Hoff, Your Readers Are Young, Not Stupid

I'm typically biased in favor of classics, and I rarely find myself disappointed, so it surprised me just how much I found to dislike in Syd Hoff's Danny and the Dinosaur (HarperCollins, 1958), which the New York Times hailed as an Outstanding Book of the Year, and which has stayed in print and remained a staple of kids' book collections for decades.  The story is cute enough.  A little boy goes to the museum, just because he "wanted to see what was inside" (an endearing moment), looks at some life-sized dinosaur models and wishes they were alive so he could play with them.  One does come to life, and they spend the day romping through the city together and having a grand time until the dinosaur has to go back to the museum and Danny has to go back to his own house, which he has to admit would be too small for a pet dinosaur.

Here's the first thing that bothered me.  Danny knows the dinos in the museum are fake--he says so--but when one speaks to him, there is not an instant of surprise.  The dinosaur offers to play with him, and away they go.  It's awkward and jolting: a definite hiccup in the smooth flow of the story.  Here's the next thing.  The dinosaur stops for red lights, knows what a car is, and understands the rules of baseball.  But he has no clue what buildings are; he mistakes them for tall rocks.

When Danny has to lift up clotheslines so the dino doesn't get his neck tangled in them, the narration reads, "Danny had to hold up the ropes for him."  Ropes?  Who calls clotheslines ropes?  Maybe Mr. Hoff thought "clotheslines" (or even "lines") would be too long a word for children, although I would imagine that a child capable of sitting through a 60-plus-page picture book could figure it out, and even if she couldn't, the picture of what Danny is doing would probably clear things up for her.  

Finally, the dino mentions more than once how nice it is to get out of the museum for an hour or two after a hundred million years.  One wonders, why didn't he ever just walk out before?  Did it take the presence of a wistful kid to wake him up?  If there was a magical formula that enabled him to play in the city all day, the story provides no hint of it.  And we must not ever give in to the temptation to dismiss inconsistencies by saying the story is "just for children."  That would imply that children are inherently less smart and/or less deserving of a coherent and cohesive story than adults are or that writers for children are also less smart and/or less skilled than writers for adults and that children's literature doesn't have to be intelligent as long as it is pretty.

Maybe the dinosaur is just dumb: as dumb as Mr. Hoff evidently thought his small readers would be.  It's a pity.  The illustrations are adorable.