The grotesque truth about children They are drawn to the dark, the sadistic and the cruel

And Count Olaf — who physically punches a child in book one — is nasty. One of the glorious things about Lemony is the way in which, contra a whole history of fluffy bunnies, kindly bears and amiable ducks, his books tap into the appetite for the gruesome, violent and macabre which — much as adults who fetishise childhood innocence would prefer otherwise — are absolutely a feature of the childish imagination.

In doing so, he plays with the very traditions of children’s literature itself. The established tropes, in Handler’s work, are knowingly burlesqued — not least the orphan protagonists. Lots of children in children’s stories are orphans (it’s a convenient way to get the parents out of the way so adventures can be had; Roald Dahl, outstandingly, had James, of Giant Peach fame, orphaned when his parents were eaten by a rhinoceros), but Handler makes their orphanhood the centre of the story.

The very first line of his first book tips the hat to a narrative convention, too: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” Throughout the work this narrator (of whose ill-starred personal life hints are from time to time dropped) makes forlorn attempts to dissuade his readers from continuing. Here, of course, Lemony Snicket exploits the fact that, as Mrs Bluebeard knew all too well, warning someone off something makes it twice as attractive.

We’re still working, as Handler recognises, through the legacy of a series of dramatic, centuries-long swerves in how children were understood, and how that understanding was expressed in writing for and about them. It’s a swerve between insisting children are “innocent” or encouraging them to be so — and recognising that they are nothing of the sort. Look at your sweet little 10-year-old, face in his phone… are you entirely confident that he’s not Googling “100 most gruesome funny deaths”?

Children are drawn to the dark, the sadistic and the cruel. Nothing makes a child laugh harder than a cartoon character being hit in the face with a frying pan or flattened by an anvil. We know, proverbially, what wanton boys do to flies; and children have always been a large part of the appetite for gruesome and prurient sensation literature. Who can forget that lovely joke in Tom Stoppard’s script for Shakespeare in Love, when we encounter a boy (the young John Webster), who says how much he loved Titus Andronicus: “I loved it when they cut heads off, and the daughter mutilated with knives…”?

The improving, inspiring, cosseting mainstream of children’s writing tends inadvertently to affirm that side of childhood — even as, anxiously, it seeks to occlude it. The Puritans, who took the lead in the 17th century, may have been onto something when they saw children as, if not uniquely evil, at least uniquely in danger of damnation. The doctrine of original sin meant that you started life with red on the ledger, so children’s stories had work to be getting on with. One notorious example was the nonconformist preacher James Janeway’s 1671 A Token for Children: Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives, and joyful deaths of several young children. The idea, here, was to scare children into repenting their sins before it was too late.

The funny thing is that A Token for Children has, these days, a faint Lemony Snicket vibe. Read at this distance it’s a riot, with pre-teen after pre-teen going tearfully and gratefully to his or her maker, warning parents and schoolmates with their dying breath to repent: “O make use of time to get Christ for your souls; spend no time in running up and down in playing.” Janeway was deadly serious. But Handler and his like exorcise that religious pathology as arch laughter — history repeating itself as farce.

What makes such campery possible is that between then and now we had a long period, which really takes off with the Romantics, in which the pendulum swung the other way. As Wordsworth put it, “heaven lay about me in my infancy”. Rather than being tainted with sin, children were now moral superheroes, paragons, holy innocents: a rebuke to the fallen grown-up world. That, too, was an adult projection — and, if anything, more fanciful a one than that idea that they’re damned from the get-go.

To this day, we can’t quite make up our minds about children, and out of the cognitive dissonance emerges anxiety — and laughter. It’s a knowing double-standard that the likes of Handler cheerfully skip back and forth on.

As has always been the case, for instance, the most fervently didactic children’s literature captivates its audience with exactly the things that it ostensibly encourages them to disapprove of. The fate of Augustus Gloop in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory may be a caution against the sin of gluttony: but a fat kid getting sucked through a chocolate pipe to an unknown fate is fun to contemplate. It’s the punishment, rather than the moral, which the reader enjoys. Think, too, of the glee in Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (Roald Dahl claimed to have the latter memorised as a child); or the macabre and surreal works of Edward Gorey — not written for children but riffing on the conventions of children’s stories, and an acknowledged influence on Handler.

That’s the tradition to which Lemony Snicket belongs — and it’s rather older than the amiable duck one, too. Folktales and fairytales are violent and strange, and they are the wellspring from which subsequent children’s literature springs. Handler himself describes being entranced as a child by the tales of the Brothers Grimm; and the turning point in his literary life was when, aged 12, he discovered a copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil in the local library: “I knew what it was at once. The title of the book made it perfectly clear: it was a horror novel.”

Roald Dahl’s stellar success wasn’t, or wasn’t just, a reaction against the wholesomeness of Enid Blyton. Child readers lapped up the surreal grotesquerie and gleeful cruelty of those books. It’s a macabre tradition that goes right back to the start of the modern children’s canon: it’s striking how violent as well as how strange are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and how bloodthirsty is J. M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan. The Princess and the Goblin — often cited as the first children’s fantasy novel — is terrifying at the same time as it’s funny.

In his memoir, Handler writes that he is often told by strangers that he’s “a child at heart”. He doesn’t disagree. He remembers, after all, his mother telling him that if ever their house caught fire he was to jump out of his bedroom window on the grounds that a broken leg would be better than perishing in a fire. The infant Handler’s thoughts filled at once with burned houses, broken legs (“I moved my legs in bed, twisting them best I could into broken positions I had learned from cartoons”), and to the possibility that in falling he’d accidentally eat the poisonous berries from the neighbour’s shrubbery.

“This is what I think of, when people say I am still a child,” he writes: “moving my legs around, thinking about poisoning people and houses burning down.”

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Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator. His forthcoming book, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, is out in September.

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