Scissor-wielding Tailors and the House around the Corner

My mother swears she never read me the Struwelpeter (aka Shock-headed Peter) story about the tailor with the huge pair of scissors who leapt in through the window and cut off your thumbs if you sucked them. I will choose to believe that it was a baby-sitter. Although our baby-sitter was an older Italian lady who didn’t speak much english, and had no books that I can remember. Lots of doilies and artificial fruit and Lawrence Welk which caused nightmares of another kind. I sucked my thumb until I was about 5. So did my sister. That story scared the bejeezuss out of me. Much later, as a young adult I found a copy of Struwelpeter (long out of print for causing severe psychological damage to generations of children). You can read about it here. I thought it might be an interesting piece of history, a slice of my childhood, but I still found it disturbing and soon gave it to a friend who liked gross things. What confounds me is that it is meant as cautionary tales for kids, to promote good behavior, but there is nothing child-like about it. No whimsy, no calming effect. The drawings are frightening and most of the children die in horrible ways. I never minded Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tales but for some reason Struwelpeter was just so teutonic or something. There was gleeful aspect in it that made me think that all adults were happy when the precocious unmindful child(brat) burst into flames. Like, “See, we told you not to play with matches. You got what you deserved!” There was another story book that gave me nightmares. I don’t remember the title or the author just the plot. A little boy who wanders is told by his mother (who seems to leave him alone a lot) not to go around the corner because there dwells a cannibal who will eat him. Of course the boy doesn’t listen, gets caught in the cannibal’s house, hides under the sofa and has to trick the cannibal in some way to avoid being eaten. If anyone remembers that book (probably from the early to mid 1970’s) I’d love to know. I read to both my kids although the 7 year old is on to Goosebumps, Horrid Henry and Junie B. Jones which delight in the horrifying and gross and uncomfortable but with lots of humor. We have a stack of well-loved picture books and none of them have scary story-lines. I think it’s interesting how that’s changed. Older kids are exposed to all sorts of horrors. Many teenagers are numb to shocking, gory, graphic violence. But what was ok for little ones twenty or thirty years ago is not ok now. Maybe we’re trying to prolong the innocence a little while longer? I know parenting styles have changed. What I’m most curious about actually is why out of all the books I was read and have read since the age of 5 (which is when I started reading by myself) those 2 stories embedded themselves in my memory.