Are you Mr Grumpy or Little Miss Sunshine?
THE instruction to readers is a clear one: ‘If you’re ever thinking of being rude to anybody, “Please” keep a sharp lookout for goblins!’ It’s the final warning in a cautionary tale that, as a child, wholly beguiled me: my favourite ‘Mr Men’ story, Mr Uppity.
Remarkably, Roger Hargreaves’s first six ‘Mr Men’ stories—the tales of Messrs Tickle, Greedy, Happy, Nosey, Sneeze and Bump—celebrate their 50th birthday this year. Their instant success spawned more than 40 further stories, including, in 1972, , the ‘Little Miss’ series initiated by American publishers in 1981 and global sales of more than 100 million books. Hargreaves himself, despite his early death in 1988 at the age of 53, has been listed as Britain’s third bestselling author, after J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown, and the distinctive imagery of his buoyant, boldly drawn, brightly coloured inhabitants of Mister Land has imprinted everything from bed linen to plastic lunch boxes for generations of children globally.
