Oooh, that was weird! And what other children’s book features that many methods of execution?!
The Water Babies, a Victorian children’s book, begins with the protagonist, an abused young chimney-sweep, committing suicide by drowning himself.
And then, lovely & magical things happen to him, that makes up for his horrible life!
WHEE! Hemlock Society Youth League, anyone?
I really loved that book. They were all identical, so every time the bad guy (the Emperor?) tried to kill them, they just took each other’s place. One of them could hold his breath, and so he was sent in when the brother was to be executed.
When we had our daughter, my MIL went out and bought Grandma’s Big Book of Stories For Children or some such. A lot of the standard fairy tales are in there, but there’s quite a bit I’d never heard of – I Love Little Pussy, for example. :dubious:
I hadn’t thought about that in ages, but add me to the list of those who loved this one as a kid.
Another fan here. Thanks for the gift of that memory, which must have been last recollected by me over 40+ years ago!
Any idea the name or author of that one??
It was a judge.
To this day my brothers and I still say “It’s only fair, said the judge” when someone makes a clueless decision (he kept allowing each of the brothers to go back to say goodbye to their mother, which would allow one of the other brothers to take his place).
I forgot about how George came to America. The other unusual part was “After a good meal and a good pipe, George was very tired.” As Ken Jennings can tell you, George has been tamed in his later years.
And they arr rook arike!
Ooo! Thanks for mentioning that! I was thinking about that book a while back, but couldn’t remember the title. For some reason I was remembering 12 brothers, but it’s been a very long time since I read it 
It’s funny that people complain about the “stereotypical” artwork making all the Chinese people look the same. Those people should look at some typical Japanese anime. Know why the girls all have differently colored hair? It’s so the viewer can tell them apart because otherwise they all look exactly alike!
ETA: I think it’s entirely possible that the book I had as a boy was The Seven Chinese Brothers. Same story, different author, more brothers.
It’s not just these old books. There’s a relatively recent children’s book called “The Rainbow Fish” where there’s a fish who’s got these beautifully iridescent scales that he’s quite proud of. The other fish find him self-absorbed and conceited. OK, so far I get the set up. I figured it was headed for a “beauty is not skin deep” kind of a moral.
But no. The central plot point is when a “dull and normal” fish asks him for one of his shiny scales, and the Rainbow Fish refuses, so all the normal fish snub him. Lonely and rejected, he consults with an octopus, who advises him to give up all his scales and distribute them out to all the other fish, one scale for everyone. He does this, after which they all like him and become his friends.
WHAT?? The moral is that you should buy your friends? And/or that the way to deal with envy is to dilute everybody to a lowest common denominator? I hate this book.
As for weirdness in old children’s books, I was always kind of put off at how Curious George was basically kidnapped from the jungle. I mean, obviously kids were supposed to identify with George, yet the first thing we see is this guy with a Big Yellow Hat trapping him, crating him up and taking him a continent away. Where’s George’s mama? Crying in the jungle for him?
La crème de la weird to me, though, was the second book in the Oz series. I loved the movie and read the book, The Wizard of Oz, and found to my delight that there was a whole series to follow. I stopped after book #2 because of its “twist ending” worthy of M. Night Shayamalan…
…where Tip, the ten-year-old boy protagonist of the entire book, is revealed in the last 10 pages or so to be Princess Ozma enchanted into a boy, and is turned “back” into a girl. Wha-aa-a? Did I mention I was a ten year old boy when I read this?
I’ve found Peter Pan to be very disturbing ever since we did Oedipus in high school English. 
Weren’t the original Brothers Grimm collected stories ridiculously dark and violent and gory? And anti-semitic? And pedophillic by today’s standards?
The story of the Chinese brothers was recently redone as a graphic novel, Seven Sons by Alexander Grecian and Riley Rossmo.
Yes, but the original stories were (way back when) mostly told by adults for an adult or mixed-age audience, not necessarily for children, so they don’t really fall under the OP’s criteria.
JRB
I first read it in an old collection of “Best Loved Children’s Stories”, so at least one editor thought it was intended for children. I read this out loud once for a group of friends, and all agreed that it was quite erotic.
Apparently, Christina Dante had been involved in a very torrid love affair that ended badly. After writing this poem, she started working in a home for “fallen women”.
Jean Webster’s Dear Enemy (1910), a lovely book and the little-known sequel to Daddy Long-Legs has, as a sub-theme, a dead-serious endorsement of eugenics.
I rushed out to grab a Little Golden Book titled “Mister Dog”, the cover of which has him smoking a pipe. Only a matter of time before the Tobacco Gestapo burn that!
And I have to admit that my patron saint C.S. Lewis’s portrayal of the Carmoleans (sp?) in my beloved NARNIA is a bit less than progressive. L