The Museum of Cultural Waste: Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories
When I was a child I had a fairly good nose for moralising that masqueraded as entertainment. I'd see it coming. I'd spot the signs. A tingly sensation warning me that the adult world was trying to insidiously slip one past me. Disguising their nasty medicines with a spoonful of sugar (see "Educational Board Games" for more of same).
Occasionally, however, I'd lower the guard and gobble up the goods without really checking what I was consuming. Only later, when I saw, say, Christians sniggering behind their hands and elbowing each other would I realise I'd been had. Such was the case with the Narnia books. It was a grim day when I discovered that Aslan was really just Jesus hiding inside a fancy-dress lion suit. Still, at least those swarthy, scimitar-wielding baddies were creatures of pure fantasy, and in no way, shape or form a baleful example of Orientalist demonising…
But, by and large, my instincts and suspicions were sound. My daughter, sadly, has yet to develop these deductive skills. In her defence, she is only two, and thus not to be judged too harshly for recently finding this in a second-hand book shop and insisting (in a way only toddlers can) that I buy it. Immediately.
After flicking past the yummy Battenberg-ian cover – and a title page telling us that this is Volume 43 (!) in series that has, apparently, sold 30 million copies – we arrive at "Uncle Arthur's Letter". A 2-page missive from the bespectacled and avuncular man himself. There, in the final paragraph, are words that would, and should, chill any lively and imaginative child's heart.
"Readers may rest assured that every story is true to life, and that every one contains some uplifting, character-building lesson."
True to life? Character-building? Noooooo! This fucking sucks!
Happily, the contents page lightens the mood slightly with a list of titles that are so transcendently banal they become the stuff of high hilarity. Who, for example, can resist the exotic lure of "The Boy with a Bag"? Who can fail to be seduced by "Peter's Pyjamas"? Or the Hitchcock-ian thrills and intrigue of "The Unclipped Ticket"? Or "Daddy's New Watch"? Or (gasp!) "How Barbara Went to Sleep"?
Though the text may be tedious (and stuffed with "Jesus is amazeballs!" platitudes), the images, throughout, are glorious. Especially if (like me) you don't bother reading the associated tales and just view them as decontextualised things of creepy beauty. Enjoy.
June 9, 2011
22 responses to The Museum of Cultural Waste: Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories
I’m a bit worried for Robyn.
I know. Yer man has the affected insouciance of the juvenile delinquent child-murderer.
“Now she could get home…or could she?!”
I own the most Protestent book ever published. Your efforts are puny beside it.
You can’t just leave it at that. Spill your beans.
Also, the hitching kid in picture 2 looks like he’s in peril, but will undoubtedly, Tales of the Unexpected style, turn out to be a psychotic midget escaped from a local asylum.
No, that last one is so sinister. Poor little Barbara!
Cover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor_tupp/5816641096/
Inside Cover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor_tupp/5816075831/
Opening pages:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor_tupp/5816645678/
Need I go on?
My own heathen lack of enforced dogma left me blissfully ignorant of the allegory in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, I #m happy to say. I felt a bit cheated when I found out, but just cheerfully reverted to the version I’d read.
The golliwog seems to have been inserted to represent the demonic (pagan) thoughts deviling Barbara and causing her restless nights. It’s like a racist Child’s Play.
Side note: Barbara is the absolute image of my wife at that age. So much so that I’ve practically convinced my mother-in-law that it is her.
No. I presume tea, cakes and a fête are thrillingly involved at some point?
@Jo – The fucking allegory overload ruins Lewis. A real shame, as he was a fine writer. His adult “Space Trilogy” starts off brilliantly with Out of the Silent Planet but then disappears up its own hole in book two as the Christian motifs suffocate the story.
Funny you should mention that:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor_tupp/5816142107/
It didn’t take much of an imaginative/deductive leap.
Oh and the little chap on the cover seems to be (delightedly) holding a flap of human skin. Like a young Jame Gumb.
But Lewis redeems himself with book 3 of the Space Trilogy! Orwellian organisations, man-eating bears, the definitive argument against birth control,* disembodied heads with brains spilling out the top, Arthurian myth, all the animals in Britain having sex…
* “Your hypothetical child would have saved England!”
@Aishwarya – Much as I loved the first book, I never made it that far. 3/4 of the way through Perelandra I gave up. Think it was around the part where it all became transparently Adam & Eve-y.
A description that dazzling has really whet my appetite though. Disembodied heads! Sex-mad animals! I mean, who could refuse?
Welcome back sir.
What vintage is the book? I’m guessing it was published in England in 1964, if the photos are any indication.
Images to irritate gooseflesh and freeze blood right enough. The flat and dispassionate quality of the accompanying texts accentuate their sinister insinuations .
The boy with the bag suggests Graham Young, (he of ‘The Young Poisoner’s Handbook’), on some murderous, experimental bob-a-job run. The next photo, some hellish fusion of ‘Village of the Damned’ with ‘The Boys from Brazil’ and the text for the third I imagine is just a fragment of an original which began, “By the local park, which bristled with waiting Triffids…”
Enough of my morbidity. I’m even creeping myself out now.
Love these! Although I’m boggling a little at the idea that there are 43 volumes.
10-year-old me thought I was so damn smart for figuring out the Jesus allegory in the Narnia books. It was so subtle!
Anyway, this reminded me of the Catholic pamphlet archive I stumbled across a few years ago. Here’s a particularly choice one: http://bit.ly/loY0j2
@Nam – No date that I can see but early-mid 60s seems a safe enough bet. One thing I didn’t mention is that Uncle Arthur actually routinely inserts himself into the stories as a background character. A passer-by. Kids who don’t recognise him refer to him as “a kindly looking gentleman”. Kids who do recognise him almost soil themselves with excitement shrieking things like “It’s Uncle Arthur of the famous Bedtime Stories fame!! OMG!!”
It’s all a bit meta. A bit self-referential. Like the work of a shit Christian rapper.
@Ms. Avery – That link! I’m wiping the tears away.
Glorious.
I thought you’d like it! There are some other good ones on that site, but there’s a lot to wade through.
(My favourite bit is when the priest suggests the local steel mill as a place for a date.)
half a dollar a highball and getting woozy in the process.
We come for the drink, but we stay for the wooze.