In another town Stuart has a brief flirtation with a human teenage girl his own size (and again may I say, ew), but it doesn’t work out because his plans for showing off to her on their date get ruined and he’s not willing to consider doing anything else fun with her. One of them, when asked what’s important, says, “A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby’s neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy.” If this isn’t an author manipulating his characters to make his own point, I don’t know what is. White also has extremely bizarre ideas about how school children talk and think. White a chance to display his contempt for modern education methods. Stuart takes a gig as a substitute teacher in a small town (the Superintendent of Schools is weirdly sitting by the side of the road depressed that he can’t find a substitute), which gives E.B. The second half of the book is about his adventures on the road, and we are given to understand that it is not just about finding the bird but about some ineffable longing of the soul. Then Stuart befriends a bird, and after a few more minor adventures the bird flies north and Stuart decides to follow, in a toy automobile. It has been taken up since by books like The Borrowers, 1952 The Rescuers, 1959 and The Littles, 1967.) But to give credit where it is due, Stuart Little was the first children’s novel to really explore the charms of this kind of thing. (This kind of territory was already explored a bit by children’s novels like Ben and Me,1939, and The Little Grey Men, 1942, which incidentally includes the characters making use of a toy boat. The first half is Stuart living life as a very small person, with clever uses of ordinary objects, like a cigar box held up by clothespins for a bed, and including a long interlude of Stuart sailing a toy boat on the pond in Central Park.
More important, what is this book even about? But we’ll let that pass we’ll pretend that White’s target audience in the 1940’s knew nothing about the facts of life. Little gave birth to a mouse - just doesn’t bear thinking about. Though I be beaten to death by enraged fifth-grade teachers, I have to say it: Stuart Little is a terrible book.įirst off, the premise - that Mrs.
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