The Child's Death as Punishment or Nonsense? Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" (1963) and the Cautionary Verse Tradition

Edward Gorey's alphabet book "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" (1963) can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of a tradition of literary representation of children's deaths and especially of cautionary tales and verse. In order to show how Gorey's Gothic nonsense modifies this tradition, this paper considers different functions of the child's death in literature, moving from the moralizing cautionary tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the more parodic cautionary verse that emerged in the nineteenth century. Classic examples of cautionary verse such as Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (1845) and Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) can be seen as precursors of Gorey's work, while a comparison of selected vignettes from the three texts illustrates Gorey's innovation and the refinement of his nonsense. The children's deaths no longer serve any moral or didactic purpose, producing a tension between the search for such a purpose and an apparent meaninglessness. Instead of resulting in despair, the Gothic elements of Gorey's text and images are placed in the service of nonsense, which resolves in humor.