Oscar Wilde vs Uncle Wiggily And Why The Rabbit Won

My son reads…..anything….that is, he can read anything . But that doesn’t mean that I still don’t read him bedtime stories. I do, every night. I have been reading to him since infancy. Everything from Scientific American to The Pokey Little Puppy to Green Eggs and Ham in Latin . We read here.


Often times I read him a gem titled Popular Mathematics. Don’t gasp all horrified. This is a fabulous book. Gloriously old and out of print. Beautifully brown covered cloth boards. As plain as Jane, but holding true to the old Maxim , that, "you can’t judge a book by it’s cover". It Gives wonderful colourful descriptions of primitive tools in geometry, fabulous little historical tid bits,cleanly worded information on mathematics while remaining interesting and fun for everyone involved. We like this heavy brown book. We like it a lot. All hail the eternal triangle and all of that.


Those that know me , know that I am a collector of antique books. I think the hobby has progressed more steadily since my son’s birth , this side-note of my existence. It is these books. I enjoy reading and I have a true love of antique children’s books. There is something especially lovely about a book , almost centurion in age that has worked through generations as a tool of knowledge , maternity, of childhood, imagination, wonder and innocence.


I love the perfect dresses on the mothers , the respectful clothes and actions of the children. Even if they are sexist,and out of date, even if they are pure fantasy in this day and age, these books have something very special that current day children’s picture books, for the most part, have lost.


So much has been replaced by the crass, the crude, the violent, the inane bold type face in garish colour, that I find comfort in the faded ink pastel of "Buddy Jim", "The Cat Whose Whiskers Slipped" , or ‘Rhymes for Kindly Children". From the last I will share you one such ‘kindly rhyme"

The Kindly Rule
My teacher says
that animals
Deserve the best of fare:
Clean beds
Fresh water, healthful food
And very loving care
And when their eyes
Look up at me-
Such deep and trusting eyes
I wonder
How can one forget
To treat them otherwise

This book, was published 1937. I can’t tell you how much I love my books. But I am sure that one could gather. Anyway it came to me the other night to read to him some Oscar Wilde. I knew that I did not want to read "The Birthday of The Infanta", because I knew I felt it too dark so I re-read, the others The Happy Prince , The Selfish Giant and so on and so forth and I made a judgement call and I decided I wouldn’t read them to him now.


I love literature. I actually really enjoy dark literature. Right now I am reading Death On the Installment Plan by Celine, Sometimes I sit at the park reading this nihilistic stream of consciousness , other days some semi panic stricken book or article on environmentalism , atheism, French surrealist poetry or any other sort of thought provoking madness that I can manage at the moment. So I guess it may seem horrifying to those who have a flair for the dramatic, myself included , why I wouldn’t include Oscar Wilde’s fairy tails in our bedtime story repertoire .


It’s simple. The stories are entirely too fatalistic, fraught with tales of martyrs and entirely pointless altruism on the part of birds and statues to be good for any child of six. Not that I don’t love Oscar Wilde. I have a first edition of one of his books, even , haha! But still, I couldn’t see myself reading them to my son. especially before bedtime, highly illogical.


Of course I want to expose him to literature. And I do, even the poetry , but there is far to much sorrow and grief in this world for him to be exposed to it in such a dramatized fashion at this point in time. Others may disagree and that’s fine. But for now I have decided that we won’t be going Wild with Wilde. As for the adults and older children, these Fairy Tales are a must read. Just utterly beautiful and heartbreaking. If you have not yet read the complete fairy tales, you have been missing out.

As a side note I think also the lesson regarding the tales is of course one of repeated altruism. They are written carefully and beautifully to make an impact. I think that with my son this is something that comes so natural to him, whether it be nature or nurture, he has a joyful and yet selfless kind way about him. Strong tales of selfless woe like this , for such a sensitive child could be potentially depressing. There’s no call for that.

So we come now to Uncle Wiggily. Which is what I read tonight. To be Precise, Uncle Wiggly on the Farm and the Story of Uncle Wiggly and The Oats. In which Uncle Wiggly calls on Doc Possum because he feels ill and the possum says he must go to the country to get away from it all. There is only one picture throughout this entire Uncle Wiggily book, unlike the others.This particular book I believe is from the 1930’s. But it was well enough because Uncle Wiggily is embossed on the cloth cover and you get a fine idea of what he must have looked like falling into a barrel of slippery oats,big old rabbit ears, top hat and all.
So tonight the rabbit wins, Wilde will have his time, just not today………….