Pleasant Stories and Funny Pictures (original: Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder) was written by Heinrich Hoffmann. The German Hoffmann (1809-1894) was a pediatrician, psychiatrist, and author of books for children. He achieved international fame in his lifetime for Pleasant Stories and Funny Pictures, which went through 175 editions in Germany alone by the time of Hoffmann’s death.

Pleasant Stories is a set of ten stories designed to teach children proper behavior. Each story is about an individual child who becomes an object lesson for the reader. There is Shock-Headed Peter, who has “nasty hair and hands/See! his nails are never cut; They are grim’d as black as soot;/And the sloven, I declare,/Never once has comb’d his hair...any thing to me is sweeter/Than to see Shock-Headed Peter.”¹ There is cruel Frederick, who tears the wings off of flies and kills birds and throws kittens down stairs and whips Mary, his maid. One day he whips his dog Tray, and then Tray mauls Frederick’s leg, and the Doctor makes Frederick go to bed, “and gave him nasty physic,”² while Tray gets to eat Frederick’s soup and pies and puddings. There is the story of foolish Harriet, who likes playing with matches, and accidently sets her apron on fire: “So she was burnt, with all her clothes/And arms, and hands, and eyes and nose/Till she had nothing more to lose/Except her little scarlet shoes;/And nothing else but these was found/Among her ashes on the ground.”³ There is the story of Edward, William, and Arthur, who taunted a poor “black-a-moor,” even though the great sorcerer Agrippa told the three boys not to. Agrippa dipped all three of the boys in a giant inkwell, and now all of them are darker than the “harmless black-a-moor.”⁴ There is the story of the hunter who falls asleep; a hare gets his gun and shoots at him, missing but destroying the cup and saucer the hunter’s wife are holding. There is the story of Conrad, “Little Suck-A-Thumb,” who ignored his mother’s warnings and continued to suck his thumb, until “The door flew open, in he ran/The great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man,”⁵ who cuts off Conrad’s thumbs. There is the story of Augustus, who refuses to eat any soup and who starves to death on the fifth day. There is the story of Fidgety Philip, who rocks in his chair at the dinner table, despite his father’s commands, and tips the table and all the silverware on top of himself. There is the story of Johnny Head-In-Air, who never looks where he is walking and ignores every warning, until he falls into the river and loses his writing-book. And there is the story of Flying Robert, who doesn’t stay at home when it rains, like all good little girls and boys, but goes out walking in the rain with his red umbrella. The wind picks Robert up and blows him away, and he is never seen again.

Pleasant Stories belongs to the class of children’s literature known as “Cautionary Tales,” which warns children of the consequences of foolish behavior. While the Cautionary Tale goes back to the 1770s, Pleasant Stories introduced an element of grotesqueness and a dark humor to the genre; Pleasant Stories, “hovering halfway between real warnings and comedy, converts potential fright into laughter.”⁶ Pleasant Stories is in several respects typical of German children’s literature of the time: “perversity, gloom, and torture are...evident in the Germanic folk and fairy tales which often use gruesome scare tactics to frighten and/or control children.”⁷ Following the publication of Pleasant Stories, a wave of Hoffmann imitations followed, some nearly as successful as Pleasant Stories, albeit without the longevity.

Pleasant Stories was also one of the early prototypes for the modern comic book. The format of Pleasant Stories, illustrations accompanied by rhyming captions, was not original to Hoffmann, of course. Chapbooks, cheaply produced works of popular literature crudely illustrated and sold for a few pence, were produced from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and many had illustrations which were not mere adjuncts to the narrative but directly complemented it. In the 1830s the Swiss schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer created “histoires en images,” illustrated novels, which are generally considered the first significant prototype for the modern comic book.⁸ Pleasant Stories’ illustrations are not as central to the text as Töpffer’s, and Hoffmann did not influence later artists, such as Wilhelm Busch, whose Max Und Moritz (1865) was a later prototype of the comic book. But Pleasant Stories was seen by far more people than Töpffer and Busch combined. Pleasant Stories was almost immediately fantastically popular, and it spawned numerous pirated editions and imitations in America from the 1850s through the 1870s, and has never been out of print in Germany, England, or the United States.

Hoffmann wrote Pleasant Stories for children–reportedly his three-year-old son Carl–on the grounds that

a child learns only through his eyes and understands only what he sees. Abstract rules do not mean anything to him. The admonitions “be clean,” “do not play with matches,” “obey,” are only empty words for a child. But the pictures of a dirty child, or burning clothes, show the consequences and are understood.⁹

Hoffmann himself drew the illustrations for Pleasant Stories and many editions have either reproductions of Hoffmann’s illustrations or other artists’ renditions of Hoffmann’s drawings. The drawings are crude but effective, whether of Frederick’s leg being bitten by Tray (and the blood pouring from it), of Harriet a-flame, or of the scissor-man cutting off Conrad’s thumbs. Hoffmann drew the pictures to match the stories in their complete lack of sentimentality. This brutality was a radical change from most contemporary English and American children’s literature, though as mentioned was standard for German children’s literature. Pleasant Stories is far less didactic and makes its points through laconic, morbid humor rather than saccharine sentiment. Pleasant Stories is as effective today in delivering its message as it was in 1845, and some of its lessons–prejudice based on skin color is bad, cruelty to animals is bad–will perhaps be appreciated by current audiences more than they were by Hoffmann’s original audience.

Purely as a reading experience Pleasant Stories remains enjoyable. Its humor is sharp, even savage, but adults may enjoy it all the more because of this. The rhymes are simple but often clever–the standard translation from German is excellent–and the stories smart and effective. The stories can even be frightening. Adults will likely not be frightened, but if readers put themselves in the right frame of mind they will enjoy a pleasant scare at the almost sadistic images, especially the strangely powerful (and symbolically castrating) image of the scissor-man.

Print: Heinrich Hoffmann, Slovenly Peter (Struwwelpeter), or, Happy Tales and Funny Pictures. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2013.

¹ Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter; Merry Stories and Funny Pictures (New York: F. Warne, 1962), 2.

² Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter, 5.

³ Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter, 7.

⁴ Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter, 11.

⁵ Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter, 16.

⁶ O’Sullivan, Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature, 62.

⁷ Barbara Smith Chalou, Struwwelpeter: Humor or Horror? 160 Years Later (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 43.

⁸ David Kunzle’s Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007) is required reading for those interested in Töpffer’s role in the evolution of the comic book.

⁹ Heinrich Hoffmann, Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 1985), 114.