James Catchpole on Disability in Children's Stories

As teachers and parents, how do we judge whether the books we loved as children are suitable for children today? They may still have magic in them, but what about the messages and the morals? In this article, children’s author, literary agent and Story Museum trustee James Catchpole turns his attention to how disability is represented in children’s stories, with a particular eye on classic novels.

Our daughters are 7 and 11. They’re not disabled but we, their parents, both are. Before we put stories in their hands – novels with disabled characters in them – my wife and I have had to think carefully. What ideas about disabled people are our girls absorbing, from Heidi or The Secret Garden? What are they learning, for that matter, from Wonder?

When you consider handing on the books you loved as a child, and whether they’ve aged well or badly, is disability in the mix? Re-reading books with my own children, I can see how easily it could get lost. Perhaps you’ll consider what sort of roles those stories gave their female characters (did the girls have agency in Watership Down? were there even any, in The Hobbit?!) or maybe you’ll try to remember if they had anything awful to say about race (please, oh please, Rudyard Kipling, just stick to the animals…). But will you also consider what your children will be learning from Heidi, when Peter pushes Clara’s wheelchair down the mountain? And would it be obvious to you, why it matters?

I’m not here to browbeat you, dear parents and teachers! We all have to make our own judgements, with our own children. But as someone who works at the crossroads of children’s books and disability, I can take you through some of the lessons your children may learn, from classic novels with disabled characters. Forewarned may be forearmed!

Perhaps the best way into all this is to think about the role of disability in storytelling more generally. I would say that role, whether in children’s stories or those for adults, has chiefly been to elicit emotion in the reader. In fact, I would argue, that’s what most disabled characters are, in books: devices to make us feel. You might ask, doesn’t that apply to all characters in fiction? Well, consider who those disabled characters are…

Who comes first to mind? Maybe it’s a photo finish between Shakespeare, Dickens and Hugo – between Richard the Third, Tiny Tim and The Hunchback of Notre Dame – with Long John Silver and Captain Hook leading the chasing pack. They’re quite a motley crew - good luck to the International Paralympic Committee, trying to work out the classification for that race! But they do have something in common. 

As a literary agent, it’s impossible not to admire the skill with which the great writers have used these characters to wring the very strongest emotions from their readers: horror, pity and fear. Almost nothing taps into people’s most visceral feelings like disability does. As a disabled person, I know this well, but not from books – from everyday life. From going out in public, every day, looking disabled.

As a disabled reader, I have never been able to recognise myself in any of these characters. Not in Richard, in Tiny Tim or Quasimodo – not even, as an amputee, in either of those famous pirates. But I recognise people’s emotional responses to them, only too well.

And having been a disabled child, I can tell you: Tiny Tim casts a long shadow. When did I ever see a child like me represented in popular culture, except in adaptations of A Christmas Carol, or in the charity collection boxes you’d see in shops back in the 80s, where you could pop a coin into the lifesize effigy of Tiny Tim in modern clothes?

That’s an odd kind of representation. Who were we disabled children expected to be, waiting patiently, cap in hand, for charity? Bob Cratchit has the answer:

“He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

Not children then, but angels.

Your children will almost certainly have heard a version of this line in the voice of Kermit the Frog, in A Muppet Christmas Carol. In case the meaning of the original text isn’t quite clear, a popular online teaching resource spells it out:

‘Instead of regretting the fact that he can’t walk, Tiny Tim feels happy to think his handicap might benefit others.’

Perhaps you can see why I couldn’t quite relate…

A Christmas Carol is virtually a set text in the UK, where most schoolchildren study a Victorian novel at some point. It remains a hugely powerful story, and a cornerstone of our culture. But would teachers - and online teaching resources - frame the text differently for their students, if they had any inkling that Tiny Tim might just be to disability what Uncle Tom is to Blackness? 

Dickens’ novel may be read by children, but it wasn’t written for them. Let’s think about those famous disabled characters in children’s novels, now, and what they might be teaching our children.

What of Colin in The Secret Garden, who treats the staff so contemptuously? There’s a Dickensian precedent (isn’t there always?) in Mr Smallweed, the wicked invalid, carried around in his sedan chair. Anyone with a disability that necessitates physical reliance on someone else will feel the shadow cast by those characters, and countless others like them.

What of Clara in Heidi, who uses a ‘wheeled chair’ until healed by the intervention of fresh air, goats’ cheese and vandalism? It’s hard not to wonder how many disabled children have been forcibly wheeled outside into playgrounds and gardens by well-meaning peers, with the vague hope of healing in mind. We can only hope no mobility aids have been sabotaged…

As for the other kind of disabled characters – the ones to be feared, rather than pitied – there’s a clear line to be traced from Captain Hook to Voldemort. Did the loss of a hand, or a nose, help to make those villains evil? Or are those just the outer signs of an evil already within them? Does it matter?! Disfigurement has always been a shorthand for villainy. Just think of the stories they used to tell about Anne Boleyn’s (fictional) sixth finger.

And that’s where we might hesitate before making an assumption that the modern classics of children’s literature must surely approach disability in a different, better, more evolved way. Let’s finish with the obvious one, the modern children’s set text on disability: Wonder by RJ Palacio. I started reading this just a few years ago, and initially I was impressed…

Auggie Pullman is no crutch, no sidekick, but a true main character. We see the world through his eyes. Other people react to him with fear and horror. So far, so real. And he makes for a hugely compelling hero. Millions of readers have been given a glimpse of how the world might look through the eyes of a child with a facial disfigurement, and been deeply moved by it.

And yet…

Then I came to the final pages and Auggie went up on stage, thrilled to receive his award for, what was it? Kindness and resilience? For being disabled, then? Or maybe for being an inspiration to others? And then I felt duped, like I’d been reading about Tiny Tim in modern clothes, all along. As most disabled people will tell you, pity and inspiration are two sides of the same, very familiar coin.

The truth is, some modern children’s authors have put disabled characters front and centre, over the past twenty years or so. But vanishingly few of them have done so with any deep knowledge of their subject, either from personal experience or from thorough research. Often, they’ve done so with no research at all, perhaps because too much reality might actually inhibit the device, the emotion-wringer. And if anything, adult publishing is worse. I’ll take Auggie Pullman any day, over the hero of Me Before You – an unholy mashup of Tiny Tim, Colin and Mr Darcy, and the only significant character who (tellingly) doesn’t have a chapter from his own perspective.

It’s hard not to conclude that, on the whole, disabled characters in fiction have always been fantastical figments of non-disabled authors’ imaginations - like dragons, orcs and elves.

As I see it, the modern children’s classics with something true to say about disability are only just starting to be written now, because children’s publishing has only just woken up to the idea that this might be a legitimate goal: disabled characters not as tools to elicit emotion, but as real, rounded characters with disabilities, written by authors who know whereof they write.

Which isn’t to say that my wife and I have decided to sidestep all these books with our children. As disabled parents, we’ve drawn a regretful line at Colin and Clara, but can’t bear to deprive our girls of Kermit Cratchit or Voldemort. I expect they’ll read Auggie, at some stage. He’s still everywhere. But we may hand them a memoir by an author with a facial disfigurement, too (say, A Face for Picasso by Ariel Henley), to introduce some reality. 

As parents and teachers, we’ll all draw that line in different places. 

Wherever that line is for you, if your child is reading a novel written any time before, say, 2020, and that novel has a disabled character in it, then you can helpfully tell your child, with almost total confidence, that the character in question will bear very little relation to any kind of disabled reality. Worth knowing, I think!