Unkind Children's Writers: The Weirdness of Famous Writers, After Which You Look Differently at Children's Books

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

It seems that people who write wonderful stories for children should be just as wonderful. And also good parents, of course. If you do not want to part with this fairy tale, it is better not to read the real biographies of many children's writers.

Peter Pan prototype hated Barry's book

The film with Johnny Depp tells the story of the emergence of a book about Peter Pan: an elderly, very lonely bachelor began to take care of other people's children - after all, he did not have his own, and their mother was so sweet! In real life, the author of Peter Pan was married and had no children, because - this can be learned from the letters of his wife and himself - he did not have sex with his wife. The mother of those same children was happily married, and Barry constantly spent time with the children, and not with their parents - as a family friend. Since no one knew about his sexual incapacity with women, it looked exactly like a longing for paternity.

However, modern researchers are inclined to think that the writer generally found only the company of little boys pleasant. What scares him is that he built Neverland with them - there are associations with Michael Jackson, who also "was friends with families" and also created a fabulous country, only under the pretext that he himself was like a child. There are photographs showing what appears to be a frequent game: in the guise of Captain Hook, Barry grabs one of the boys. You can also draw attention to Hook's obsession with Peter Pan, to the fact that Wendy does not cause any of the boys even a hint of romantic feelings - she is needed only to take care of the boys …

But the same researchers warn against rampant fantasies. There is no evidence that children have suffered from communication with the writer. Not to consider the fact that Barry's photo album was filled with their photos as such? Even where they are naked, they pose with their mother and the whole composition is innocent.

True, alas, it cannot be added that the very boys whom Barry constantly took care of lived a long and happy life. One of them drowned young, besides with his lover, a man named Rupert Buxton, the other died during the First World War. The same Peter, after whom Peter Pan was named, suffered from depression all his life and committed suicide. By the way, it was he who did not like Barry's book very much.

Interestingly, the writer adored his character so much that he commissioned a sculptural image of him and secretly (and illegally) installed it in Kensington Park, which, by the way, belonged to the royal family. The royal family didn't like it very much. They took the installation of the statue as an act of self-promotion. But the children liked Peter Pan so much that they left the statue.

Children are good when they are small. Or not good at all

When Dickens wrote his books, the division of them into children and adults was still conditional, and nevertheless, some of his works began to immediately be attributed to children's literature. This, of course, "The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twist", the instructive "Christmas Carol", "Cricket on the stove" and "The Antiquities Shop". Looking back now at these books, it is difficult to imagine that they have long been considered children's literature - there is so much childish malice towards people in them. Unsurprisingly, they are usually heavily adapted in film adaptations.

In life, Dickens loved children very much, but only very small ones. As soon as the child entered school age, the writer seemed to forget about him. Yes, we are talking about his own children, and not some outsiders. Perhaps, so that the kids would not be transferred in the house, he made ten children to his wife. And all ten at some point do not care that they were left without a father. The contrast between the years of affection and the sudden estrangement that began was likely to have a profound effect on their mental health.

By the way, Hans Christian Andersen, with whom Dickens was friends for some time, openly hated children in general and believed that he was writing his fairy tales for adults. The popularity of it with the kids somewhat offended him: what do they understand in his literature! Andersen had high hopes for communicating with Dickens, as sentimental and sublime as himself, and eventually came to visit him. As a result, Dickens became very cold towards his Danish colleague - although Andersen managed not to even notice that his dear friend finds it strange when Hans Christian lies on the lawn and sobs.

Children's writer who was a fascist

Gianni Rodari was a good man and an excellent family man: he adored his wife, was not rude to children, worked successfully at school. But for the period of work at school, Rodari just had to find himself in the party of fascists. He was very young and seems to have sincerely shared Mussolini's ideas. But a few years later, after the deaths of several of his acquaintances in concentration camps, Rodari became a member of the Resistance. Neither he, let alone the publishers in the USSR, remembered these few years of fascism with the children's writer.

Tolstoy's unhealthy addiction

The classic of pre-revolutionary children's literature Leo Tolstoy loved to teach peasant children for free and constantly repeated to his own children that one must live according to honor. But he was very unimportant as a father. His gentleness has always been for other people's children. With his own, he was strict, picky, fanned real sins from their childish pranks. He loved to watch people die, and his own children were no exception: the death of his six-year-old son Vanya, painful, many days long, he describes with a feeling very similar to admiration. And his childhood stories often revolve around death.

In general, many of his children died young from the fact that their mother's body was too worn out by frequent childbirth. Doctors warned Tolstoy that children would be born too weak and live short if they now continue to conceive new ones. But Lev Nikolayevich insisted that his wife give birth further: "Why do I need you differently." Given his love of watching the dying, his behavior looks like a desire to watch the dying more often.

Ouspensky gave his daughter to the sect

One of the most beloved children's writers in Russia with real children was not very affectionate. It is known that he strictly forbade the son of one of his wives, his stepson, to seek comfort from his mother at night - and the boy was very anxious. As a result, the boy sometimes sat at midnight at the door to the bedroom of his mother and stepfather, afraid to knock and return to his room. He quietly crawled away to sleep only when he was completely freezing. The mother did not know anything - the son was afraid to tell her that he was half violating the prohibition of his stepfather.

But even with his own daughter, Ouspensky's relationship can hardly be called good. When she was little, the writer used her as a secret liaison with his mistresses. The girl understood everything, but she was afraid to tell her mother and was very tormented by the fact that she was participating in her father's romantic scams.

In Soviet times, there were no official sects, but in fact, in the eighties, they flourished throughout the country in the wake of enthusiasm for theories about how to make a new, perfect person. One of these sects was created by Viktor Stolbun. The sect recruited the parents of the children for money, promising to "fix" them or raise them into the people of the future. Often their mothers were there with the children. Premises for the educational process were provided by adult sectarians. As the former "educated" Stolbuna Anna Chedia Sandermoen recalls in her book "A sect in my grandmother's house", the children in it were used for free labor, almost nothing was taught and they were openly beaten. Not all of them - there were those who were not touched with a finger, so that something would not work out, but they also experienced stress, watching how their peers were brought up with cuffs, and also worked from seven in the morning until nine in the evening.

Anna recalls that the children slept in the mud, constantly suffered from head lice (simply lice), they were taught that the sect was saving the world from schizophrenia and that they were all sick, they told about mothers outside the sect that they were prostitutes. In such a situation, Eduard Uspensky sent his daughter Tatyana to reform. At that moment she was eleven years old. She managed to escape some time later when she and her two boys were sent to the store. I got on the train and drove to Moscow. On the street, I collected money from passers-by on the subway to get home.

Ouspensky confessed to his acquaintances that he hated children in general. They frankly annoyed him, but children's books and their characters brought him huge incomes. At meetings with children, he could say aside about a girl who asked a stupid, as it seemed to him, question: "Can I give her a pendel?"

Pamela Travers also did not have a good relationship with children. When you find out all its ins and outs, it becomes clear why the creator Mary Poppins was loved much less than her heroine, and she herself hated Disney.