The children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone?
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl (even), that is super strong, independent and generally self sufficient. It gave kids their own agency which resonated with kids and I guess the time was right that parents did not forbid reading it.
An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.
Even the Disney Pinocchio movie is about telling kids to obey their parents, in ways that 2000s Disney movies probably wouldn't do.
But Grimms tales and 1001 night were not originally childrens stories. They were entertainment for adults.
"(the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering)"
I think you should reread some collection of these that isn't disneyfied. They're great, but probably not what you want to read to a prepubescent kid because that'll start all sorts of conversations you'd rather not have them bring up at school and elsewhere.
The framing is that a king goes to hunt but has to turn back to get something and sees the queen and other women of the court have an orgy with his black slaves, so he murders them all and gets sad. So he goes away with his brother who is also a king to get over this betrayal and finds a threatening demon spirit, who has a human female companion who sings the spirit to sleep and then talks to the kings and tells them that she's taken captive. But, she survives by being unfaithful and fucking random dudes they come across and collect trinkets to remember these partners by. Then she fucks the kings and they return home.
One of the kings then starts fucking a virgin every night and kill her by the morning, until Sheherazade is chosen, who instructs her sister to intervene after the sex, rape in contemporary parlance, and ask her to tell a story. The king agrees to hear a story, and by having an unfinished or another story to tell when morning comes is how Sheherazade keeps the king from killing her.
To late or postmodern sensibilities there are a lot of things to take issue with in these stories, like the casual rape, or insults that are derogatory towards jews and blacks, like calling someone as stupid as the stairs to a synagogue.
Still, they're fantastic and hilarious, and have a lot of interesting information about life in Asia and Africa during ancient and medieval times. They also invite careful thought and deliberation. At least one swedish translation is quite suitable for reading aloud with a partner, something my wife and I had a lot of fun doing way back when we didn't yet have kids.
As for Pippi, she messes with cops and orphanages and refuses to go to school, so it's easy to see why some uptight jurisdictions would censor it. Personally I consider The Brothers Lionheart to be a better story, but its ethics are less obvious and it also starts off with a kid dying violently and another from disease so it's not immediately comedic in the way Pippi is.
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?
On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.
One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.
After reading your first paragraph, I was already drafting a slightly standoffish response in my head, to the effect that the children who grew up on our sanitised fairy tales seem to be blowing each other's heads off on the battlefields of 2026 with undiminished enthusiasm and sadism, and the only difference is that now more of them need a Xanax prescription afterwards. I appreciate that you actually addressed this view with less snark than I was able to.
There are cultural differences here though. Brüder Grimm aren’t quite as toned down in Germany as we see in US stories being Disney-fied.
The U.S. was born out of Puritanism. That prudishness and absolutism continues to echo through into its modern culture. Most people don’t even realize it does.
> The U.S. was born out of Puritanism.
That reminds me: apparently, the Puritans have actually managed to ban the celebration of Christmas and other church feasts in the Britain during the English Interregnum (An Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, June 1647):
Talk about the war on Christmas!> Talk about the war on Christmas!
Not just a war on Christmas, but an actual war too: this led to a whole bunch of Christmas riots throughout England, including Canterbury's famous "Plum pudding Riots", where rioters ended up sacking the mayor's house and taking over control of the city for weeks. The whole of Kent ended up revolting after the rioters' trial, essentially starting the Second English Civil War.
It's funny, because I think that to certain other cultures, for example the Japanese, Christianity (and other Abrahamic religions) are Lovecraftian horror. Shinto isn't really a religion in the sense you or I know it, it's more of an animistic set of practices related to daily life. The kami are very much real to the Shintoist mind; the big ones, like Amaterasu, don't have much of a direct interest in your life, and the little ones are more like neighbors. You have to pay them their due respect, and they could grant you boons if you made them the right offerings. OK, now tell this person that there is only one all-powerful god who lives in the sky, that he is keeping meticulous track of everything you do, and that he will doom you to eternal torment if you do not meet his threshold for good behavior, or even fail to properly believe in him. (Japanese have a concept of hell, borrowed from Buddhism, but it's much more a place of repaying karmic debt than of eternal suffering. Japanese hell is time-boxed.)
To me there is a reason why when Japanese media invokes Judeo-Christian themes, it's with a sense of grandiosity and terror. Think all of Evangelion. Or how in a JRPG, any time there's a "pope" character, he's the bad guy (or at least the penultimate boss just before God himself).
>That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
Could you elaborate on this?
Children were entering the workforce between 7 and 9 years old; in 2000 kids were entering the workforce between 14 and 18 (a lot of my friends bagged grocceries after work) in 2026 I think the average person enters the work force after 18 now, working in high school is much less common than it was 25 years ago.
TL;DR heavily moralistic stories are probably more relevant in a society where you're commuting to a factory at 9 or 12, vs modern society where your education continues into the mid 20s for many and the 5 or 6 year degree being more common than 4 these days.
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
Yes. And we gave children Disney and television or Netflix, with only violence, with, when existing, a dumbed down plot.