Shockheaded Peter
Nine of the ten stories in Dr Heinrich Hoffman’s seminal picture book are what you would call cautionary tales. Misbehaving or disobedient kids get their comeuppance: some consequences are rather lenient – the boy who walks around with his head in the clouds gets rescued from the river and loses only his writing book; some are quite predictable – ‘If you don’t eat your dinner, you’ll grow thin and die,’ ‘play with matches and you’ll start a fire and burn to death’; others are startling and memorable.
The first story, ‘Shockheaded Peter’ is little more than an image, a full-length portrait of a slovenly boy accompanied by one stanza (the book is written in verse). But what an image! The text describes a boy whose finger nails have never been cut and whose hair has never encountered a comb, but the drawing insinuates something more (see above). The corkscrew nails seem deadly, razor-sharp and nearly six inches long. His soft feminine features and his open palms reveal a helpless vulnerability as if a savage, feral nature were engulfing him, his lethal nails preventing others from getting close. (This is Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissorhands’.)
Cruel Frederick is a complete shit, a cocky, cruel brute in a blue cap who tortures animals and servants until the family dog bites back. Frederick gets confined to bed while the dog sits at the dinner table and gobbles up his “pies and puddings”. Serves you right. (A similar role reversal is found in the non-cautionary tale where a hare steals a hunter’s rifle and chases him through the forest in a precursor to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.)
The Great Tall Tailor
The most memorable character, however, is a bogeyman: the “great tall tailor” invoked by a mother to scare her child from sucking its thumb. The child cannot help itself and the maniac appears wielding scissors a metre long to lop off its thumbs.
The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legged scissor-man.
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast,
That both his thumbs are off at last.
This is the stuff of nightmares, the stuff that creeps you out, the stuff you can’t shake – Freddie from ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’, the Childcatcher from ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’.