Today’s Scary Stories Are Tame Compared To Victorian Age Tales

October 25, 1996

GAINESVILLE — The “Goosebumps” series might frighten kids today into sleeping with the lights on, but these tales are tame compared to stories written in the 17th and 18th centuries that told of children baking in ovens, being eaten or transforming into wild animals.

In fact, children catching on fire after playing with matches or falling out of trees and dying were common images in books designed to teach children moral and social lessons into 19th century also, said John Ingram, chairman of the special collections department at the University of Florida libraries, which houses more than 93,000 volumes of children’s literature.

While today’s scary stories are meant to entertain, horror themes were used in the Victorian Age and earlier to teach children etiquette, restraint and responsibility by showing terrifying examples of the price of misbehaving.

“One of the oldest cautionary books in our collection is from 1789, titled Vice in its Proper Shape, or the Melancholy Transformation of Several Naughty Masters and Misses into Contemptible Animals,’” Ingram said. “In this book, the children behave like animals and then slowly turn into animals representing these characteristics, almost like the werewolf or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Such literature was thought to be an effective way of instilling moral lessons and proper behavior.

“These stories represent the ultimate pragmatic world,” Ingram said. “Nothing is free, and nothing is without consequence.”

Frightening elements can also be found in earlier stories, especially fairy tales handed down through the ages. For example, “Little Red Ridinghood,” originally penned in 1697, tells of a wolf eating a little girl’s grandmother.

Stories during that time, however, used horror to empower children, said UF English Professor John Cech, author of five children’s books.

“Children had to cope with the ogre, the giant or the witch in a way that unvictimized the child,” Cech said. “These stories spoke to an older psychological necessity, which was more ancient and, in a sense, more vital than the Victorian stories.

“In the late 19th and early 20th century, we began to realize that children were much smarter than they were given credit for being,” Cech said. “We didn’t have to sacrifice children to these horrors to get them to learn moral lessons.”

Part of the violence in children’s stories can be attributed to the time period in which they were written, Ingram said. In the days before vaccinations, there were examples of physical “horror” on display every day, sometimes from disease, sometimes from physical abuse.

“These were very rough times,” Ingram said. “Millions of people suffered from terrible disease and ignorance. Education was not universal, literacy was not universal. This was a harsh, harsh existence with much untreated sickness and disease.”

Horror stories meant to educate children gradually died out in the mid-19th century, with the advent of new technology, modern medicine and progressive social movements that improved living conditions and helped prevent many physical signs of disease. Another factor was a change in literature — for example, Edgar Allen Poe’s use of stories of terror as entertainment.

“Poe transformed the period. This was the beginning of the end of horror as functional literature,” Ingram said. “Poe raised terror to an art form.”