Killing Cartoon Children: Edward Gorey and the Gashlycrumb Tinies
Horror Moments: Edward Gorey Edition
My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the last series on The Sopranos here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.
What do child sacrifices, pet demons, invasive houseguests, sinister sofas and doleful tarot decks have in common? They all feature in the weird and wonderful work of illustrator Edward Gorey. we’re going to delve into all these stories and more as we sample treats from the most horrible of chocolate boxes in this new series: Horror moments, Edward Gorey edition!
Edward Gorey and Charles Addams
When it comes to creepy cartoon artwork, the two illustrators who come to mind are probably Charles Addams (1912-1988), creator of the Addams Family, and Edward Gorey (1925-2000). Superficially they are similar, both specialised in monochrome images full of strange elegant figures having dark adventures in grand mansions. Yet the tone of these gothic worlds is strikingly different and although I love both, they leave a very different aftertaste.
The Addams family was created by Charles Addams in a series of cartoons for The New Yorker, between 1938 and 1988. The simple running joke is that he gives snapshots of domesticity and family life a gothic twist — although the family themselves seem to think they’re perfectly normal.
For all their weirdness, they are living the dream. The children, Wednesday (‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe’) and Pugsley, are seen playing cheerfully with dangerous toys, being read scary stories by doting parents or wreaking havoc to their hearts’ content. The extended members of the clan all get on and help with the childcare and the housework. The butler Lurch is part of the family. Morticia and Gomez Addams, the matriarch and patriarch respectively, are completely obsessed with each other, a fact which was played up in the 1960s sitcom and then exaggerated to hilarious proportions in the early 90s films.
In short, for all their eccentricities, the Addams household is one of the happiest families in pop culture.
Cartoon Violence
Of all the words to describe the world of Edward Gorey, ‘happy’ is the least appropriate. He treats the unlucky denizens of his crosshatched tales with apathetic detachment or bemused sadism. He doesn’t have a running cast of familiar faces precisely because so many of his protagonists don’t survive their plots, they are destined to die in the brief pages of the tiny books that Gorey both wrote and illustrated. Usually, a single line or rhyming couplet supplies a dark punchline beneath a tragic or alarming scene.
There’s a sketch-show sensibility to some of these short stories which is likely influenced by Gorey’s time in the avante guarde theatre scene. One of my favourite anecdotes from Mark Dery’s biography of Gorey (brilliantly titled Born to be Posthumous) is his account of Gorey’s deliberately unwatchable ‘The Teddy-Bear, A Sinister Play’ (1952). In this short drama all that happens is that a married couple has an argument whilst a teddy bear moves slowly across the stage on its way to strangle their child.
In some ways, this sensibility is sending up the same idealised visions of domestic bliss targeted by Addams, but for Gorey the pretensions of the middle and upper classes are the butt of crueller jokes about what evils of neglect and vice can lurk around each corner of a well-kept home.
Dogs and Cats
Another distinction between Addams and Gorey is their relationship with animals. Charles Addams was a huge fan of dogs and used to travel with several including Alice B. Curr “a dog of uncertain ancestry,” Desti, part shepherd and part wolfhound; Tigger, a feisty papillon, and Macy, a Yorkshire terrier.
He and his wife Tee were even married in the pet cemetery of her family home. To misquote the Ramones, I don’t want to be married in a pet cemetery — but I can appreciate a fellow dog enthusiast.
Gorey, on the other hand, admired the elegance and independence of cats. He illustrated T. S. Eliot’s collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and drew them more than almost anything else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he was also a great patron of the ballet, there is something both balletic and feline about his elegant ingenues and sinister dandies. Gorey lived alone for most of his life, but his house was always filled with cats.
So here’s my somewhat unscientific conclusion about the two illustrators: if you’re a dog-goth you’ll love Addams, if you’re a cat-goth you’ll love Gorey. (Or you can be both, like me.)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
Nowhere is a cattish indifference towards the fate of humans more apparent than in the book with which we will kick off our new series of horror moments: The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963). Here, Gorey sends 26 children to oblivion with the coolness of a cat pushing past a row of delicate objects on a mantelpiece.
It’s an ‘abecedarium,’ or book of ABCs, a macabre twist on the kind of twee Victorian rhymes used to teach children how to read. Here, each letter denotes the name of a child who has perished in increasingly improbably circumstances.
Gashlycrumb inherits much from Hilaire Belloc’s 1907 Cautionary Tales for Children: Designed for the Admonition of Children between the ages of eight and fourteen years which was itself a parody of Victorian instruction books, although some of Belloc’s children survive and benefit from the moral, like Algernon: ‘Who played with a Loaded Gun, and, on missing his Sister, was reprimanded by his Father.’ Gorey is also a spiritual cousin of Roald Dahl, but although Willy Wonka might let you die in a chocolate lake, he’ll at least teach your companions a lesson about greed. The figure of Death on the front cover of Gashlycrumb seems disinterested in our moral improvement.
It’s true that some of the ‘Tinies’ are somewhat responsible for their deaths. Take George who could so easily have avoided his fate:
As could Leo:
And Olive really should have known better:
Then again, some are just victims of bad luck, like poor Hector:
There are deaths which are funny because they’re outlandish. It’s implied, for example, that poor Fanny was sucked dry, not by leeches but by a single leech (perhaps with a vendetta?):
Some deaths are made funny simply by the way the illustration shows us the moment just before disaster, when Gorey lets us imagine what comes next, like poor Prue:
Or Titus:
The only consistent moral of the story seems to be: try not to die, children. Useful advice, I suppose.
In a way, Gashlycrumbs is a good litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy more of Gorey’s work. There’s a growing group of Gorey superfans who find his blend of horror and humour particularly hilarious. I am definitely one of them — but I must warn you that things do get a lot darker than this. There will be charming and amusing scenes, yes, but we will also delve into the deeply disturbing. Don’t be fooled by that polite Edwardian veneer…
My favourite death from Gashlycrumb? It has to be Nevill, of course.
What’s your favourite death in the series? Read the whole picture book here and do tell me in the comments below. I’m so excited about series it’s been loads of fun to research. Next week, the story of a lady and a rather impolite devil. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!
Horror moments are published on Thursdays and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.
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"a cattish indifference towards the fate of humans" is a lovely bit of writing. Looking forward to the rest of this series!
I can tell I'm going to love this series... That play about the teddy bear sounds amazing.