Valediction 18: Poor Cancelled Dr Seuss
Brian Alderson is bidding farewell to old favourites as he donates his remarkable collection of children’s books to Seven Stories. Next to be packed up, a very early Dr Seuss.
There was disturbance in the first-grade pigeon lofts of America in 1955 when an educationist, Rudolph Flesch, published his polemic Why Johnny Can’t Read. It was an assault, surely justified, on the tedium of such reading schemes as the infamous ‘Dick and Jane’ primers (cf. ‘Janet and John’ and the dreadful Ladybird ‘Key Words’ scheme) and its bestsellerdom bespeaks a widespread agreement. It is said that a suggested remedy might be to get ‘Dr Seuss’ to write a reading scheme – a cartoonist probably best known for his long-running ads for disinfectant: ‘Quick, Henry, the FLIT!’ but who had also written several amusing stories for children such as Horton Hatches the Egg (1940). Thus it was that in 1957 The Cat in the Hat was born: a comic masterpiece with cartoon-like illustrations and a vocabulary amounting to 236 mostly single syllable words.
Probably the first of the millions of copies that came to be sold worldwide was the London edition from Collins, also in 1957.[1] It would be followed by the Seuss canon of some fifty or so titles, those for easy reading being joined by ‘Beginner Books for Beginning Readers’ which brought in other comedians such as the Berenstains who produced that twenty-word masterpiece Inside Outside Upside Down.
What needs to be pointed out is that the first of Dr Seuss’s extravaganzas had appeared twenty years earlier than The Cat, in 1937: And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street. (A boy is asked to observe anything of interest on his way home from school and can find nothing but a horse and cart. So he invents a vast parade of traffic, improving each event in jog-trot verse as he goes along, with lithographs to match:
An elephant pulling a thing that’s so light
Would whip it around in the air like a kite
But he’d look simply grand
With a great big brass band…)
The originality of the idea was not lost on this side of the Atlantic and a second printing of the story was taken up by Noel Carrington for the ground-breaking children’s books that he was editing for Country Life. (He would soon after be chosen by Allan Lane to edit the also ground-breaking Puffin Picture Books but the War forbade any further cheerful activity to appear there from the good Doctor.)
Ah, what innocents we were in those days and who then would have credited that by 2024 the corporate owners of the Seuss copyrights would have chosen to withdraw Mulberry Street and several other titles from publication. As with the much-loved Laura Ingalls Wilder or, here, the vastly popular Roald Dahl, Dr Geisel has fallen foul of our contemporary evangelicals running their tooth combs through authorial work to find deviations from the current moral code. The sin is clear for all to see when that misguided youth finds in Mulberry Street:
A Chinaman / Who eats with sticks.
That will not do for us now.
Addendum:
The English edition of Mulberry Street seems nowhere to be recorded, as is the case with a companion work The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Perhaps, thanks to the presence in London of Oxford’s US children’s books editor, Grace Hogarth, the book was published by Oxford University Press in 1939. This wholly prose work does not seem to have offended our guardians of morality – but you never know. I have never seen The Seven Lady Godivas of 1939.
Brian Alderson is a long-time and much-valued contributor to Books for Keeps, founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times. His most recent book The 100 Best Children’s Books is published by Galileo Publishing, 978-1903385982, £14.99 hbk.
Biblio details:
Dr Seuss [pseud Theodor Seuss Geisel] And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street. New York: The Vanguard Press; London: Country Life Limited, 1939. 260x215mm. [32]pp. ([1] tp.; [2] dedication; imprint: Second Printing. Copyright 1937 Dr Seuss. Manufactured in in the United States of America by the DUNEWALD PRINTING CORPORATION [3-32] Letterpress verse text with lithographed illustrations.) Blue pictorial paper over boards, blue pictorial endpapers front and back; matching dj., inner flap synopsis with clipped USD price replaced with UK 3/6. Rear flap biography of Dr Seuss. Younger 14-15 [Pic 1]
(Anne Carroll Moore, the fierce New York children’s librarian sent a copy of the first edition to her friend Beatrix Potter who greatly appreciated it. She expressed thanks but also mentioned her pleasure in it to another American friend.)
[1] I have an unverifiable conviction that the first two books in the series were first published by Hutchinson. Could that be so?
