“It is very important, Harry, to choose the best course from the beginning,” observed Lady Harriet. “Good or bad habits grow stronger and stronger every minute, as if an additional string were tied on daily, to keep us in the road where we walked the day before; so those who mistake the path of duty at first, find hourly increasing difficulty in turning round.”
In her children’s novel, Holiday House: A Book for the Young, Catherine Sinclair includes a modern-day fairytale complete with good and evil fairies and a child-eating giant, aptly named Snap-‘em-up. The tale told by Uncle David to mischievous children is a morality play about Master No-book and his indolent ways that land him in the larder of a hungry giant. Uncle David’s memorable tale is included in collections of children’s literature, including Harold Bloom’s Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages and Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves.
In Sinclair’s story, the children for whom the tale is told, Harry and Laura, are described as “two of the most heedless, frolicsome beings in the world.” Following the parable, which seems unlikely to have much effect on the impish children, their grandmother, Lady Harriet, expounds on the difference between good and bad habits. Using language similar to Samuel Johnson’s memorable “chains of habit,” Lady Harriet describes habits as strings tying the person more tightly to a course of action with daily repetition. With the dawning understanding of neurological pathways, the string analogy is even more compelling.
Sinclair, who wrote in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, is viewed as an innovator in her memorable creation of life-like children who romp and rollick, much to the consternation—and amusement—of their guardians. A paper on the misbehavior and punishment in Holiday House, one scholar observed, “Children, here, are constructed not as naturally evil, tainted by an original sin that must be corrected through moral teaching and physical punishment, but rather as lively innocents whose lack of adult understanding of the consequences of their actions leads them to behave the way they do.”
This hardly as subversive as the commentator seems to think. This portrayal of the destructive children as lacking full responsibility yet causing serious harm is in accord with reality. The child is not capable of personal sin, lacking reason, yet can cause grave harm by acting on his selfish impulses in a fallen world. It is not that the child wants to be bad, and most children will earnestly proclaim a firm desire to “be good” when asked. Listening to the graphic tale of Master No-Book and his illiterate friends heading for the giant’s dinner table, a stack of bodies in one corner, a living boy hung to fatten on a hook, the grotesqueness of being “bad” is so apparent.
The idyllic harmony of the good Fairy Teach-all’s commune of happy and compliant children appeals in contrast to the isolated self-indulgent boys who opt for a paradise of fleshly desires, which ends in a dreary and solipsistic misery. In this, the tale conforms to the mysterious fairy tale model in which good is unequivocally beautiful and evil is hideous. This simple moralizing is seen as dull to modern readers. One reviewer of a collection that included Sinclair’s tale wrote, “One cannot imagine that children ever willingly ploughed through such stuff, and certainly today’s children will find next to nothing to please them…”
This dismal prediction is contradicted by the wide-eyed child confused but enraptured by the Fairy Teach-all plunging a carving knife into the giant’s heart.
The innocent child is subject to a fallen world. Where the modern purists want to claim the heathen child incapable of wrong, the wise adult sees that the connection between action and result must be patiently taught to the child who cannot yet understand. Yes, the child is innocent of personal fault, but guiding the child to act well instead of being led blindly by passions will determine the result that the child cannot foresee. Those strings and chains of actions performed daily become the rituals of our lives. The habits we have no ability to discern in our infancy render the landscape of our moral struggle in powerful ways. It is not impossible to change (Master No-book does), but it is startingly difficult.
A myopic focus on recent centuries leads people to view Sinclair’s insights about children as novel, but the novelty is Christianity. This worldview of sin and salvation explains man to himself and reveals the path of virtue. Certainly, philosophers in other eras have come to know virtue, but the parables of Jesus, those moralizing simple stories like Sinclair’s, make accessible to the simple, the child-like.
Sinclair wrote in a preface about children’s literature, “But above all we never forget those who good humouredly complied with the constantly recurring petition of all young people in every generation, and in every house, — ‘Will you tell us a story?'” Uncle David’s tale, which seems dull and strange to our ears, offers something to young listeners. It would not have been preserved and it would not continue to delight. The next time a young imp demands, “Tell us a story!” tell something that offers a meaty lesson amidst a rollicking good time.
