The Hapless Child, a Melodrama

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 current series on Edward Gorey here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.

Edward Gorey was no stranger to the theme of child imperilment. So far in this series, we’ve seen poor Millicent Frastley carried off to the Insect God and met the morbid parade of the Gashlycrumb Tinies — the latter so iconic that The Edward Gorey House in Massachusetts actually encourages you to spot the 26 expired youngsters hidden around the building.

Screenshot from ‘Reveling in the macabre at Edward Gorey's House (Yarmouth Port, MA)’ by @travelbythebooktv on YouTube. Video here.

This week’s tale, The Hapless Child (1961) is bleak even by Gorey’s standards. It follows the fate of a sweet little girl called Charlotte Sophia, whose life goes from bad to worse…and then to much much worse. Superficially, this tale has a lot in common with The Insect God. In that article, I argued that a theme of real-world child abuse lurks beneath the outlandish plot.

The horror of The Hapless Child is not magical or fantastical at all. The book is a much more direct parody of nineteenth century tales of childhood woe like Oliver Twist, The Water Babies, A Little Princess and so on. This literary subgenre of ‘bad childhood’ novels traced the journey of a neglected or abused child from misery to happiness, whether in the arms of a loving caregiver or (more darkly) of God Himself. Through their trials the children learn clear moral lessons about right and wrong, usually from an overtly Christian perspective.

Naturally, this popular theme migrated to the cinema and in 1913 a French silent film called L’enfant de Paris (The Child of Paris) told the exhaustingly protracted tale of Marie-Laure who is kidnapped by a gang of criminals and eventually reunited with a father she believed was dead.

It’s pure melodrama, either deeply affecting or deeply silly depending on your point of view. You can watch it here and make your own mind up. In defence of Victorian sensibilities about children, cloying though they often are, I do think it’s worth remembering just how common the sight of a suffering child used to be. In the UK, it wasn’t until 1889 that the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act was introduced which first laid out the principles of child protection that we take for granted today. Many an image which looks ludicrously tragic to modern eyes was painfully familiar to anyone who had walked the slums of a Victorian-era city.

Let’s examine Gorey’s pastiche. Charlotte, the protagonist of The Hapless Child, has loving parents and a beautiful home. Life is going well until her father leaves for unspecified colonial duties in Africa and is killed by a ‘native uprising.’

As ever, we can spot Gorey slyly criticising bourgeoise sensibilities. What kind of unseen regime is Charlotte’s father propping up and why exactly do the natives want to violently resist it? A veil is drawn. All we know is that Charlotte’s newly-widowed mother falls into a decline and dies leaving Charlotte in a boarding school where ‘she was punished by the teachers for things she hadn’t done’ and bullied by the other girls.

After running away, she is robbed, carried off and sold to a ‘drunken brute’ who ‘put her to work making artificial flowers.’ If The Insect God hinted at the sexualised abuse of children, The Hapless Child all but confronts us with it in this grim depiction of a little girl cowering whilst a grown man gets the ‘horrors’ which make him violent and unpredictable.

The panel where the wild man brandishes a smashed bottle over Charlotte as she faints away is surely one of Gorey’s darkest moments, it looks like an NSPCC ad.¹

If you though the tale would have a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention. Charlotte is knocked down by her father’s own car (he is alive and has been searching for her), but when he cradles the little girl we are told ‘she was so changed, he did not recognise her.’

Is there anything ‘fun’ about the experience of reading The Hapless Child? Mark Dery, author of the biography Born to be Posthumous, definitely thinks so, finding the joke funnier and funnier as Charlotte’s sorrows pile up. Interestingly, Gorey himself worried that the tale was a bit excessive or ‘overdone’ and I probably agree. It feels to me like the same joke being retold again and again, ‘this is like The Infant of Paris but worse’ and has the effect of petering out into an inevitable punchline rather than shifting up a gear into a ludicrously unpredictable climax like The Insect God.

For me the most interesting thing about the book is a strange, unexpected motif that adds a uniquely Gorey touch. It begins with the frontispiece where a pair of strange winged demons are holding Charlotte’s picture.

By the end of the book another such entity is seen callously discarding her.

Look again at some of the panels above and see if you can spot these creatures crawling and lurking in the crevices.

Have otherworldly evils latched onto Charlotte, and does this explain her implausible bad luck? Are they drawn to her purity, the shining whiteness that makes a little patch of unmarked paper in amongst the crosshatching? At one moment a creature is actually seen in a bottle on the drunkard’s shelf, an on-the-nose reference to the demons that have made the adults so cruel.

Art critic Joseph Stanton joked that in The Hapless Child ‘the devil is in the detail.’ Mark Dery notes the similarity of the design with depictions of the temptation of St Anthony (which I read for my Tea and a Tale this week, do go and have a listen).

Here’s my interpretation, for what it’s worth. The creatures that follow Charlotte through her sorrows are all doing the same thing: nothing. They are defined by their inaction, watching with their beady little eyes, sometimes looking faintly sorry or regretful, but doing nothing to intervene. In the final image, the creature is already taking off from the back of the book, casting poor Charlotte away.

Haven’t we picked her up with the same detached fascination? Haven’t we trailed after her, peeking through doors and windows into the increasingly tragic moments of her life? Haven’t we stayed with her just long enough to see the ending of her story and then moved on from her as we’ve closed the book? If The Insect God is a story about the apathy of bourgeoise parents towards their children, The Hapless Child is obliquely criticising the reader. Is the reader the slender devil, all eyes and no mouth, who looks and says nothing, surveying calamity and then flitting away?

Perhaps this story is a deliberate send-up of what we expect from Gorey and if we’re searching for ‘the joke’ the joke is on us. Yes it’s fun to laugh at his pastiche of Victorian melodrama, but if we opened up a book called The Hapless Child for fun, we’re just as devilish as those little monsters lurking in the margins.

You can read the whole text of The Hapless Child here. Next week, Gorey tells us an erotic story about a sofa…with a horrifying twist. 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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1. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, one of the UK’s main child protection charities.