Parents – Who Needs ‘Em?
Orphans and Runaways

The four Banks children actually do have parents – but their father is busy, and their mother is ineffectual, so like many upper class children, they are being raised by a nanny. Mary Poppins is no ordinary nanny, though, and takes the children on many odd and magical adventures. Despite her bossiness, vanity and fits of pique, she wins the children’s hearts by being so much more interesting than their real parents.

Pippi is practically feral: her mother is long dead, and her buccaneer father has vanished at sea. While her lack of conventional manners and education creates some humorous – and sometimes dangerous – situations, her life is the ultimate child fantasy: she has pets, friends, a house, a chest of gold, and absolutely NO ONE to tell her what to do.

Everything about the little boy Saint-Exupery’s narrator meets in the desert is a mystery: his name, his parents, how he came to be living on his own little planet; but clearly he manages just fine with his volcano-stoves and forty-four sunsets a day. His biggest problem, the one that drives him to cross the universe, is loneliness. Well, that… and a co-dependent relationship with a rose.

Peter Pan has a complicated history. He first appears as a 7-day-old baby who flies from his mother’s window to live among the fairies and crows in Barrie’s adult novel The Little White Bird (1902); those chapters were republished with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in 1906. But his character is better known as the “boy who wouldn’t grow up,” as he appears in Barrie’s stage play Peter Pan (1904) and children’s novel Peter and Wendy (1911). In these two works, Peter leads a band of abandoned boys in a violent fantasyland of pirates, crocodiles, Indians and fairies. Despite the anarchic joy of their existence, the boys miss their mothers, and so Peter entices Wendy to the island to care for them.

Dahl pulls no punches in depicting the horrors of James’s life. After the death of his parents, he is sent to live with his cruel aunts who beat him, starve him and treat him like a slave. His deliverance comes in the form of a giant enchanted peach and its friendly insect inhabitants. They roll away together on a grand adventure, squashing the evil aunts in their wake.

At a boarding school where everything is neatly arranged and orderly – even the girls, in their “two straight lines” – red-haired, mischievous Madeline stands out. Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962) would know something about that; his father abandoned the family when he was eight, and his mother was unable to keep him in line, or even in school. At fourteen he was apprenticed to his uncle in the hotel business, but he wrecked his chances at that career by shooting at a waiter.

Bemelmans tells a teacher that his “genius” for writing and painting is “like epilepsy, an affliction with periods of lucidity above normal, and ecqual [sic] periods of black depression.” He adds that, had he not “escaped Germany” and emigrated to America, he “would have ended up as a leading criminal in one of its penal institutions – or worse, become one of the political maniacs in that unhappy land.”

The three Baudelaire siblings lose their parents in a house fire, and are sent to live with a sinister uncle bent on stealing their inheritance. It only gets worse from there, but the kids use their wits to outsmart him again and again through the 13-book series.