World”, are also in vogue.

Children’s literature has never been just for children: adults happily read “Harry Potter” and Philip Pullman. All good children’s writers know that they are “writing for a double audience”, says Cressida Cowell, a former children’s laureate in Britain and the author of the “How to Train Your Dragon” series. There is the child being read to and the adult doing the reading: “The very best children’s books…work on both levels.”

Fashions in children’s literature tend to have great “swerves” says Mr Leith, followed by “massive over-compensation”. After a recent testy period, tensions have calmed a little: attempts to censor books fell in America from January through August 2023. Penguin, after noisy complaints, reinstated the fizzwiggling parts of Dahl. Children’s books are certainly not as dark as they were in the Grimms’ time (incest sells less well these days), nor do they need to be. But perhaps more parents will crave books for their children that better balance dark and light, happily ever afters with big bad wolves. ■