The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

Upon the release of her private diaries, the (British) world was recently shocked to discover that beloved children’s author Alison Uttley, was, apparently, not very nice:

She created the enduringly charming children’s characters Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog but the private diaries of Alison Uttley reveal the author to have been a controlling, difficult woman who despised many people, including her near neighbour Enid Blyton whom she called a “vulgar, curled woman” (The Guardian).

I was not shocked by this, but that is because I recently picked up a stack of Uttley’s books at Savers.

Every evening this week, my son has walked over to the bookcase in his room and selected the next book in the Gray Rabbit series for me to read at bedtime. Every evening, I read a lengthy and meandering story about how a few well-meaning but daft animals spent a regular day in their lives, rendered in excruciating detail:

Grey Rabbit sat at her cottage door one fine morning with her work-basket at her side and the scissors on the doorstep. She was making a night-cap for Mrs. Hedgehog out of a little pink handkerchief. Hare had picked it up on the common, dropped from somebody’s pocket. Grey Rabbit decided it was just right for a night-cap. She snipped the edge neatly and sewed a hem, shaping it to fit Mrs. Hedgehog’s head. Her little needle flew in and out of the linen and her stitches were so small they were almost invisible (Little Grey Rabbit Makes Lace).

Are you still awake? My son isn’t. And these are the opening lines of the story. This is the hook that is supposed to keep the reader turning pages. This is an accurate synopsis of the 62-page book:  Grey Rabbit is sewing a night-cap. Grey Rabbit wants to finish the night-cap with lace. She does not know how to make lace. Eventually she will make lace. I no longer need ply my son with Benadryl on flimsy excuses. He sleeps the deep sleep of the profoundly bored.

Grey Rabbit and her friends, Hare and Squirrel, live in a two-story house near a farm, where they serve as the social and emotional center of their anthropomorphic animal community. Whereas, in Beatrix Potter, the stories underlying the community are often dark — the story, for example, where enraged mice trash a dollhouse because it turns out the food on the table is fake — in Uttley’s works, there really aren’t any stories, just a bunch of animals hanging around washing clothes and making lace.

Are the works classist? Of course they are. Classic English literature for children is always about reinforcing the status quo, whether Beatrix Potter or Tolkien (there’s an excellent and very funny essay about Lord of the Rings that brilliantly tears Tolkien to pieces on this and other points.) Most children’s literature is. We’re not raising revolutionaries; we’re educating them about how their society works and where they fit into it.

(In classic American children’s literature, for example, we teach children that if you give and give without asking anything in return, all that will remain of you is a sad stump in a forest, and that, when your parents leave you at home, you should never admit manic felines who obviously follow the Grateful Dead and own many Phish albums, especially if a talking goldfish warns you not to. No hippies!)

No, my criticism of Uttley’s Grey Rabbit series is not that they advance a very specific class consciousness — with stern, paternalistic Owl, essentially the Lord of the Manor, at the top of the pecking order; Grey Rabbit’s household as comfortable country squires; Hedgehog the milkman, with his inexplicable broad accent, playing the faithful peasant; and characters like the “gipsy rabbit”, who “was very brown, and her hair was rough and tousled, with thorns and leaves sticking in it,” and is unquestionably the rabbit equivalent of a Magic Negro.

Can you guess what Grey Rabbit is making? SPOILER ALERT it is lace.

Nor is it that it is possible that a person who wrote books for children hated not just children, but everyone she knew, and was consumed by loathing for people like her illustrators (who, I am sure, dreamt of doing something grander than coloring pictures for a mean lady of rabbits making lace). She also bristled with jealousy of Beatrix Potter and Enid Blighton, female contemporaries who were far better writers.

Imagine that. A woman, who should have been nice in real life, was not! Though no one ever said Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were nice. [Perhaps Lewis Carroll is a bad example :'( . And J.M. Barrie was not rumored to be mean, but weird.]

No, it is that they are boring, and that I cannot forgive, because there are tons and tons of beautiful, hilarious, fascinating, educational books for children that are amusing to read, and I am trapped reading these instead.

But they are peerless at putting children to sleep.

P.S. The worst part is: I actually like making lace.