2023 read #146: Wanted — A King by Maggie Browne.

Wanted — A King, or How Merle Set the Nursery Rhymes to Rights by Maggie Browne

Illustrated by Harry Furniss

89 pages

Published 1890

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

Like Goblin Market, this novella was a mostly forgotten Victorian children’s fantasy, anthologized in the 1973 collection Beyond the Looking Glass. It’s an obvious imitation of the Alice books, but with centralized executive authority at its heart rather than chaos.

Our heroine Merle, abed for months after a bad fall, drifts off and finds herself at the turnstile into Endom, the land of nursery rhymes. The turnstile is manned by Grunter Grim, an irascible old man / evil spirit who hates children and refuses to give her a ticket, insisting she must leave her body behind before she can enter. Topleaf — a friendly leaf who used to wave at Merle from the top of a lime tree — curls around her and smuggles her in. Merle quickly discovers that the odious Grunter Grim has given the fairy who tells fairy tales all the wrong details, making the nursery rhymes ever so mean, so it falls to Merle to fix the mixed up nursery rhymes by selecting a king.

“Fixing” here entails making the nursery rhymes all proper and mannerly, undoing all the naughty changes introduced by Grunter Grim. Jack Horner, you see, tries to be a good boy, instead of boasting that he is. And so on. It’s the most Victorian thing imaginable — Victorians had such a passion for editing out all the disreputable details of history, folktales, ballads, etc. Bold of Browne to make that the stated reason our heroine quests into the land of fairy tales.

But in the midst of the monarchical bowdlerizing, there was one detail that fascinated me. When children arrive at Endom and Grunter Grim takes their bodies, he doesn’t return their proper bodies back. Merle meets a ten year old girl who was given the body of a three year old boy, who explains: “every one is astonished because… some girls [are] more like boys, and some boys more like girls.” A basic sense of gender expression in 1890! There isn’t much of interest in A King beyond that, but it was something. (Well, some of the art was pretty cool too.)