I wouldn’t have read it to a three year-old learning to read. Each youngster is shown in a moment of suffering ranging from all sorts of discomforts (like falling out of a sleigh or having drunk too much gin) to totally dreadful ends (like drowning in a lake, being struck with an axe or perishing from fits).
“The Tinies” of Edward Gorey, however, are young children who find themselves in far from secure and comfortable predicaments. We almost always associate this learning with comfortably secure, encouraging settings. “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” defies convention of the alphabet book genre, that of inspiring young children (usually learning to read) to explore letters that make up words that in turn make up stories. The book incorporates several elements from alphabet books (such as having each child in the book named after a letter in the English alphabet, and having each entry illustrated), and appends a cause of death for each child, such as being set on fire, being run over by a train or being attacked by wild animals.“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” is the gift that keeps on giving The book, an abecedarium, tells of the deaths of twenty-six children, and is told in thirteen rhyming dactylic couplets, accompanied by the author's distinctive black-and-white illustrations. Gorey has stated the book to be inspired by "those 19th century cautionary tales, I guess, though my book is punishment without misbehavior". Far from illustrating the dramatic and fantastical childhood nightmares, these scenarios instead poke fun at the banal paranoias that come as a part of parenting. The morbid humor of the book comes in part from the mundane ways in which the children in the story die, such as falling down the stairs or choking on a peach. It has been described as a "sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive". It is one of Edward Gorey's best-known books and is the most notorious amongst his roughly half-dozen mock alphabets. The book tells the tale of 26 children (each representing a letter of the alphabet) and their untimely deaths. The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing is an alphabet book written by Edward Gorey that was first published in 1963 as the first of a collection of short stories called The Vinegar Works, the eleventh work by Gorey.
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